This article on xoJane has restored my faith in what I am doing with my life.

You should read it, even if you don't read the rest of my post here. It's about fat shaming, not judging a book by its cover, all that good stuff.

The basic gist is summed up really well in the following:

"To paraphrase Marilyn Wann: The only thing you can tell for sure by looking at a fat person is the degree of your own bias against fat people."

"A stance against fat-shaming is not a matter of trying to make anyone feel bad for enjoying exercise/being vegan/wanting to lose weight. After all, there are lots of fat people who enjoy exercise immensely. There are lots of fat people who are vegan. There are fat people who do all kinds of things, because fat people exist in a dizzying variety of perspectives, experiences and lifestyles. Just like not-fat people."

"I choose not to diet, not to try to lose weight...my body’s dramatic response to starvation (and really, that’s what a diet is) makes it impossible for me to lose weight and still have a life that is at all worth living. My priorities are different..."

"Even for those few who manage to beat the odds and maintain a significant weight loss long-term, the price is constant vigilance, and I can’t live with that degree of food obsession and also be at all mentally stable...You may not understand this. That’s cool. We don’t have to fully get each other; we just need to mutually respect one another."

I don't think I'm fat. Sometimes I think I LOOK fat, but I don't think I am fat. I have decided to do what Lesley (the author of the above article) is doing - shifting my priorities to what is healthy, regardless of how it will make me look, and enjoying things in life instead of obsessing over things that distract me from the things in life that I should be paying attention to, like time with friends, or a really awesome piece of cheesecake, or even doing yoga (or writing run-on sentences, apparently).

The one thing that I ask myself is, "Will my body let me do things like yoga, take walks, jog, or hike?" If I am sitting around a lot eating fries and hamburgers every day, it's going to be harder to do the physical things I want to. That is one thing that bothers me about having a desk job; it's like I can feel my arteries withering up from too much sitting.

But in reality, I can do those things, and while I'm still trying to get back into things like jogging and hiking, and it's going slowly, I know I will get there again. And I may not lose a ton of weight in the process, and that's fine. As long as I'm feeling well enough to do those things, I don't really care. I can have a huge pudge and a round ass, as long as I can climb a mountainside without feeling like I'm going to die!

I want to feel comfortable in my skin, regardless of what people think. There have been times in my life when my family members have made comments about my weight (fat-shaming, even if they meant well), which was always really hurtful, because I feel like I gained weight very quickly and it just has been a huge struggle to lose it since then. It's like I was a skinny kid one day, then I hit puberty and the next day I gained a bunch of weight. But I'm trying to put those comments behind me and focus on feeling good, whether that means I have curves and or I don't. I also know that my boyfriend would be really sad if I didn't have my curves anymore. But I'm not doing any of this for him or for anyone else, I'm doing it for me. (By "doing it" I mean focusing on my health and what makes me feel good.) I'm not doing it for the media who think I'm not toned enough, I'm not doing it for my mother, I'm not doing it for my sister, I'm not doing it for my father, I'm not doing it for my friends...I'm doing it for me. Trying to find the happy medium where I feel good and balanced, healthy and lively and alive and strong.

Damn girl! That's hot! (Though it makes me sad that the website it was on had an ad for losing weight with Slimband...Totally not the point. By the way, this model is Tara Lynn, and she's like "I don't care what the scale says, yo!" OK, maybe she didn't say "yo," but that was basically what she said.)

Is there such a thing as willpower?

We constantly hear that our diets don't work, we can't get ourselves to the gym, we can't do x y and z because we don't have the willpower. But this book my friend told me about a few months ago says that willpower isn't the problem. There are 6 influences in our daily lives that lead us to stray off the path towards our goals...Ourselves, the people around us, the media, etc. The book is called "Change Anything" by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Yeah, that's a lot of people. But it was a really great book that helped me to start eating better...But then I just kinda stopped doing it. It was really weird.

So, does that mean I don't have strong willpower because I stopped reading the book and doing the "plan" I had set up while reading the book?

Maybe I need to set up a "plan" to start living according to my Change anything plan again. That sounds like a vicious cycle.

When I was using the book, I was really making progress. My goal was to eat mindfully for every meal unless I was with other people at a restaurant or party or potluck. Eating mindfully means not doing anything besides eating, really tasting every flavour, smelling every smell, feeling the textures with every bite. It causes people to actually stop eating when they are satisfied, it stops them from overeating, and it reduces cravings. It was really wonderful when I was doing it, but I guess life got busy and I found it harder and harder to eat mindfully when I was always rushed.

So I guess you could say one of my outside influences is my schedule, and my work. Unfortunately, those can't go away right now, so how can I work around them? That's the ultimate question with everything right now. I want to be doing some kind of exercise every day, I want to be writing every day, I want to be able to balance everything better every day. For some reason, that is so freaking hard.

Is there anyone out there who is able to balance their lives well? What's your secret?

Strangely enough, I'm pretty good at balancing poses in yoga. I guess I have to just somehow apply that to my daily life...In yoga, you stare at a spot that is not moving in order to keep your balance, and you try to feel every corner of your foot on the ground or floor, and you keep a little microbend in your knee so that you have more of a solid foundation and your muscles in your balancing leg are keeping you up. Maybe that can be seen as a metaphor for reaching a goal...Your goal is the fixed, unmoving point you are staring at. Your feet are what bring you forward to that goal. You have a solid foundation - a plan - for getting to that goal. Voila. Metaphor. Hmmmm...

I realized, I haven't written much about yoga.

Yoga is something I love, love, love. (Did I mention that I love it?) It's a moving meditation, it makes us face things we usually ignore, it puts us in touch with our bodies and every aspect of them, it makes us stronger and is a great workout.

I've always had a bit of a problem with the "westernization" of yoga. I took a class about eastern religions in university, and we talked a bit about yoga. Traditional yoga is not soccer moms wearing Lulu Lemon and spouting "namaste" at every chance they get. Traditional yoga has many goals and takes a few different forms, but in general, the yogi is trying to attain spiritual insight while meditating on the concept of divinity. It's also a way to achieve moksha ("release" from this world of suffering and being free of the birth/rebirth cycle). I think there are some yoga classes that touch that in our western culture, but I don't think it's anything like it would be in say, India.

(I don't do this) -

I remember hearing about certain yogis in India who believe the body mirrors the constellations in the sky when doing yoga, so doing certain poses brings you closer to that. I love that imagery, that concept. I also know there are yogis who practice yoga all day long, and they are quite hard on their bodies. But it's all part of the practices I mentioned above.

What I do love about the "westernization" of yoga is that we have made it to be whatever want it to. And I don't see a huge problem with that. I think we should be careful when saying that the yoga we practice is what they practiced in ancient India. We're not practicing that, we're practicing a western version. But, there is so much you can do with it. I have this wonderful teacher who is also a writer, and I adore her class. We do 45 minutes of "yang" yoga (that's "male" energy, getting the heart rate up, flowing through asanas, using our voices to release tension and stress, etc.), then we do half an hour of "yin" yoga ("female" energy) where we hold poses for quite a long time and relax into them to release tension in the body. It's a really great class, and it gets me in touch with my emotions, what's going on inside of me, things I might have been ignoring, and it forces me to face my ego...On Tuesday we did some Qigong with it, and that was really great, and made me feel so powerful.

My dietitian is telling me that I need to exercise more, and I have been trying to go on jogs and walks. But the fatigue I've been feeling is making jogging almost impossible. I feel so tired, so discouraged, and like my body is going to collapse when I do it. It's not normal fatigue from exercising. Even when I do yoga, I feel this fatigue, and it is different from 2 months ago, when my yoga classes were starting to feel too easy. Suddenly, something changed, and now even yoga exhausts me.

But, I think I am going to do a 30 day yoga challenge. Every day, I will do at least 15 minutes on my yoga mat (on the days I'm taking a class anyway, it will of course be longer). No matter if I'm hungover, tired, angry, sad, sleep deprived, whatever. I am going to do it every day. Maybe it will help me with my help esteem, and I'm sure it will help me mentally in other ways. And of course, I'm going to blog about it.

Stay tuned for more on my yoga adventures!

(My yoga looks more like this) -

I know I wrote recently about hating ourselves just a little less, but I gotta be honest...I hate my body tonight.

I hate how it looks in the mirror. I hate how I eat, and I feel hungry again right away. I hate how I have gained weight, how I feel in my body, my rolls and my bulges. Tonight, they are not curves, they are not "womanly," they are not sexy, they are ugly. I hate how I can't see my feet without bending over significantly, as if I were pregnant or something. I hate my double chin, my flabby arms, how my inner thighs touch, and my love handles, and I hate that name for them, because there is nothing to love about them, and I don't want anyone handling them.

I have struggled with feeling hungry all the time for so long, and I am trying to work on it, with a dietitian no less. And it just will not go away. No wonder I have always had weight issues, I'm constantly trying to make the hunger go away by eating more.

Everyone always has ideas, and sympathy, and that's great, but it's just not helping anymore. It's like the doctors and my dietitian telling me to just exercise, because I'll feel better. Well, I don't. I am tired, and hungry, and I want to scream and throw something and run and get that stomach stapling surgery. Or go start taking an appetite suppressant. I feel gross, and this gnawing hunger is going to make me go nuts. I'm starting to think there's something medically wrong with me, but doctors are stumped.

I'm also sick of people telling me it's in my mind. If I could take control of this, I would have already done it. I wouldn't have let myself get to the weight I am today (I was shocked when I was weighed at the doctor's office yesterday).

Another one I really like - "be kind to your body." Well, I would be, if it would stop being so annoying and aggravating!

Can I please just have a body that doesn't need to struggle every day? Can I just have a normal hunger pattern? A good energy level? A body I can be happy living in? Please?

"Thank you for calling Your Relationship, please hold..."

Tom, formerly known as my boyfriend, and I have decided to put our relationship "on hold." That basically means we are broken up until further notice. He was going through some issues, and I am going through some issues. He and I are on different pages in terms of what we want out of a relationship. He wants to date around, and I've gotten that out of my system. It's not that I don't want to date around, but I'd be ok with developing a more serious relationship with someone, and that's not where he is at this point on his life's path.

Maybe we'll get back together in the future. Maybe we won't. It could take him years to get to the point where he wants to be more serious with someone. By that time, I might not be even in the picture anymore. I may have found someone else, or there are a whole myriad of other things that could happen. (Though, I do have to say, if we did come to a point where we thought we could be in a relationship again...Thank the universe for polyamory, right? That is, if that's where I am at that time...) There may be no possibility of having that kind of relationship with each other.

And strangely, I'm at peace with that. Normally I would be freaking out, really depressed that this didn't work out, I would wonder what's wrong with me. I'm not doing that, not right now, at least.

We talked about still keeping in touch, because we do really care about each other and want to see the other get better. (Without giving away too many details, an event in his life triggered some emotional hardships and kind of shook him up; I am dealing with health problems of various sorts, depression, anxiety, and self esteem issues that go back really far and are very deep rooted). At this point, I think we could even get together in between and just be friends and check in with each other. That thought actually makes me happy.

I have to admit, though, there is a little bit of hope inside of me that this could work out someday. He said last night that he thinks hope always has an expectation. I don't actually agree. I think hope is leaning more towards the possible positive outcome, but knowing that there is an equal chance of it not happening that way. I mean, we say, "I hope I don't miss my bus," but we know there's an equal chance that we will. Or, "I hope we can get back together in the future," but there's an equal chance that we won't. Or maybe I'm just pessimistic and seeing this in a pessimistic way, but it makes sense to me.

Either way, it's time for me to focus on my life and the things I need to change and work on. It's time to see my friends, meet new friends, write (every day!), work on my crafts with a friend of mine, meet with my pagan group, get healthy, exercise, raise my self esteem (or at least learn to treat myself with esteem, as my therapist says), lose weight, and be in the friggin moment.

That's right. The friggin' moment. Booyah.