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Sunday, June 8, 2014

Skinny Junk



I’m not an eater.

Some people are great at eating. I, alas, am not gifted in the art of mass consumption. Food and I have a healthy and respectable give-and-take matrimony. There is nothing I love more than a good plate of swoon-worthy vegetables, succulent kisses of fruit, balanced with occasional rounds of lactose and gluten. But I also take good care of my body—meaning it also takes good care of me. No more and no less. Excepting the few times when the mirror disagrees, I manage to make it out of the house from day to day without any major qualms about my physical existence.

“But you’re a model,” you might say. “Models always have perfect bodies.”

Models, truly, have a physic that photographs well and by media manipulation are presented in a perfect image. My legs don’t go on for days, I’m sub-average in height, my cheeks are full, and sometimes I take really bad pictures. Yet what glamour and an airbrush can’t fix lies much deeper. I won’t own a scale because quite frankly the scale doesn’t own me. If I feel good then I look good...

BUT, Today I ate a lot of junk.

A healthy lifestyle, after all, affords occasional saturated meals. But today I ate simply because it was junk. It was a fanciful smorgasbord of sensual chaos. There was homemade jam, and biscuits with melted cheddar, pizza, cookies, soda, ice cream etc. There was no fruit and there was no vegetable excepting the tomato sauce hiding in my three slices of pizza.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t feel good. Who was this girl and why was she so hungry? I thought of myself as reckless, careless, and (as most humans do in times of binged glutton)… I felt guilty.

“Hey Mami, ” a guy called lustfully to me as I was walking home/burning calories/planning to start a detox cleanse tomorrow.

“You don’t want her,” his androgynous friend said. “She ain’t got no meat on her bones!”

There I am again. I am the chicken-legged vegetarian who is fit, happy, and healthy. I was not a weak person for eating junk food; because at the end of the day, I knew my body would always take care of me so long as I loved it in the process. A diet is not perfect if it does not consist of love. Feeling good is a choice that happens at any size or over any meal, but it is first and foremost a choice. A healthy life starts with loving yourself, feeling good about your choices, and looking good while doing it. So, eat some love today.