Power to the chubby girls!
A couple of years ago I had a friend who wasn’t a chubby girl but felt like a chubby girl and she was the first to arriave at my house for a potluck. She spotted my stair-stepper (you know, the bench to do step aerobics) leaning against the wall in our living room.
“You are so brave,” she said. “To have that out with all those skinny girls coming over.”
I wasn’t clear why she thought it was an act of bravery for a chubby girl — like me — to publicly admit to exercise in front of skinny girls. But then a couple of weeks ago, another friend was talking about a new exercise class at her gym.
“The woman who teaches it is a big girl [her euphamism for fat],” she said. “I can’t believe they let her do it! It’s not a very good advertisement for the classes!”
I happened to be visiting her with my (skinny, exercise-phobic) sister and I pointed out that even if you couldn’t tell by looking at us, I’m in much better shape than my sister.
I don’t exercise to get thinner (it’s a nice bonus if it happens but it’s not my goal), I exercise because as an apple-shaped person, I have concerns about my heart health. Also, it gets me high — gotta love those endorphins! — and helps me sleep and it’s fun.
I don’t have anything brilliant to say about this; I was just thinking about it while I was working out yesterday.
being a tad (euphamism for a lot) chubby myself and being an exerciser, i say amen to you. exercise has lots of wonderful benefits and weight loss is just one of them. i agree about the high, nothing beats it.
My roommate from college and I use to have this same discussion…. In college (NOT NOW!) I was a size 2… I hated to exercise and running up one flight of stairs would kill me. My roommie was a size 12 solid as a rock, and she could have done three flights two at a time and still been ready to “rock and roll”….
As the years have come across me (nearly 20 now); my size has increased 6xs and I still think of myself as a skinny girl… meanwhile, my roomie is slimmed down, continues to be fit as a fiddle and thinks of herself as a chubby girl….
it’s all in the mind
-d
Amen again.
I took a water-aerobics class; it was fun, except for one very skinny girl who kept loudly and constantly commenting on how “fat” she was and how bad she looked in a bathing suit. She was perhaps 20; the median age of the class was probably 55.
About 3 weeks into the class she began wondering why no one hung out next to her. It was everyone was hanging around with the cool funny older women who made wisecracks about the names of the exercises, or who talked about “where I was when this 60s song was first popular” or said “oof, this is making my butt float up!”
Some of the people who tire me out the most are the body-obsessed. I exercise, I try to eat right, but it’s a means to an end (living longer and being able to enjoy life more) than an end in itself.