Post Image Gosh, I'd love to have a body like a Victoria's Secret model. Who wouldn't? Granted, if I did I wouldn't be letting people take pictures of it and publish it in a internationally-distributed catalog, but that's not the point.

I think I have accepted the fact that even if I get to goal, my body will always bear the scars of obesity and pregnancy. Looking good, or even halfway decent, in a bathing suit is not one of my goals. Wearing a bikini...not on your life...unless I suddenly give my life completely over to vanity and keep a gifted plastic surgeon in my personal employ. And that is not going to happen. Not on this paycheck.

As much as I'd like to climb on a soapbox right now and preach about how my goals are about having more energy and lowering my risk for disease, I have to be honest. I want to look better than this! Living longer is a fringe benefit.

Reconciling my desire to look better with the reality of what my body is capable of...that is the hard part. So, in my own best interest...I have been forced to come up with some non-looking-good-in-a-bathing-suit goals.

Here goes...

Last summer, we bought season passes to a local water park. Honey and The Boy paraded around that place with me without shame. They love me. So, my thighs look like water-logged kitchen sponges, big deal.

I think it had been at least fifteen years and a hundred pounds or more since my last trip down a waterslide. I went down two last summer and learned an incredible lesson: a waterslide is about the only place in the world where FAT = FAST.

The first slide I went on looked tame to me, but that small, winding, completely-enclosed tube was a lot steeper than I thought it was and the interior was completely black. AND there was no need for me to sling myself into its frightening innards with such force. By the time I got to the end, I was like a bedraggled spitwad shooting out the end of a soda straw at 900 miles per hour. The bottoms of my bathing suit were lodged uncomfortably you-know-where and neither of us have been the same since.

It wasn't fun. I was terrified. Water was spraying directly into my face, so breathing wasn't an option and claustrophobia set in after the first nanosecond. I thought I was going to die. I'm sure that if there is a waterslide into that Biblical Lake of Fire, then it will closely resemble that one.

Even after that, my family talked me into another slide. This one, they assured me, was a slow one. They reasoned that it was so slow, they even let you go down head first. I ascended the tower with apprehension, taking courage at last when I saw a small boy passing a loop beneath us. He had to scoot foward on his bottom to avoid coming to a complete standstill. Again, I began my ride with confidence that evaporated like sweat in the desert. Again, I couldn't breathe without inhaling chlorinated water and skidded out the bottom of that slide, hydroplaning twenty feet into the pool before sinking to the bottom in the fetal position.

So: pulling this tale together...goals and bathing suits. My only bathing suit-oriented desire is to be able to ride the waterslides with my family without killing myself or being the fabulous fat lady who can go from 0 to 142 miles per hour in a single turn of the slide. The Boy might think that my "gift" is outrageously cool, but I do not. I don't have to look like an underwear model while doing it and, frankly, do we not know what happens to women who go down waterslides in bikinis?

Really, I'm okay with being asthetically imperfect in this case. I'm not crazy about it, but I can stand it if being at my goal weight means I might have to scootch foward on my bottom in order to get around that first turn on the "slow slide".