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RantGirls, It's time to "get rid of your winter body" again
It has begun again. Just saw several ads advertising weight loss products to get your body ready for summer. Women around me are starting to talk about losing the holiday weight again. None of them have gained a visible amount of weight and most aren't overweight either as far as I can tell.
Sure, it's good to want to eat healthier, but it always seems to be so appearance focused. Gaining 5kg in winter isn't going to kill you. Your body needs calories to stay warm. Having a healthy amount of fat will also help keep your body temperature up in cold weather.
You don't need to look like a model to be allowed on a beach. You certainly don't need to start starving your body 6 months in advance.
If you're overweight, it might be a good idea to lose some weight, but the motivation should be to be healthier, not to look good in a bikini. I just wish women could be allowed to exist as we are and not always have to try to look pretty.
When I talk about how my body cycles between 5-10 pounds over the seasonal change and act like it’s completely normal, people give me really weird and surprised looks.
The absolute best thing about not being underweight anymore is not being absolutely freezing cold all the time! It’s such a miserable state to be in, both mentally and physically - no more reynards, no more shaking, no more meltdowns, no more insomnia, no more all day sickness, massively reduced OCD and the list goes on.
Doomed to failure crash diets one after another are a way to keep us down, depressed and distracted
Gah, the Raynaud’s! I used to not be able to sleep alone because I needed someone else’s warmth to de-ice my hands and feet.
The weight that women are being told they're supposed to be is not a healthier weight. Statistically, women in the "overweight" range are better off medically than women on the low end of the "healthy weight" range, which is what women are told to aim for.
Exactly! A few extra pounds are definitely helpful in case of sickness because the body has more resources to draw on. When my mom had cancer back in 2019, one reason why she managed to fight back was that she had about 15 kilos extra back then. Even when she started to lose weight in the process of fighting that cancer, she was never dangerously underweight. When that cancer decided to fuck off, my mom was at a perfectly normal weight for a woman of her height and age. I think those extra kilos played a huge role in helping her survive.
On the other hand, there's my best friend. She's always been very slim, is unable to gain weight and has a very hard time finding clothes that fit her because sometimes, even XS is too big. When she catches a severe cold, she's down and out for weeks, and on top of that, she loses weight which makes it even more difficult for her to fight off a simple cold.
I'd rather have a few kilos extra, though I gotta admit that I'm trying to get rid of a few of them simply because I'm starting to feel uncomfortable, but as long as my clothes from last year fit again, I'm good.
Neither I nor any woman will be able to get the perfect summer beach-ready body, no matter how much dieting, exercise or surgery we have. It’ll never be good enough, and filtered and photoshopped reality will always be seen as the ideal when men and cash runs the show.
The good news is that I don’t know if any beaches near me that require users to be a certain size, shape, age or weight before they can use it, so I’ll be going to the beach no matter what these assholes trying to flog their diet pills say. Maybe I’ll even shave my legs (but don’t count on it).
The idea that women and girls should put their lives on hold until they reach a certain goal (thinness, relationship status, job status etc etc) is so poisonous. So many women are losing time and wasting energy focusing on these pointless things. You don’t need any kind of body shape to go to the beach, and who gives a toss what you look like to other people while you’re there. Sick of having every joy in life hijacked by the ‘you can’t have it until you’re beautiful enough’ brigade.
There’s a campaign (I’ve encountered it locally, but it might be national) for people with cancer with the tagline “keep making plans.” Like you’re saying, life keeps chugging on, don’t stop doing things you love or plan just because everything isn’t perfect.
Of course, if the ideal was actually attainable, then who would buy these companies' products for years on end? And we might even have time, money and energy to focus on things that actually make us healthy and happy with what we have. Can't have that!
Men accepting that women exist outside of looking sexy challenge: difficulty level: IMPOSSIBLE
And don't forget to shave those legs you've been neglecting all winter too, ladies! Wouldn't want to look slovenly!
I swear if I hear one more person telling me to shave my legs and pits, I will dye them neon purple just out of spite
Hot take: women are meant to be a bit “overweight” by how we define that today. We are meant to have fat stores, so that we can survive famine and still nurture our babies. Not having enough body fat is not healthy.
That’s very different from being overweight though, which refers to having too much fat and putting you at increased risk of health problems. Even the flawed bmi scale allows for women to have a fair amount of fat and still be defined as healthy. Our perception of what is over and underweight is skewed both ways imo.
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I had a health visitor tell me they had a training exercise where they showed them all pictures of children, from thin to fat, they had to rate them from underweight/concerning to overweight.
And wouldn’t you know, it was a trick. The child labelled as underweight was actually the ideal body weight, and the subsequent children were a little too chubby to obese. Not one health visitor got it right.
I read an article some years ago about parents not recognising their child is overweight or obese, that they cannot see them objectively. (Not sure that was the case for oldies like me - our Mums were prone to telling us disapprovingly that we were “getting fat”.)
My best friend had an enlarged photo on her wall of her obese pre-pubescent son in a swimming pool - he looks like a beached whale in it, no exaggeration. It was only years later, when he’d lost all the fat that she appreciated how obese he’d been.
I have also observed how dog owners fail to recognise their precious pooches are overweight, even when the vet tells them. Love must blind us.
Same with me. I was skinny until I was about 13 and I got a little chubby probably due to puberty. My mom tried to put me on a diet and my dad put his foot down. The next year I grew 4 inches and was thin again and stayed that way until menopause.
I think I’ve definitely witnessed this!
My parents were like yours, the smallest healthy baby fat was very disapproved of and my dad once said to me “I don’t know if you’re overweight or just have a very unfortunate body type” he also encouraged me to keep going when I was already underweight, saying I still had “woman squidge” … (yes I have had to have years of therapy, if you wondered)!
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No UK, and it was based on NHS health guidelines (health visitors are early years baby and child assessors). many think the weight stuff is a conspiracy and there’s “health at any size” but I tend to trust the dr’s on this one, broadly speaking (I know there’s always outliers and exceptions)
In the 50s and 60s, everyone cooked at home. Going out to eat was generally a treat. There weren't a lot of fast food places. My parents liked to go out to dinner but it was usually only once a week and usually with another couple.
Damn, really? There's advice on how to get rid of the winter body?
Why didn't anyone give me advice on how to achieve it? I'm sitting here, freezing, with my inadequate amount of body fat, and no one told me how to GET my winter body in the first place!
The world is unfair.
(I mean, yeah, I guess people's weight fluctuates and hundreds of years ago, people would have put on weight in autumn, lost it gradually over winter, and be rather thin around Easter, and yeah, perhaps that is the natural and healthy state we ought to try and emulate, but if they are going to go with that, then where is my advice on putting on weight, dammit!?)
I think that's the whole reason Lent was invented, there's not much food, hey!, you need to fast before Christ's crucifixion and resurrection! So it was perfect timing, as far as the winter and not having much food.
And people in the past certainly wouldn't have tried to lengthen the starvation season until summer to look pretty. They'd be happy to start building new reserves as soon as crops were starting to grow again.
I also just hate the phrasing "get rid of your winter body" "get your ideal summer body". Whatever my weight, my body is still the same body. It's not a product, it is me.
My ideal summer body is one that doesn't put me at risk for diabetes. That also happens to be my ideal fall, winter, and spring body. Losing weight is a means, not an end.
Exactly. Losing weight in a responsible way with the goal of being healthier should absolutely be encouraged. Just like eating healthy food should be encouraged if you're already thin. My weight is well within the healthy range and I am trying to eat healthier. Because I care about my body functioning well, not because I want to be a nice object to look at.