Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I have noticed a strange pattern in my weight loss journey. EVERY time I start to see some success and talk about it here on Starling Fitness, I end up backsliding again. It has made me skittish, superstitious and unwilling to share any positive experiences I’ve had.

I think it all boils down to humility. When I post entries to Starling Fitness, I’m bragging. Somehow, that bragging is the polar opposite of the way I need to act for losing weight. I started Starling Fitness over TEN years ago and it has taken me this long to learn this one simple message.

I NEED TO BE HUMBLE.

The act of humility is the one thing that can make losing weight EASIER. EVERY time I’ve humbled myself, admitting that I don’t know everything, I have found a better way of living. The sad truth is that we Westerners just aren’t taught how to be humble. When I did a search, I found mostly religious references, which leave me feeling lost as an atheist. I did find one list on wikiHow:

• 3 Ways to Be Humble – wikiHow

Their list of ways to learn how to be humble are:

• Accepting Your Limitations
• Appreciating Others
• Rediscovering a Sense of Wonder

I’ll be writing about these three methods of humility as they relate to weight loss for the next few days, and hopefully, I’ll be able to learn to share here without sabotaging my efforts.

I’m not a sporto girl. I have watched scant few sports movies, probably because they don’t really have any female characters who aren’t love interests. In fact, in this list of Top 10 Sports Movie Speeches, I have only seen ONE of the movies, and it was only an honorable mention.

It was League of Their Own, and honestly, the “There’s no crying in baseball,” is one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever seen on film. When I fell on my bike, ripped my hands open and bleeding, I thought, “There’s no crying in baseball.” When I’ve been so tired at the end of the 5K Halloween race at Gardner Village and I could barely climb that tiny hill right before the finish, I thought, “There’s no crying in baseball.” If you haven’t seen the whole thing, it’s here”:

After rewatching that speech, however, the BEST part comes when the umpire tells him that he should talk to each of his players like they’re his mother and he calls the umpire a penis with a hat on. I wanted to call the umpire worse. No, Mr. Umpire. We don’t need someone to talk to us like we’re their mother. We need to hear that there’s no crying in baseball!

I think the reason that list of Top 10 Sports Movie Speeches fell so completely flat for me is because I was never the target audience. Sports movies aren’t written for me. They’re written for over-the-hill jock boys who want to relive their past glory days. It’s an entire GENRE of movies that really just doesn’t care about HALF the population.

If find that incredibly sad. Where is the collection of motivational speeches made by women? They are RARE. Hayley in Stick It comes to mind, but her speech isn’t on YouTube. You can see part of it in the movie trailer:

“If you’re gonna eat mat, eat mat hard.” Yeah, don’t hold back. Don’t keep your best for later. Really give it all you’ve got and if you fail, fail hard. Why isn’t her speech on YouTube? Why was it so hard to find even a portion of that speech there?

The only other one I could think of was Bring It On with Gabrielle Union. Her Bring It speech is perfect. After Kirsten Dunst’s team has stolen her routine, her advice to them is spot on:

“You wanna make it right? Then when you go to nationals, bring it. Don’t slack off because you feel sorry for us. That way, when we beat you, we’ll know it’s because we’re better.”

We need more movies like this for our girls, except with ALL sports, not just gymnastics and cheering. Title Nine is not just about providing equal opportunity for girls, we need movies and inspiration for them as well. Until they do, women who could be great athletes will be lost.

I was at Dillards the other day and I saw this display.

I needed some workout clothes, so I wandered over there to see what they had. Unfortunately, the “Large” size that they had couldn’t have been bigger than a size 12. Shame on you, Nike!

I have had this problem with them before and talked about it here:

• Starling Fitness – Fitness, diet, and health weblog » Why I’m Angry At Nike
• Starling Fitness – Fitness, diet, and health weblog » Nike! What The BLEEP Is The Matter With YOU?!

Back then, I said:

The fact that they don’t carry a size for me when I’m fifty pounds lighter, just tells me that they aren’t an athletic clothing company. They’re a fashion clothing company just like Kenneth Cole. They don’t want “fatties” like me wearing their clothes and giving them a bad name.

I wrote that entry in 2006. It’s SEVEN years later and they are STILL making the same mistakes. I was going to write an entry about the new Nike App called Nike+ Move that would turn your iPhone 5S into a device that monitors your every move like a FitBit, ActiveLink or Fuelband, but I don’t even want to give them a link now.

In the end, we left Dillards and went to Forever 21. They had plenty of exercise clothes to fit me.

The SciShow has another great show about what happens when you stop eating:

It might sound great to just be burning fat constantly, but the irritability and the inability to think clearly is horrible. I have enough fat stores that I probably could go for a LONG time without food, but every essence of my body is screaming for it when I’ve tried to fast for more than six hours.

In the end, it’s easier to lose weight by feeding myself small quantities of healthy food every two hours. I drop the pounds like crazy when I do it properly and I rarely feel hungry for longer than a few minutes. Just stopping eating isn’t really an option for me.

Apparently, on Twitter the hashtag #FatShamingWeek is trending and a bunch of really mean tweets are associated with them. I could go on an on talking about this and HAVE in the past. You can read some of those entries here:

• Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People?
• Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? REDUX
• Tired of High-Tech Fat Hatred
• Your Chubby Lass Can Be the Belle of her Class
• The Biggest Loser
• Skinny Bitches
• We hate her

This video from Meghan Tonjes, however, is so succinct that I thought I’d share it with you.

I love her:

You have a right to your opinion and you have a right to express that opinion, but you also, within that bundle of rights, have the right to sound like an asshole. Make jokes about whatever it is that you want to make jokes about, but this goes beyond jokes. This goes to a mindset that people have that it’s okay to make people feel that they’re not worthy of respect or love.

I refuse to entertain the notion that publicly shaming people for being big or fat or anything that makes you uncomfortable is anything but completely demeaning, ignorant and disgusting.

If you’re focusing on tearing people down, it’s because you’re miserable and misery loves company.

THE BEST QUOTE:

It’s no one’s job to defend themselves as being worthy of existence.

Here’s some good advice to all those people who think it’s their job to police other people’s bodies.

You’re making the world WORSE. STOP! Why aren’t you making the world BETTER?! The rest of us are fighting to make this world a little better for everyone else, and you’re slowly just fucking it up!

My thoughts about this issue is that these people are STARVING. When they are so hungry and see someone who is fat, they get jealous, thinking that person is eating everything that they’ve denied themselves and they lash out.

The saddest truth of all is that most of the people who are fat are ALSO starving, trying their hardest to get thin. And when they see thin people, they get angry because they think that those people didn’t have to work to get where they are and lash out, calling them skinny bitches and yelling, “Just eat a sandwich.”

How about this radical idea? How about no one starve themselves? When we feed ourselves properly, there is no starvation and no reason to lash out at anyone.

Via: “#FatShamingWeek” Except congress. Seriously… – Hank’s Tumblr

This show is brilliant. It takes away all my hope that I will ever be thin, but it is brilliant.

Here is episode 2:

Episode 3: This episode includes a man who has a tube permanently attached to his stomach where he can eat a full meal and then empty out the eaten food into the toilet. It’s a disgusting medical device for bulimia.

Episode 4:

Via: Fat Head » The Men Who Made Us Thin

Kudos to MotiveWeight for posting a link to this TED Talk. It’s a talk called Image Is Powerful from supermodel Cameron Russell.

You can just hear in her voice how scared she is to tell the true story of being a model.

If you ever think, ‘If I had thinner thighs and shinier hair, wouldn’t I be happier,” you just need to meet a group of models. They have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes and they are the most physically insecure women, probably, on the planet.

If there is a take-away to this talk, I hope it’s that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures.

This is a wonderful talk explaining the strange world we call fashion and modeling.

When I heard that Abercrombie and Fitch made XL and XXL sizes in men’s clothing, but the largest size in women’s is a 10, I almost blew a gasket.

• Business Insider: Abercrombie & Fitch Refuses To Make Clothes For Large Women

Their nearly naked male models made me uncomfortable enough to avoid the store before, but now, they can kiss my money GOODBYE.

In fact, it made me want to show up at their store and do this!

Then I remembered. That’s how real life is.

In real life, women who are overweight are discriminated against ALL the time. In fact, pretty people get FAR more perks than ugly people. It’s wrong, but discrimination is rampant against people who aren’t sexy. Some scientists even argue that it’s hard-wired into our brains. We should do everything we can to avoid this behavior in ourselves, but at the same time, we need to be aware of it.

If you ever need inspiration to stay on the treadmill for ten more minutes, this is it. When you get to your goal weight, people will take you more seriously. They will listen to what you have to say. They will deign to allow you to buy their over-priced clothes.

F-You, Abercrombie & Fitch! Forever 21 has been there for me during my fattest times and I am buying EVERYTHING in their store when I’m at my goal weight. If they can showcase their “fat” clothes on models and make them look THIS good, then you have NO excuse!

Via: Funeral For My Fat, Abercrombie & Fitch Refuses To Make Clothes For Large Women

This postcard from PostSecret tells us all something we already knew.

It reads:

I hate people who successfully lose weight.

Yeah, I know you do. You want to know why? It’s because you hate YOURSELF. If you were at your goal weight, you wouldn’t be trying to pull down everyone in their lives who were bettering themselves. You’d be happy and supportive of them.

I recently read, “I Got This” by Jennifer Hudson. After she lost all her weight, some people were literally ANGRY with her for getting healthy. She talked to her WW leader about it, and her leader asked her:

“Would you trade your weight loss for acceptance from others?”

It’s an amazing question, because when I read that passage, I realized that, yes, I HAD traded my weight loss for acceptance from others. I had felt rejected by many people because of my new-found loss. I have the complete acceptance from those people now that I’m nearly one hundred pounds over my goal weight. Was it worth it?

Hell to the no!

The next time I feel that someone doesn’t accept my weight loss and maybe even HATES me because of it, I’m letting it fall away from me. Either they will get used to the new, skinny me or they weren’t worth it in the end. If you only like me because I’m fat, then you can not be my friend anymore.

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

The always entertaining Jenna Marbles did a funny video showing how her home workouts “work.”

If you have trouble working out at home, then a gym membership might be the best thing for you, or even taking a walk (or run) outside. I actually prefer to workout at home where no one can see me, smell me or laugh at me. I can’t wait until Jenna does a “How Gym Workouts Work” video!