WHAT WE'RE ABOUT
We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
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I love when it gets warm outside because I can wear shorts and dresses and jiggle my thighs around, which is one of my favorite feelings.
Whenever anything or anyone ever asks me about my “fitness regimen”, I am quick to say it doesn’t exist.
But, in a way, it does.
This past week, I technically worked out a number of times; It consisted of dancing (by myself) in sporadic bursts of time. Hot, sweaty, and smiling.
I went on a couple of walks, too.
I spent most of my evenings stretching, painting my nails, doing light yoga and exercises while watching whatever, and smoking cigarettes if I felt like it. (For some reason, I haven’t been smoking much lately. Today I’ve had two.)
Somewhere in there I did some strength-training and pilates that I made up along the way, which escalated into testing myself to see how long I could keep my legs lifted, parallel to the ground, with my back to the floor.
The answer was: not long. But I kept lifting them up again anyway, and my muscles became warm and happy for it.
One week can not accurately encompass all of my life habits, but as an average: I’d say it’s about right.
The anxiety I live with every day is dense within my body. It saturates my muscles and nerve-endings so much that it seems I can feel it surge and recede like jolts of electricity.
Sometimes, my body is sore from anxiety’s effect. My muscles twitch, sting, and ache due to internal forces rather than outward physical exertion.
The burn of physical movement and the ache of anxious muscles, together, is bittersweet.
So I focus on that feeling, on myself, when I move my body to music. I feel how my fat sways and gives way as I bend, jump, and stretch - and it empowers me to move more. I test my flexibility and feel as the tension dissipates. I am aware.
I am so aware and in touch with myself in these moments of radical self worth and solitary movement that I actually forget what “fitness” is.
I don’t need a set of rules to tell me how I should or shouldn’t be moving my body in a healthful way.
I know that whatever I am doing is what is right for me because I have learned how to listen to my body’s cues - and we’ve decided to set our own goddamn rules.
You just gotta respect this guy. Dew Manning went from fit to fat to fit again just to prove a point and to “walk a mile” in his clients shoes.
In honor of the over 5k notes!!! Drew Manning deserves it!
He even admitted the journey to get fit again was tough on him mentally and physically.
wow.
Yeah, (kind of) slim man spends years restricting his diet. Finds the need to indulge the inner feedee this has created. Goes on a deliberate and sustained binge spree, tells gullible fat hating world what they want to hear. Is HEROIC, because he lowered his status to that of a fat and it felt *
soooooo gooooooodI mean emotionally devastating, poor bastard.I’m sure if he wanted to gain a real understanding with his gay clients he wouldn’t bother to speak to them either. He’d just do some rigourous “undercover work”.
Not for his own pleasure no way! But out of a preparedness to heroically sacrifice himself, a need for a deeper, harder understanding. Not just because he just wanted to try guys, no way- that would challenge his idea of himself.
Meanwhile fat people defined as greedy, not in anyway heroically though, just worthless scum.
Slim people’s halo just got even more ridiculous.
* [take a good look at his expression in that middle picture]
Let me just throw this in the pile of:
- woman who wears burqa for a day
- man who shaves legs
- celebrity who restricts diet for a week
arecoverypath:
buttahlove:
A gallery of large bodies doing yoga. Quite impressive & motivating!
Yoga is for everyone!
My roommate has been here for me every step of my recovery. It’s been interesting- when I began recovery, she began her weight-loss journey. She is the reason that I’ve made it this far.
Anywho- we both get really annoyed at fitblrs and blogs that post really harsh things like “NO EXCUSES” or “DO THIS, DO THAT” sort of mentality.
Life is not about being the fittest. Life is not about going to the gym on a regular basis. Life is not being fashionable. Life is not about how many reps of something you do a day. No. If you don’t feel like going to the gym for 2 weeks, then who the fuck cares! Don’t go! Your life shouldn’t revolve around going to the gym and eating gold foods.
I completely respect people who carry out a healthy lifestyle by going to the gym and eating right. What I admire about those people is that they are also mentally in check. They don’t have a bad relationship with keeping up with their health.
I’m trying to understand where the line gets drawn between being fit, and being obsessive.
Moral of this scatterbrained post: Don’t feel forced or obligated to do anything.
The thing about being “mentally in check” is that, like, not everyone is mentally sound.
I mean, I am a fucking madwoman. I don’t always know what it means to be “mentally in check” and when I do, I appreciate it and everything, but it doesn’t make me a better person.
The line between fit and obsessive often depends on health.
But health is widely defined as one thing, when it should really be defined individually.
For me, good health means waking up without a migraine and feeling good enough to get out of bed. It means not letting my anxieties control me and doing the things I want to do in a day, like cooking myself food or getting some work done or spending time with my family. It may or may not include some kind of movement or physical activity, that is not always a priority.
Good mental health leads to good physical health, but good mental health isn’t always a given.
Just more thoughts to chew on.
I went through a dark period in my life where depression knocked me right off my feet. I ended up being hospitalized at a mental health facility for 9 days. I got discharged and was doing better, but I kept falling into the pit of depression and going back to the hospital. Throughout this process I was using not only self injury but food as a coping skill to deal with my unhelpful thoughts and feelings. I gained a lot of weight in the past year. Starting last summer I began to completely hate my body. I would have panic attacks if I looked in the mirror too long because I couldn’t stand the skin I was in. Never in a million years would I have dreamed of submitting a photo like this. But I have found blogs like this and I am working as hard as I can to love myself, and it is paying off. I can now proudly say that I love my belly, my stretch marks, my thighs, my lack of collarbones, my arms, my scars, and everything in between. This is my body, and I am not ashamed. ♥ http://s-ecular.tumblr.com
I have bought these skeleton tights on ebay to go with some Gothic Lolita or creepy cute outfit. I totally love how my legs look in tights and they are obviously needed during winter if you want to wear a skirt!
The reason I am submitting though, is that people have been bothering me about the size of my thighs. I have received lots of hate when wearing short skirts, so I just kept hiding them in sweatpants… I have also had several periods in my life where I compulsively worked-out and starved myself to make sure to fit into the beauty standards.
My own mother has even asked me ‘Shouldn’t you get breast implants? because your chest looks ridiculous with a butt like that.’ What if I don’t WANT them, I am already super happy to actually have breasts, (as a trans* person ;) ) why do people still bring me down like this?!
I don’t want to hide anymore, I am not less of a human because I have more fat on my thighs than I have on my chest… I don’t need a ‘thigh gap’ to be happy or beautiful. Neither does any other person. A few extra pounds can actually be better and healthier and I just wish people saw that.
Yes, this is SUCH an important point. Fitspo tends to be ableist. It also tends to push a ideology — and it is an ideology — that the height of human achievement/perfection is a ‘fit’ body. Now, if some people want to pursue that, fine. But many of its members can’t seem to understand that theirs is a belief system not based on objective truths. There is no moral difference between someone who runs marathons, and a person who runs marathon coding sessions. Or someone who does neither. None.
-ArteToLife
rebloggable by request
This was why I had to stop using myfitnesspal—it was fucking me up mentally and I was on the fast track to EDNOS because the whole idea on that site (and other fitness sites) is that if you’re exercising and calorie-counting and not losing weight, it’s not because there’s something wrong with your body—it’s that you’re lying to yourself and not trying hard enough because you “don’t want it enough.”
I have hypothyroidism because I’m living with half a thyroid, and that half barely functions. Even when it’s being treated properly, I gain weight very easily. After years of struggling and beating myself up over not being able to lose weight, a doctor finally told me that the 20+ lbs. I gained when I was 21 was metabolic weight gain (brought on by steroids, which I had to take to treat a pretty severe bout of bronchitis) and would therefore be very difficult to lose for a totally healthy person, let alone someone with a disease that affects the metabolism.
Fuck ableism. Fuck fitspo.
It is ableist at heart in that it is based on the assumption of able bodiedness, as well as a lot of other privileges. It also trades in and lends itself to things like eugenics and other improvement of the (human) race type notions.
Yet it’s fair to say some PWD are more inclined and able to exercise than many able bodied people.
Ever have one of those days when you’re unsure how much phobia, hatred and all the bullshit society throws towards us that you can handle?
If I see one more Special K advert telling me I need to weight x amount to have self worth, I’m going to break my fucking television. Thank you for making my day 5x harder.
If I see one more poster of some airbrushed model who prefers to stand for nothing but an unattainable level of perfection to an audience of young, impressionable Women; I’m going to rip it off the wall and shove it in the garbage where it fucking belongs.
If I have to be fronted with one more comment like “This is ONLY x amount of calories; feel less guilty and have this disgusting alternative”, I’m going to take it off the shelf and stamp on it approximately twenty times. Because that’s what I fucking feel like doing.
If some ridiculous company ran by people who clearly have the intelligence of a fucking fish, tell me that I have to be a certain size to fit their idea of beautiful, hot, sexy, whatever; I’m going to cut the label out of every fucking clothing item in their store because it doesn’t matter what size you are.
The next time someone compliments my body based on their like/dislike/preference, it isn’t a compliment because YOU like it. I like myself for myself, if you want to actually compliment me, then state it based on something that matters; like the fact I’ve got a sparkling muthafucking personality, not whether or not I’m the size you find visually pleasing.
The next time some uneducated, naive person tries to tell me what is right for MY body; whether that be how much exercise I should be doing, how many calories I should be consuming, or whether or not I can allow myself to eat such a thing; I’m going to honestly tell them to shove their idealistic standards up their fucking backsides and grab a reality check. If you really had any concern for my well being, you would focus on my happiness; not some ‘statistics’ (informal consent, look it up.)
If someone decides it’s within their right to tell me I have to cover up my acne excessively in order to look pretty enough, I’m going to smash ten bottles of foundation and tell them to fuck off.
The next time someone tells me my ass is ‘too big’, my lips are ‘nice and voluptuous’, or my ‘hips stick out a tad’; I’m going to tell them that my body is no concern of theirs, because their opinion is no fucking concern of mine.
(This could go on forever..)
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Hello, my lovelies.~ I am posting here today because I thought I might share my story with you. My entire life I’ve been ridiculed about something or another, i.e. my weight, my glasses, my voice, and so on. It became crippling to the point where I felt as if the world would be better off without me, and I know many other people feel this way. But you know what? I found tumblr, and in so doing I found others like me, and learned what true beauty is. Beauty isn’t the clothes you wear, the hairstyle you have, or the number on a scale, it’s what lies beneath your rib cage. Please take my word for it, you’re so incredibly beautiful, and you deserve happiness. Never let anyone put you down, because you are worth it, and you are amazing inside and out. Don’t forget it!~ If any of you lovely people should ever need a helping hand or a sympathetic ear, I’m here 24/7. I love you all.
Hi, in 2011/2012 I lost a total of 150 pounds, leaving me with the body I have now. I’ve always felt a little insecure but since the weight loss I genuinely have had a hard time keeping my head up. I’ve stopped losing and have been about a size 20/22 since June. I’m trying my best to embrace my new body, and little-r belly :)
just thought the story in this post (and the recipe, which like all of Peabody’s is a tasty thing :D) would really fit your awesome blog.
Peabody’s blog is a joy. She’s funny and the pictures are great. Reading her blog cheers me up a lot of the time when I need it. For anyone not a Peabody fan already, please go over to her blog. She’s a funny, positive lady who plays ice hockey and bakes delicious stuff.
No the hell it isn’t.
Fatspo is the celebration of fat bodies.
Period.
Regardless of the ‘health’ of that fat body.
There are fat bodies here that exercise.
There are fat bodies that don’t.
Regardless, those bodies are celebrated.
Thinspo is the worship of skinny.
Fitspo is the thinspo at the gym.
Fatspo is fat body acceptance.
Learn the goddamn difference.