Inspiration archives

I know my messages here are mixed at LTB these days. I'm still trying to find a happy middle ground for myself, one that gives me permission to like being in a smaller body and one that won't beat myself up for any perceived misstep as a result of keeping it.

It would be nice, obviously, if we could all come to terms with our body anxieties and self-esteem just by saying so but it isn't that easy. I like training and exercising but I wish I could enjoy it without assigning value to the act, and more importantly, wondering how many calories I might have burned in doing so.

I found Good With Cheese today and I'm just in awe of not only what she's done but also that she's brave enough to write so honestly about her experiences. If you've ever wondered what it might feel like to try and love yourself beyond the calories you consume or the size of your jeans, Megan's blog is for you.

(Yes, I know I'm late to the game. I'm bad at reading new blogs sometimes.)

I'm not even done reading her archives but I'm so inspired by her already. This stuff is full of contradictions and triumphs and failures and successes, on so many levels, that it's refreshing to read someone so willing to admit that.

Posted by Erin at 02:43 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

The lovely Sarah at Peanut Blog & Jelly needs your help!

Sarah is my kinda gal - she started out in an effort to lose some weight but woke up to something bigger: the awesomeness of running. Now Sarah has gone from couch potato to a marathon runner and triathlete.

In fact, now she's a finalist to be a member of a sponsored triathlon team! But she needs your votes and only has until tomorrow to make that happen. Click on over to her site to learn more!

As for me? I'm off to the gym. I've been REALLY good about getting into the gym for running and weights before work, and it's been making a huge impact on my productivity all day long. Plus, you know, it's out of the way should I want to go to places like this for dinner. Which I may be doing in the near future.

Mmmmm. Cheese plate ...

Posted by Erin at 07:23 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

"My life would have been better as a teenager if I had even a small fraction of the self-esteem I have now, and my ideal reader is I guess the teenage me, and I'm trying to convince her she's worth something."

- Monique "Mopie," Big Fat Deal, A Comment That Got Really, Really Long

I don't think you need to please the masses, but hey, when it comes to societal pressures, some people still consider me fat. No matter what I do, I'm always going to struggle in some capacity with finding happy balance between the emotional fucktitude of a culture that has insisted I need to be skinny, with the responsibility I must take for my own actions.

This is why the lovely Monique and her blog, "Big Fat Deal" are two of my very favorite things. I've had the pleasure of spending time with Mo in person, and working with her on Tales, and her talent and compassion are refreshing. Her blog is so important for so many reasons, and she summed up beautifully what I feel like I've been trying to do over here this last year.

Posted by Erin at 08:49 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

One of the things that happens when you write a weight-loss/health/fitness/body issue blog as long as I have is that you stumble upon Web sites that make you ... well, sad. Not where you feel pity for them, just sad. Sad that the state of the world is as such where women constantly feel so at odds with their bodies that they starve themselves down to a state where they think they're finally acceptable.

They're not sleeping, they're hungry, they're emotional, their loved ones are worried ...

I used to pity these sorts of women. Think they weren't enlightened. Think they were sheep. Stupid. Shallow. I don't think that anymore. If not for a few key, parental interventions here and there, we all could be the sort of woman torturing herself into a size zero. Eating only 300 calories a day, burning off 500 in the gym.

Those who look down on these women? You are no better. You are no more intellectual. You are no more healthy.

If you think you're above that sort of self-torture, you're deluded and no longer in touch with your humanity, and, let me just put this out there, so anti-woman you ought to turn in your club card to the feminist movement. The moment you turn your back on these women is the moment you decide that the very voices who influence these women to act in such a fashion have won out.

You cannot be a member of the Westernized society and not, in some part, have been affected by the idea that your body is not good enough. Some people just get out a little less scathed than others.

That said, I want to share something with all of you that my dear friend, Carissa, shared with me a couple of months ago. Take it to heart with you this week as you go about things. Really.

Posted by Erin at 08:37 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

"It could have been quite a different book had I actually spent six whole years on a Jenny Craig-esque regime:

Day 976: Chicken cacciatore. KILL ME!"

-Shauna, Diet Girl, Modus Operandi

Congrats, my lovely friend! You kick ass and take names. You're tote-leh oarsome.

Posted by Erin at 02:53 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

People, there is a reason why I write and don't speak, and one listen to The Daily Special will tell you why!

Yeesh. I could not have sounded like more of a dunce today! Thankfully they have editors to clean up my stammering. So if you're here for the first time, yay! Thank you! I represent much better on a blog! Seriously! If the interview isn't up yet, well, it will be soon!

I know what I didn't do a good job of conveying is that I don't have anything against programs like Weight Watchers - I really don't. They help a lot of people get healthier, and lose weight if that's their goal. They certainly introduced me to healthier fare in ways I'd been completely ignorant to before. What I have issue with is that, you know, Weight Watchers is a diet and the current trend is to be "anti-diet" so the way in which they're going to sell you their diet is to convince you that it's not.

And sell is the operative word here.

In the end, any program that has you operating on such restricted amounts of food is a diet. And there is no way that anyone can exist on such a small calorie intake and not go a little nutso at some point. And that, my friends, is a diet.

Anyway, I'm so honored and flattered that I was asked to join The Daily Special today. If you're not a regular reader of Elastic Waist, you're missing out! And is Kimberly not so adorable and awesome? Love it.

Posted by Erin at 08:15 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

Everyone knows what a big fan I am of Shauna, aka Dietgirl. We've been friends for years now, meeting in person, finally, this year.

She's witty and sharp and brilliant and inspirational and gorgeous and just everything you could want from a friend. Especially one who allows you to say "My Australian friend living in Scotland." How many people get to say that? I do! She allows me to sound cool, which I love.

What I love even more is that her memoir, the aptly named "The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl" has been published and hits stores January 1. You European readers out there need to buy it NOW. Unfortunately for us Americans, the book won't be that easy to come by. In lieu of hopping a plane over to the UK to go pick one up - a tempting proposition, believe you me - you can always enter Shauna's Amazing Scavenger Hunt and win a copy of your very own!

It will take you all of five minutes, especially if you have a Flickr account and the upload tools. What are you waiting for?! Do you know good this book is? Don't you need something to read other than my drivel? Of course you do!

For those of you who remember, Shauna contributed her words of wisdom to Tales From The Scale and, like the others, made the book sing with honesty and humor. I was so honored when Shauna agreed to write for the book, and it wouldn't be what it turned out to be without her. I can't begin to tell you how excited I was for her when I learned she was doing a memoir of her own.

Now stop reading me! Go enter! I did!

Posted by Erin at 08:20 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

Do you all read Big Fat Deal?

You really should. I've said both privately and publicly that I have some general disdain for some body acceptance blogs/groups because for the most part, they're really not accepting of all bodies, just the fat ones. And we all know that's crap. As women, we tend to get marginalized when it comes to our bodies and rare is the woman who feels as though she fits the standard, thin or fat. I can't abide those who jump on the "She's-losing-weight-so-therefore-she's-a-lemming" bandwagon that is so rampant in some body acceptance movements.

My body, my choice. Suck on it.

But Mo's blog is different, and she's sharp and witty about addressing the issues that women face as a result of what the world at large thinks about our bodies. Not that they should give one wit, but clearly they do or we all wouldn't be as conflicted as we are about the issue. Anyway, Mo does a fine job and this post in particular made me reflect on something that I ... well, reflected on recently.

I was at my boyfriend's grandparents' house a couple of weeks ago. We all went out to dinner and then the old home movies got dragged out. Namely all of the ones of my boyfriend as the cutest baby in the history of babies, except for myself, of course, which means when we have kids our children will be unstoppable with the cute. World-dominating cuteness is what I'm saying.

I'm sorry. Please excuse the thumping of my uterus.

Anyway, the movies were filmed around 1975, 1976, more than 30 years ago. Ah, thirty years ago. You know, the halcyon days of the American body. A time when everyone was in shape, ate smaller portions because larger ones weren't available and obesity wasn't threatening to take over the world like so many alien invaders. That is if you believe the media reports of the past five years or so.

But as I watched these movies, I couldn't help but notice the varying body types - some fat, some thin, some in between. Generally speaking, just as reflective of any family gathering I go to, at anyone's home, in present time. Now, granted, we're Midwesterners, and we're always considered the Fatlands, no matter the decade, but still. It wasn't as though everyone back then was somehow trim and thin. Which, of course, begs a series of questions that I'm not going to publicly ask here for myriad of reasons, the largest of which is that I don't have time to dig up scientific documentation and the least of which is that this is just an observation I had, not the set up for some huge argument.

It's just that, well, to my eyes, fat people have been around for eons. The idea that somehow we need to slap words such as "epidemic" and "death" onto being fat, as if the state of being fat is novel, or not just the way some bodies are built, or that those who are fat are something to fear. The reason for why when I diet and exercise I don't get much smaller than I am now is because my people are big people. My mother, at my age, was my size. Almost to a tee (or T or whatever). And the only reason she was 100 pounds when she died was because all she did was smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and work on being pissed off at the world.

And since that's what it takes for me to be that thin, I'll take a pass. This is how I'm built. Move on. Don't make assumptions that I just can't commit to my health enough to skinnify myself.

I've said for years now that what I think it truly plaguing us as a society is our laziness, our inability to think for ourselves, to educate ourselves and then form our own opinion. I just think that before we buy into every Fat Is Evil argument, we do some thinking for ourselves.

Posted by Erin at 08:51 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

This morning I decided to shake the dust off of my pass book and take a yoga class. While I took yoga at my gym, and years of Bikram, I've never really done much at any yoga studios or centers. But since money is short, and I'm no longer part of a gym, it was to the pass book centers I went.

My mind has not been the nicest place to be these past 24 hours. Sundry things have made it so - or, I should more accurately say, spurred it on as I'm the only person who makes me be anything, really - and despite trying to calm myself down, nothing seemed to work. I woke up angry, and I just didn't want to be angry anymore. I have a hard time letting go. I am, as my shrink has alluded to, a control freak. And when my control is challenged I have a difficult time responding in a calm, level-headed fashion. Worse yet, I almost refuse to let reason enter the picture, and subsequently take hold of whatever it is that's bothering me as though I were a rabid dog. It's almost as if I want to remain in a state of crazy, hot pissed off.

I am trying to stop all that. Or at least reduce the amount of time I spend stewing. I don't want to be so angry when things don't go my way. I don't want to be so mad when my feelings get hurt. It's not that I'm necessarily trying to suppress my feelings, but rather take it all down a notch. All that ends up happening in the end is that I end up feeling ashamed, more than anything else.

So at 8:23 a.m., sitting at this computer, I realized that I was embarking on yet another few hours of "I am so right and I am so mad so someone justify these feelings now, dammit," I decided that I might be better served to find a yoga class and calm the heck down.

So by 8:45 a.m. I was at the studio, signing the papers and getting ready. It's a small space, and the class is tiny - nine people. It was a Hatha yoga class, and while I wasn't worried about how I would do, I knew I'd stumble a bit. I tried to remember that important lesson - to let myself stumble, that it would be OK to let go and not know it all. Somehow it seemed to help with the greater struggle before me, the one where I was so angry and hurt but knew I had to be done with it.

I say that yoga for me is a lot like golf is for golfers: when I'm practicing yoga, I'm not thinking of anything else. And like golf, you can never really be perfect at it. Everyone, for the most part, is on equal footing as far as this concept is concerned. You're each constantly working on something, and the entire activity is dependent upon your mind and body being focused, working together in tandem. There is little room for distraction. And in truth, the lessons you seem to take with you occur after the fact, and aren't ones you're particular conscious of during.

Also, everyone needs something that takes them out of themselves for a couple of hours. Forcing yourself to forget the niggling details of life tends to unclutter us just long enough to gain perspective.

I am not good at inversions. They make me nervous. Again, it's a control thing. But it's funny when you consider my childhood, one in which I spent hours turning flips and cartwheels and somersaults and headstands. As a kid, I'd watch TV, upside down, in the living room, in a headstand.

So we prepped for handstand, or the proper name if you care, "Adho Mukha Vrksasana," and I told myself that I would just try. No matter what, I would try. We did a position before launching into handstand that had us position our feet against the wall, in a handstand position, forming a 90-degree angle. I managed that without problem, but my shoulders certainly felt weak and sore. As our teacher went into discussing handstand, she said this:

"It's the little things that scare us. Rather than just going forward and doing it, we take these little steps that end up doing us more harm than good."

In some ways, she clearly meant this literally as you're more likely to successfully get yourself into the handstand position by sweeping your leg on up and over. But it's scary. It seems safer to scuttle your feet on up and hop around and maybe then get your feet up and over your head onto the wall. But it doesn't work that way. You just have to get in there and do it.

It's stupid, perhaps, and a whopping yoga cliche, definitely, but I smiled as soon as she said this and let everything go. I probably had one of the most relaxing and true Savasanas I have ever had.

Plus I managed to hoist my legs up and over. Only once, and it took me a while, but I did it.

Sometimes I have to remember to just let go when it comes to nearly every aspect of my life. I'm not alone in this. Sometimes it feels safer to hold on to it all, whatever it is, when there is usually greater reward in the release. Overeating is sometimes like this, as is drinking, sleeping ... an excess of any vice is usually the result of us clinging onto some feeling rather than just putting down the Cheetos (if you're me) and getting on with it. It takes a certain amount of courage to sit with not only the original feeling, but the result of your reaction to it - empty potato chip bags strewn about or a messy house or missed appointments because you never left the house ... the list goes on, I suppose.

For me, today, not only am I dealing with feeling hurt, but also the results of my reaction to that hurt, which found me snapping at someone I love, and closing myself off as quickly as I could. I'm better prepared to sort through it all now, but it's still there and I still have to deal with all of it and oy.

It sucks.

It's worth pointing out that the woman who taught my yoga class this morning is the very same woman who authored the "Wear Sunscreen" column ten years ago, which was mistaken to be a M.I.T. commencement speech give by author Kurt Vonnegut, and to which Baz Luhrmann set to music and released as an album. I'm not totally surprised she teaches yoga. Or that I was inspired by her today.

(Here's the column if you're interested. I remember when it came out. Yeesh. I was still in school.)

For now, I'm going to take my dog to the dog beach and spend some time outside. She likes it there and goes nutty for it. I could use the fresh air and some more perspective. Plus, tomorrow I have another tough workout in front of me before I take it easy in preparation for next Sunday's 10K.

Posted by Erin at 12:17 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

I was checking my referral logs tonight (so much for not being on the computer this week) and noticed I was being linked by the lovely people over at Glamour magazine.

(Hi, Glamour! Want some help testing beauty products? Any workout togs you wanna pass my way? Call me!)

(Kidding. Sort of. Heh.)

Sunny Sea Gold, Glamour's associate health editor, has started up a blog - at the Body By Glamour section of the site - that I think is just fantastic, and that's not just because they're linking to me. I've been linked by plenty of magazines before, that doesn't mean I liked what they were doing. I'm not a total ho. At least not yet.

Anyway, it's refreshing to read a blog by a magazine staffer that you can relate to, and doesn't feel like the byproduct of a marketing meeting where a bunch of people who have no concept of what a blog actually is, and what it can actually accomplish for a publication, said "Hey! Let's have a blog!" and then give it to someone who can't write a blog for diddly. I work in the medium, in the industry, I know from which I speak. Even if that was what happened, no matter, because Sunny can write and it's a great MSM blog.

Sunny is very fun and honest and NORMAL. Definitely worth making the stop over at the Glamour site to give her a read.

In other news, despite fitting into a smaller size last night, that had not swayed me from a polish sausage, two beers at the Sox game today, and a little bit of cookies and cream ice cream tonight. A 1/2 cup of ice cream is not going to keep me outta that dress and hello! VACATION! What is a summer vacation without some ice cream I ask you?

Posted by Erin at 10:13 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

"Maybe the reason so many people wait so long to eat better or exercise is because they are waiting to get motivated. When you hear about people's weight loss stories you expect to hear about the time they had a huge revelation that kicked them in the fat pants. You want to hear about the time they couldn't fit in the roller coaster or the time their uncle died from heart disease. But why wait until you've wasted $40 bucks on an amusement park ticket or you're buying huge black pants for a funeral? You know what you need to do, so do it. We often wait for motivation to find us, but we need to go out and find motivation. It's doubtful that you will get to the bottom of that pint of ice cream and find the message "You need to lose weight" written on the bottom."

- Pasta Queen, Motivation Schmotivation, May 23, 2007

Posted by Erin at 06:27 PM | TrackBack (3200) | filed under: Inspiration

Two of the lovely ladies of Big Fat Deal are helming Elastic Waist Dot Com, which, according to Weetabix, is "the first of several new blogs associated with different Conde Nast publications."

It's a great site, worthy of your blogroll considerations. Check out Anne's "Body of Work" blog, too.

Posted by Erin at 04:43 PM | TrackBack (209) | filed under: Inspiration

"The more weight I lose, the more I'm finding that my fitness goals are becoming more important than my weight goals. If I had to chose between weighing 160 pounds or running a 9-minute mile, or dare I dream an 8-minute mile, I think I'd go for the speed." - Half of Me, April 14, 2007

Like Jeanette, one of the things that I've noticed during this past month or so is that I'm starting to again focus my efforts on my fitness goals, rather than my weight-loss goals. Maybe that's because I'm not struggling to fit into my clothes as I've been the past couple of years, but I'd like to think that it has something more to do with me just enjoying being so active again.

This is for another entry at another time, but having gained back a good chunk of weight, and then lost it again, I've noticed I'm a little easier on myself when it comes to What My Goal Is. I can assure you spent waaay too much time fucking around with my physical appearance and idealizing "just another 10 pounds" before I gained some weight back. I really wasn't that satisfied with anything, which is sad considering what great shape I was in.

So I suppose the lesson for me now is to concentrate on my health and my athletic abilities, as opposed to my clothing size. Again, it's another entry for another day, but I can't tell you how much time I spent looking back on old pictures of myself from 2004, early 2005, and wondered why I ever wasted the energy I did, beating myself up for still being in the 140s.

Posted by Erin at 03:25 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

You know, yesterday was the first race I've run in 18 months. EIGHTEEN MONTHS. Sometimes I'm baffled that I let it all go on so long - the making excuses, the wallowing in depression, the consulting a pile of french fries as to what I should do in moments of stress. All of it.

Just the same, when it took me only 10 minutes to get to the first mile marker yesterday morning at the Shamrock Shuffle, I knew I was back. Maybe a 10-minute mile is no shakes for some of you, but it was a shocker for me. So much so, that tears sprung to my eyes and I had to try and compose myself to keep from crying like a big fricking baby down Grand Avenue.

It's been a long, long eighteen months.

Now, granted, I didn't keep that pace for the entire five miles - I'm not stupid and not in that great of shape - but I managed to average out 12-minute miles for the duration. No kidding - it took me exactly 1:00.16 to finish. I can't begin to tell you what a shocker that turned out to be, as I was just shooting to cross the finish line without stopping. I did both, and I managed not to embarrass myself in the process.

Although I just woke up - at 5 a.m. - with the worst pain in my back. My hips are hollering too. Thank God for yoga tonight.

One of the hardest things about letting myself get out of shape was knowing that when I picked back up it wouldn't be from where I left off. I wouldn't be as fit and as athletic as I was when my life hit the pothole that it did. That knowledge sucked, and it kept me from taking better care of myself so many times. Yesterday I read, on the back of someone's shirt of all places, this phrase:

"The miracle is that I had the courage to start in the first place."

That is kind of how I feel right now. It does, and continues to be the case, take a lot of brow-beating to get me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I can wallow like nobody's business. And for as good of reasons as I've had these past 18 months to be upset, and deal with my feelings over a gin and tonic or seven, it had to stop. It just did. We've all seen what pain and sorrow and shame and guilt can do to people if they get a chance to burrow down deep, and I don't want that to be my reality.

I'm not saying that finishing a five-mile foot race on a beautiful Sunday morning in March is the cure-all, but it's certainly a nice start.

The rest of my weekend was peppered with random niceties - coffee with an old coworker from the magazine; Jenni and Lissette's new puppy, Charlie; an impromptu puppy play date; hearing Anne Lamott speak at Lookingglass with my friend Jen; new brakes on JoJo the Wonder Scion; barbecue and comic books with The Boy as soon as he arrived home from being away all weekend with his friends ... the list goes on. The race was the biggest.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm already plotting what my next race will be, how I'm hoping that I'm feeling a little less sore by tomorrow night so that kickboxing will be doable, and mainly just being thankful for having gotten through it all.

Posted by Erin at 11:56 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

"Mostly I've just learned that if I want to address the disconnect from the body and from the physical universe, no one is going to do it for me. I can think about it all day and wind up more frustrated than before. I am in charge of making the changes that I want to see in my life." - Romanlily, Lessons from the Past Three Weeks

Grace is a dear friend and a lovely soul down in Atlanta. I hope she forgives me this post before writing her back from last week, but I thought you'd all enjoy a little lunchtime inspiration. She's very correct - each of us is in charge of making the change we hope to see in our lives, no matter what. It's easy to forget that this all is a very easy concept and that sometimes, we need to let it be that easy and realize that the rest are just excuses we give.

Not all the time. Just sometimes.

Check out Grace's pictures, too. She's an amazing photographer.

Posted by Erin at 02:42 PM | | filed under: Inspiration

"My body is shrinking, and soon I will be in territory I've never been in - I've lost weight before, gotten down to the two-teens, but after that, what happens? What will I look like, and how will I feel, and how is my body going to change? I have spent my entire life plump, chubby, overweight, fat, obese - who I am has been shaped by who I have been, and if you catch me off-guard, and ask me point blank, I will tell you: I like the person I am, the reader, the writer, the bad-joke-teller, the oversensitive person I am and would not be if I had not grown up looking the way I did and feeling the way I did. And now I am undoing all that, film spinning in reverse and I am becoming lighter, less substantial and solid, turning into something I am afraid I will not recognize."

Anne just nailed the incredibly frightening aspect of weight loss for so, so many people. And while the context is not the same for each of us - Anne recently had weight-loss surgery, for example - the feeling is universal for many an overweight person.

You all really need to be reading this woman. She's brilliant.

Posted by Erin at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | filed under: Inspiration

I had originally planned on running the Mardi Gras Half-Marathon with my dear friend until it became clear that the best weekend to hold JP's 60th surprise birthday party was the same weekend.

Just this past weekend.

My dearest friend, Eliza, whom I haven't seen in almost four years now, which shocks me outta my socks, did run it, however, and kicked major ass. I can't be more proud of her.

Read her account of the race if you need a proper kick in the pants to remind yourself that everyone - EVERYONE - can start with nothing and end with something so fulfilling and rewarding that it'll change your life forever.

YAY ELIZA!!!

Posted by Erin at 11:56 AM | | filed under: Inspiration

Some of you may remember Put Down The Donut. It was one of my very favorite weight-loss/health Web sites. Alas, it is no more.

But today, thanks to the magic of Flickr contacts, I find this fantastic picture post from Joelle.

I read somewhere recently - or heard, I can't remember - that in order to be successful with weight loss or fitness goals of any kind, you need to start by being truly appreciative and loving of the body you're in right now. I agree with that 100 percent, even though it's something of which I have to remind myself on a near-daily basis. I am grateful that my body works without much help from me. I don't suffer from any chronic pain, and I can run, lift, bike, swim ... hell, I can still even turn a cartwheel if the spirit moves me.

I know people often wonder why I don't update the Progress Pictures anymore. A lot of my reasons are obvious, but mostly I stopped doing them because even after losing 60 pounds from my highest weight of all time, I had a hard time looking at even my most recent pictures and not finding serious, mind-bending, gut-wrenching fault. As I figured it, if I was still kicking myself at 139 pounds, I needed to step back and reassess the situation.

While I've been without my camera for a couple of months, via my Flickr page you can get a good idea of what I look like. This picture here is probably the most recent. I think I'm in a few others in that group. Once I get my camera back, I'm going to take more pictures. Not necessarily Progress Pictures, but more pictures that include snaps of myself, certainly.

There's no sense in hiding something that has no business being hidden.

Posted by Erin at 09:20 AM | Comments (2) | filed under: Inspiration

I was reading the Go Fug Yourself entry on America Ferrera and her digs for the Golden Globes the other night, and Jessica did a wonderful job summing up, again, how it's perfectly OK for women to look like women.

I mean, let's be honest: most of out there would cut a bitch for America's figure, and here we have tons of celebrity industry types who drop ridiculous euphemisms on women like America because somehow we still have to make sure we're herding all women into particular categories, especially the ones who dare to give Hollywood's beauty standard's the finger.

I'm not going to rehash a ton of points that I know you all read a million times a day, anyway. But I really enjoy when the Fug girls do it and thought you might too.

Posted by Erin at 09:06 AM | Comments (1) | filed under: Inspiration