OK, this isn’t really my first day at trying to eat and live healthy – it’s just my first day writing about it. But we have to go back a bit before that to gain some perspective, so here goes:
I’m 39, just about a month shy from 40, and I’m a fat woman. I was a fat child, a fat adolescent, and have been a fat adult for about 90% of my adult life. The 10% representing “the thin years” only came about because I either purposely starved myself (800 calories a day) or because I was in such an unhappy, unhealthy, volatile and chaotic relationship that I couldn’t eat. Neither weight-loss strategy, by the way, is recommended. However, both – along with years of yo-yo dieting- contributed to the fucked-up, slower-than-a-tree-sloth metabolism that I have today.
However, even with the crappy metabolism and the genetic hand I was dealt, I had to be honest with myself. If I wasn’t starving myself, I was giving in to some horrible health and dietary habits. It’s not that I overate all the time – I didn’t – but I tended to eat a lot of unhealthy crap. I drank almost nothing but soda (most of it diet, but still). Literally days could go by without a single fruit or vegetable passing my lips – unless you counted french fries. I never exercised. So, for the first time in my life, I decided I was going to get healthy. Not thin, healthy. Thin, for me, is never going to be attainable and sustainable – genetics and the above-mentioned tree-sloth metabolism have already decided that for me. But between eating crap and never exercising, and starving myself while obsessing over food, there has to be a happy medium. For me, that’s being the healthiest I can be, while accepting that I’m always going to be a fat woman. So that’s what this is – Finding My Happy Medium.
In this blog I’ll talk about food, exercise, fat acceptance, the fat experience, life, love, motherhood, pop culture, and whatever I happen to be thinking and feeling at the time. But first and foremost, this will be about my efforts to become a healthier human.
Good luck on your weight loss and health journey. I too, have only just begun.
Comment by madamlight — July 26, 2007 @ 12:48 am
Thanks, Madamlight, but I have to stress this isn’t a “weight loss journey.” I’ve been down that road too many times before, only to end up right back where I started. This is strictly a health journey – weight loss, if it happens, is a nice bonus but not the goal.
Comment by happymedium — July 26, 2007 @ 9:44 pm