I admit that my weight is rather closely linked to my confidence on any given day. However, my weight has nothing to do with who I am. I find that I am liking myself more and more as I age; and while my weight rises and dips, my sense of who I am and what I can accomplish steadily increases. Why is this? I think it's because the more I try, the more I learn about myself. I have tried many things. Some have been a success, some an utter failure, but each time I find I understand myself better.
"There are a number of very important irreversibles to be discovered in our universe. One of them is that every time you make an experiment you learn more; quite literally, you cannot learn less."
Buckminster Fuller
I just read an article in Runner's World magazine (
A Thin Line by Peter Sagal) about a guy who was fat as a kid, and still feels fat now, even though he is a marathoner. One of the most compelling parts of the
article is this:
The obsession with weight—far, far more common than you might suppose among amateur athletes—is a curse. "I run to eat," we say, but we're not so much taking pleasure in the food our running earns us but in the immunity it grants us. We hit the box of doughnuts at work or the side of fries with lunch, telling ourselves, "I did my six this morning," and we feel, for a moment, that we are Normal People, able to indulge in sweets and fats without suffering the kind of inner guilt and recrimination usually reserved for embezzlers.
I think we tend to look at skinny people, athletes in particular, and think that they never have to worry about what they eat. It looks so effortless for them, and we wonder why we can't just flip a switch and be like that. After all my reading and research on this topic, I conclude that there are actually only about five people
in the world who don't struggle with their weight in some way. We're all in the same boat, people. That thought brings me a great deal of comfort.
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