Weight Watchers

When I was young I had quite a sizable belly. I was that kid with clear baby fat that entirely gathered around her mid section. When I look at pictures of myself in elementary school or middle school it is absolutely adorable how far my gut sticks out, and it is no wonder I didn’t gain a complete inferiority complex about it. Kids could be cruel but I guess my mother and fathers continuous reassuring of my beauty made me never question my looks. I also grew up knowing that beauty was on the inside and that God never made mistakes. 

Well with me being a teenage girl growing up in a less than forgiving society, it is a miracle that I skipped the ‘freak out over my weight stage.’ I was lucky enough to grow out of my pot belly and be somewhat proportional, but with peer pressure to look a certain way I should have been completely self conscious. All of my close friends in high school would adamantly skip lunch and smoke a cigarette instead to try to curb their appetite. I would watch them in confusion of their choice, because personally I liked to chow down on my packed lunch that my mother gave me leaving all my food devoured. I hated cigarettes since my Grandma was a smoker and loved to eat…..so it never occurred to me that giving myself lung cancer was better than doing what was natural; eating. 

I watched numerous friends over my high school and college years struggle with eating disorders and worry themselves sick over their weight.  I would listen to them throw up their food in the bathrooms after meals and try to tell them they were beautiful inside and out with one failed attempt after another.  Some clinically needed help, and some would minimize it to just ‘being a girl.’ I would be told ‘All girls worry about their weight and that’s totally normal, aren’t you worried about it too?’  I am not sure if it was because I grew up in a household with a strong faith or a household where I was cherished and told I was beautiful just the way I was on a daily basis, but I somehow did not fall into this typical cycle of weight obsession that so many of my friends fell victim too. 

To this day it overwhelms me with sadness to see people obsess over their weight as if we are meant to look ‘a certain way’ and that we all aren’t somehow beautiful just the way that God made us.

I’m not saying a diet every now and then to cut out fast food or sweets isn’t a healthy choice. Working out is excellent and is great for your mind and your body. I just would love for women to be motivated to do it for all the right reasons, and not because they want to look like the women in the movies or to look the way a man tells her she should. Where is our confidence ladies? Remember that precious word; confidence?

Summer is approaching and in Korea women are working hard to get their bathing suit body. Weight is such a sensitive and obsessive topic here that it brings my anger on the subject right to the surface. A woman who is a trainer at my gym told a coworker of mine that all she ate one day was 8 egg whites and the next day all she ate was an orange. My response was, ‘Doesn’t she know she shouldn’t tell people that! She is so unhealthy the way she is losing weight and she is in a position of power to tell other women how to look like her by being a trainer at a gym. Women come to her for advice, and this is what she will tell them?” Because after all that’s not a diet, that’s not advice, that’s not healthy, that’s anorexia.

I’m lucky to have the confidence I have in my body and in how I look. My parents made me feel beautiful no matter what the scale says and have taught me that who I am on the inside shows my real beauty. ( I wouldn’t know what the scale says anyway because I have never owned one!) Both them and my faith have taught me that its things like honesty, integrity, loyalty, and generosity that make a person beautiful. Not their pant size.  So when my kids at school call me fat or my coworkers comment on my weight it just rolls off my shoulders because I value my inner beauty more than what others see and judge at first glance. It’s always the inner beauty you remember about people anyway, isn’t it? Their kindness, their compassion, their humility? Even the most beautiful person can ruin it with a snide and ignorant comment.

I just wish more women in Korea could understand where their true value lies.