You can have some chocolate

As a woman in the United States, your weight and body seem to be everyone’s
concern.

It doesn’t have to be in everyday conversation, but it will be thrown at you the minute you turn on the television, the computer or open a magazine.

Soon enough you’re going to start hearing the bikini season bells right around the corner, and we all know what that means.

After stuffing yourself with food this holiday season, eating your weight in store-bought chocolate because “it was on sale,” and listening to advertisers tell you that the only thing you have to put on your plate is “more”, you will see the media switch gears.

Let me tell you something — you don’t have to follow it blindly.

Don’t worry about counting calories as spring break looms over the horizon, and don’t worry about counting calories in the summer.

I hear a lot of girls say that when they’re thin they’re going to love themselves, that they’ll hate themselves if they eat too much or have too many sweets.

That shouldn’t be an issue at all. Your body is your body specifically. It is designed in a certain way and will not react to certain diets or routines the way another person’s might.

Before you do anything, you must be familiar with your own limitations.

Don’t look at a Victoria’s Secret model and idolize her. If you’re 5-foot-2, no matter how much weight you lose you will not have a miraculous growth spurt.

Take a different approach. Don’t obsess over what you can’t control. For a long time I counted calories and avoided eating, but I had no idea what I was doing.

Then it dawned on me that all I had to do was exercise and make sure that at some point during the day I ate a vegetable.

That’s when I began seeing results. It’s not about becoming “perfect”. Human beings are inherently flawed. Perfection is simply an impossible ideal.

It’s about keeping your body useful — making sure your joints work, that you’re not short of breath when you walk up stairs and that your heart is strong.

Listening to fad dieters and “exercise gurus” will only harm you. They don’t know you, they don’t know how your body works and they don’t know what your limits are.

So even if the holiday season is over, go nuts. Eat three square meals a day, gorge on fudge and hot chocolate, but eat a salad if you have time.

Don’t worry about fluctuating body weight. If your weight didn’t change here and there you’d be dead.

Come summer, don’t be afraid to eat ice cream, don’t worry about getting that “bikini body.”

It’s about what makes you happy.

Nothing more, and nothing less.

— ewenning@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Emma Wenninger on Twitter at @EmmaWenninger.