13th - Body Image

Day Thirteen! On the agenda for today is my opinion about my body and how comfortable I am with it. This topic, along with yesterday's original assignment to choose five guys that are attractive, make me believe that this 30 Day Challenge was originally intended to be taken by female bloggers. I suppose it's more likely that women will have body image issues. That doesn't mean that men don't have body image issues. It probably just means men don't typically advertise their issues. Advertise is the wrong word. I don't mean it like that. Men tend to have a reputation of repressing. We hold things in if we're bothered. We really shouldn't do that. And it's possible that I'm just reading society incorrectly and now I'm just rambling.

Personally, I don't have issues with my body. From a medical standpoint, I could stand to lose some weight. I have certain goals for myself that I'm working toward, both in terms of weight and, more importantly, exercise. I once had a goal of running a 10k. I met that goal. For some reason I lost my motivation to keep moving forward and sort of backslid in both of those categories. Now I have a new goal for myself, to run a half marathon. But, at this point, I should probably make the goal to once again do a proper 10k.

I look in the mirror and I'm okay with who I am. I don't necessarily like getting winded when I run up a flight of stairs, but that goes back to the whole being in shape thing. Look, I know I'm not a 10. I doubt that there are many women who see me walking down the street and think, "Wow, that is one fine specimen!" But I don't think I'm a bad looking guy. I think the recent additions of glasses and the full beard have helped. I'm not sure if they make me look younger or more mature.

Though I was told by an Old Navy coworker that she thought I was 25. I thanked her, because I'm nearly a decade beyond 25. Most people who aren't aware of my 34-ness will guess that I'm around 27 or 28. I really don't mind that people assume I'm younger than I am. Because really, I still feel like I'm in my early 20s, fresh out of college. But that's more of a maturity thing and not a body image thing.

So yeah, I'm okay with who I am overall. That doesn't mean I won't still make regular trips to the gym. But, please note, I'm not going to the gym because I'm trying to impress anyone. I'm going to the gym because I want to continue feeling good about myself. Also, I want to be able to run up a flight of stairs without getting winded.