birthday again

My physical state, this time.

I've never been thin. I've always been tall. We have "The Picture" at my parents' house that shows me and my brother romping in the sprinkler. I'm probably five and my brother's probably seven. I'm about the same height he is and I have a round belly. His ribs are showing. No, I wasn't stealing his food and we went out and played a lot, probably as much as each other.

He was short and thin and picked on until he was sixteen or so, when he finally shot up and was tall and skinny. But those are his issues, not mine. Well, they are sort of because though there are 2 years and 5 days between us, people sometimes thought we were twins.

Anyway, I look at pictures of myself from when I was 10 or 11 and I have a round belly and I was already 5'8" and taller than all but one boy in my class. I was on a sort of modified weight watchers (my mom was pushing fruits and vegetables, but not putting me on a diet, really). By the end of junior high, i was still taller than all but that one boy, but was built a bit more like a woman. By high school, the boys started catching up, but i was still terribly awkward about my height and weight.

Oh, and I played a sport every season in junior high. I wasn't very good and was slow, but it was a small school and I was tall, so was 1st string basketball and volleyball and even track (though I was better at the shot put and discus than at running). We lost a lot.

I look at those high school pictures and yeah, I had a big butt and thighs, but really, i was in a size 12 or 14 or so. Yeah, that's enormous by supermodel standards, but for someone who's 5'9" and has a large bone structure (honestly, I do - broad shoulders help project that mannish look - I didn't wear shoulder pads in the 80's because i would have looked like a linebacker), it's pretty good. Seriously, if I were rail thin, my shoulders would still be in a size 12, my pelvis in a 12 too, most likely. It's never going to happen.

So then college and grad school were all up and down, depending on how much exercise I was getting. And I didn't exercise unless I HAD to, like walking to the bus stop or whatever.

And grad school, I felt pretty good about how I looked. And then up and down some more and then when I got married, we had been walking a lot and swimming laps once or twice a week, so i was pretty hot :)

Basically, since then, it has been up and down. I wouldn't quite call it yo-yo dieting, just yo-yo living, because it's been rare that I have considered myself to be on a diet.

I gained 60 pounds or more with my first two kids, lost it between the two boys by eating less and exercising more, lost most of it after DS2 and then gained it back and forth for a bit. I started this latest pregnancy already really overweight, so managed to not gain 60 pounds. And then I had the baby and, well, the weight just hasn't been coming off.

I finally found a sport that I can do to my own level, karate, and yet I've been getting bored with it lately and can't get there in the evenings because of DH's schedule. And my favorite instructor left and it's just not so fun. AND then on top of that, it hasn't been enough to get me really fit. But if I don't go to karate, if I don't have a time and place that I have to be there, I don't exercise much at all. so I've signed up for Curves and am exercising with the older crowd. I am worried that I am going to get bored with the same workout all the time.

But karate makes me feel strong and capable. Pumping a machine for 30 seconds at a time just doesn't come off as very practical.

So anyway, like so many women (and men too) before me, I look at my teenage body and think, wow, I should have appreciated it when I had it. And I know that even if I weighed the same now, it's all shifted and sagged and all that and I wouldn't look that good now.