(Originally posted on befabulo.us)
I'm Summer J, and I suffer from delusions of fabulousness. It's tremendous fun.
I haven't always been this fabulous. No, it's true! There have
been times in my life that I've been dorky, other times I've been
downright dumpy. But I have always wanted to be fabulous. Gorgeous,
glamourous, glittering, glowing. I wore silver platform shoes with
6-inch heels to my own wedding, and danced in them all night. As I've aged matured, though, I've learned that feeling fabulous is about more than sparkles. It has to come from the inside out.
Would you like a little more history, a few more details?
I started life as a wee 6lb. baby in 1974 -- go tigers! -- so you can do the math and figure out how old I am now. Go ahead, I'm not ashamed of my age, and I don't intend to ever be. As a child, I was weak and scrawny and bookish, but I was also pretty enough to be my mother's living doll. (She loves to tell the story about how she once sat me on the checkout counter at Bloomingdale's while she paid for new dresses for me, and another customer spied me, mistook me for an actual doll, and began lifting up my arms to look for my price tag.) I was a low-energy, unathletic child, and silly me, I thought that condition was permanent.
My boobs grew when I was nine. They grew a LOT. I was a DD before my weight cracked 100 lbs. This development made me Feel Like a Natural Woman, but did nothing to improve my athletic confidence.
I didn't have any trouble staying slender until I hit my early twenties. You see, I'm not an emotional eater; if I get upset or stressed or depressed, the first thing that happens is that I lose my appetite. It's when I'm happy that I get fat. And I was so very happy at that time, living with the man who would become my fabulous husband and, eventually, the father of my fabulous son, that I started gaining. I didn't gain a ton of weight, but I am short and small of frame, and every ounce is obvious. For me, a five pound weight gain means I have to go up a size in pants. And in the two or three years before my wedding, I gained about twenty pounds, enough to transform me from a size 0 to a size... well, I should have been wearing an 8, but my vanity wouldn't let me, I kept wearing size 6 even though my pants were so tight you could see every stitch embossed on my flesh when I took them off.
Yes, I know that a size 8 isn't big. It's just big for me, several sizes bigger than I ought to be. I look great at size 2, okay at size 4, and flabby at size 6. And those sixes were really, really tight as I was planning my wedding.
"Don't worry about your weight," my recently-married cousin promised. "You'll be so nervous before your wedding, you'll drop 10 pounds without even trying. Trust me," she said, and I did. Maybe it's a sign that I was completely confident I was marrying the right man, maybe she was just flat-out wrong, but I didn't lose those ten pounds. I didn't lose even ONE pound. I had to wear a boned corset and a girdle -- a GIRDLE, yes, they still make them, and yes, they still hurt to wear -- in order to get into my wedding dress. I had to spend more money on the underpinnings than on the dress. Seriously. Also, I had a double chin. Hopefully my guests were distracted enough by my Bride of Frankenstein in Outer Space shoes not to notice.
Three months after my wedding, I heard about the T-Tapp exercise program. I read about other people's results with it, and thought it was too good to be true. I had to be convinced before I dropped cash on the videos, so I chose just one exercise off the "Try Before You Buy" section of the website. Awesome Legs. I chose that one because I've always fretted about my thighs, always wished they were smaller and smoother. I measured the tops of my thighs, then did the exercise every night for a week. At the end of the week, I'd lost an inch on each thigh.
I called the company, credit card in hand, the next day.
I started the program in February 2001, and by September I'd gone from a very tight size 6 to a loose size 2. I also lost twenty pounds without dieting. I felt FINE. That fall, I got pregnant, and had every intention of being a fabulous T-Tapp Mommy and working out throughout my pregnancy and looking delicious shortly after giving birth. (My friend Esther, T-Tapp trainer and hot mama, is a living embodiment of my goal. Just look at her in this picture with her 7-week old daughter... most women would kill for abs like that, and she's less than 2 months postpartum in that pic!) Alas, it was not to be. At 7 weeks pregnant I started bleeding, but since my baby still looked ok, my doctor's orders were to stay off my feet as much as possible. But the baby wasn't ok. I lost him in my 5th month of pregnancy. I kept the 15 pounds I'd gained, and thankfully, I soon had good cause to keep gaining weight. I was pregnant again, and this time the pregnancy was normal and my son was born healthy... a couple weeks late, but healthy, and when you're talking babies, better late than early, I say. But I'd been terrified all through my pregnancy, and I hadn't wanted to break even one of the pregnancy "rules" in case something went wrong. I knew that if I lost another child, I'd blame myself for even the most minor indiscretion. So I went ten months without drinking a Dr. Pepper or popping a Benadryl or eating sushi... or exercising.
I lost weight quickly while I was nursing my son. By the time he was 6 months old, I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight, but this time I wasn't slender and fit, I was just skinny. But that was good enough for me -- skinny is skinny, right? Wrong. The kind of skinny that comes from expending more calories than you take in doesn't last the way that fit and strong skinny does. I couldn't nurse the boy forever. Eighteen months was plenty for both of us, but after he weaned, I started gaining weight again. That didn't thrill me, but did I do anything about it? No. I started trying for a second child when my son was two, so I thought, why bother? I'll be pregnant again soon.
Ha, and also ha. He'll be five in January and I still haven't gotten pregnant. After a year of unsuccessful trying, I realized that maybe, just MAYBE I should stop thinking that I'll get pregnant any minute, and maybe, just MAYBE it would be worthwhile to get back in shape. By the time I dusted off my T-Tapp tapes in April 2006, I was back up to the size and weight I'd been when I got married.
It took some patience, but this time around, T-Tapp worked even better than before. I went into it with a store of knowledge, and just expanded on it. I went to a clinic and lost an inch off each upper thigh with one afternoon's work. A month later, I flew down to Tampa to attend the T-Tapp trainer certifications, where I met Teresa Tapp for the first time. By that time, November 2006, I was back in a size 2. Now, a year later, I'm still a size 2, but I'm even stronger and tighter and less cellulite-y and more defined. I wear a bikini every chance I get. What's even more amazing is that I still have my measurement log from before my pregnancies, and I am now smaller in every single measurement than before I ever got pregnant. It's a good thing I have a few stretchmarks to prove I grew my boy!
