I've always been a "chunky" gal. My mom calls me "curvy," and I've inherited my Norwegian grandmother's top-heavy genes, if you follow. I'm 5', and since I actually started keeping track of my weight around age 16 have bounced between 112 and 130.

I always figured I was chunky because I just didn't enjoy sports. I played tennis and softball recreationally, but not enough to claim it was any kind of extended exercise. I hated running, found weight lifting monotonous, and only enjoyed time in the pool in short spurts.

When I was a sophomore in college, I joined a martial art. I loved it. I stuck with it, and last year I trained for my black belt. The regiment was not easy... it's a 4 month test (test once a month for four months), the first two being pure aerobic endurance. To prepare, we met 5 nights a week for 3 hours, January to July. Bizarrely, I gained weight... I went up to 130, the heaviest I've ever been. I looked it, too... but I could do the extremely physical things required of me for my black belt. (9 long forms, and then those 9 long forms again in under 8 minutes... 10 knee-or-higher kicks in under 30 seconds... ki-ups, that flashy move you see martial artists do when they flip up from their back onto their feet... etc.)

Immediately after getting my black belt, I moved to Japan. Obviously, I ate differently; fish and rice, fish and rice, fish and rice. I bike 20 minutes a day out of necessity.
I only lost 5 pounds.

Even more incredibly, when I got the chance to train again a few weeks ago, I could barely keep up. I used to be able to do circles around other students. Now, 10 pushups are a strain.

Moral of the story? Skinny, or lighter on the pounds, does not necessarily mean healthier. Yes, obesity causes several health concerns, but can we please stop assuming that chunky, or even overweight, automatically equals obese, and therefore unhealthy? I was stronger, faster, and slept better when I was "heavy."

And frankly, sometimes being too skinny is just as unhealthy as being too fat. In the newest crop of people going for black belt, there is a girl so skinny you really COULD snap her like a twig... In fact, she's had more injuries this semester than I've ever had in my life, because she has no padding to protect against some of the force of things she's putting her body through.

Absolutely...healthiness is the thing, and that's what's attractive. Doesn't sound like Shallow Hal's wife is especially interested in her health, though.

If you're carrying around a lot of fat, you cannot be healthy. Muscle weighs more than fat, so if you were working hard and weighing 130, that was all right. If you weigh 130 and you're sedentary, then what you're carrying around is fat and that is not good for you, no matter how much you wish it were.

I do the same thing. When I work out I put on muscle like my peasant forebears. At 5'8" and 145 to 150 - I'm carrying muscle, and I usually drop a dress size. If I don't work out all the time, I weigh ten to fifteen pounds less and gain a dress size - which is what I SHOULD do. I'm not skinny. I'm NORMAL.

Now, carrying a few extra pounds when you're under 40 is no big. You can handle it. Your body is still resilient enough to cope. When you're over 40, that's a whole different thing. Then your body starts to punish you for it.

I used to be into martial arts also, and I was really bulky back then. I used to get mad as hell because my 7 for All Mankind jeans were always too tight in the thighs and I never could find tall boots that I could zip. I thought the jeans and boots makers were conspiring to make normal women look fat. I bitched about it constantly and had tailors let my jeans out and bought boots with vents. Two kids later and I don't have time for my instuctor's demanding format, so I don't work out anymore. My jeans hang like a sack and I can zip those boots up with my arm in them. Grrrr.

Ironically, I weigh the same 125 pounds at 5"6 that I did then. Also ironically, I get better reactions in short skirts and shorts than I did then. Society likes women on the skinny side.

That said, I don't think the LW's wife is a badass blackbelt with bulky muscle. I think his problem is that she can't keep up with him and won't try.

Jeez, your blackbelt exam sounds tough! Mine was a one-shot deal, but I had to fight all the advanced students 5 at a time. So, that was drills, single fights, 9 katas, three 5-on-one fights (one was all men), then I had to fight the other female black belt and that was worse. I knocked her ponytail tie out with a punch and she gave me a black eye.

Crap, I miss that class!

you gals are scary! my only chance would be running away from you, catch me if you can!

I'm similar - when I really start to exercise, I briefly cross above the line into overweight before dropping down below my starting weight. I guess my favorite exercise builds up muscle before it tears down the fat.

Here's one for y'all - did you know that the Boy Scouts are going to regulate the activity of their members and leaders next year based on their BMI? Kids' and leaders' doctors will have to certify that scouts are within the "normal" BMI range before they are allowed to join rigorous outdoor activities or any events that are more than half an hour from healthcare - this includes participating in summer camp. You know - pond swimming, macaroni stringing, stupid song singing summer camp. So potentially, every boy who NEEDS to get out from behind the Game Boy will not be allowed to do so for fear that he's a secret heart attack-in-waiting. The thing is, through the years I've known quite a few kids who snuck up into the overweight range but happily carried fourty and fifty pound packs across twenty miles of terrain. And I hate to tell the BSA this, but a number of the children who've died of thrombosis after rigorous playing in hot conditions in the last few years were within the healthy BMI range.

But this is a tangent. I'm sorry to threadjack.

Thank you all! Healthy at Every Size, Pru, come on.

@Alldenwall

In some ways, I think the one-shot can be a lot tougher... If I hit the next big goal point in my martial art (you get a black belt in the "undergraduate" program, then a black SASH in the "graduate" program) I have to manage all my forms, basics, techniques, sparring, grappling, and weapons in one day. I think your test required a heck of a lot of preparation and guts, to tackle it all at once. So major kudos to you!!

Yeah, I detest our society's preoccupation with skinniness, if you couldn't tell from my post! I've been chunky my whole life-it just seems to be the way my body wants to exist. I think the only way I can drop below 120 is to either shock my body into some sort of weight loss (the one time I was 112 pounds, I'd just gotten into college and was doing some serious walking. Soon as my body got used to it, though, I went right back up to 120) or turn anorexic. It's pretty darn sad when I've seriously considered the latter option.

I'm not so sure about LW's wife. I mean, he never mentions if he ASKS her to participate. He also never mentions if she does like any sports... From his letter, we make the unconscious jump from chunky=doesn't enjoy physical activities but it's highly possible she does, and her body is just the way it is.

What clued me in that maybe she's actually AT a healthy weight and that the problem is her husband, was his admission that she hasn't really gained weight since they got married. 3 years of marriage and her weight is still steady?! That's amazing! Watching how much my friends started gaining weight after they got into marriage commitments, this admission makes me think that she probably DOES exercise in some shape or form, just not enough to make her skinny.

In conclusion, I don't think the problem is her health or her weight (and like I pointed out, the two are not mutually exclusive.) I think it's HIM, and his preoccupation that somehow skinny is the only attractive way to go.

F you, society!

I understand the frustration with our skinny-centric society, but a culture always has its standards of attractiveness, there's just no way around it - everybody can't be above average. There's also an evolutionary component - guys have an innate desire to feel larger than their women, and women have an innate desire to feel smaller. Exceptions abound, but there are clearly some biological tendencies. Don't believe me? Ask women if they'd date a guy who's shorter than they are. One of the most progressive women I know just can't get around her height requirement (that requirement being 6'1" or taller), even though she knows it's not rational. At least a woman has *some* control over her weight. Not so with height.

Good point. I always used to say I'd never date a guy that looks like I could bench press him. What was weird is those are the guys taht would ask me out the most.

Personally, I like the Paul Bunyan type guy. Barrel chested and muscular. I used to have the height requirement of at least 6'1" too.....my ex hubby fit that description, but my second hubby (whom I'm much happier with) is only 5'10". Guess I finally grew up and learned to look past something as superficial as height.

spackle:

There's also an evolutionary component - guys have an innate desire to feel larger than their women, and women have an innate desire to feel smaller.

I don't know about that. Look at the Renaissance paintings. (I think that's the right era.) The women were almost always quite chunky, and the men tended to be thin. That seems to be the way society preferred it.

I've read somewhere, long ago, that men used to prefer heavier women, because biologically, it signified that they were well-fed enough to carry a healthy baby to term and to feed it afterward. Heavier men indicated enough power (or wealth) to supply enough food for the woman and any future children.

IncogNeato:

Look at the Renaissance paintings. (I think that's the right era.) The women were almost always quite chunky, and the men tended to be thin.

Yes that's the right era. ;)

...right into the end of the 19th century. Fat equalled prosperity back then - if your wife and kids were fat, it meant that you had enough money to feed them whatever they wanted AND it was proof that they didn't have to go out and work. Only poor people were thin.

After the Industrial Revolution and WWI, things went the other way. Clothing was designed NOT to have major foundation garments and so looked good only on thinner women. "Leisure" meant not loafing around, but having the time to exercise for fun and was conducted outdoors - as in playing tennis, boating, rowing, etc. It also became chic for women to smoke cigarettes, which any woman who's quit smoking will tell you, keeps the weight down nicely.

Factory workers had neither the time or the money for such things, and as such tended towards being more stout...and pale. Having a suntan pre-WWI meant that you were poor and therefore had to do manual labor, which meant being outdoors. The leisure class was able to spend all of their time indoors, and women were valued for their pale complexions. Hence the later trend towards getting a "healthy looking" tan. Playing outdoors was a mark of wealth - it meant you could afford not to work during the day.

It was Coco Chanel who coined the phrase "A woman can never be too rich or too thin." It was she and her wealthy clients who started the push to vacation in sunny locations in the winter and arranging things so they could be outdoors for as much of the year as possible.

Exactly so, Messy.

Paleness is still a huge status symbol in Japan. Old women cover themselves head to toe, and actually have these nifty glove things mounted onto the handlebars of their bikes so their hands won't even tan as they ride around. Arm socks are high fashion, and lotions actually have whitening agents in them.

Western ideas about tans are slowly starting to catch up here among the young, but for every bottle of sun tan I see at the local drugstore, there's two dozen whitening agents alongside it.

And ideas of thinness, whatever we like to tell ourselves, are a social construct. In America I'm average to slightly chunky. In Japan, I'm a friggin whale. But Japanese people are generally smaller than Caucasians, and so the ideal for "skinny" is even more sckewered towards unhealthy stick.

Fascinating, really.

Some of that is genetic, you know. I had a roommate from Malaysia who, although her grandfather was Portuguese (that's why she went to school in Canada - she couldn't get into university there - nice, hey?) blamed her mother because she inherited what she called the "Asian No-Bum". This distressed her greatly, because no amount of working out was going to help her with that.

I, on the other hand was quite thin then, and I'm not big (though I did gain, I'm going to be 46 after all) and I STILL had more cottage cheese on my ass than the average dairy farm. Seriously. 5'8" and 120, and I had bum issues, too. Just the other way around.

I love Japan, but I could never live there. I'm taller than most of the men and I have red hair and green eyes. Everyone there looks at me like some kind of weird creature from outer space when I think of myself as pretty ordinary.