It’s Not Body Drama When You’re Awesome
News: I am at 13% body fat.
Sure, that’s a good number, I mean, it’s about 10% less than average. However, I still weigh 193 pounds and am 68 inches tall. No, I will not convert that to metric. Ok, fine, I think it’s a little more than 85 Kg and something like 170 cm. I’m too lazy to run a calculator, but I sat here for about two minutes staring at the ceiling counting on my fingers. Huh.
Anyway, the point is that I am overweight by quite a bit. In fact, I am closer to ’obese’ than healthy, going strictly off BMI standards.
But I don’t really care about all that. Call me obese, motherfucker. I will annihilate you. Not really. But I may choke you out on general principle.
The saddest part of my research today was the reams of Yahoo Answers queries from kids that were young teens, or even preteens, asking if they were overweight. A lot of the answers were yes. A lot of the questions were sad. A lot of the responders were ignorant at best and abusive at worst.
Yeah, I was chubby as a kid. Shit, most people were chubby as kids. It’s called padding. Because part of being a kid is being a complete retard. You’re supposed to land on that padding, use it to stay warm because your dumb ass has no concept of cold, use it to float because you’re too dumb not to jump in that high flowing creek. If you’re talking aesthetics, I can’t think of one skinny kid who didn’t turn out sort of weird looking as an adult.
So no, I’m not a Calvin Klein model, which is good news as the price of heroin has skyrocketed with the weakening of the dollar against the peso. Neither are you, most likely. Most people aren’t. I read an article that was made up almost entirely of quotes by women about their shape. It made me think about my teenage nieces and the struggles they have with our family’s genetic tendency to be built like trucks. It was saddening.
I tell you this: you know that shape you were born with? It looks good on you. Are you heavier than you should be? Then lose it. Don’t kill yourself over five pounds men don’t notice anyway. Shit, a little jiggle looks damn good under some smooth sun (or genetically) browned skin.
Which leads to other news:
At first I was ignorant. Then I suspected. Then I was sure.
The pregnant chick was flirting with me. Like, throwing it out there.
I have to admit, I considered the efficacy of her ill-concealed offer, and found it suitable until I found out about her already born toddler son.
Hey, I don’t mind flipping someone else’s burgers, long as I get to start ‘em from scratch.
Unreasonable?
I think not.
I suck at blogging lately. Shit, I should have took her on a date just to get a decent entry out of myself.
May 21, 2009 at 3:20 am
pregnant women need love, too…
hate the bmi/obesity charts. while i believe the secret to aging well is being on the ‘very thin’ side, i would have to lose another 40 lbs to do that – putting me on the low side of my recommended weight for 66″ tall and a large frame. my goal, which would get me to about a size 8, requires only 25 more pounds to vaporize. that’s fucked up.
May 21, 2009 at 6:38 am
She apparently really needed it.
I would actually argue about the very thin thing. In my personal experience with the unnecessarily old, they have a tendency to be thick farmer/woodsman types. Sure, as they get older they get skinny, but in their youth they’re pretty stocky.
I’m sure my perception is skewed by the number of farmers and anarchic woodsman I have been around in my life, but that’s what I noticed. I think you need some meat on your bones to survive those first few serious ills in your seventies. But so far, half of my great grandparents have lived past 100. All lived past 90. All my grandparents are still alive and showing few signs of dying within within the year.
I don’t know what a size 8 is, but the Gap store has some interesting ideas on what constitutes a ‘large.’ I can barely move in this thing.
May 21, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I get really peeved at this fat/thin thing. It’s as much a construction of our self-obsessed modern society as what kind of haircut you have, or what team you root for; ultimately it’s irrelevant societal fizzing. Sure it matters that you’re healthy. Sure it matters that you feel good in yourself. But this pointless striving for some kind of hypothetical ‘perfect’ does no-one any favours (especially young women).
Watching the twins grow up, I’m totally appalled at how much pressure they’re under to conform. They are two of the most gorgeous teenagers you could imagine, and yet they both think they aren’t ‘attractive’ (whatever that means). The corollary to that is that they spend hours every day trying to attain some kind mythical ‘look’ so that they can appear acceptable in the eyes of their peers. So much wasted time! So much pointless preoccupation! Neither of them are overweight, but they have friends who are, and the criticism and judgemental assessment – so cruel and unhelpful. Why has all this crap become so important?
May 21, 2009 at 7:11 pm
@casey – yeah, my dad weathered 3 years of chemo for stage V cancer, and it probably helped that he was over 250 lbs when he was diagnosed (tall, solid 250 lbs). much of the elder-health is certainly genetic. just rocked 20 miles after work on my bike, and am planning at least 60 miles over the weekend. that – and backing away from the tequila and whiskey on a regular basis – is probably the best route to health and staying frisky into my 70’s…
@anaglyph – it’s an artificial construct, but there’s a biological need to feel attractive. birds do it and all that… to some degree (just from a ‘dinosaur brain’ perspective) we are compelled to listen to that construct of what is attractive…
May 21, 2009 at 7:57 pm
@daisyfae: Oh I understand it alright, I think there’s an argument for putting some effort into your appearance. But it’s something that seems to have far too much importance – it’s out of balance.
May 21, 2009 at 11:44 pm
I’m with you on brown/tanned skin effect. It shaves a couple of kilos away. As for body image, the media aside, do you think if men weren’t such visual animals, women would be so obsessed with their figures?
I’m not touching the pregnant or the flipping burgers comment.
And yes, you suck at blogging.
May 22, 2009 at 7:55 am
It is definitely that. When I’m in the gym, I overhear people talk about random parts of their body like they’re the latest shoes you’ve got to own. The one I heard last night:
“Dude, you totally need to work on your major traps. Chicks don’t even talk to guys without major traps.”
I don’t even know what that means, so apparently I have a long, lonely life ahead of me. Or at least a life lonely and devoid of the vapidity of major trap trouncing hookers. Tragic. My room mate, who has more body drama issues than most teenage girls, told me he read that almost all women are into arms, anymore. That sucks since last season quadriceps were in, and here I am, all lower body and that is SO 2007.
I guess what I find the most irritating about all of this newfound fascination with below the neck aesthetics is that it rarely emphasizes health. If you have a six pack showing, you should probably eat something, and quick. That’s your reserves.
In some way, I sort of blame the movies. Look at how reasonably built 007 was in something like From Russia With Love. Now he’s some sort of action figure. And all the women lose their shit over him. Which brings up a point that Daisyfae brings up.
In the dinosaur part of our brain, I think men are getting as ridiculous as women have been for about 100 years. And it all has to do with visual motivation. Women, for better or worse, have started adopting some of the worst habits of men in this brave new sort of post-gender world. Meaning they look to outside qualities, many of which no one can control.
My brother got into the model type fitness thing before. He was about killing himself. he never achieved any of his aesthetic goals, so he just started being the best dad he could be, which assumes you’re healthy enough to play with the kids. To her credit, my sister-in-law says that nothing to her is sexier than her man playing with their kids, so he has a pretty good motivator there. Now, my friend’s wife that is constantly berating the guy for being fat, she deserves a gym rat, and all the douchebag tendencies that go along with it.
Which, I guess, plays into your second comment. If you’re putting in some effort for your appearance, wouldn’t you try to appear NOT to be so shallow as to spend most of your waking hours pursuing narcissistic horseshit?
Cléa: Thanks for reinforcing my ineptitude at blogging.
I think men have always been visual animals, but before inundation of images, we probably looked more toward practical evolutionary traits. You would probably look for things like quick eyes, healthy build, good skin, etc. All the actual visual cues to a person’s health.
May 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Perhaps “Men’s Health” magazine is partly to blame? Doing to men what Cosmo piled into our ‘inadequate’ buckets years ago?
When i was a gym rat, i always joked that i wouldn’t go out with any man who spent more time shaving and looking in a mirror than i did. Now that i’m single? i’m good on my word… sexiest part of any man (or woman)? the brain. followed closely by the genitalia… of course.
May 24, 2009 at 10:58 am
I think that is actually true. I saw a poster a former room mate had hanging in our barracks room. It was just a collection of fitness tests, pushups, situps, etc. It had four levels for every excercise, weak, average, fit, and Men’s Health Fit. It was really dumb. And I was sort of against hanging pictures of single digit body fat dudes up on the wall of a room I had to sleep in.
The brain is sexy, and I have tried to explain that to women before. I know one girl who recently moved away that would cause me to burst into flame every time we talked, and she was definitely not ‘Cosmo Fit.’ She was downright chubby, really, but beautiful and so confident and intelligent that I wanted my pretend babies to be half hers. I also know a girl who just graduated law school who argues with me about EVERYTHING. That and she’s got an ass like makes evolution happen. Definitely the brain, though.