Food for thought

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Do I really want to lose weight, or do I want to gain health? Does it matter if I eat healthily, exercise regularly, and still have some extra fat?

We bought Fable 2 recently, and one of the things that has changed from the original game is the option to choose male or female character (this story is going somewhere, trust me!). I chose a female character, and then I started fretting about my character getting fat. That's right. I started to moderate the food intake of a video game character. Now, in the previous Fable, I happily made my (male) character fat, thin, muscly, stringy, short, tall, without having a second thought about his level of attractiveness. After all, my character totlly kicked ass! Yet, make it a female character, and even with high levels of ass-kickitude, I still fret over my character's fat, or lack thereof.

Obviously, this is not healthy.

I think this needs to be said. I don't have an unhealthy relationship with food. I have an unhealthy relationship with body image. For a majority of my life, my body has been made public property. As far back as I can remember, the people around me have felt perfectly comfortable telling me that I'm too fat, too thin, too pimply, my hair is too curly, etc. I'm unfortunately certain that most readers can understand this.

When it comes to food, yes, I could do a lot better. I could make healthier choices more often. Like most people, as much as I enjoy a plate of vegetables, I'm more often going to go for the quick choice than the more nutritious choice. But generally, I don't think my relationship with food is that screwy. Aside from poor choices, I don't tend to binge these days, nor do I deliberately starve myself.

But my body image is fucked.

And the only reason I can come up with to lose 60kg is to attempt to "earn" the praise of others, particularly my family.

Why?

Now I've thought of it, that's a stupid reason to make myself half the size I currently am. Sure, I may get to that magical beacon, "60kg lost! Size 10 - 12!". And yes, I will get praise, compliments, and the rest. But if these people criticise my weight now, if I no longer have that weight, they'll find something else eventually. My teeth are wrong. My hair is too short. My weight is starting to creep back on....

So fuck what other people think. A life lived to try make others happy is a life that is not my own. So what do I want?

I want to be fitter.

I want to eat better food.

I want to learn to cook healthy food better.

I want to enjoy my life on my own terms.

My physical size does not appear on this list. Pursuing health and fitness will probably result in my losing fat, but ultimately? I want to learn to love whatever size I am, and learn to tell people who want to put me down to piss off.

So the focus of this blog is kind of shifting focus. But I can't continue agonising over body fat. Because the day I agonise over the size of my video game characters, is the day I officially have a problem.