The Thick and Thin

Greetings Loves,

The summer of 2010 I was enrolled in a required 1 hour gym class. The class was pretty basic we did walking, jogging, and step aerobics. I of course dreaded having to take this class and in fact had procrastinated until the last year of my undergraduate career to enroll in the course. Why would I dread taking a fitness class you might wonder? Well, perhaps it was the fact that I was ridiculously out of shape. Working out? What was that? That was for skinny white girls who were afraid of gaining a pound or for the frighteningly fitness conscious female sports participants who honestly always scared me with their gusto towards working out and ugh, sweating. No, though it was not my being out of shape that made me not want to attend this course. No, what caused me to postpone the inevitable was an unwillingness to want to face reality. The reality that would undoubtedly stare me in the face if I enrolled in a gym class. This reality in fact struck me in the face on the first day of class. The students filed in and there in the middle of the floor was a scale. Yes a scale. Now, I am not afraid of the scale in fact I had even been known to use one during my high school fitness craze. It was the years and pounds in between that time and five years later that smacked me in the face and welcomed me to the land of reality.

Super old pic but you get the drift

250 pounds. Yupp at 5'6, I weighed in at 250 pounds. Now I have never been "thin." I believe the last time I was truly at a low weight was when I was around 2 or 3 and my older sister was stealing the food off of my highchair before I could eat it, IE before I learned to open the refrigerator on my own. At the age of 23 though I was officially obese. And yes I was one of those women whose weight had not greatly affected my life at all other then limiting the places that I could shop. I had boyfriends...it was undergrad, I had lots of boyfriends lol. I had an active social life, I was involved on campus and I knew I looked good. I had high explicit as well as implicit self esteem. I mean do you know the symbol for potassium on the periodic table? I do it's a K which happens to also be the initial of my first name. Orienting one's self to objects, subjects and symbols that are associated with one's self are indicators often used to measure implicit self esteem. Back to the topic at hand, being that heavy did not make me sad or depressed. I am an African American woman, I wasn't fat I was thick.

Yea, I was thick alright and horribly out of shape and heavy. So I decided to do something about it. Over the next two years I joined a gym, changed my eating habits and as of today have lost 75 pounds. Yes, I was able to easily and simply sum that up in one sentence but it was anything but easy. I spent tons of sweat and time trying to figure out how my body worked. What foods I could eat and what foods I needed as well as what kind of exercises my body reacted best to. Being a pear shaped woman, my hips are larger then my chest; I liked to focus on my lower body because this contained the majority of my weight. I sweated my way through various workouts and eventually was able to arrive and my current weight of 175. I am sharing all of this because first, I have an intense interest in African/Black American women and beauty standards. Interestingly enough where as for white women, weight is often synonymous with beauty the same does not ring true for African American women. Well, as long as you weight is in the right places. The one conclusion that I have come to from my weight loss journey is that nothing has really changed about me other then some numbers :).

I am also working on getting to 150 by the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester! I have about three months left and 25 pounds to go I will be chronicling my progress from now til then. Let me know if you are currently working on your health/fitness and how the journey and change of lifestyle has been for you!

Blessed be,
Rose