body image walk

there's this walk I take - maybe 1.5 miles each direction - that takes me through several different neighborhoods. Here are the student ghettos that I hate so much, then there are family houses with a few doubles/apartments, then totally run-down and abandoned, then hospital, then abandoned except for groups of guys who stoop sit. That's the part that kinda gives me the creeps each time - that if I were to scream, there's literally nobody to hear me. Blocks and blocks of flooded and/or burned houses that are abandoned. And I see cars that drive slowly through - some of them, the trucks, are looting the houses, but the others - the lowriders with booming music - are more sinister. Not that lowriders with booming music are sinister the vast majority of the time - I just mean in this neighborhood, how they drive around and around and around, sometimes following me - they're up to no good.

Usually I run into way friendly folks who wave hello and wish me a great day and comment upon my exercising.

Today was the funniest. I'm walking - I had just turned around in the last, totally abandoned part after walking past two creepy male stoops - one with six guys and two dogs, the other just two guys but really loud. A woman was walking towards me, swinging her arms wide and talking. Either she was talking to me and getting some cardio walkout with her walk, or she was crazy.

So I took off my headphones and said, "What's that?" as I kept on walking.

"You're out here gettin exercise just like me," she said. "But don't you be losin those hips! Hips are what it's about now! Hips are sexy!"

As I walked past, I got to hear about all the physical attributes which I should not be losing, as she patted it on herself. She ended with the butt - which is either (I couldn't quite hear) important for "our" sex or just for sex.

She spoke with the zeal of a West African missionary (trust me, they're zealous). When I said, "OK, but, well now, I could stand to lose quite a bit," she shouted, "NO!"

She wasn't crazy and she wasn't scary - she was just really adamant, and it cracked me up. It was like being back in Senegal, except the whole part where I understood what she was saying because it wasn't in Wolof. Both women and men there insisted that my body type is THE image of beauty and I shouldn't change a thing, except maybe get yet more hip and butt.

So, no more exercise for me. But, also no more sugar for me - it affects me hard, and I don't need anything else messing with my moods. Because of my hyperthyroidism but slow metabolism, research says I'm probably highly insulin resistant.

Drats anyway.

Which reminds me of another problem with going to Liberia - it always pisses me off when I go to Africa and I live on a diet of less than 1000 calories per day (porridge for breakfast and one more meal of rice and vegetables with fish or chicken - the most calories are from the palm oil) and do not lose weight. Bless my metabolism, it adjusts down. And while I do a lot of walking, it's too bloody hot and humid to do it fast enough for cardio benefits.

Sigh.