Ditching Skinny

3 entries found for skinny.
skin·ny ( P ) Pronunciation Key (skn)
adj. skin·ni·er, skin·ni·est
Very thin. See Synonyms at lean2.
Of, relating to, or resembling skin.

n. Slang
Inside information; the real facts: learned the skinny on their falling-out.

skinni·ness n.

skinny

adj : having unattractive thinness; "a child with skinny freckled legs"; "a long scrawny neck" [syn: scraggy, scrawny, underweight, weedy] n : confidential information about a topic or person; "he wanted the inside skinny on the new partner"


When I first started trying to lose weight, I told myself over and over that I didn't want to be skinny. I loved my curves, dammit! I still wanted to look like a woman when I was done losing weight, and not like a little girl. And I wanted to avoid getting back on the anorexia train to skeletonville. But the more and more weight I lost, and the closer I got to my goal, the more and more unsatisfied I became. I started to hate the curves I had been so proud of before. I started to CRAVE skinny. Maybe part of me had been afraid to begin with such a lofty goal, so when I actually did start to lose weight, when it turned out I wasn't a complete failure and I COULD do it, maybe that was when I started to let myself dream the skinny dream.

Skinny is such a loaded word. It conjures up images of perfection. To me it sounds clean, and neat, and crisp. Ironically, I can practically taste skinny in my mouth. It tastes like apples, or clean snow, or sugar free strawberry popsicles. Clean, pure, but with a tart edge. Snappy and precise. All the things that being fat means you are not.

If you let skinny get ahold of you, you can lose sight of all the other reasons you wanted to lose weight to begin with. I'm toying with the idea of banishing skinny from my vocabulary forever. If you read the definition of it from the dictionary, it doesn't sound like such a great thing to be. And the truth is, unless I stop eating all together and really go off the rails to a place I never want to be again, I'm just never going to be Nicole Richie skinny. And I shouldn't want to be. The reality is that skinny is a pipe dream for me, and dieting makes me feel like maybe that dream could be achieved. It is really really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I'll never ever be tall and thin and blond, with those ridiculously long coltish preadolescent legs and short shorts and a swinging ponytail and perfect skin and blue eyes and a tan. That's not the body I got. I'm 5'2". That's just not my reality. But that's partially why it seems all the more wonderful to me. And it's hard to let that skinny fantasy die. It's hard to let go of the idea that if I work hard enough I could at least get CLOSE to that ideal. I know I need to learn to love myself. But sometimes I get so tired of having to love the body I got.

I think it's ok to want to be normal. But I've come far enough to know that wanting to be so skinny that my bones stick out and people comment on it isn't right, isn't normal. Some days, that doesn't stop me from wanting it. Maybe if I banish skinny from my vocabulary, I can stop thinking of it as something so desirable. I'm just sort of confused as to what to replace it with. Saying "I just want to be small" feels wrong as well. As if I'm giving into pressure to be cuter, and younger, and to take up less space in the universe. And saying "I just want to be healthy" sounds like a failure to me.

I suppose this is like anything else. You learn to love yourself, for who you are, one day at a time. So I practise. I will say it right here. I am NOT skinny. And that is ok. Even more, that might be GOOD.