Hairmoting

the other day i was at the gym, in the middle of my super impressive workout, when a man randomly came up to me and said, "you don't need to be here. the gym is for fat people."

classy.

i was put-off for obvious reasons but his little statement got under my skin and stayed there (and not just because he follows me around the gym now and watches me lift weights and makes me vow internally to never wear my lynyrd skynyrd t-shirt again, no matter how sweet home i think alabama is).

a couple of days later i read this article in time magazine about how exercise makes people hungry so they probably won't lose weight.

and then later that day, while i was at the gym, cnn had a feature story about how dieting or trying to eat right makes you gain weight.

and here's where the soapbox starts.

every girl in america has body issues. and if she's lucky, she grows into an adult who still has body issues but is able to ignore them most of the time. i think i had a comparatively healthy self image as a teenager and i know it's because i had good genes and a huge amount of positive support but even cocooned in that absolutely ideal scenario, i can remember looking in the mirror and picking out everything that was ugly about myself. i also remember the way my friends and i used to reassure each other by putting ourselves down ("i'm so fat." "whatever, my thighs are huge." "no way, they're not as big as mine.").

it's weird.

teenage girls are messed up.

in the best cases, that mess turns into a sense of humor and even though fifteen years later i still look in the mirror and catalog my flaws (seriously, guys, i have those lines between my eyes now) at some point i'm able to shrug and say, "eh, whatcha gonna do?" and then go about my day. for the most part. i absolutely go through phases where i hate that i weigh 152 lbs instead of the 138 lbs i weighed in college (for like a week (the best week of my life!)). there are times when i want to get breast implants and also botox (the lines between my eyes, guys. they're there.) but thankfully not for long. however, if there were some sort of shrink ray that could make me 5'7", sigh, i would so be on board (i feel like the new airport security things might be shrink ray machines... however they also remind me of the machine that turned jeff goldblum into the fly... and also the machine that turned steve urkel into stefan urkel... i've forgotten my point).

so, ya, grown women are messed up too.

but there is a measurable decrease in my crazy when i eat right and exercise. i feel better, i sleep better, i have less migraines, and i don't care quite so much about that catalog of flaws. it's like i feel like i look better.

so what i really find maddening is that i can't get away from the crazy. hollywood has been messing with me my whole life, so that's pretty easy to disconnect from. but it's harder to disconnect from actual people standing in front of me, objectifying me and thinking it's somehow a compliment because they have deemed my outside parts acceptable.

here's what i'm making my new standard of normal human behavior. i feel pretty good about holding people to these two basic rules:
1. i'm not saying you shouldn't compliment the people in your life on their appearance. by all means do it. just, you know, also compliment them because they're smart, or interesting, or funny, or kind, or talented.
2.  maybe don't go up to people you don't know and comment on their bodies. it's really hard to make that seem normal.