Spare me a new-year guilt trip
If Christmas ‘tis the season to be jolly, the new year sure ‘tis the season to feel guilty. You’ve set yourself ambitious new-year resolutions, like losing 5kg, working out every day and training for a marathon, but so far, you’re yet to move from your sun lounger for anything other than another beer or a second helping of dessert.
Now, for the first time since you decamped to the beach and spent two weeks exclusively in your kaftan, you put your pants back on only to find the button no longer lives in the same area code as the button hole.
Logging back on to the internet after a few weeks abstaining from the mindless scroll-fest risks you being bombarded with images of the abs of (celebrity fitness entrepreneurs) Ashy Bines and Kayla Itsines, and tips on how you could reacquaint yourself with your own.
Ahhh, ‘‘happy’’ new year – where advertisers invite you to hate yourself just enough to prompt you to buy their stuff, to deal with the consequences of what other marketers sold you before Christmas. The annual binge, whinge, shred and repeat self-hate cycle is about to launch. Except this year, I don’t want to participate.
Don’t get me wrong, after a summer of enjoying myself a bit too much I’ll still wince when I put my pants back on. I’ll still hit the gym at a time of year when newyear resolutions are still a novelty and you can’t turn around without being clotheslined by a stray, bulging bicep.
But this year I want to change the conversation, or rather conversations – the one I have with myself when I look in the mirror, but also the one that’s on high rotate with my girlfriends. It usually involves a whingefest about how fat you are, while enviously eyeing up the others and commenting that they are in fact all skinny goddesses, in basically the most bizarre and pointless round of oneupmanship known to man.
My husband has got so tired of me saying ‘‘OMG, I’ve got so fat’’ that he’s started rolling his eyes heavenward and rather than reassuring me, drolly replying ‘‘Lucky I like the big girls then, huh?’’.
I’ve clearly been drinking the sugar-free, fat-free, marketing Kool-Aid for too long, because somehow, I’d come to think your value and attractiveness was proportional to the gap between your thighs – and I was coming up short.
Fixing that will take some doing, but I’m going to start by binding and gagging that eternal, internal Mean Girl who is particularly cutting. And when the conversation with my girlfriends descends into the fat-whinge zone, I’ll be switching the topic to something that’s more worthy of occupying headspace than calories and caliper testing, because neither number denotes your worth.
I can entirely see the e-bike changing life as we know it.
The annual binge, whinge, shred and repeat selfhate cycle is about to launch. Except this year, I don't want to participate.