Our Friday ritual has centered around our bed, Chinese food,
and tabloid magazines for the bulk of our marriage. We have this Friday ritual down to a
science. And to prove this, Chad came
home from work this morning with some groceries and two magazines for my Friday
enjoyment. “Check out the headlines!” he
exclaimed as he proudly displayed them for me.
“Best and Worst Beach Bodies!”
Chad knows what I like, and beach body stories are right up there with
my favorite. It’s a guilty pleasure, for
sure. I think what I like about this
storyline is that you get to see celebrities with flaws. Let’s face it, when you read a more quality
magazine, maybe Fitness Magazine, or Real Simple (one of my favorites), or
Glamour, we all know that the photographs have been professionally produced
with the best lighting and angles, then they’ve likely been touched up in
Photoshop…by the time the photo makes its way into the magazine, it’s a mere
shadow of the true representation. Plus,
it’s nice to know that even celebrities have flaws and imperfect lives, despite
what we see on television.
What frustrates me, though, about the beach body storyline
is the hypocrisy of the magazine writers themselves. One
story will splash a super-thin celebrity across the page with a headline like, “Scary
Skinny!” and then two pages later a headline will read, “Will Jessica Simpson
ever lose the baby weight?” It’s pretty
much a whiplash message of confusing body image stories, and it’s no wonder we
women are confused about how to feel about our own physiques.
I don’t have a perfect body.
I’m not terribly athletic, I don’t have a workout regimen, and I do love
Oreos. I don’t really deprive myself of
food, but I’m not what I would call an unhealthy eater, either. I typically wear a size 9 or 10 in
jeans. Would I like to be a size 8? Absolutely.
Do I try to monitor what I eat?
For sure. Now that spring has
finally shown up, Chad and I enjoy evening walks, and I love taking more
rigorous walks on the weekend. I care
about my heath. I don’t want my creaky
knees to get to the point that I need surgery.
But I’m pretty exhausted by all the conflicting images we women are
bombarded with on a daily basis. My
ultimate goal is to find a pleasant balance between being good to my body and
also just enjoying life without strict barriers holding me back.
When I see women on the street, or when I hang out with my
girlfriends, what I realize is that I don’t spend an awful lot of time noticing
their physique. I know this might sound cliché,
but what I see is their internal beauty.
Sometimes when I am people-watching, I will see a woman who, by tabloid
standards, would be deemed overweight, but she is in fact very beautiful. And unique.
It’s funny that I can see that in a stranger, but not in myself. I am really hard on myself. I see my rear-end in a mirror, and I swear it
looks like the back of a Greyhound bus.
My laptop is currently resting on my tummy pooch. I want to learn to be okay with that…not in a
gluttony sort of way, but in a “I like myself pooch and all” sort of way.
Eva Longoria was photographed on the beach recently. She was in a lounge chair, leaning up to get
something resting near her feet, and her tummy bulged as the photographer snapped
his shot. Shortly after the photos hit
the tabloids, Longoria was on the Dr. Oz show.
In her candid interview, she said that her divorce from Tony Parker was so hard on her
that she pretty much stopped eating altogether; she was wasting away. She said, "That's probably the time I got the most compliments because I was
so skinny. I was not eating. I was depressed. I was sad. My diet was coffee. So
people kept saying, 'You look amazing. Divorce agrees with you.” Isn’t that crazy? To applaud a woman’s weight loss that was
caused by such tragedy? What Longoria
discovered, however, is that her body was in big trouble. She went to a doctor who realized that her
body was shutting down from lack of nutrients.
She had to undergo heavy vitamin treatments and finally got back on
track. She gained some much-needed
weight....and now she’s in the “Best and
Worst Beach Bodies” story for her tummy pooch.
Seriously? We women need to be
kind to our bodies and to each other’s bodies.
I need to accept my bulges that seem to be in all the wrong places. I need to look at myself the same way that I
look at my girlfriends and even strangers on the street, because I give them
much more grace than I give myself.
Thankfully I have a
husband who loves me no matter what. And
he frequently (despite my protests) stocks the pantry with Oreos as proof.
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