As promised, perhaps to myself more than anyone else, I wanted to go back in time and explore my lifelong obsession with diet and exercise. When I do look back … I see some scary shit. I don’t have a great memory when it comes to my adolescence, perhaps in part due to excessive recreational drug use for most of my formative years, but I did my best to try and reach back into the old memory banks to see what I could find.
Even though as a teen, I could pretty much eat anything I wanted and never exercise without getting fat (god how I miss those days), I do still remember always being aware of my body. I recall as a teen hating my legs and always thinking I had big thighs. My sisters and I referred to them as prosciutto thighs, and thanks to our half Italian background, we were all blessed with them. We grew up with a swimming pool and even then I remember feeling self conscious in a bathing suit in front of others, thinking I looked fat. Looking back now, I was a typical skinny little kid, but my warped teenage girl mind thought otherwise.
When I started to become sexually active, I was always afraid to have boys see me naked, fearing they would judge me and not like me anymore. Little did I know as teenage boys they likely didn’t care, they were just happy to be having sex at all :)
You hear a lot in the media these days about how teens (especially girls) are bombarded with unrealistic images of beauty in the media and how this negatively impacts their self esteem. I don’t refute this theory at all; I believe it to be 100% true. However they seem to portray this as a new problem in the world today; and to that point I disagree. Just like so many other things in life, these “things” existed back then just as they do today. There was just as much infidelity, there was just as much drug use (scroll up and see !!), there was just as much homosexuality, and there was just as much low self esteem. The only difference is, we didn’t talk about it as much, and we didn’t have today’s media and the internet to exploit it. We felt we were the only ones suffering these ails, so we suffered in silence for the most part. We also didn’t know there was anything we could do about it.
Of course this is all just my own personal opinion … and I’ve also gone way off track here. All part of the obsession I guess ;-)
So we've come to the conclusion that the obsession first started when I was a teenager. One of my first jobs was actually at a gym; I was about 15 or 16 and was surrounded by bodybuilders and fitness nuts. This was a small, local gym so most of the members were pretty serious gym rats, and they were ridiculously fit. I worked out there off and on, and then got my first of many gym memberships a few years later. Even WAY back then, I did weights, cardio, and I attended aerobics classes. At home I did the 20 minute workout (remember that show boys and girls !!) and I was always doing my best to keep slim, lose weight … whatever. The one area I didn’t think about though was diet. I thought I could exercise my way to a hot body. Boy was I wrong.
I continued this pattern until my mid-20’s. I went to the gym for brief spurts, and I ate to my heart’s content - and boy could I eat !! I’ve always been a good eater, and once again I’m blaming those good ‘ol Italian genes. Enormous bowls of pastas smothered in rich sauces and blanketed with parmesan cheese … and that was just to start. There was almost always a first course (pasta, risotto, polenta), and then a second course of meat and salad. My mom fried everything most of the time, unless we BBQ’d, and the more fatty the meat the better. And don’t forget the bread, butter and countless other side dishes and condiments laden with fat and calories. I’m salivating just thinking about it.
At about 23 years of age, I started dating a guy who later turned out to be my husband. I know what you’re thinking … I was young and in love and trying to impress him, so I starting eating salads and drinking water whenever we went out. Nope. Our first dinner date I ordered a plate just as large as his, and I licked it clean. Okay not literally, but you get the picture. We ate and drank our way through courtship, and I always got a good laugh at waiters who would bet me I couldn’t finish all that food I ordered – sometimes even more than my husband-to-be. Of course I always won :)
Somehow though, I never really managed to pack on a lot of pounds during that time. Perhaps it was the stress of planning a wedding, or the fact that we were always out doing things and being active, but 4 years later I was pretty damn skinny at our wedding.
But that was the end of that.
What’s that phrase for students who pack on the pounds when they start college or university … the freshman 15 ?!?! Well someone needs to come up with a similar phrase for newly married couples. You do whatever it takes to look fabulous for the big day, and then you settle in to the doldrums of married life and start to explode. Our big fat bliss continued throughout 14 years of marriage ... oh the joys of matrimony !!
No comments:
Post a Comment