A body to love
Any regular Amayzine.com reader will already know that Jet and I are busy with a project called Destination Killer-body. We wanted to get out bodies into tip-top shape so we could parade them around on beaches this summer without a care in the world, and with no insecurities whatsoever. I have a fairly ambivalent relationship with my body like most other women. I’m happy that everything works on it and that I’m healthy but that’s kind of where it ends. I hate my feet, my legs are reasonable, hips are kilometres too wide, despise the fat roll on my belly and thighs, and the list goes on and on. It might all just be in my head, but it is well and truly stuck there.
We’re nearly at the end of our ‘Destination’ trip as I write this. For three long months we trained like crazy, three times per week starting at 7:30 am. Of course I’m fitter and starting to see new muscle definition here and there, but not that spectacular transformation that I had hoped for. I’ve been saying for years that I want a slimmer, trimmer body and I torture myself regularly by following women with extremely toned bodies on Instagram, always hiding behind the excuse “yes but I hate doing sport, if I started I’m sure I’d get a body like that too.” Not true, as I found out.
About a year ago, during an afternoon nursing a hangover, I watched an episode of the MTV program Made. It was about a very fat girl that desperately wanted to become a cheerleader and a trainer with the body of Da Vinci who would help her achieve it. And an army of dieticians and psychologists to help get the chubby teenager back on the right track. She spent two months crying, puffing and almost throwing up on the treadmill, and still hardly any change was noticeable. Then came the inevitable speech from her coach. Usually full of lip service and ridiculous cliches, but this time something in his story stayed with me. “You have to do it yourself. You can have all the help in the world, but it is still up to you.”
And that is exactly the same with me. I have a personal trainer, a personal dietician of sorts (Jet knows a huge amount about healthy eating and a friend of mine Esmée has a website www.workthates.nl, so more than enough information available), and if I wanted to I could go for an hour run in the park every day. None of this will help, not even a hundred personal trainers if I keep stuffing my mouth with fries at lunch, or feeding my snack attack with mini Mars-bars and Twixes, or drinking a glass (or two) of wine with my proscuitto and cheesy pizza followed by sticky toffee cake with vanilla ice-cream. That hour of sport every morning will be totally eradicated.
Got me thinking. Do I really want it? That body? Do I want to forbid myself from eating certain foods? Do I want to drink less wine? I sometimes joke that I’ll probably end up fat and happy later in my life anyway, so maybe I should just accept myself as I am. Something about loving my body the way it is, not being embarrassed in a bikini, embracing myself. Destination Killer-body was and is fun, but Destination Killer-mind is what it’s actually about. So you see, it is all in the head.
