Let’s get rid of thighs.
Keep the waist and curve of the hips—gotta have that hourglass figure—but then jump straight to the knees. I like knees. When you put on weight, you don’t look at your knees and think, “Gosh, that chocolate cake went straight to my kneecaps.”
It’s a worthy goal. No more fat thighs. EVER. AGAIN.
Perversely, there’s one group of people who never complain about their thighs:
Men.
Strutting around on their skinny legs, they have no clue of the anguish our feminine thighs put us through. The chafing, the jiggling, the suffocation of skinny jeans.
I’m certain it was a man who invented the thigh gap. Whoever invented the thigh gap should be shot. Repeatedly. With an air brush.
If you’re a woman without supermodel genes, you were born to store fat in your thighs. Sorry. It’s nature’s way of trying to protect you from starvation. Like you need to be protected from starvation, but hey! A bit of gratitude should probably be in order.
I was born stocky. My mother took one look at me and shook her head. “You’ve got my genes,” she said. I come from a long line of sturdy peasant women who didn’t grow far from the ground.
What didn’t help was taking up weight-lifting as a teenager.
I thought, being young, that the cure for thighs that ballooned from gym shorts was muscle. I did a lot of leg presses. And I got bulkier, sturdier, stronger thighs.
So I got cannier. I became a runner.
I adore running. For twenty years, I’ve run almost every day. And you would think all that running would give me thighs to die for. Even a thigh gap, with luck.
Nope.
I’ve got great calves. Great knees, even. But my thighs look like every other woman’s. Like an upside down triangle.
Then serendipity struck.
I started living somewhere I didn’t have a car. I had to walk everywhere. Luckily, the city was pedestrian friendly. There were plenty of tree-lined sidewalks. But everything in my life slowed down. It would take me half an hour to walk to the grocery store, then I’d have to lug all my groceries back home.
I got used to it. You do, if you have no choice.
I even began to enjoy my 40-minute walk to work in the mornings. I tried to maximize my use of time by reading while I walked. I only chose paperbacks I could hold in one hand, and I made sure to hold the book low enough I could see any obstacles ahead. That didn’t stop me from walking straight into a light pole one morning, but only one of my fellow pedestrians laughed out loud.
And here’s the miracle:
In exchange for all that pain, all that endless walking everywhere, my thighs began to transform.
They became slimmer and narrower and more, well, rectangular.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. This had never happened before to me IN MY LIFE. I had slim thighs!
I had to find out how this had happened.
So I started doing some reading. I found out many supermodels swear by walking. Not weight-lifting, not running, not muscle-building exercise, but rather activities that sculpt the body.
Walking is the best. It’s low-impact, it’s free, and you can do it anywhere, any time.
Not to mention, many models live in big cities like New York or Milan or London, where everyone walks. It’s easy to do something when everyone else is doing it, too.
Then the inevitable happened:
I moved.
I moved to a place where you had to get in a car to get anywhere. Endless parking lots and urban sprawl meant the only obvious opportunities for walking were inside a shop or the mall.
My thighs assessed the situation, looked at each other, and happily leapt back to close proximity.
I tried to regain my walking habit—honestly, I did—but life got in the way. Whereas once I had set out on my lunch breaks with walking shoes on and sandwich in hand, I now scarfed food at my desk while I checked my emails.
It’s funny:
Once you’ve had slimmish thighs, you don’t worry so much when you look in the mirror and see the chubby darlings looking particularly plump that day.
You know that, if you’re willing to suffer, you can have slim thighs again.
But everything in life is a tradeoff. And, right now, I’m not sure I want to walk for a half hour just to get to the grocery store. I think I’m okay hopping in the car and hearing my thighs sigh.
Maybe it’s just the sound of happiness.
Let us know what you think!