Body Issues

Today I am really struggling with a lifelong battle - body issues.

I have no real reason to be so ungrateful - I have all my limbs, and they function. I was able to babies with no lasting trauma. My socioeconomic status allows me to have food, and not just junky food; we get fresh fruit and veggies and sometimes even spring for organic stuff.

And yet I spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about the size of my hips, thighs, ass, stomach and lately even my upper arms.

Stupid things we think about, and yes, I do mean girls. Women. Females. And some boys. My daughter has a male friend, thirteen, who has an eating disorder. I know two men who probably have bulimia (exercise kind). But mainly, I think women are the ones who almost down to a (wo)man worry about how their ass looks in jeans/skirts/panties/shorts/naked.

Call me sexist. I don't care. It's true. Even the most confident, awesome, smart, gorgeous women I know fall victim to it at least occasionally.

So today's falter was caused by two things: I saw a reflection of myself in a glass window I was walking by, and then later, as I was dashing somewhere, the shadow of my body seemed awful butt lumpy.

Now these are crazy things to notice or care about. But there they are, right there, telling me to go on a diet, work out harder, get lypo, cry, and about ten other things. Now, of course, I won't be doing any of those, not really - I eat healthily more or less, work out plenty and refuse to actually DO crazy things. But the fact that my time is taken up even thinking this way annoys me.

It also makes me feel a real kinship/sympathy with those women who are unable to stop with the thoughts - the women (and yes, ok, the men too) who abuse their own bodies in order to get rid of the "imperfect" image.

Yea. That's enough time wasted for today on such trivial things as the size of ANYONE'S ass.