Mission Statement: Tanya

I am Tanya. I work in fashion but am not a size zero…not even a size 4. If I ate only chicken breasts and spent two hours a day in the gym, I *might* whittle myself down to a size 6. But the fact of the matter is, a) being a healthy size 8 is more than a-okay with me, b) I love to eat, and c) I have a life and think spending any longer than 1.5 hours in the gym is ridiculous (unless 30 minutes of it is spent dozing in the sauna).

I have two parents. My mom is a skinny vegetarian who loves yoga and outdoor activity and eats her weight in chocolate on a daily basis, and my dad is a big guy who hates physical activity. I’ll let you guess whose genes I inherited.

Fortunately, once I get over a certain hump I do actually like working out and being physically active and I do recognize that it makes me feel better, physically and mentally. So Part A of the Getting Hawt Plan is just being diligent about doing something physical every day, and so far the plan seems to be: Pilates 2x a week, weights 4x a week, cardio 5x a week, sauna 1-2x a week. I am not claiming that jumping in the sauna is going to do anything earth shattering for me, I just like sitting in the sauna, and when I like something and suspect that is somehow good for me, I like to Google “health benefits + x” and then pretend like it was somehow part of my get healthy plan all along. I hadn’t been doing weight training for a while, but I think that weight training will be integral to the Get Hawt Plan, as not only are a bunch of scientific types increasingly yapping about how good strength training and weights are for women, but probably the happiest I was with my body was when I was regularly working out with weights (more on this in a second).

Part B of the Get Hawt Plan, unsurprisingly, is to eat well. I am one of those people who see the newest fad diet and think to themselves, “all I eat is blueberries and fish that swim in Lake Huron and I lose 50 pounds and grow scales? I’m on it!” but then go ahead and unrepentantly eat nachos for lunch. I love to repeat and consider things that sound bogus, but I don’t necessarily buy into them.

As I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, I felt healthiest and best about my body when I was regularly weight (and cardio) training and I was on the Atkins diet. I initially did the whole shebang - induction, etc, and I dumped weight in a way that blew my mind…I was eating a lot, but there was no doubt when I was hungry and when I was full (unlike when I was eating a lot of complex carbs and didn’t have such a definite line between hungry and not). I know people have their issues with Atkins and I certainly don’t claim any medical expertise on any subject, nor do I think it’s a one-size-fit-all plan (note my mother, who could eat pasta and bread until the cows come home without adding an ounce to her frame)…but instead of eating bacon and eggs all day long, as some might claim, it actually prompted me to eat a lot more vegetables and gain a healthier perspective on my weight and eating in general.

I grew up riding and showing horses, and as in any sport that is image-based, it’s pretty hard not to be exposed to or develop a body image or perspective on weight that is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I had already gotten my period and had serious boobs by the time I was 10, so my body was different than a lot of my friends. As soon as I started showing, what I ate was under constant scrutiny by my horse trainer and the other adults that I rode with and respected and loved. I remember coming back from a long day at a horse show when I was about 11 and being praised for opting for a diet soda (my parents would have died…if they were anti-anything, they were anti-soda) while everyone else got ice cream. Any longing I felt for the ice cream was dissipated by my trainer’s approval for passing on it. And mine was not a unique experience: throughout the years, my female trainers told me stories of what they were subjected to growing up: locks on refrigerators, dinners being flushed down the toilet by their trainers (save for a few vegetables), etc. It was just semi-shocking to me years later to see a picture of myself at that age and realize that I was actually a pretty skinny kid…taller than most at that age, with a chest, yes…but pretty skinny.

So I guess it’s not astonishing that at some point during my teenage years I sort of gave up eating entirely. I wouldn’t have classified it as anything back then because I didn’t really think too hard on what I was doing, and even now I’m hesitant to give it a name. All I will say is that when you come back to your senses after doing something like that, you are most likely scared shitless of doing it again. And so I sort of had a yo-yo of “oh my god I’m eating too little, oh I’m my god I’m eating too much” until I did the Atkins thing.

Again, I’m only saying that it worked for me, and it allowed me to eat in a way that seemed so normal…no analyzing every bite that went into my mouth, no worrying that I was being watched while I ate and judged. And after periods of being less diligent or more diligent, at this point I am using the low carb thing more or less as a guideline. I am largely avoiding eating high carb bread, pasta, and sugar, but I also don’t freak out about going to Burma Superstar once in a while and eat their delicious samusas, See Jyet Kauswer noodles, and pratha bread.

The condensed version is this: in order to get hawt, I’m going to exercise and eat well. For me, ditching bread, sugar, and pasta is a fair enough trade to continue eating cheese and Vosges sugar-free chocolate (I am Swiss, after all).

Oh, and of course the Part X of the Getting Hawt Plan.  This will largely be composed of a mishmash of bogus/crazy fads that sound good and/or the aforementioned stuff that I like that I’ve Googled to corroborate my theory that it somehow works into my general health/growing hawtness.  And so the longest mission statement ever ends and the experiment begins…

- Posted by Tanya