It’s International Women’s Day, so perhaps this video is poorly timed. We’re supposed to feel strong today. We’re supposed to celebrate each other and ourselves. And I’ve created a parody movie trailer making light of women’s body issues.
Tag: Body Image
Mommy Fat
As of this morning, I have lost forty pounds of postnatal weight. That’s all the baby weight accounted for, plus five pounds, which is a feat I should be celebrating. Unfortunately, I still have a long way to go.
The weight that registered on my scale this morning was, before I got pregnant with the boy, the heaviest I’d ever been. It’s six pounds into the overweight zone as far as BMI is concerned. Before babies, I’d only ever reached this weight because of over-indulgent vacations, and I’d never stayed here long. However, though my weight has almost always been within (often well within) the normal BMI range, I have felt self conscious about my weight almost every day since I was (if I remember correctly) eleven years old. That’s twenty years of disliking my body, eleven years of indifference. Except for those times in the third and fourth grade at the swimming pool, noticing how much rounder my belly was than the other girls’. Or the day in first grade when the girls laughed at me for weighing a whopping 55 pounds.
My freshman year of high school, I joined the swim team: partially because my mom said I had to play a sport, and partially because I’d watched a video of myself and been appalled at my awkward, chubby self. I would love to be so “chubby” now. Continue reading “Mommy Fat”
