Oh, Look. Legs.

On Friday, on Tamsyn's gentle but firm insistence, I got myself a pair of black skinny jeans, which is what the Fashionable Kids are wearing. This is something I would have likely never done by myself, but I'm glad I did. I have legs! You can see them! Not just vague baggy shaped pillar things that hold up my bum. You know when you change the way you look, and keep checking the changed bits out as part of the process of integrating the new data into your self image? I keep doing that with my legs. The new jeans go nicely with my boot purchases too, which is a bonus.

Also, I would quite like to let go of the many years worth of accumulated body image issues now, please. Kinda sucks. Growing up with two brothers who called me fat way back when I wasn't, then being a Big Kid at high school, and then the years of being unhealthy and inactive... well. You know the best thing I've heard since losing weight? Not the repeated 'you look amazing!' because those rarely register and I put on a fake grin and say thanks. It was from mellific, who came up to me at her party after I'd received a round of congratulations from some dude I hadn't seen in a few years. She quietly said 'you know, you've done well getting to where you want to be, but I think you were just as awesome back when you were heavier'.

I am unrepentant about the fact that losing weight was right, for me. I mean diabetes, duh. This makes the whole fat acceptance area a very raw subject for me, and one that is very hard to look at objectively, because the baggage, I still has it. But what mellific said was, I think, at the core of what fat acceptance is all about, and it really stayed with me and honestly, I wish I'd been told that much, much earlier. I currently think there is a middle ground between accepting the body you have, and keeping it within certain healthy parameters. What those parameters are, (and how much body fat is involved), are of course very much up for debate, and whether it's possible to discuss them without attaching judgement values is an entirely different matter.