"Just because this is never going to work, there's no need to be negative."

Remember when I wrote about being twelve and locking myself in my room to do push-ups and sit-ups to the tunes of fuzzy local television? I remembered a tidbit about that era recently, something I had almost forgot about. I was flipping through another of the new Pilates dvd's and on the back Ana is doing this sort of inverted pedaling a bicycle in the air thing. Hello, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman! Remember 1993-1998 when Jane Seymour was huge and her babies were Gerber babies and she married Sully and lived on the wild frontier? I do! I don't remember being obsessed with her, per se, but apparently at some point I watched some kind of biography/interview of her where she talked about her figure and they taped her exercising. I definitely remember her doing the inverted bicycle thing, although I didn't know it was Pilates. And I probably didn't care anyway because I was thirteen and I just really wanted to be tiny like all the other girls. I really believed the bicycle thing was the secret because Jane Seymour was tiny, and rich, and she played a doctor on tv. Jane Seymour wouldn't lie to me.

I added the bicycle thing to my daily repertoire of sit-ups, push-ups and the three mile bike ride I took on the dangerous back road with no helmet on. And then I'd come home and have a bowl of spaghetti with no sauce(fattening!) but plenty of cheese(protein!). It's a shock I didn't wake up one day Kate Moss, what with my unflinching dedication. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that I was so young and smaller than I ever knew because now I know how dangerous it is to randomly do a Pilates move you saw an actress do on tv that one time. I'm lucky I never hurt myself. Or got run-over. I couldn't say if I lost weight because of all my efforts, we never had a scale that worked. I have no idea what I was measuring against, or how I gauged my success. I have this vague feeling that it didn't matter because no matter what I did it wasn't going to be good enough.

I really hate thinking about that time in my life. I suppose puberty equates to years of self-loathing for a big chunk of society and we've all grown because of it but I'd really rather have the memories surgically removed. Liposuction of the brain. Lobotomy is so under-rated.