I have a great butt! Always have and it looks even greater in a pair of tight jeans. I wish I could walk behind myself sometimes just so I can admire it. Understand though that I have only a one small mirror in my house in which I can barely even see my face so I may very well live in constant delusion but the point is I believe it to be true and so it is. But my beautiful derriere is getting harder and harder to jam into every one of the dozen pairs of jeans I own and I need to do something about it.
Let’s expand the picture outwards from my tush for a moment. I am 48 and I had a total hysterectomy 2 years ago so I am in surgical menopause which means my body has changed radically in a short time frame. The thing is it would have changed anyway, albeit at a slower pace, so I need to just deal with it as a woman with or without a womb. It’s incredible the things I am learning about how women’s changing hormones affect every part of our being and it is frustrating to think that I have no control over this since it is biological. But guess what it is also liberating to know that there are very good reasons why my body is changing and that it’s not my fault. I may not be happy about it but if I remove the self-flagellation it is less painful. Actually I should thank my body for storing the scarce estrogen in my blood as tummy fat because it is trying to help me.
I should forgive my body too for the el nino dry skin, as it still works well and serves the purpose it was intended, to keep my insides on the inside and protect them from the outside! In other words it is so futile to be beating myself up for love handles and extra tummy fat when my body is doing what it is naturally meant to be doing.
I guess it is all the more difficult when our society, in spite 3 billion years of evolutionary evidence, is trying to convince us that is not natural to get old or to die. Well in honour of my intelligence I choose not to believe the hype and I accept that I will in fact die one day and I will age slowly along the way. But my epiphany is not just about accepting the aging process it is more about realising that riding the rivers of change will be so much more fun than standing still in the current.
I may be tired a lot of the time, because my adrenals are working so hard to produce hormones now that my ovaries are not, but I am way more time efficient than I was when I was younger. I may not be able to do 20 chin ups like I used to (and I really could) due to the lack of testosterone menopausal women experience, but I am way smarter and way more capable than I ever was. I am beginning to look at time passing in terms of gains rather than losses.
So I think I don’t want to stuff my excess fat into my tight jeans anymore, it’s just physically uncomfortable and I need to feel physically comfortable if I am going white water surfing on that there river. Gotta get me a snorkel though.
