The Adventure Begins

Photo credit: Flickr | roosterfarm

So, I kind of thought I had this - the Tiny Tummy thing - all figured out. I thought I knew why I got fat in the first place. I thought I knew what I had to do to not be fat anymore. I thought I knew that fat really wasn’t about fat anymore. I thought I knew why I had been on a three month plateau and I very damned well thought I knew what I was going to do to end that three month plateau. I thought I knew that I was going to tell all of you about it on January 1st and launch into a twelve month project and have lots of fun stuff to write about and be mightily victorious in my journey to a healthy body and it was going to be awesome and super and fantastic and sparkly stardust was going to follow me everywhere for the rest of my life.

And then New Year’s Eve happened - some dude that I’ve never met before, and hope to never meet again, made an inappropriate comment about my body. Which seems harmless enough because that shit happens to women everywhere every day and they handle that shit without losing their shit all the time. Right?

Well, maybe not so much.

Apparently that one little comment was a mighty fucking huge trigger for me. So much so that I’ve thought about it pretty much nonstop ever since. I even spent an entire session weeping about it to Jillian, therapist to the stars, on Saturday. How is it that one so seemingly innocuous comment from someone who doesn’t matter at all to me can make me feel so small - so minimized, patronized, inconsequential?

“Fuck. There’s something still here, isn’t there?” I asked Jillian, therapist to the stars.

And then she smiled that knowing smile she reserves for moments when shit’s about to get called out for real and asked if I was finally ready to tackle the big issue I had been toying with, but avoiding, for the past five years.

I said yes - as long as we could do so in the fifteen minutes we had left in session because I had made some big plans for the next twelve months and this whatever was really getting in the way. She insisted that it was going to take just a tad longer. Sigh... therapist to the stars, my ass.

In the fifteen minutes we had left on Saturday she challenged me to define what it was we were going to be working on - give it a name that I could hold on to when it got messy and focus started to get fuzzy. In short, develop a battle cry.

This morning, while playing on Twitter, my battle cry finally came to me in the form of two hashtags (how terribly Millennial of me) - #reclaimyourbody and #minenotyours.

My body has always served me well - even when fat. Actually, especially when fat. My fat kept me, psychologically (and, I guess, physically), safe by keeping unwanted attention at bay. But here’s the rub... it was shaped and formed in response to others. My body was fat so you wouldn’t pay attention to it. So even if it was serving me, it was serving me to serve you. (The proverbial you - not actually you, my gentle snowflakes.)

I have decided that I want a body that serves me exclusively now. Thing is, a healthy body that serves me well is also a body that gets attention. A body that some douchebag in a dingy bar on New Year’s Eve will try to lay claim to. When that creep complemented my breasts he was, in essence, telling me how pleasurable my body was to him and that shit just did not sit well with me. To quote Dr. Frankenfurter, “I didn’t make [it] for you!”

Mine - not yours. For me - not you. To serve me, exclusively.

There’s so much more to work out on this front, but this is as far as I’ve gotten in the past 48 hours. Apparently Jillian, therapist to the stars, knew a thing or two when she said I couldn’t solve it all in a day.

What I do know moving forward is that the body I envision serving me best is more limber, flexible and strong. There is no number attached to that vision because I have no clue if limber, flexible and strong happens at 200 pounds, 175 pounds or 150 pounds. The number doesn’t really matter- nurturing a body that can accomplish things that it hasn’t been able to do in a long time, or ever, is the goal. By extension, the numbers will change - a happy byproduct of a twelve month adventure to reclaim my body and make it mine again.

So, the adventure…

Over the next year I am going to:

1. Perform the Eye of the Needle yoga pose without a strap
2. Go jumping at a trampoline park
3. Shop at a “regular” store for pants
4. Wear high heels
5. Ride a Segway
6. Sit in the exit row on a plane
7. Ride the Ripcord at Michigan’s Great Adventure
8. Spend 5 days hiking
9. Register for the Bone Marrow Transplant List
10. Let me husband pick me up
11. Run a 5K
12. Splurge on an Athleta shopping spree

More to come soon on the how, when and why of these twelve adventures soon.