working out working out

This week, i met a woman i was drawn to. She was bright and energetic. I wanted to touch her, and she seemed to like me. But as i watched her on the final day of an event we were both working, deciding whether to give her my card, my eyes kept tracking down. She carried maybe fifteen extra pounds on her posterior. I looked. I looked. I walked out of her life.
Let's talk about that.
To what extent do people work out for themselves? In addition to sporty activities and biking to get around, i do yoga/calisthenics nearly ever other day. Artists tell me i look good naked. To what extent does that motivate me? The memory of a woman seeing me naked for the first time and letting out a whispered "Wow"...is that a kind of reinforcement i can never get enough of?
Yup.
Yet it's too easy to dismiss that (and the fact that i've almost never been attracted to a fat woman) as shallowness. Being in shape is part of a larger outlook on life...physical and mental, two sides of one coin. And i love physical activity so much, i want a lover who can experience it with me, not someone who has to turn back halfway up the mountain.
Don't think i don't know the sting of negative objectification, either. I've been called "too skinny". So if, for example, i have some injury that keeps me from my normal activities, i get a little self-conscious about losing weight. It's narcissism. But it's more. We live in a society where competition is everything...who gets the best job, the best mate, the best life. Every last one of us has had our self-worth crippled by the fear of what will happen if we fall behind, if we don't measure up.
If we aren't attractive.
Human beings were never born to live like that.
I never took to team sports, in those early teen years when my folks pushed me into one after another. I was skinny and undersized. Plus, i saw in sports the glorification of competitiveness my father embodied - another negative. I didn't bloom athletically until my late teens. Since then i've always taken great joy in physicality...biking, hiking, swimming, volleyball. Last night, in the quiet darkness while listening to Vince Gill, i worked out. A variation of which i've done uncounted thousands of times. Four sets of push-ups, totalling some 200. Yoga poses. 170 sit-ups and other ab crunches, including one i invented in a headstand position. Plus other stuff, including weightless curls and thigh "limbo" blasts. It took about an hour. With less stretching, i can do it in half the time. It averages out to thirty minutes a day. Not a lot. Some people are surprised i get such results for so little. Many people in this society have an intimidated attitude when it comes to exercise. They lack the willpower to start, or continue, or whatever. And yet each of us is so cripplingly self-conscious about our looks! It is one of the schizophrenic conundrums of history that America is the fattest country ever....and it's no accident that we lead the world in homicide and violent crime. We are a people screaming inside with the pain of existence.
Canadians are screaming too, of course. But we're a little louder. Goooooooo U.S.A.!
Is it unfair to say that something is out of balance in the life of the woman i met this week? Think about it, and give the world your answer. The simple balance of how much food we consume, relative to how many calories we burn. And yes, i understand that America's relationship to food is nothing short of pathological. Restaurants offer individual servings that are enough to feed two. Plus many of us equate food with love, psychologically. But all that aside...this isn't rocket science, it's a straightforward consuming/burning equation. We have a coddling, enabling attitude toward being overweight. We invent cutesy terms like "BBW" (and "overweight", for that matter) to obscure the truth and make us feel better about ourselves.
Perhaps this woman chooses to not care about how she looks? In this society, is that even possible? Or perhaps she rejects being in shape, as a way of rejecting American values? But even if that's true, something still feels out of balance.
I like working out. I love how it makes me feel. If i don't feel like doing it, i don't. But most of the time i'm happy to do it, and am fairly sure i'd feel the same even if we lived in a world where fat was the ideal of beauty.
So was i just a shallow fool, letting a potential romance pass by? Such assessments can be less black and white than we might like. For did i also sense that she was more invested in the wheel of materialism than myself? Did i intuit that she was too "white picket fence"?
I intended this article to be a simple glimpse into one corner of my life...the uncountable hours of decades worth of exercise.
Why did it become something else? If i didn't know better (and i do), i'd wonder whether i weren't just trying to avoid the appearance of narcissism, by turning this into a pseudo-polemic. Yes, that sounds like fun...avoid a charge of narcissism by inviting accusations of shallowness.
This topic can be very emotionally-charged. For every person offended by my acute awareness of that woman's ass, there's another accusing me of being a namby-pamby apologist.
Can we work this out?