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Me: I’ve gained 18 pounds since I stopped smoking last year.
Other Person: Start smoking again.
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Me: I’ve gained 18 pounds since I stopped smoking last year.
Other Person: Start smoking again.
I gained 15 pounds when I quit smoking last year. In the spring when I went to a yoga class and felt just how unfamiliar I was in my own body I got a scale, got on, and got busy. I’ve lost it all from going to the gym and changing the way I eat (no, you cannot have a Magnolia cupcake to reward yourself for not smoking). Unfortunately I have totally slacked off on the exercise front and my diet is not all whole grains and veggies anymore. I gotta get back on it! I am cutting myself some slack due to holiday treats and general stress related to school.
Congrats on losing it! I’m sure you’ll be able to get back to it and succeed in losing however much you’d like to. :)
I like my 18 pounds. I’d actually like even a little more weight. I may change my mind after I do gain more though. lol
Poop on the advice to start smoking again. Cancer is better than curves? I find it repulsive that the typical kneejerk reaction to any mention of weight gain is to tell the person to lose it, and did this person have any right to editorialize on your body? Given your height, I think the extra weight would look great, and you’re obviously pleased. When you’re not comfortable, not feeling healthy, or your body lets you know it has taken enough space, you’ll know. It is hard though to overcome societal inertia around weight issues, especially when people feel so free to give “advice.” I have people freaking out that I still am intentionally lifting heavier and heavier and eating more to get bigger muscle mass, especially in my arms. Feminine beauty norms? Fuck ’em. They sure fucked me.
Yeah, I have to agree with Jen. AND I hope you didn’t take my comment to mean: lose the wieght! I had very mixed feelings about my desire to lose weight, and was worried I was capitulating to fat phobic sexist rigid norms. Let’s be honest; I’m sure some of that informed my gym membership. AND I know that I was lazy and sedentary and ate too much sugar and then REALLY ate too much fatty sugary fast food type things as a replacement for cigarettes and that I felt sluggish and totally out of touch with my body. So I’m glad I started moving and eating differently (no diets for me ever) but don’t presume to tell others what to do in this department.
I didn’t take your comment that way at all, Spinster. :)
I smoked for 20 years and quitting was THE hardest thing I ever did in my life! It took about a year for my weight to go up – like almost 30 pounds – and then about another year and a half to get it back down to something approximating my original smoking weight. I did that becuase I felt like shit at the higher weight, not because of societal pressure to “thin down”. The temptation was always there to start smoking again but I refused to listen to the nicotine addiction and realized that if I could kick that one, I could kick the fat/sugar addiction I had replaced it with. If you must start smoking (NOT recommended), just tell yourself that you’re going to wait until you reach a specific goal before you start … like your 95th birthday.
Just to clarify: spinster, I didn’t take your comment as telling Maria to lose weight either. I thought you were being supportive and describing your experience. My ranting was directed to the person who said “time to start smoking again.”
I think you raise a great point in your second comment, spinster: how much of what we do is informed by the pressure to meet certain bodily norms, even when we’re health-focused? When I read your comment, I thought about my relationship with exercise, shaping my body, and fat phobia in this culture. Even though my focus is developing mass and strength (which is subversive to some degree for a female), I still have to admit to my aesthetic concerns and my questions about where they come from. There are so many tapes playing in my head that have been ingrained over time about the body’s appearance and shape. I can’t get rid of those messages, but I try to keep an open, aware dialogue with them instead, lol. Discussions like this highlight lots of grey zones for me, like the way plastic surgery makes me both inspired and suspicious. (Do I want it for myself? Yup.) I keep trying to respect individual choices about self-improvement (including my own), but yeah, there’s always the question for me about what comes to the fore (and why) as worthy self-improvement.