I work with a girl we'll call Roxanne. She's a couple of years younger than me, and has two kids with two different dads. She's living with a third guy, who she luckily didn't get knocked up by before realizing he's a douche. She's a skinny, pretty little thing--who is utterly convinced she's fat. She goes on and on about how big her belly is, grabbing it and squeezing it. She bemoans how her second son ruined her figure, and says she looks like "one of those hillbillies" with scrawny arms and legs and a "big belly".

Meanwhile, I'd love to look like her. Yeah, if you really, really look, you can see her stomach isn't flat--which is natural, not "fat"--but she looks like a normal, healthy woman. And yet I, at 260 pounds, would be more comfortable wearing a swimsuit in public than she would. I've tried several times to tell her that she's being too hard on herself, that nobody else thinks that, that she's perfectly proportional and has no reason to feel self-conscious. She just says either "you don't have to see me naked" or "you don't know how I used to look".

It makes me sad that she's got such issues, but it also makes me sort of happy that I don't have any sort of glorified, thin youth to look back on and beat myself up about "losing".