Fit? Fat? Fantastic.

Here's something I highly dislike about myself. I'm around 245 lbs, and it's the most I've ever weighed.

It's a pretty shallow thing to place a lot of worth on body image, but there is a lot of truth to the idea that people will subconsciously judge you for your appearance. I've wanted to lose weight all of my life, but it takes a lot of effort due to my body type and I'm not sure of a good test that would show how much muscle weight I have. It takes almost no effort for me to build muscle, whereas my boyfriend can eat six plates of food and not gain a pound of fat or muscle due to his shrew-like metabolism.

With PCOS and a tendency toward diabetes, the only real cure for those moments when my sight goes inexplicably blurry or when I have appendicitis-like pain accompany every period is:

1. Birth control

2. Losing weight.

There's been a lot of hullabaloo about birth control thanks to this brave girl making a case and then every Republican with a talk show projected his need for sex onto her. Thankfully, things can't be unsaid with a quick HTML edit anymore. Sandra isn't backing down despite this attack on her character, and I'm proud of those in my gender that will stand up for gender-specific rights.

As for losing weight, I've been through several schools of martial arts thanks to my parents' support as a child, but it was rare for us to stick with any school for long due to the cost of the school and the fact that my family moved so much. I would love to get into that again, but money is money is money, and I can't afford it right now. Thankfully I'll be able to afford bc for the PCOS in a few weeks.

What I do for losing weight is simply walking for at least two hours a day and eating a lot of salad. My hike this afternoon was wrought with dead grass, steep cliffs, beautiful sights, and a stomach that wanted to vomit up everything. However, I made sure that I walked an hour and that I wasn't truly hurting myself, just exerting myself.

I've always been heavily into cooking, and if fish wasn't so expensive, I'd be making many more dishes involving salmon, shrimp, and tuna. Salad, lentils, and spices are my new best friends because sauces and dressings are all based in lovely fats that provide a decent taste for a lot of calories. I'll go back to them when the apocalypse hits or when I can get a grip on my current health issues.

All of this can have a damper on your self-esteem when your skin breaks out into red splotches because blood is strongly circulating close to the surface of the skin--just because you walked two miles more than usual. Another example is getting on weight scales and finding that time and time again, no weight change has been made for some reason despite upping your exercise and refusing those damnably delicious Oreos. 

An old roommate of mine gave me a 'hippie blessing' a few nights ago by spraying the top of my head with frankincense and myrrh body spray, and the scent was divine. I noticed that her bedroom was arranged with cloth wall hangings that framed her bed almost like an altar, and I don't know if she consciously or unconsciously did that. It shows that she does take her body seriously and that it's her greatest gift, one way or another. I wouldn't go so far as to call her narcissistic, but that love of the self is something we need in a culture where self-deprecation is the most readily used form of humility.

Good luck in loving yourself. Whether you are fit or fat, you're fantastic and fabulous. Your frantic flights in finding fictitious flaws and failures in the mirror are all in fiendish fear of yourself. The world around you is a canvas to explore and paint yourself onto, not a prison to be navigated. If you must play the latter game, make it a game. Life is not a battlefield; it is what you make of it whether you make it or not.

-Amber