Kris’s Kolumn

So I’m just back from my bi-weekly bike ride and I can’t stop thinking about all the men and women on REALLY nice bikes who passed me wearing REALLY nice and very tight fitting clothing. Why don’t they all just ride naked?

Truth be told I was wearing the same blue bike shorts I have been wearing for nine years.  There’s a hole close to a very important part of my body, the seams are all stretched out (we know why – don’t we?) and when I take them off the outline of my stomach is right there staring at me as if to say, “Did you enjoy that glass of wine last night?” or “I told you not to have a cookie you pig!”.  I always hide them when I take them off.

I was wearing a kind of tight fitting top myself that needs to be thrown away because it no longer supports my drooping breasts and it’s from the old days – old meaning thinner. Imagine how big I would be if I didn’t bike.  Holy crap!  Anyway, when the last two buff butts passed me, all snug in their bright spandex, I thought about cotton with great joy.

Cotton does not accentuate our bulges, does not make us look like we really look when we are working out, absorbs our stinking sweat and is very cheap. Spandex is like wearing a see-through blouse. Spandex is disgusting.  Spandex should be banned from all public places and gyms and bike routes and the entire universe. Spandex is for people who are showing off and I hate them all. Those people need to eat and drink more and buy a few baggy t-shirts. (Of course I’m jealous!)

I feel so much better now.  I may even have a cookie.

This is a short story about my stomach.  My stomach used to start a few inches below my pointy little breasts, which are now starting to slide south just a bit, and then end an inch or two about my pubic bone. This is what I recall anyway when I look at old photos of a woman who looks like me only thinner.

Now that I’m pushing 59 things look much rounder down there and my stomach is so happy to be a part of my body it’s divided itself in half.  There’s one part that lives adjacent to my breasts and its big sister pretty much fills up the rest of the middle part of my body. Big sigh. Hello stomach!

There are many reasons for this and the other day when I was out power walking I decided it’s okay that I am not Jane Fonda. I am Kris Radish and I have had two bigass babies, and I drink wine, and my body is producing more fat because it knows I might fall sometime in the next 30 years and it doesn’t want me to beak a brittle hip.

So here’s the deal and my lesson for the day.  I think it’s important to embrace yourself every single day – even if you did have  kettle korn the night before – while keeping a notion in your mind’s eye about who should really be in control of your stomach and every other body part.  It’s not a magazine, or someone you live with or your best friend – but you.  It’s also important, and I work very hard at this, to make certain you have a sense of what your body needs to look like to make YOU feel good – to hell with everyone else.

I admire what Jane Fonda has done to keep her body looking like it did when she was 30 but I can’t afford a personal trainer, or a chef, or a massage or a home gym.  But I can go to yoga class, and lift weights in my office, and ride my bike, and pass on the french frys and crackers. I can put out more calories then I take in and I can hold the image of who I am striving to become – physically, spiritually, and mentally e in my mind’s eye.  See it and be it – why the hell not?

So I’m throwing down the computer mid-morning to go hit my self-created bike route and you can bet your sweet hinder I’m also going to finish the kettle korn tonight because it tastes really, really good. Life is about balance and I don’t want to miss one single kernel of it.