Coloring Bodies Like Mine In Spaaaaace!

Yesterday a box arrived at my door. Inside were four copies of Nicole Lorenz's new coloring book, Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace. I saw it mentioned on The Rotund and just had to have a copy. I knew I wanted to give at least one copy away and Amazon has a buy three get one free deal so I ordered four. After I got home last night from a beer tasting party to benefit my UU church I sat down and colored a few pages.


I love seeing these images of women with bodies like mine doing the things I love to read about and imagine. What a gift Nicole Lorenz has given those of us without the ability to draw such things by making our fantasies come to life in such a fun way!

As I was coloring the tummy of the Diva below, I realized how I could fully see this body type as beautiful now which I'm not sure I could have a year or two ago. This is still impacting changes in how I dress and how I date. I am no longer petrified that the lump of my belly may show too prominently in an outfit. I don't think "yuck" when I look at that part of my body (most of the time anymore) and I don't mind if it is highlighted a little bit by the clothes I have on. I am so much nicer to my physical self.



Nicole is also having a coloring contest and one of the prizes is for her to do one of her drawings of you in this style!!! I can not imagine how cool that would be to have. I probably don't have the talent for coloring (or the technical know-how to do it on the computer) to win but hey a gal can dream!

So go download a few sample pages from the website and order your copy/copies on Amazon. I highly recommend getting your color on with these, they are FABULOUS!

Head Meets Body

If you haven't read it yet, check out this brilliant post by my favorite author Kate Harding over at Shapely Prose. The following quote in particular hits home for me:

“Which is one reason why exercise can seem like such a daunting task when you’re new to it. It means actually acknowledging your body and inhabiting it, instead of keeping your mind — the good part of you — comfortably separate from its housing.”

I once told my yoga instructor that she was responsible for re-attaching my head to my body. At some point in my childhood I had completely separated them and started mostly ignoring the parts below my neck. I had been a clumsy child who almost never succeeded at anything physical and though I was always interested in participating in those activities that others seemed to enjoy so much, I usually found the experience disheartening and so I focused completely on living through my mind. I read everything I could find and concentrated on establishing my worth based on my grades and my emotional responses to people. I got really, really nice.

Luckily a few years ago a friend dragged me to a yoga class and through the help of an amazing teacher, I suddenly started to realize that my body was there for more than just to give my brain a ride. I got strong and developed an awareness of my body that allowed me to move each part separately. The slow nature of the poses allowed me to use my brain to override my clumsiness and suddenly I was succeeding at something physical. It completely changed my life and even allowed me to start being less nice and being more real. I also found that when I was doing regular yoga I could succeed at other physical activities that had previously been out of my reach and I took up salsa dancing and got to have some of the most exhilarating experiences of my life as I spun and shook and whirled around the dance floor. So though I understand one of the commentors points about not focusing on bodies, I just don't think it is realistic or even desirable to pretend we don't see bodies. I don’t want my body ignored. Getting connected or perhaps re-connected to it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

On a side note, I think one of the reasons yoga has been such a successful modality for me was that it gave me tons of proprioceptive input through my joints and muscles. As a pediatric occupational therapist I use this all the time to help children organize their motor activity and improve their motor planning. I was finally able to really map each muscle in my body into my brain through this slow focused work that I did in yoga. My teacher, the amazing Marni Greer, was adept at helping us isolate movement and understand how our bodies worked. I don't think I could have done it without her. One of the biggest compliments of my life came last year when she told me I had excellent body awareness and that I should think about becoming a yoga teacher. I've made that one of my long term goals as I think it is important for people of all sizes to be represented in the yoga community but unfortunately the PhD needs to come first!

Broomball the pics!

Look at me all dressed in fleece and defending the goal! It's always so interesting to see pictures of myself. I love taking pictures and am often the person in the group with a camera but for once someone else was documenting the event so there are lots of great shots of me and everyone else. My first thought upon seeing the picture above was "My eye-makeup looks pretty good" others in the set got my negative self talk started but I was mostly able to head it off at the pass.


This one made me realize how really round my body is. I rarely look at it from this angle...in fact I'm not sure I ever saw my body from this perspective, but it doesn't look inherently bad. It certainly doesn't look like a fashion model's body, but it's kind of cute. And look at how active I look in that picture, not posed and careful of every lump and line. I'm moving, attending to the ball, ready to drop to my knees or sweep the ball away at any second. I don't see pictures like that of me very often either.



This one is harder for me to get over the negative self talk with. In this one it's my giant busthoomas that are giving me trouble. I'd just run down the bleechers from setting the self-timer on the camera and didn't have time to make an adjustment so I'm uncomfortable with how much flesh shows in this shot, but it's such a fun picture. Look at the silly grins on our faces. I know it's hard to look away from the boobs but trust me the rest of the picture is more interesting! We were all lit up with the energy of the playing the game and goofing around with the fake mustaches from our goody bags. It's just hard for me to see beyond the fact that my boobs are bigger than some of their heads. But I'm trying. This is a journey afterall. That is my body. My body that served me very well for the game and which does so many other wonderful things for me. I've got a couple of serious bruises and a few sore muscles, but overall it held up and allowed me to have the most fun I've had in weeks!

What do you think when you see pictures of yourself? If you have negative self-talk, how do you handle it?