Before and After?

Over the past ten years, I've decreased in mass by a surpisingly significant chunk, which is boggling to me on a couple of levels. First off, ten years - I am now of the age where I am able to track back through something approximating an "adult" life for ten years, or at least I have been my full adult height for more than ten years, if not of exactly adult mind (still waiting on that one, but at least I'm not a raging bucket of angst and hormones anymore - phew!). Technically, in most states I could legally date somebody ten years younger than me; I am glad to report that I'm not quite of the age where this would actually be appealing, because really have you met most seventeen year olds boys? Talk about angst and hormones. And actually it's really only been over the past five years, but ten sounds way more intense and terrifying.

But it's also interesting because I'm currently a "healthy weight" according to the bmi (take as you will, but it's the prevalent chart out there anyhow) and have never been too far above "healthy," despite a deficit of about sixty pounds: at my absolutely heaviest I was never more than a bmi of about 26 (one point overweight). It makes it hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that we have an obesity rate of about 30% in the US. Admittedly, I've always been a fairly active person (of the "take the stairs and park at the far end of the parking lot" variety, if not the "run a marathon twice a year" variety) with a healthy bent in culinary preferences. The fact that the weight came and went mostly with my stress and activity levels and never with too much of a conscious struggle on either side isn't so surpising I suppose. I progressively gained weight over a few years after I quit my five day a week ballet habit, and started losing it over a similar period after I started my five day a week ballroom/tango/running/etc. habit - never seemed too striking either way), but the breadth does surprise me sometimes.

 It's also weird while I can tell the difference, it doesn't seem as huge a difference as I would have envisioned. When I was nineteen I thought for certain that if I lost more than about twenty pounds, I would look emaciated and skelatal, by which reasoning at my current weight I would look like a dusty raisin to my once vine ripened physique. Sure, Sir Mixalot will no longer eligize the fabulousness of my once magnificent "back," but ultimately I wouldn't even necessarily say that I've changed my position on the attractiveness scale (granted, this is a hugely subjective thing, but I'd say on average, probably not so). I guess I've been fortunate to gain and lose weight in proportion (for better or for worse depending on one's body image, I suppose).

I blame the trickery of advertisement before-and-after photos, which use a little bit of physiological change, a shitload of tanner, lighting changes, dissociated posing, good posture and other tricks to make the difference of 10-25 pounds look like *an entirely new body* to say nothing of recruiting models who are usually athletes or body builders on break from training for their befores, but that's not the point I want to make today. For instance, here are two photos of me - one in 2005 and one from this year. In the former, I'd been dancing for about  four or five months and maybe weighed about 175 (so, I'd already lost some weight, but I don't seem to have a lot of photos from my earlier twenties). The latter is about two months back and I'm pretty sure I weigh around 135:

I tried as hard as I could to find similar photographs, but even in this case, the newer photo is posed to make my hips look a lot thinner (the angle, the dissociation between upper and lower body, the outfit itself). Even these things granted... they don't look that different.

So 175-135 = 40 pounds give or take. On one of those ads for hoodia, these are before and after photos for women who also "lost 40 pounds":

Anyways, I'm not sure I have much more of a point to make, although I could rant about our social hangup with weight, the amazing beauty of photoshop (do a search though - there are some interesting sites about how these photos are faked either through the previous methods or by simply just photoshopping stock photos) and lord knows what else, but for now I'll remain fickle and return to my actual work.