Fitness Goddess

Jackie Warner and my girlfriend share similar dimensions.

If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter feed and Facebook statuses, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been trying to go to the gym more, and have been whining about it pretty constantly. I’ve learned a little something about relationships in the process and want to share it with my lovely readers.

My girlfriend is fond of saying, “you’re skinny, not healthy” which is probably the most accurate assessment of what’s going on with me. Having a Buddhist’s mind for only eating out of necessity and petite Asian genes galore, I have always been skinny. But Nikki is right. Just because I look like I’m healthy doesn’t mean I actually am. I have my weekly trip to Wendy’s. Up until a few months ago I was smoking 3-4 cigarettes a day, which I know isn’t a massively unhealthy amount, but I can’t imagine smoking any amount is a good thing. All of this probably wouldn’t have even been noticeable if I wasn’t dating a fitness goddess. When you’re living with someone who runs 5 miles a day and lives at the gym, you tend to start wondering why she’s never out of breath and a couple flights of stairs kicks your ass.

Another source of epiphany on my lack of fitness is football. I’m in week three now of a coed-flag football league and I’m doing just terrible. It’s a no contact league and somehow I’m always sore after the games (mostly from falling down a lot). This is probably where my Asian genes work against me. Ever hear of an Asian football player? Me neither.

I share similar dimensions with Mulan...or maybe the dragon.

I’ll admit my privilege in this though. I don’t have to work at all to look like I do. I sleep 10 hours a day. I play a lot of video games. My quads (learned what they were called from Nikki, it's the top of your legs) are used almost entirely to support my laptop for writing. I subsist on a diet of Wendy’s, ramen, and breakfast cereal because I don’t really know how to cook. Yet, even with all that, I’ve hovered around 100 lbs since 8^th grade (don’t worry, I’m short enough for that to be well within normal - BMI 20.5). If you think that all sounds fantastic, let me ask you this:  could you put a baseball uniform on and easily infiltrate a Little League team? If your answer was anything along the lines of, “Of course not, I have boobs and hips” you’ve got me beat, because I’m positive I could pull of an Amanda Bynes type switcheroo for the LittleLeague World Series except I’m hopelessly unathletic. The point being, I’m not trying to build the body I have into the body I want. All the exercise I’m doing is only going to change the composition of the same shape I’ve always had; I’m literally exercising to lose my nerd’s lack of stamina. This is probably a strange concept for a lot of women, exercising for functionality rather than appearance, which is kind of a shame, isn’t it? More on that later.

So now I’m trying to go to the gym, which is kind of not what you think. We have a tiny fitness center in our apartment complex that nobody really uses, except for me now apparently. My girlfriend uses the massive athletic complex gym at UCF for real athletes and, while she’s offered to come with me to the free fitness center in our complex, I always tell her I’d rather she didn’t. It’s impossible to go to the gym the 1 hour a day I can tolerate (I get so freaking bored), when the person who is supposed to be your gym buddy could stay there for three hours quite happily. More than that, I’m fairly certain I use most exercise machines wrong the first time, realize there’s no way I’m supposed to bonk my head that many times, and then have to look at the vague silhouette diagrams on the sides to see what I should have been doing. I definitely still have this "please oh please oh please don’t embarrass yourself in front of Nikki" thing that has persisted since I met her. Despite the fact that she could probably really help me in this, being the multi-sport athlete and personal trainer she is, I still really want her to think I’m cool even though I’m really obviously not. This is when I realized my fitness idol and hero was actually my girlfriend. She exercises to be a better athlete and ends up with the amazing body she has because it is functional for what she does. When I realized I was doing very badly in my own sport, I figured out fitness wasn’t something that functioned only for looks, which I already have and exercise wouldn’t change, but should help me do the things I want to do physically. Ladies, look at your own fitness routine and ask yourself, is it helping you do what you want to do? Does it make you more functional or are you doing it in hopes of changing your appearance?

Oh! Yep, I was on it backward.

So the question becomes, how does a couch potato date a fitness goddess? Actually, strike that, I don’t like couch potato. Revised:  how does a bedroom bunny date a fitness goddess? All my exercise usually comes in the bedroom, so this is far more accurate anyway. To this point, she has tried to help me be a better person and I’ve convinced her an occasional trip to In-n-Out won’t kill her girl abs. This is one of those surprisingly complex relationship questions most people probably don’t even consider. A differential in fitness and health goals can really strain a relationship. I mean, she is up at 6 AM every day for jogging, and I’m rolling into bed most nights around 2 AM not to be awoken until noon, which means there are whole chunks of the day where one of us is awake while the other is asleep. My sister says this is completely normal, especially since she’s had her son, but I have the lesbian urge to merge here. I’d pretty much wrap myself around Nikki 24/7 if I could figure out how to manage that without it being socially awkward. I think the answer is incremental change and unconditional acceptance of benign traits. Let me explain that since it sounds all jargony.

In any long term relationship, you’re going to find there are things that don’t match up that can be changed and things that don’t match up that don’t matter. The skill set to develop here is to figure out the difference. When you’re with someone special, you’re going to have this urge to want to be a better person for them, and they’ll have this whole other set of interests and ideas than you, which can end up enriching you as a person if you’re open to trying. You’re not changing to suit them, you’re trying what they like and seeing if it might also be something you like but have never considered. Positive changes in your life can come from other people’s desires for your best interests. Take the smoking thing, if Nikki hadn’t pressured me, I’d probably still be doing it—incremental change. There are other traits though that are basic to happiness and aren’t really harming the other person, but just might not be what the other person would like for themselves. My sleeping in doesn’t hurt anyone. I’m a freelance writer. I can have the sleep schedule I want so long as I’m productive with my waking hours. It doesn’t really hurt me for Nikki to get up at 6 AM since I’m a dead to the world type sleeper, and it doesn’t really hurt her for me to wake up at 11:30 or noon. So we just accept those idiosyncrasies as part of the lovely tapestry that is the other person even though it doesn’t match our own personal preferences. If it doesn’t hurt you or make you unhappy, let it go.

I don’t expect the complaining about going to the gym will leave my Twitter feed anytime soon even as I’m getting into better shape, but hopefully I’ll stop falling down so much during games.

Dating Advice and Updates

 

Bette and Tina of the past?

I realize I've been missing awhile. Apparently finishing my degree, finishing all the edits on my first novel, and moving across country was all a lot of work. I am now graduated with the expectation of my degree being mailed to my parents' address, still working on the edits of the book, and I'm comfortably in a hotel in Orlando. There was just something unappealing about signing a year long lease on an apartment sight unseen, so we drove all the way here and now we'll start apartment hunting from the comfort of a motel room. I'm going to need to change my website banner at some point to reflect my status as no longer living in Huntington Beach.

Relationship advice is something I've been dabbling in since sex advice isn't as reliable of work. As it turns out, I'm actually pretty good at it. Apparently being successfully monogamous for several years can really make you something of an expert on monogamy. Or, at least, that's what I keep telling myself...

“My question involves defining "average" body type in on-line dating. Can you help define it for me? I am overweight, but I have been losing weight. At what point will I be "average"? I am interested in a profile that has average body type listed under attractions. I read conflicting articles on-line that define average as a size 12, or 14, or even a 16 being the average size for a woman in the United States. What are the measurements? (waist and hip) Thanks. I just want to be honest in how I describe myself.”

~Sincerely,

Average in the USA

Dear Average:

I realize this isn’t a sex advice question and is more relationship/general info about the world, but I thought it was an interesting topic and I’ve been behaving so PG lately since I’ve started writing more relationship advice stuff. It seems less like an opportunity for sex advice and more like a chance for social commentary and we all know how much I love social commentary.

Firstly, let me praise you for trying online dating as a lesbian. We’re a teeny tiny portion of the total population (3% last census), and if you use the Seinfeld rules, only 5% of that is dateable. So really, you’re looking at a 0.15% dating pool in your given area. It’s probably why so many lesbians live in the Los Angeles area—0.15% of 10 million is a pretty good number. For everyone else, and even people living in a major metropolitan area, online dating expands your chances to meet people you wouldn’t normally meet, which is key for lesbians. I would also encourage you to expand the radius of your searches online; there are fantastic women all over the place, and you shouldn’t settle simply because of geography.

To address the actual question, I really don’t think it’s as simple as a dress size. Were you hoping I’d just say, “14!” and let you off the hook? I can’t even give a short answer to whether it’s raining or not and I lived most of my life in Southern California—little hope of a short answer to this. You said you’ve searched around for what qualifies as average in the U.S. and that might be a good start if we weren’t such damn liars about everything. There’s this enormous gap between what is literally the average in this country, and then there’s what we perceive the average to be. Our understanding of sizes and averages in this country isn’t so great. One of the jokes my girlfriend and I make all the time is how enormous Marilyn Monroe has become after death. Everyone always says she was a size…(usually one bigger than they currently wear). It turns out she was a size 12, and it turns out the 1950s version of a size 12 is actually closer to a size 8 or even 6 (in vanity size—clothing manufacturers artificially lower sizes on some clothes to makeyou buy them even though that 6 is an 8) in modern sizes. Back in the 1950s, they didn’t have as many sizes as we have now—they didn’t need them. The whole range could be contained by about 20 and the largest sizes weren’t as commonly worn, so a size 12 could describe about average back then when the same woman would be considered fairly small by modern standards. According to the CDC, twenty-something women in 2006 were 30 lbs heavier than the same age range in 1960. As a society, we have gotten a lot bigger (taller too for some reason), but our models and actresses haven’t, they’ve even got a little skinnier.

Can we please stop pretending she wasn't this thin?

And that is precisely the problem. Physically the average in the United States, is fairly large, but that’s not true across the developed world and it’s not true of what we think is average. In reality, you may be well under the national average, which is about a 10-14 taking the national average height of 5’5” and the national average weight of 165 (Marilyn was 5’5” and 140lbs at her very heaviest, also at the national average for 1960, although her acting weight was much closer to 118, putting her at a modern size 6 or 8—see what I mean about the fudging of sizes that goes on with her?). She looks bigger to our modern eyes not because she actually was, but because she isn’t the 5’9” 120lb Heidi Klum we’re used to even though, in reality, Marilyn Monroe, by today’s standards would be 25lbs under the national average. Yes, she was a size 12 by 1960s standards, but a 5'5" 118 lb Marilyn would be positively swimming in a modern size 12.

 Compare Heidi's picture to Marilyn's:

Starting to see what I mean about perception of size being our problem?

All of these CDC reports and vanity sizing and lying about how big Marilyn really was to make ourselves feel better is really pretty irrelevant though because it’s not a matter of what is statistically average, it’s a matter of what you feel is average and more important, what she thinks is average. This is something you’ll run into again and again—other people’s perceptions of your weight are going to be varied, they’re going to be unfair at times, and they’re all completely out of your control, so the best option is to get to the weight you’re happy with and understand people are just going to see you how they see you. There are a few things working in your favor here when it comes to dating other women:  we tend to be cooler about weight issues since we usually have our own body things we’re trying to hide and lesbians do tend to weigh a little more than our straight counterparts so average in the lesbian community isn’t the same number as elsewhere.

If Eddie Izzard can do it, so can you!

 BUT! All of this is negated by something else entirely! Here’s what you do… (I usually do come to an answer after making people listen to me for a long time). You need to take an honest, not cropped, not top down, not hidden beneath baggy clothing, full-body picture of yourself for your dating profile and send it out with pride to the women you’re interested in. Nobody will feel cheated, nobody will feel lied to, and if she’s attracted to you, then congratulations, you’ve hit what she considers “average” weight. This is, of course, easier said than done. Ladies, seriously, we need to stop doctoring our photos online (I do it too by the way). The top down one drives me nuts…you know the one, where you hold the camera over your head, point it down, and give your best sultry eye look up while forced perspective gives you the waist, hips, and feet of a Barbie Doll. Or the waist up crop, where you put on your best pushup bra and cut the picture off just above your navel—boobs for miles, but who knows what else is going on with the rest of you. Then there’s the “duck face” where you purse your lips and suck in your cheeks which gives the impression of cheek bones and full lips where neither actually exists (this is the one I’m guiltiest of).

Take an honest, full-body photo of yourself for your online dating profile, one that will not be a lie or marketing job you have to make up for when you show up for the first date. And let the women you’re interested decide whether or not you’re average based on full disclosure of what you really look like. Now if you’ll excuse me, I should probably go delete all my Facebook pictures where I’m making the duck face…