How many brown skirts does one woman need?
I just bought yet another brown skirt. Ever since I took the pledge to stop wearing black, I seem to have become a little obsessed – every black piece of clothing in my closet must be replaced with something of another color, and this summer that color seems to be brown. In addition to de-blacking my wardrobe I'm also altering several items of already-approved colors that no longer fit properly. Resizing seems like a better way to go than buying all new clothes, since I'm stuck for the moment at a sort of in-between size – thinner than I was, but still only about halfway to where I'd like to be. I've been here for awhile.
Losing weight is hard. Why this should come as a surprise to me I'm not sure ... except that when I was younger, it was always easy – so easy I sometimes had to kind of watch it, or I would tend to get (though this is hard to believe, now) too thin. I now know that a tendency to low blood sugars and weight loss is just as much of a red flag as a tendency toward their opposites – both conditions suggest that the body is having trouble maintaining a healthy equilibrium. Why don't they teach THAT in health class?
With all the hullabaloo these days about childhood obesity I fear kids will not hear the message that being too thin is just as much a danger sign as being too fat. And that either way, it is not their fault – different bodies process food and respond to exercise differently, and some people just naturally tend to be fat, and some tend to be thin, and some tend to be just right. And also – that just because your weight tendency is not your fault, that does not mean you can't, or shouldn't, do anything about it. Because you can. It just means that for some people, staying at a healthy weight is way harder than it is for others. But the benefits are there for everyone, and the hard work is worth it.
Preaching to my own choir, as usual, and also as usual humbly acknowledging that all this is much easier said than done. Five or eight or nine years ago or more I remember starting to notice (and probably writing about too, if I wanted to go back and check) that I could no longer tell when I was hungry, and when I was full. I didn't know what that meant, except that I felt like eating all the time, and once I got started it triggered this desperate animal need to continue eating even after I could feel my stomach was full. Very strange, and disorienting, but at the time I chose to "trust my body" and just go with it. Why I didn't recognize it as a symptom and do some research on what might be going on ... hmm. Not to shirk my responsibility for my own body, but I really think a huge part of it was a reaction to the general cultural bias against fat people – fat hatred – in which the media's supposed "concern" over the "health risk" of excess weight felt like nothing more than a smiley face sticker on the stylishly shrunken chest of the hollow-cheeked, thin-worshipping vampire of the fashion industry. I wasn't buying into that. I might have been fat, but I was healthy. Or so I thought.
Anyway. I'm still working on losing more weight, and in the meantime I'm wearing brown skirts and green dresses and enjoying playing with clothes this summer, which is something I haven't done in quite a long time.
Losing weight is hard. Why this should come as a surprise to me I'm not sure ... except that when I was younger, it was always easy – so easy I sometimes had to kind of watch it, or I would tend to get (though this is hard to believe, now) too thin. I now know that a tendency to low blood sugars and weight loss is just as much of a red flag as a tendency toward their opposites – both conditions suggest that the body is having trouble maintaining a healthy equilibrium. Why don't they teach THAT in health class?
With all the hullabaloo these days about childhood obesity I fear kids will not hear the message that being too thin is just as much a danger sign as being too fat. And that either way, it is not their fault – different bodies process food and respond to exercise differently, and some people just naturally tend to be fat, and some tend to be thin, and some tend to be just right. And also – that just because your weight tendency is not your fault, that does not mean you can't, or shouldn't, do anything about it. Because you can. It just means that for some people, staying at a healthy weight is way harder than it is for others. But the benefits are there for everyone, and the hard work is worth it.
Preaching to my own choir, as usual, and also as usual humbly acknowledging that all this is much easier said than done. Five or eight or nine years ago or more I remember starting to notice (and probably writing about too, if I wanted to go back and check) that I could no longer tell when I was hungry, and when I was full. I didn't know what that meant, except that I felt like eating all the time, and once I got started it triggered this desperate animal need to continue eating even after I could feel my stomach was full. Very strange, and disorienting, but at the time I chose to "trust my body" and just go with it. Why I didn't recognize it as a symptom and do some research on what might be going on ... hmm. Not to shirk my responsibility for my own body, but I really think a huge part of it was a reaction to the general cultural bias against fat people – fat hatred – in which the media's supposed "concern" over the "health risk" of excess weight felt like nothing more than a smiley face sticker on the stylishly shrunken chest of the hollow-cheeked, thin-worshipping vampire of the fashion industry. I wasn't buying into that. I might have been fat, but I was healthy. Or so I thought.
Anyway. I'm still working on losing more weight, and in the meantime I'm wearing brown skirts and green dresses and enjoying playing with clothes this summer, which is something I haven't done in quite a long time.
Labels: body image, clothes, health
1 Comments:
i, too, love brown, but find myself his summer collecting items in shades of red/pink/purple. what's that about? not neutrals at all. but i'm starting to use purple as a neutral. good point about the too thing thing. would love to see what you're wearing.
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