thin days and naked bodies

I've been keeping at my goals for the week so far. Eating and exercise is going well and I've been doing really well with the water. I just keep increasing my intake a little bit each day so I can avoid drowning in it!

I'm feel particularly thin today, which is odd, because yesterday I felt fat. Every time I looked in the mirror yesterday my face looked really chubby to me. Ordinarily I wear pants to work but today I wore a skirt and my newish shoes shoes and just feel thinner than normal. I think it's because the top I'm wearing with my skirt is one of my old tops, a size 4X, which I couldn't wear without a sweater for like, two years. I also wore this outfit on Easter Sunday and felt pretty good then too. I'm just really enjoying that feeling of being able to get into stuff that I "out grew."

Over the past few months, I've become addicted to a show on the Discovery Health Channel called "Taking it Off." It's a series that followed 8 people in Edmonton over a six month period as they started a weight loss / fitness program. They were all starting at different weights and fitness levels. Each episode shows them meeting up for a "support" session with a nutritionist and a weigh-in with a trainer and in between, they follow 2 or 3 folks during their week and demonstrate how they are doing as far as their fitness programs, family issues, work, etc. It's quite engaging and everyone in the group takes a different approach to their fitness program, some are doing Body for Life, some are doing the Zone, some are working with personal trainers, etc.

Last night, I flicked into it 1/2 through an episode I'd never seen (I've seen most of them, this was an early on show that I'd missed) and one of the participant women was talking to her girlfriend about her weight-loss / gain and her relationship with her husband (the counselor had opened their weekly discussion by asking how their body image affected their personal relationships). I was surprised to hear both of these women remark that they only liked to have sex with the lights out and under the covers and, that if their husband's touched their naked asses, they would touch the same spot right after so they would know what it was that he was feeling (and if it was okay I guess). It sounded like they were still really uncomfortable with their bodies.

This struck me as rather odd because not only was this something that I'd never done, it was not something that I would ever think to do. I guess it sounded weird to me because a) I know what my fat ass feels like when I touch it already and b) my hunny knows how big my fat ass is and he loves it anyway (and lately, he's been commenting on how it's getting smaller). (The lights-off thing is something I could write a novel about but I won't!) I could almost imagine doing this if you were with someone new and you'd been able to hide your ass from them before they got to touch it. The likelihood of this happening is pretty slim (no pun intended!). I think that women worry too much about what men think about their naked bodies. Most men (decent men, like the wonderful ones we surround ourselves with -- right girls?), if you ask them, will say that they are just so happy to be in close proximity to a naked women (particularly, according to my hunny, to be close to naked girl nipples) they don't care about stuff like stretch marks, cellulite or fat asses.

You would think after spending the past number of months reading the journals of women of different sizes and shapes I'd be used to hearing about stuff like this but it still surprises me when I hear it. It still makes me feel a little sad. I hope that these women who are getting fit and healthy like me, are also working on the inside as well as the outside because in my opinion, a healthy self-image is way more important than numbers on a scale.