Alright, stop right there. I bet you’re reading this title and thinking, “What is wrong with you, obviously there are naturally thin women! They are those evil women who eat nothing but bacon cheeseburgers and beer battered onion rings and guzzle it down with an extra thick strawberry milkshake and then complain about how they need a bikini that is smaller than a size 0.” Yes, I know. Those women exist. They are not unicorns, they are just few and far between. However, my point is that while there are some women like that, most women I know who are not even skinny or thin but just slim and trim have to work at it. And they work hard.
See, my problem is that for years I thought that naturally thin women were the rule, not the exception. And I know right where this thinking comes from. It comes from the period when I was around 9 or 10 and I actually was bigger than all of the other girls. For whatever reason I had gained a ton of weight and was around 120 pounds. 10 years old was young enough that most other girls weren’t talking about losing weight, going on diets or going to the gym. After all, 10 year olds can’t even go to a gym! I was jealous of the fact that it seemed like every other girl in my class was thin and it just happened. I carried that attitude with me to high school. Once again I was jealous of all the other girls who had flat stomachs and small curves. Why couldn’t I be born like that?
It wasn’t until the last few years that I realized that most women aren’t born like that. Now obviously the girls back in 5th grade probably weren’t working to be thin. But I am still working to accept that most women over the age of 18 have to actually work at not gaining weight. This is something that took a long time to occur to me but I noticed it would spring up casually in conversation. For instance there was my friend who wanted to lose 10 pounds so she started a tough workout regime. I have another friend who runs long distance almost everyday (and maintains a healthy diet). Another friend of mine complained about only snacking on carrot sticks in an effort to get rid of her baby weight. And I have a lot of friends who simply don’t include sweets and fatty foods as part of their regular diet.
What it all comes down to is that these women work at it. Some part of me still believes that they might have it slightly easier than me. After all, I’ve been working out for a month and haven’t dropped a single pound. But at the same time, if I were to take any one of these women and force them into a sedentary lifestyle that includes a high fat diet (which is what I’ve been doing for the past several years) I can almost guarantee that they would all gain weight. Maybe not as much as I have but I have to bet that the results would be visible and probably not that surprising. So I guess what I have to do now is actually work.