51/90, eat the cake. eat iiiiiit.

I ate a piece of cake at work yesterday.

Then, I went back and gathered all of the crumbs and globs of icing on the tray and ate those, too. And hand another glass of iced tea.

While home for Spring Break, my mom bought me a piece of chocolate. It was raspberry cream. She also baked cookies, and I repeatedly dipped my fingers into the batter to steal several white chocolate chips at a time. Then we went grocery shopping together. While walking around the store, I grabbed a jumbo ag of trail mix, the kind with M&Ms. I walked around the store eating one peanut, then one M&M.

For the past, I don't know, several weeks, I had made banana-peanut butter pancakes with carob chips for breakfast. They're healthy, so I'm not really counting these.

This may not seem like a big deal.

It was a big deal. Walking up and down that row of chocolates, deciding if I really wanted the raspberry cream–if I could afford those calories and that sugar–is a conversation I've had before every dessert since I felt fat in middle school.


But when I picked up that raspberry chocolate, that cake server, that bag of Reese's cups I started eating in the line at Target this week, I said what I've found myself saying a lot more lately.

Fuck it.

No, I have not been able to get myself back into my fitness regimen. No, I have not even done yoga more than twice a week for over a month.

No, I have not been eating the kind of meals that I like to make–with solid, organic ingredients, a bit of time and a chair to sit in and eat it.

No, I have not refused any sort of free food that has been offered to me since the semester started. No matter how processed, how loaded with sodium or sugar, how not hungry I am.

Because I've realized that this is my body. I am living in it, and I'm going to love it. I am not Swedish. I am not a model. I am not paid to have a flat stomach or a tiny size. I am not forced to stand on a scale ever.

I am German-Irish. I am short, but not quite petite. I am a woman. For the past three years, I've been longing for the 105-pound frame I had in high school. Then, when I saw my sister and realized that she had reached that true teenage-frame, that she looked so much like me and that she was still a kid, things got put in perspective.

My hips have settled. They've widened themselves past my waist, curving out to prepare for, well, life really. The obvious purposes and the less obvious–the work that we do each day. This body was more built for manual labor, for bratwurst-eating and heavy beer. So why not enjoy it?

Maybe I've read to much Lady Chatterly's Lover lately. But instead of wishing for the boyish frame that changed fashion and expectations in the 1920s, when your beads had to hang flat against your chest, I'm starting to look at my curve for what they are. I'm starting to look at that bit of stomach that hangs over the top of jeans and notice that everyone else has it, too. So maybe the body isn't the problem. Maybe the jeans are too low or too tight or cut too off for your body.

Maybe I look just exactly as I'm supposed to. This isn't what Hollywood says. According to them, my height looks like Selma Blair or Christina Ricci or Eva Longoria.

Natalie Wood was 5'3". Ok, I'm not saying I'm a Natalie Wood, but at least there's hope. At least there was a moment when the small height wasn't limited to the width of their bones.

So for now, when I have stressed about everything else, I'll let this one go. I may never be truly satisfied with the softness of my stomach, my little pooch of a belly. But for now, no piece of cake or handful of M&Ms will kill it.

For now, I can say it will only get better. The air will get warmer, and I'll be out more. I'll be home, doing Tae Bo with my sister, riding my bike across town for whatever job I manage to find. My energy will be back. Life will be pumping through these veins again, in a whole new way.