The Weight

‘Tis the season for shorts, sunning and summertime fun. But hand in hand with warm weather frivolity comes the guilt of an ice cream cone, the disheartening try-on of last year’s favourite pair of cutoffs, and the anxious mirror inspection to decide whether you're comfortable going sleeveless or not.

I’d like to claim immunity from this. I like to think of myself as a gal who’s embraced her frame, and that a 6 foot tall woman (5’11 and ¾”, to be precise) is never going to be a lithe size 6. Not that would I really want to be anyway—I stand firmly behind the fact that I’d rather eat what I want, when I want; that it’s way more fun to hug people with meat on their bones; that in the end, no one notices a few pounds as much as you do.

But you do, and your clothes do, and that's often worse. You know when something doesn't fit like it used to, and then it's banished back to the part of your closet I've now nicknamed Summer '09, a time when I biked everywhere, ate baby carrots and hummus for dinner nightly, and invested my paycheque in thrift store wiggle dresses. It pains me when I see those hard-won frocks I'm just not ready to part with yet, because I'll never find them again once I do. And it's really just the hips that don't fit, because in the two years since that summer, I've earned myself some bodacious lady hips and a pair of thighs that grind like awkward adolescents every time I walk. High fives back atcha, Indian roti place on speed dial.

I hate weight as a topic of conversation. I hate that it's something we're supposed to actively work against, whether through exercise or dieting, or that it's a commonplace topic to comment on (like, weight as water cooler talk? WTF?). I hate telling someone worrying about their body to stop worrying about their body and then getting "but YOU don't have anything to worry about!" response (that was not code for "stroke my ego please!", and also, bitch please, I'm a bundle of neuroses like, most of the time so of course it's on the list). And I hate myself for loving dieting tips supplied by friends or particularly anxious Google searches, which I then squirrel away for late night grocery store runs.

So it's (un)officially summertime, and while you get sunshine (yay!), you also get a steaming pile of women's issues with body weight shoved onto every RSS feed, magazine cover and clothing rack (was every woman in the past a 28" waist or lower??). And I'd like to have some sort of solution for how to unite my two fronts—the proud-of-my bod gal who shuns the conversation, and the prideful gal who wishes she'd wake up tomorrow returned to a size 8—but I can't and I don't. I guess being more active is probably a start but ew, movement.

Feel free to leave tips on how you've reconciled your self-loathing/loving halves, recommended activities for lazy people, or just some ego-stroking in the comments.