no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I want to try pizza on the grill (now that I am reunited with the grill) but first I have to find every last kitchen thing that we put in storage. Jeeezus why was a not more organized about this--every box I open has contained everything EXCEPT anything I want/need in the short term.

Like I have to start my internship tomorrow and atm it looks like I will be doing so in a bikini and cowboy boots???

by tomorrow I mean next week but still

Made a homemade pizza for lunch and ate it while it stormed. Perfect!

is it worth investing in a pizza stone?

Yes! If you love making pizza...I had one and miss it.

there is one on my wedding registry, ive wanted one for 10000 years but its the kind of thing that you never want to buy for yourself cause its boring to buy

What's a good bathing suit to wear when you are out of the bikini club that still looks cute not like you are trying to hide, youthful etc...ugharghhhhhh!???

I fucking hate swim suits now. Use to be so easy, had tons of them, never a thought, now it's an ordeal, want to live wear no one can ever swim. I actually feel better naked but swim suits take your body out of context and ugh.

swim suit... i mean.

You mean you don't want to wear a bikini? I would go with something vintage/retro looking. Go for 40s glam. It provides coverage if that's what you want but you can swan around like a fabulous starker.

Bwahahaha STARLET

http://www.modcloth.com/shop/search?keyword=Bathing+Beauty+One+Piece?

Maybe something like this?

You could also look for a bikini that's got a more modest cut with that same retro look.

http://www.modcloth.com/shop/twopiece-swimwear/fave-denim-swimmies-two-piece-swimsuit

Anyway, I feel you. I'm not too worried about swimsuits but after years of a solid truce, I'm feeling some animosity towards my body. Part baby, part getting old, part catching every cold that comes within 50 yards of me, part some kind of hormone induced joint pains. Bleh.

I have a halter neck tank-top bikini thing with kind of shortie shorts. Thought it would look really mom-ish but it's cute. I've never felt comfortable in a normal bikini although i'm happy with my body - just feels like i'm walking round in me underwears.

I have the one piece that Carl linked to and it's very cute but I think it runs a bit small just FYI.

i have not worn a swimsuit in over a decade.

i have had the same cheap JC Penney swimsuit for 10 years & as long as it keeps stretching enough to fit me, it'll do fine. vintage style full coverage low leg-cut with tummy panels etc

aka grandma swimsuit if you wanna go there lok

Thanks, Gals! My fave seems to be the Modcloth Marilyn Monroe looking suit.

I owned a '60s vintage one piece that was incredible! But I was stupid (20 something) and cut it in half and turned it into a high waisted two piece. I would LOVE to have that suit today, in either incarnation in fact.

The day got worse when I ventured into American Apparel and tried on the "Skater's Dress" with low cut sides. I was super curious and on days when I had strong body positivity (which was one day last month) I thought I could sport this with a simple bra...all summer. Uh....no. All day today I have felt like I am heading towards midlife or something. I also tried on high waisted jeans, one pair. Shot out of that dressing room so fast.

I realize it is because I am an actual mom now that things that are momish bug me (my midlife symptom) because I was embracing styles I should be embracing now, years ago. Anyway, this is all a bigger mess in my head than I am letting on...the whole aging, no working out n months and months, living in a college town etc...I feel I need to cross over to a better place in my head and once I do, smooth sailing. Starting with a return to some sort of exercise, maybe Callanetics.

It's funny because at 18 I had a similar experience. All my friends started wearing bikinis and I loved my one piece, felt sexy in it. They laughed at me. I tried a bikini and felt naked. I bought one and wore it with denim shorts (in the original high waisted/ cropped shirted era) and slowly worked my way into the comfort of a bikini. Now it's time to return to the one piece.

kinder: I looked for a tankini with boy short combo but never found one :(

Tera have you looked at http://www.swimsuitsforall.com

Oh haaaayyy actual plus-sized models!

Working out is so key to my happiness. I had to let go of my membership at the fancy gym near our apartment because I stopped teaching and no longer qualify for their generous teacher discount and can't afford it anymore. I try to make up for it by taking a lot of walks/bike rides, and that is helpful but it's not the same as 45 minutes of sweating my face off on the elliptical machine (running is out of the question as I have terrible knees, and also I fucking hate running, in case anybody was going to suggest it). I hope you can find time to exercise and I hope it makes you feel better, tera!

gah, me too -- i was just thinking that i exercise/stretch/move around in order to feel good. exclusively, really. it helps me stay limber, energetic, and positive.
my exercise routine got me through this awful winter for sure. also it was fun to develop a workout routine. it occurred to me that i tend to just like to do things my way and that was a concept i needed to apply to exercise as well. it worked!

this is totally in response to carl's post -- the swimsuit body stuff is a conversation i avoid entirely these days! like even online! if i start to go down the road of spending my time typing about how i feel about my body in a bathing suit, it leads nowhere. better to do something else. nothing personal! just a thing i need to do in order to feel alright.

except i did like that slim goodbody one piece!

Thanks for that website!

I did start walking hills to get my hear rate up and then Callanetics for an hour. Now on day 2 and feel better. I did Callanetics 14-28 and then stopped. It was my religion all those years and worked great. Once I started living with someone else it was harder to keep up. Decided to commit to it and see where it takes me.

*heart

I'm going to bust out my Jane Fonda workout record.

She reminds me of Jazzercise and that reminds me of Fosse...high waisted pants and leotards also...Fosse.

Remember Denise Austin? I had a few of her videos, too.

I wonder if Netflix or Amazon have anything streaming... we're about to get new downstairs neighbors and maybe they would enjoy listening to me jazzercise.

I used my years of dance classes and aerobics vids to make up my own routine and it's like 500% more fun than any video!

oh man Mum had a pile of Jane Fonda, Denise Austin, Jazzercise, all the hits on vinyl when we were kids. And she had this awesome aerobics video called Aerobics Oz Style and this gawky man in Australia flag jogging shorts was the instructor

I love Denise Austin!

I wish Callanetics vids weren't so boring. I own one DVD but never use it, I know the workout. The pilates videos I had were also boring.

I wanted to buy this thing:
http://www.fluidity.com/
Been looking for a good price or giveaway on Craigslist and at garage sales.

I was doing K. LaShae's vids all last year but stopped in August because we moved and the new place had no space for workouts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dJkiRE0ymw

They were effective...

I LOVE KEAIRA LASHAE.

Hi, girls.

Wondering if it would be OK to suggest a line of discussion I feel is pretty appropriate for this thread? It came up on another thread yesterday, and has been rattling around in my head, but the original thread seems to have just disintegrated into puns and "jokes bruv". BUT, it involves talking around issues of food-policing, body-shaming, food as control issue, food as means of boundary-setting or boundary-violating. And I recognise that this line of discussion might be upsetting or even potentially triggering to anyone struggling with body issues or disordered eating. But I also recognise that this is something that is very gender slanted, so I thought this thread was more appropriate than others.

Would anyone like to talk through this stuff with me? Or would anyone really rather not discuss this stuff here? I'd be OK with taking this stuff elsewhere.

It's talking about the stuff *behind* the jokes on the "bread shaming" thread. That this is something I know exists, in my life (and also has been confirmed that it's not just me, it happens in other people's lives, from reading around the "fat-o-sphere") that family members, acquaintances, even complete strangers all feel like they have a right to comment on or even police one's food choices, if you are a woman living life in a larger body. But also about how exercising control over one's own food choices (even food choices that may seem spurious to others, like veganism or gluten free lifestyles) can be a way of exercising control that one feels one has "lost", over one's body or one's life or other aspects of it. And about other people's boundary violations with regards to one's food choices (there was a story on that thread which pretty much horrified me, and a couple of other people called it out, but at the same time, it's brought up a whole raft of unpleasant acts of food-based aggression, and what it's like to be on the receiving end of it) being an act of control or aggression. Sometimes it feels like my life is a steady stream of trying to sort people into "safe" and "unsafe" but that's a really giant guarantee of "unsafe" status.

Anyway, please forgive me if this is an inappropriate place to raise these discussions, but I just thought I'd throw that stuff out there, and see if there were any takers here.

I think this is an awesome place to discuss it.

"even complete strangers all feel like they have a right to comment on or even police one's food choices, if you are a woman living life in a larger body"

- When I was a chubby preteen I was walking down the street during a summer on Fire Island with two friends who were also eating ice cream cones. Some 20-something brodouche walked by us, looked at me and said, "You don't need that, sweetheart".

- The night before I graduated from college I was drinking with my roommate at my favorite bar (miss you Spring Lounge) and enjoying a pint (or several) of Guinness. While my roommate went to the bathroom a man called George came over and told me that he approached me because I was the cutest girl in the place, a little chubby but definitely the cutest one there. He then proceeded to tell me I should probably drink light beer or no beer at all and gave me unsolicited exercise advice.

Of course there's the other side where when I've been very skinny and people feel the need to tell me to eat more or just have some fries or whatever. It's all fucking maddening to be honest.

I also haven't eaten meat in 20 years so I've gotten a lot of shtick for that over the years.

In any event this plus a bunch of other bullshit has led me to think of all food in terms of good or bad and ugh. I think it really is the worst when it comes from total strangers though. I'm sorry but, excuse me? Etc.

I'm interested in such a discussion. I was delighted by the endless parade of bread puns, don't get me wrong, but this is a topic that is dear to my heart.

I have no tolerance for people commenting on what I'm eating, unless we are dining together and it is along the lines of "That looks delicious/what do you think of your meal" kind of way. Before the pun train left the station in the bread thread, I was going to say something about how as a busy and important fat woman, I have dared to do things like walk down the street while eating a 7-11 hotdog, which talk about facing fears straight on. I felt like I was daring the world at large to say something to me. Nobody ever did, though, or if they did I didn't notice since if I'm in a situation where I'm eating a 7-11 hot dog while walking down the street, I have other more pressing things on my mind such as not passing out from low blood sugar or whether I'm going to make it to where ever I'm going on time. Which in the end is a good lesson for me - most people are not paying anywhere near as much attention to me as I am afraid they are.

The office is a hard place for me, especially where I work now since there is a lot of high achieving, status-consciousness there, plus the male dominated (at least at the upper management level) field of big law, plus those horrid workplace wellness initiatives and employer-sponsored Weight Watchers meetings that reinforce this culture. I eat at my desk a lot because I'm busy and I have myself convinced that the person who sits across the hall from me (our offices have one glass wall that is frosted with a striped pattern so you can see people but not super clearly) is judging me, even though he probably does not even notice/care what the hell I'm doing. Not to mention feeling like some kind of slovenly gross person if I put cream in my coffee right there in the break room where everybody can see me. There's a lot of diet talk and women bonding through hating their bodies there, too, which I refuse to participate in, but it's always there.

I admit to looking askance at people who embrace restrictive eating for non-medical reasons, at least if those people are touting their particular restrictive regiment as a cure-all or the One True Way to health or better than your average person eating a 7-11 hot dog. I don't tell those people what I think of their eating habits, because it's none of my business, but I definitely have very little patience for it and I 100% definitely in no way want to talk about it with them.

Ha, that bread shaming thread just reminded me of these two dancers I lived with at NYU who quite literally ate nothing but chicken and steamed broccoli. I was poor and stoned most of the time so I ate a lot of pasta. They couldn't handle it at all and would constantly make comments like "OMG you're eating pasta AGAIN?". I started to make a point of only eating in the common areas and saying things like "Yeah, dosn't it look amazing?". Oh they were horrible.

just to clarify, not vegetarianism or even veganism probably since I am a super conflicted meat eater (hot dogs notwithstanding) and am secretly very shamed of my own meat eating and plus aside from one college roommate who was a complete asshole anyway, I've never actually met that proselytizing straw-vegetarian that meat-eating people are always going on about. If anything, the vegetarians I know (I don't think I know any vegans?) are too apologetic about their food choices.

E that reminded of two women I knew in college who were roommates. They were both right on target as far as mainstream beauty norms were concerned - blonde with oodles of fabulous curly 90s hair, slim, buxom but not too buxom - and were both rushing different sororities and had this unacknowledged hardcore competition thing with each other. I was hanging out with one of the roommates - V - and she was telling me that the other one was always eating raisins because she thought it was a health snack and V was like, "She doesn't know that raisins have a TON of calories and I'm not going to tell her! I'm just going to watch her get fat and not know why!"

I wanted to be like, You both have the most fabulous hair I have ever seen, you need to stop caring about what the other one eats and start a gang like the Pink Ladies but centered around your hair.

http://31.media.tumblr.com/3fcc548579a3fbfe56e9532de7d0bb0a/tumblr_myrob0oAsg1qbagneo1_1280.png

Could have been so beautiful...

"I wanted to be like, You both have the most fabulous hair I have ever seen, you need to stop caring about what the other one eats and start a gang like the Pink Ladies but centered around your hair."

Ha! Yes!

There's a lot of diet talk and women bonding through hating their bodies there, too, which I refuse to participate in, but it's always there.

this this this this

But also about how exercising control over one's own food choices (even food choices that may seem spurious to others, like veganism or gluten free lifestyles) can be a way of exercising control that one feels one has "lost", over one's body or one's life or other aspects of it.

Food control is an area where I was trying to exercise my compassion, because finding a place to have quality brunch with a vegan is no walk in the park. Then I got a whole bunch of food issues dropped on me, for my sins, probably. If increasingly narrowing their food choices and patrolling their life for things they can control helps people to deal with their demons and maintain balance, bless them.

Never realized how many rings Howard wore.

She wears a lot of rings! And no mascara. God I love her.

Oh now I long for a Claudette Wyms, Anita VanBuren, Kay Howard crossover crime drama.

Sorry, getting off topic.

I was trying to think of times that people have actually shamed me for eating something and I once went out for late night drunken diner breakfast with this male friend of mine (I probably had a little crush on him at the time, too) and we sat there eating our omelets and he suggested I get egg whites next time and try exercising more because "guys like girls who glow." Which in hindsight was probably twisted dude-code for "I like you but am too much of an asshole to date a fat woman so maybe lose weight so I'm not so conflicted about my feelings."