Anonymous asked:

Umm…why is this important? Will it make you feel better if I weigh more than you or worse if I weigh less? Not that my weight is likely to correspond well with your own.

But congratulations, anon! You have hit on something I feel strongly about so you shall now receive a soap box diatribe.

In the end, weight is not what is important. What is important is being healthy and feeling good about yourself. Am I stick thin? Hell no. Do I have curves? Yes. Do I have fat in places I would rather not?…Doesn’t everyone? But if you asked my doctor, who had to run a full panel blood test on me late last year for various reasons, about my health, he would tell you that, except for a bit of genetically inherited hypoglycemia (one of the reasons losing that fat is so damn hard), I am the picture of great health.

I wear the clothes I want and feel decently good in them most days. I feel confident in myself and I haven’t even stepped on a scale in months. 

Because guess what else? Scales don’t tell you everything anyway. Most people know that muscle weighs more than fat, but I don’t think they truly comprehend just how much of a difference it is. So here’s an quick anecdote my mother tells anyone who worries about weight more than fitness:

When my mother was training to run a marathon she gained 15 lbs…and went down 3 dress sizes. (I was 14 so I can corroborate this)

Now, her example is a little extreme because she is only 5’3” and any fat loss on her is more obvious on her than it would be on someone taller…like my 5’11” frame.

At first I didn’t take her to heart and weighed myself obsessively. Then I hit a wall weight-wise, as most do. I was discouraged, but determined to lose that weight. In the end I lost maybe another 2 lbs, which bothered me right up until I went to buy some new clothes and found that I had managed to go down a size (insanely difficult at my height). That was when I chunked the scale.

Now I concentrate on how well I can do certain exercises. Because seriously, it’s about being fit not thin. About feeling good more than looking good…because what people say ‘looks good’ is a socially constructed ideal, not reality.