Power to the chubby girls!
29Apr2003 Filed under: The Story of My Life Author: dawnA 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.
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About Me
I have two kids and a delightfully odd husband, Brett. My children are Noah (born to us in 1997) and Madison (born to her first mom, Pennie, in 2004 and brought to our family through a domestic, open adoption). They are my inspiration and also the reason I don't get more done around here.
I'm a writer and sometimes I get published, which is a nice thing. I write for joy, I write for money and when I'm very lucky, both things happen at the same time. My work appears in national publications including Yoga Journal, Disney's Family.com, Utne, Wondertime, Brain Child and Salon. Currently I am working on a book about my daughter's adoption and seeking representation for the proposal. I also own Smart Cookie Communications with my husband.
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catie
April 29th, 2003 at 2:41 pm
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.
D
April 29th, 2003 at 3:00 pm
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
fillyjonk
April 30th, 2003 at 9:47 am
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.