How I Said Goodbye To My Chubby Inner Child
Pretty much all my adult life I’ve wanted to lose 10 pounds.
I always thought I was fat. Or maybe not fat, but chubby, plump. And I loved to eat. As a kid I was always the child my grandmother liked to feed because I was happy to “eat up” everything on my plate.
Being chubby and loving to eat did not go well with my other passion, loving to dance. I started ballet at age 6 and danced till I was over 40. Throughout my entire dancing career, I struggled with not having a “dancer’s body” (tall and thin) and loving to eat, drink and basically have a good time.
Moving to the US from Jamaica at age 13 didn’t help, where my ideas about having to be skinny seemed to take root. Here’s a self-portrait taken from my diary, written at age 14, a year after we moved.
To make things worse, I was also well endowed, which didn’t typically jive with being a serious professional dancer. I remember being thrilled to see a large breasted woman on stage in a Broadway musical once and thinking wow, that could be me! Having big boobs didn’t have to prevent me from dancing on stage.