Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul - Henry Van Dyke

This blog post is going to seem a little off-topic. But I assure you - it is not. When I was 13 years old, my mother and my grandmother decided that it would be a good idea to take me to a Weight Watchers meeting. I spent my childhood being "big". I wasn't fat - the more I look at old pictures, the more I realize it, I was just bigger than normal. First of all, I was very tall for my age. Until I hit puberty, and everyone around me did also, I was the tallest kid in the class. Always. Second, I come from gigantic genes! My dad's family is full of amazons (not really - but he was 6'4", my aunt is awfully close to 6', and my grandmother was certainly NOT teeny). My mother's side is also made up of some tall, big people. Not to mention a shelf-like rear end that I have obviously inherited. But I did spend my childhood feeling... odd. Unsure of myself in my own skin. And then, at age 13, that idea that I had in my head about myself was confirmed. I was obviously fat, and I needed to be fixed... so I was taken to Weight Watchers.

Funnily enough, my stint at Weight Watchers at 13 was a one-time occurrence. My beautiful mother and grandmother, like me, were doomed to failure - in fact, as I recall, we went straight from that meeting to the Baskin & Robbins next door because "it is okay to treat yourself every so once in a while." Geesh, talk about mixed messages.

Luckily, as I've aged, I've begun to feel better about myself, how I look, and what I represent in to the world. It isn't all about looks, but I do LIKE to look good, and I get a big kick out of make-up and fashion - if for no other reason then make-up is like painting and fashion is creative and interesting.

So I loved this article/interview from Stephanie Losee on AlterNet.

Thin is the New Miserable

I know better than to diet constantly. Dieting makes you fat. Dieting makes you distracted. Distracted women tend not to make history. And yet here I am. Dieting. Even a global economic meltdown and a historic election could not take my mind off the fact that I have gained nearly 10 pounds and my wardrobe doesn’t fit. And I can’t afford to buy new clothes. Which means not only that I haven’t managed to find a way to take the shortest break from obsessing about my pants size, my dieting isn’t even working. But I don’t know any other way. My mother put me on my first diet when I was in the sixth grade, and I’ve been gaining and losing ever since.

It turns out I’m not alone -- my experience mirrors that of Valerie Frankel, self-help journalist and author of 19 books, including The Accidental Virgin. Thirty years after her mother put her on a diet to lose her baby fat, Frankel was still riding the dieting rollercoaster. She had vowed to keep her own daughters off it, but as they approached puberty, she began to suspect that not sabotaging their body image wouldn’t be enough.

"They had eyes and ears," she writes in her wry and affecting memoir, Thin is the New Happy. "They saw and heard what I put myself through: my dieting cycles, anxiety about food, dread of bathing-suit vacations, rising and falling and rising weight. I was a bad example."

Her efforts to become a good example required nothing less than a head-to-toe exorcism. She confronted her unrepentant mother, who said that if she could go back she wouldn’t act differently, even after Frankel catalogued the damage her mother’s harping had done. Frankel counted the number of negative thoughts she had about herself and her body every day (triple digits). She phoned one of the toughs who had taunted her in junior high. She posed naked in Self magazine. She asked her former Mademoiselle colleague Stacy London, now host of TLC’s "What Not to Wear," to help her throw out her figure-hiding, all-black wardrobe. And finally, she developed the Not-Diet, which had just four rules: Eat what you want. Stop when you’ve had enough. Don’t insist on perfection. Work out four times a week. Within a few months, she had reached a healthy weight and has maintained it, and her sanity, ever since. MORE...

Why am I talking about this? Because I, like so many, have spent a great deal of my life worrying about appearance and just worrying about MYSELF. I still do this, much more than I would like. Much more than I should. Don't we waste so much time thinking about the silly things - worrying with self-doubt, fearful of appearing _______ (fill in the blank: different, lazy, silly, stupid, too smart, unlovable, fat...)? How great would it be if I could take the effort that I've put into worry, and instead applied it to something useful and meaningful? Art, agriculture, feeding the hungry... so much wasted time.