Entries Tagged 'Fit Girl' ↓

“Half the 4th Grade girls have boobs and wear bras,” Ainsley reported.

“Really? Like, for real?” I asked, stunned because no one had boobs until like the 7th Grade when I was in school. “Like they really need bras?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, give me five!” I said, holding my hand out.

“Why would I give you five?” she asked

“It’s better not to be the first one to get boobs in the 4th Grade, believe me,” I informed her.

“Well, I don’t want to be the only girl without boobs,” she said.

“You’re not. You said half the class. That means half the class doesn’t have boobs.” I said.

“They are having a Bra Club. You have to have boobs to be in the club,” she reported.

“Well. Go get ready for soccer,” I said.

A few days later, as I was getting ready for bed she came into the bathroom.

“Mom? When can I shave my legs?” she asked.

“When you’re 12,” I said, because this was when I had been allowed to shave my legs and so obviously, this is the right and appropriate answer.

“All the kids make fun of my hairy legs!” she exclaimed.

“Who does?” I asked, wondering if she just uses this line because I tend to fall for it a lot.

“Sarah and the kids at soccer and when I wear shorts at school,” she claimed.

“Ainsley, shaving your legs is a real pain in the butt. Once you start your hair grows back in all stubbly and scratchy and black, it doesn’t grow back in all soft and downy like your hair is now. I’m not kidding, it’s a massive pain in the butt and you have to shave like everyday. That’s why I don’t think you should do it yet,” I explained reasonably.

“I don’t care. I don’t want all the kids making fun of me. Look at this hair! It’s embarrassing!” she yelled, showing me her admittedly hairy legs.

I looked down and rubbed her hairy legs and wondered how the hair would grow back in if we just used Nair rather than shaving them for a few years. Would they grow back in stubbly and black then?

“Go to bed Ainsley. It’s late,” I told her.

“Fine! I’ll just have everyone make fun of me and go to school embarrassed and play soccer in shorts embarrassed! You don’t care!” she yelled and slammed the door to her room.

I sighed and went to her room. I really am a sucker for the teasing and embarrassed thing,I thought as I opened her door and said into the dark, “Maybe we’ll try Nair this weekend and see what happens.”

“What’s Nair?” she asked.

“It’s this cream that dissolves hair. I don’t know how it will grow back in. But, we can try it and see,” I said.

“Okay. Thank you,” she said.

“Good night. I love you,” I said.

I shut the door. Is there really any reason that 10-year-olds were required to have hairy legs if it embarrasses them, I wondered. Is there some rule that says it has to be 12? I wonder when other parents let their kids shave their legs? 4th Grade sure isn’t what it used to be, it got a hell of a lot more complicated. 

Oh the hoopla over Jess Weiner’s article in Glamour Magazine, “Did Loving My Body Almost Kill Me?” going to a doctor, finding out that she’s 250 pounds, pre-diabetic and her cholesterol sucked and then having the audacity to do something about it.

This, from the woman who wrote Life Doesn’t Begin Five Pounds From Now .

I’ve read countless articles both defending and attacking Jess for admitting that she was glad to have lost 25 pounds and – how dare she – admit to having a goal to lose 25 more.

Because there’s this whole new school of thought that you can be Healthy at Every Size and Jess was kindof their role model, their ring leader, their thought leader. There’s a bunch of websites and books about Healthy at Any Weight. They claim that all the science that claim the correlation between obesity and being overweight and heart disease, diabetes, infertility, depression, stroke and a whole host of other deadly illnesses can’t be proven and aren’t really fat-related at all. It’s just a conspiracy against fat people – a social conspiracy. Because we don’t like them. It’s discrimination in the disguise of science.

A lot of really nice, awesome people that I actually respect and admire sit in this Healthy At Every Size camp, so I have pretty much shut my mouth about it. Except I don’t buy it. And I think it sets a lot of people up for a lot of very serious health risks, deadly ones.

I’ve read a lot of misinformation and a lot of well, weird theories about how Jess’s diet, and her new venture in conscious weight loss, is going to cost a lot of girls with eating disorders their recovery and may even cost them their lives.

I think that’s backasswards. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Did loving her body almost kill Jess Weiner? In a word, No. Because loving your body involves taking care of it, which means it doesn’t get to be 250 pounds. Because you take it to the gym and you make it sweat. You read labels and watch what you put into it.

And on many of these eating disorder recovery blogs I’ve read that they are worried that Jess may be “falling back into her former eating disorder” by deciding she needs to shed a few pounds.

Here’s the flaw with that theory: There is more than one type of eating disorder. Sure there is bulimia and anorexia. But there is also obesity and unconscious eating and eating to stuff one’s feelings, which IS an eating disorder. It is extremely common for people with addictions and eating disorders to simply switch one to another. Which is why you have very high rates of people who have gastric bypass surgery fall into alcoholism – they didn’t recover – they switched their addictions. Or coke heads who quit doing cocaine only to pick up alcohol. Did Jess really recover from her eating disorder? Or did she go from one eating disorder to another one and hide behind a Healthy At Any Size movement that makes it super easy to hide what appears to be a more socially acceptable eating disorder according to the moralistic tone in which it’s prophets deliver it’s message? Only Jess can answer that. Probably, it’s just another step in her path to recovery.

Can you be Healthy At Every Size or Healthy At Any Weight?

No, You Can’t.

A person cannot sustain a body that is 300 or 400 or 500  pounds and not suffer the consequences of impaired mobility, restricted lifestyle, high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, painful joints, diabetes, heart disease or any number of health risks.

Should we treat people at every size and every weight with love and respect? Absolutely. But that’s another issue entirely. Entertaining fictions that could kill them, or at the very least, harm them isn’t a loving act though is it?

Should girls be pressured into a narrow beauty ideal depicted in media and marketing? Absolutely not.

But, the alternative to that is not to be complacent about obesity and overeating.

I recently saw the statistic that 7 million girls suffer from eating disorders. I take issue with that.

Those numbers do not take into account the one in three (1 in 3!) children in this country who are overweight or obese, suffering from the other eating disorders of overeating, medicating themselves with food, unconscious eating, etc. Food is their first drug of choice, the first drug they have access too. And it baffles me why some child advocates, eating disorder organizations, educators and parents aren’t more concerned with those numbers and tend to focus only on the much smaller population of kids who prefer to starve themselves.

One reason I chose to offer sunless tanning products on TGR Body was personal. I laid out, went to tanning beds and never wore sunscreen or sunblock as a child or teen.

In my 20s, when I got pregnant, the hormones and my previous sun damage had a war on my face: melasma. Melasma is a darkening of the skin. Which was exactly what I was shooting for when I was sun worshiping. The problem was, it was a blotchy darkening of the skin. Blotches on my cheeks, forehead and around my mouth.

I had it in my first pregnancy and even more pronounced in my second. And it didn’t go away after the births. I kept waiting. Then I started spending dough on over-the-counter creams. When that didn’t work, four years after my son’s birth, I plopped down some more dough and bought the pricey creams that finally faded those blotches. Except they can come back, which is why I am adamant about sunscreen use.

The other reason is that I interviewed several dermatologists for a skin cancer article I was hired to write. It wasn’t pretty. Every single doctor I spoke to – doctors who treat people for melanoma from sun exposure – was crazy in love with sunless tanners. They love the invention. Understanding they weren’t effective in fighting the beauty ideal which promotes a tan, they praised sunless tanners as the happy medium. The solution to a practical issue.

Girls, seriously, stop laying out and hitting the tanning beds. It’s dangerous. It feels good now and by virtue of youth, you think it won’t matter to you whether you have great skin when you’re over-the-hill at like 30. But, when you turn 30, you still care about your skin. You do. When you’re 60, you care. Mothers, promote sunless tanners and sunscreen. It’s a safer alternative.

Books such as Reviving Ophelia, Saving Beauty From the Beast, Queen Bees & Wannabes, Odd Girl Out and Girlfighting have elucidated the cultural context that puts so many adolescent girls at risk. But that’s only one part of the story. Daughters don’t become “unconscious” in the areas in which their mothers are fully conscious. Ophelia won’t need reviving if her mother has already been resuscitated—or never needed resuscitation in the first place. Beauty is less likely to fall for the Beast if her self-esteem is high and if her mother has taught her to be in touch with her instincts.

Each of us must take responsibility for the ways in which we keep “the culture” going up close and personal in our own homes and in our own lives. This is infinitely harder than blaming the culture. It is also a far more rewarding and powerful way to change the conditions of our lives—one mother and daughter at a time.

Christian Northrup, Mother-Daughter Wisdom.

Never say “dreaded period” again!

It is not dreaded. At all.

It is a lovely gift of heightened women’s intuition. It allows one’s inner wise woman to speak louder and be heard, because one feels more quiet and slow. That’s my latest theory about early puberty. That girls simply need the heightened intuition and meditative going inside that the menstrual cycle offers us a couple of years sooner, because they are bombarded with more choices, more outside influences and more media telling them the wrong things about who they really are.

The menstrual cycle is about our reproductive cycles in the sense that it comes from our second chakra, our womb space – that of CREATION – that human element of us that is most like God.

To create we have to clean out the old crap we’re holding on to and our menstrual cycles allow us to do that. PMS is the sane, oh so sane, process of recognizing shit we don’t want in our lives. We take it out on husbands and children because they are the humans who most cross our boundaries. It’s the feeling guilty about slapping those boundaries in place that makes the natural normal emotional process of PMS so horrid for us. But, the boundaries are blessings.

If you really want to go there you should check out this brilliant woman, Miranda Grey of Red Moon who writes books (and has resources for girls to implement this in their lives as well) about how to USE our menstrual periods to become more efficient and live happier lives. I have The Optimized Woman and that has both changed the way I viewed my period (which has barely registered as a nuisance in my life). It has also drastically changed the way I want to share the blessing and joy of a period with Ainsley.

She writes about how there are optimum times during the month in which women are able to do things best. She breaks it down into 4 weeks: Expressive Phase (ovulation, passive and outgoing), Creative Phase (PMS, active), Reflective Phase (menstruation, we are not more open to meditation, we literally become meditation) and the Dynamic Phase (pre-ovulation, active).

What does Ainsley need to know? That her period is about biology and that it is natural, normal, healthy and all the biology about the sperm and egg and how to manage it and take care of herself. But, more importantly, that her period is a Spiritual Gift that heightens her ability to perceive bullshit and know which course of action is best for her. That all the marketing around menstruation products – the smelliness, the grossness, the PMS medication, the weight gain, the irritability is just a load of marketing crap – meant to make her feel bad so she’ll spend more money on their products. That there are certain times when she will feel more like going out and more like being intimate, and then there are times when she’ll get a hell of a lot more done and other times, while she is on her period, when she is meant to rest, meditate, cleanse herself and go inside. Don’t fight those times. Use them to her advantage and accept them as the spiritual gifts that they are.

On Red Moon is a resource PDF for young girls, Moon Magic for Girls, to help you share the Spiritual Gift of her monthly moon cycle with her. Midol and Tampax have been around for a few decades.

A woman’s menstrual cycle has been around since the dawn of time, it’s time we go back into our sacred feminine heritage and reclaim it for ourselves and our daughters.