Weight Loss #2: Consistency at play - Society, health, weight, and you

Everybody's got something about the fat girl. Well, here's a thought - at the end of the day, it's only your contentment that really matters.

If you would only view it positively enough and stick to it for a month or two, things are bound to ease up a bit and you’ll see many changes in your body. It might not be so much in your weight and size, but you’ll feel your body feeling lighter, better, and more energized.

The bottomline for now – before making any weight loss steps, it’s better to be honest with yourself outright. Take note of your limitations, how far you’re willing to go for a certain time frame, and which routines will work for your schedule, lifestyle, and budget. And from there we can start.

I’ve always maintained that the word “fat” is a relative term. With all our exposure to reality TV, surely we can see that real people come in different shapes and sizes. Unfortunately, though, our exposure to the merging of the fashion world and Hollywood seems to give us an idea that models and actresses set the benchmark for what a “normal” weight should be. We should have known better, of course. After all, we grew up getting to know the three basic food groups, going to the same gym classes and learning that there is a corresponding weight for a specific height, and that the BMI is important to determining what weight we should maintain, along with how many calories we should consume for the day.

Oddly enough, as more and more of our media and technology converge, the image of what a real woman’s size ought to be distorts every single day. We can argue all we want that there are those who will advocate that the ideal weight should be the one that is standardized by the medical community, but there’s no discounting the fact that weight loss campaigns and advertisements will often feature bodies that are so skinny that we might as well just slump over in discouragement.

Because of these factors, in no other time than now is it more appropriate for you to get a real idea of what you want your body to achieve. It is common knowledge that being overweight can lead to medical complications. Here’s an even more important fact: if much of the weight is in your belly, than you are even more at risk from heart disease. There’s also the rise of the sugar level and diabetes lurking around the corner to keep in mind. More than your self-esteem, you should think about what it would mean to get sick from an unhealthy lifestyle. Things will certainly look bleak if you can’t fit into good clothes AND get sick to boot.

For those of my friends who were overweight but had the bulges fat concentrated on other areas and not the belly area, they didn’t have an easier time losing the weight more than I did, but at least they didn’t have to worry about chest pains and wheezing every time they went up more than two flights of stairs!