Body Awareness

I've been thinking about my body a lot lately. I got a body on January 3, 1980 and I have been working with this baby every since. I will keep this body til I take my last breath. No matter how many face lifts and tummy tucks I go through, I still have the same body that was given to me in 1980.It's crazy to compare my unique body to the skinny frames on television. I will never look like J Lo (nor do I want to look like her), it makes no sense for me to sign up for a Thriatlon with the false hope to look like her. J Lo is doing what's best for her; Cintia needs to do what works for Cintia. This week I decided that I might as well develop a great love for my body because I don't get to change it for another one while living here on earth. When I was a child, I had no body awareness. I just got around, had no worries, just had fun. There's peace in loving your body for what it is. God created you with great love. No matter how many pregnancies I will go through, I get to keep that same body, so I want to love my body now and until I die. When you love something you give it the best care. Here's a little bit of an interesting article on the subject:

Beauty and Body Image in the Media
by Media Awareness Network

Unattainable Beauty
Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that media images of female beauty are unattainable for all but a very small number of women. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition.
Still, the number of real life women and girls who seek a similarly underweight body is epidemic, and they can suffer equally devastating health consequences.

Self-Improvement or Self-Destruction?
The barrage of messages about thinness, dieting and beauty tells "ordinary" women that they are always in need of adjustment—and that the female body is an object to be perfected.
Jean Kilbourne argues that the overwhelming presence of media images of painfully thin women means that real women’s bodies have become invisible in the mass media. The real tragedy, Kilbourne concludes, is that many women internalize these stereotypes, and judge themselves by the beauty industry's standards. Women learn to compare themselves to other women, and to compete with them for male attention. This focus on beauty and desirability "effectively destroys any awareness and action that might help to change that climate."

My Goals for the week:
{1} To burn at least 2,000 calories OK! (1.9 out of 26 miles to walk; 1 training left for 5K out of 3; 2,557.3 calories burned)
{2} To get protein and dairy daily in my diet.
{3} Focus on behavior change, not on the numbers on the scale. Haven't touched the scale for 10 days, 11 more to go.