I will open this by saying that I’ve been told I was overweight or obese my entire life. My whole life, all the way back to junior high. My mom had me in Weight Watchers and special exercise programs and therapy programs for fat kids as a teenager. I learned all the height and weight charts and everything they had to say.  I’ve known ever since I was 13 that I was supposed to weigh 135 pounds, no more no less, and until I did I would be considered unhealthy and a health catastrophe waiting to happen.

I’ve also known that I don’t have a typical woman’s body.  My bony wrists are so big that I can’t buy bracelets and watches for myself off the women’s jewelry racks.  My bony fingers are so big that I need men’s sizes in rings.  My bony ankles and feet are at the top end of women’s shoe sizing, and so wide that I can’t even buy shoes in the regular stores anymore, especially not with the arthritis in my feet.  I have to make broad back adjustments in any clothing I sew, and jackets and coats never fit me off the rack because of this.

As an adult, my weight has cycled up and down quite a bit, but I have never once been below 170 pounds, not since I was 15 or 16 years old. I think I was around 210 when I got married.

19940205 Elayne and Brian

Mostly I’ve bounced around between 170 and 210.  I think I was around 175 when I took this picture, and I wasn’t very active at all, not doing any real exercise outside of housework and child care:

20070818 Elayne

Here’s one of me when I was probably 210 or so, near the end of my running period.  At this point I was running about 40 miles a week and doing lots of strength training, so the shape of my body and my strength were very, very different from when I was 210 when I got married.

20130319 Elayne

Somehow over the course of the years, I started to lose that belief in the height/weight charts, and the BMI numbers that succeeded them.  I could see that they didn’t work quite right for me.  I spent time researching other ways to measure my health.  I could see that I was a runner who could do 12 miles at a stretch and then drop and give you 20 pushups, and yet my weight wasn’t what the weight fanatics said it should be.  I found alternate ways to measure body composition, using a variety of body measurements, and found that at the peak of my running and strength training, my body was right about at an ideal 26% body fat even though my weight was over 200 lbs.

These days I’ve gotten back up to the large end.  My weight is between 230 and 240, but my clothing size is about the same or smaller as when I got married, about 18/20.  I’ve let myself go, even though I have some residual muscle hanging around from the running days.  I stopped exercising almost entirely when I had to stop running.  My pain levels just kept going up, and I kept thinking a little more rest would do the trick, until I realized this past winter that it had been almost three years, and now I was having trouble getting up when I sat on the floor.

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I saw my blood pressure going up, and I had several nudges from the Goddess to wake up and start taking care of myself again.  So in April I started walking every day, and in June I started up my strength training again.  I don’t feel like I’ve gotten very far.  My shape is the same, and my weight is the same, and my pain is about the same.  But I can feel the functional difference when I get up off the floor, or get the bug to clean the house.  Life is getting just a little bit easier with every week, and that’s good.

Last week, I participated in a medical research study. They paid me $20 to poke and measure me for a couple of hours as part of a study on the long-term effects of chronic illness on overall health. During this, I got the chance to step up onto a very nice high-tech body composition scale.

This wasn’t your ordinary bathroom scale, with the little pads you put your feet on. Those don’t do much better than height/weight charts, really.  I’ve owned a couple, and I’ve been put on them in doctor’s offices and weigh clinics.  The best number I ever got out of one of those was probably a projected ideal weight of 145, which is only a little better than that 135 height/weight number.

This high-tech scale was something else entirely.  It didn’t just have feet pads, it had something for my hands to hold on to as well, and according to the printouts it measured each quadrant of my body as well as the overall total.  Can you guess what it said my current ideal body weight would be, the weight that would bring me back to 26% fat if nothing changed in my muscle mass?

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173 pounds.  That’s with me feeling out of shape, with a lower than ideal amount of muscle on my body.  Still, it says my ideal weight is 173 pounds, and that’s if I did absolutely nothing else to get stronger and more functionally fit, and just starved my body to drop fat.

I feel so vindicated now.  I feel very sad for teenage me, thinking I was fat when I wasn’t, letting that drive me into giving up so many times and letting my body get truly unhealthy because I still had it in my head that the number on the scale was everything.  I feel even more sad for all the other girls and women, and men, out there who think this number on the scale is everything still, who do amazing things for their health and fitness and then eventually throw it all away because of the frakking number on the scale.

But I feel very happy to see that I was right to think that I was healthy at 210 a few years ago, and now I know for sure that it’s okay to let that thinking continue and nurture it and let it grow as my body grows stronger again.  And this time, I will not be ashamed of my clothing size or the number on the scale, dammit!  I have a strong body, a beautiful body, and this is the shape it comes in!

Published by solinox

I am a Wiccan priestess, a libertarian mother of triplets plus three, a wife and homeschooling mom to blind and autistic children, a fiber artist, and a Jane of All Trades, always learning and seeking to help.

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