*pinch*

.
when i was swimming they used to weigh us, put us on diets and fat pinch us. i didn't realise then how useful that knowledge would one day be...

twenty years later.

there i was talking to a friend of mine and she started to tell me that she was fat. now i couldn't see her body really because she was wearing baggy pants but i could see her upper body and i told her that i would describe her as slender.

which i would.

and she was fully stunned. fully because she knows that i am the kind of person that doesn't say things they don't mean.

and we then went on to discuss her body image and my body image and i told her that i thought she was a size six, eight at the most. eventually i looked up her bmi (body mass index, a relatively full of shit measure of body fat) and it was twenty point eight. so i look up mine which is twenty four point eight, point one away from overweight.

i know, i know, it's because it doesn't take muscle mass into consideration.

and she stared at me.

how could mine be higher if she could see that i was fit and looked good? she's known me for years after all.

so then i fat pinched her. i know i don't have calipers and i can't get the number of millimetres of fat but i could compare her spots to mine. so i did.

she was blown away.

not only did she have less fat than i did at every spot but she could see that i didn't have very much.

she just sat there and stared at me. she couldn't even begin to understand how she could be so convinced that she was fat when all rational evidence pointed to the contrary. eventually we concluded that what she actually was was out of shape.

this is, of course, totally different. i can state unequivocally that if you are out of shape and skinny that chances are you're feeling fat anyway. i can also state with relative certainty that if you're chubby but in shape you're feeling pretty skinny.

so then i started thinking about my clients. i have a fairly large group that i teach now and with very few exceptions these are people who are relatively fit but kind of broken. in terms of the women though i see commonalities between almost all of them.

with two exceptions that i can think of (which makes it about 95% for the women i know) every single woman that i teach has body image issues or self image troubles or is somehow convinced that her body is bad.

i mean from the size two Indian princess to the size twelve most adorable redhead to the six foot blonde goddess to the five feet of adorable asian girl to the silver fox. there is no correlation between ethnic background and body image that i can see either. it seems to transcend race and age and height and weight.

the one universal is that none of these women likes her body.

NOT ONE!

what's awe inspiring about this? i don't have an unnattractive client.

i have ones that are more or less attractive. i mean i have one lady who is six feet of blonde perfection and you would not be surprised to see her on the cover of vogue (well she's a bit older than they like but otherwise you get what i mean) and of course most of my clients don't measure up to her (then again neither do i... oh her bones!) but then most humans don't measure up to brad pitt either.

but somehow that's the only person they're willing to compare themselves to.

every single woman that i teach is beautiful.

no, seriously, every single one. some of them are cuter or prettier or thinner or more ripped but they're all attractive women and not one of them believes it.

irony? this has done my own personal self esteem more good than almost anything i can imagine. even just the pinching thingy with my friend. she's slender, so if i have the same sort of fat pinching as she does then i must be slender too right?

right?

hey brain are you listening???

yeah, it's fucked up what the media and modern culture do to women. i mean at least when i was growing up i had cindy crawford or christie brinkley... beautiful women with full figures. they were thin sure but they weren't starvation chic either. they were healthy and looked like they exercised.

what they weren't were twigs.

i imagine growing up today with kate moss being practically fat by today's standards and i'm afraid for the girls that are coming up now. they have slutty fourteen year olds, bimbos like jessica simpson and anorexic super models to look up to. this doesn't bode well for their own self image.

i mean hell the women of hollywood are falling all over themselves at mach six to get plastic surgery and 'work' done on themselves because they can't keep up with the air brushing either. eventually there won't be a woman alive who is capable of looking like the women in magazines. already the models can hardly keep up.

this example pretty much sums up the problem.

women are more and more being made to look like caricatures of themselves and fewer and fewer actual females are capable of looking as they expect. i mean hell look at any magazine when they do one of those articles about 'the best jeans for your butt' and then look at the models.

they'll have 'boy', 'tall', 'short' and 'curvy' and all four of the women will be within ten pounds of each other. the woman they use for curvy doesn't ever look like she's over a size four and she definetely never has hips.

one of these days i'm going to send them a picture of my ass in jeans and say 'fit me you cocksuckers!'

until then? i guess i'll just keep spreading the message one friend at a time.

ladies? you are NOT fat. throw out the fashion magazines.

thank you.