OMG My Celluite is Gone! (Or at least it’s in remission)
Five years ago this September I was running the stairs out at our local natural amphitheater, Red Rocks, when I asked a woman to take a photo of me as I ran. She did, and did a nice job of capturing the unfortunate ripple of looseness and cellulite that wiggled on the backs of my thighs.
I was mortified. You really cannot see what those who are running behind you can, and it nearly sent me home for good.
However, I was in training for Kilimanjaro that year, and I pushed past my vanity and just kept right on running. Thousands and thousands of steps. I was punching out untold hours of exercise of all kinds, and then rather blessedly forgot about the grapefruit peel I was wearing on my legs. I figured that there wasn’t a whole lot to be done, and it was way too hot to wear long pants. Tough. Don’t like it?
Then don’t bloody well look.
At sixty, which is the age I was when the photos were taken, my mother was nothing but cellulite. She was tightly contained in a seriously ancient girdle held together by safety pins (my mother, a child of the Depression, was not one to let go of a garment just because it had a little age on it). As her girth increased, I remember witnessing large stress fractures form along the fault lines of the elastic casing that kept her hard and snug…