I Don't Like My Legs. I Went Running in Shorts Anyway

This is a pretty personal piece about beauty standards, so I thought long and hard about whether to publish it. When you share something personal, you make yourself vulnerable and an easy target, and on the internet that can get really unpleasant sometimes…

Let me just say it: I don't like my legs. I never have, at least not since I started really noticing my body. Women's magazines taught me how to hide my “problem area”: no shorts, no short skirts. I spent a lot of money on creams, hoping I could cream the cellulite away.

Because yes, I have cellulite. And hair and moles and spider veins. A funny little web of thin blue veins runs across my thighs, which I've always thought were too wide and too soft. Two years ago I scraped together 200 euros and went to a dermatologist, who injected something into my spider veins to make them disappear. It hurt a lot, I was dizzy for the rest of the day, and I had bruises on my legs for more than two weeks. Still, two weeks later I went back and paid another 200 euros for the same procedure. It did next to nothing. I still don't like my legs.

Here's the absurd part: my legs are very likely perfectly fine. I'm a normal weight, I exercise regularly, I eat reasonably healthy, and I barely drink. If I saw someone else with my legs, I'd probably think nothing at all. And I definitely wouldn't think, “Wow, those are ugly legs.”

My beauty standard, straight out of the 90s

It's just that I grew up in the 90s, and my entire youth was one long brainwashing session about how to see my body. Legs are supposed to be smooth, vein-free, slim, and firm. But I'm almost 44 years old, I've had four kids, and I don't have the greatest connective tissue. My brain still saved the memo anyway: at 44, legs should look exactly like the legs of a 21-year-old Pilates instructor.

I've never had an eating disorder, and there's a lot about my body that I like. Just not my legs. The result is that to this day I basically never wear shorts in the summer, and no matter how hot it was, I always ran in long pants. Even when I came home close to heat stroke, running in anything but leggings was unthinkable.

Because when you run, everything jiggles even more, the already super-short running shorts ride up, and bike shorts are my personal nightmare. What if the people I jog past whisper afterward: Wow, brave of her to wear shorts with THOSE legs. What if some guys take the shorts as an invitation? Please, just don't stand out, don't send the wrong signals. Those are thoughts women hear from the very beginning, over and over…

WHAT KIND OF MIND GAME IS THIS?, I thought a week ago, and I decided to face my insecurity. Because here's what I'm convinced of: everything I make up in my head, everything I tell myself about myself, is just my own insecurity.

So I dug an ancient pair of black running shorts out of my closet (I probably bought them ten years ago and never wore them) and went for a run. And now come three bombshells:

1. It is SO much more comfortable to run in shorts when it's warm out!!!
2. Nobody said anything. Nobody whispered, nobody stared. Maybe I just didn't notice, but it's far more likely that nobody said a thing.
3. I flat-out did not care. And I mean that completely seriously. I kept telling myself, very clearly: They're just legs. You're a healthy person. It doesn't matter whether you have cellulite on your legs. You don't care, and other people don't care either, just like you don't care whether other people have cellulite on their legs. This insecurity ends now.

That doesn't mean I suddenly love my legs. But I just don't want to let this insecurity, which exists only in my head, hold me back anymore. Because, again: I don't have any REAL problems with my legs (like lipedema or painful varicose veins). I just have a skewed self-image when it comes to my legs.

I told a friend about it, and she said, “I know all of these thoughts, I feel all of it too. I'm just not brave enough to follow your lead yet.” And that's when it hit me: I don't have a single friend who feels 100 percent comfortable in her body. All of these wonderful, smart, brave women are scared of cellulite, soft bellies, scars, and veins. Because they've learned that these things aren't normal. When really, they're so normal. None of my friends has a model's body, and I still think they're fantastic.

Maybe all of this sounds silly to some of you, but for me it truly took some nerve to go running in shorts for the first time in so long. I think we all have to keep finding the nerve to stand by ourselves, and we have to reprogram our brains. Because if the brain has learned that legs are only beautiful when they're slim, it can also learn that legs are just legs. Let's try to simply accept ourselves as we are. With cellulite and scars, hopes and disappointments, wounds and glow, stretch marks and strong biceps. We are all so much more than how we look.