I’ve always had a gang of hair. Like, a GANG of hair. There’s actually a very old video of my mother trying to tame my hair as a toddler, and two thirds of the screen was nothin’ but ‘fro.

Me, as a toddler... not a strand out of place.

My mother wasn’t having it, though. Born in the era of straightening combs on the stove, she was good for waking me up at the crack of dawn and burning the hell out of me trying to straighten my hair. I don’t even think I knew what my hair looked like without a handful of grease and a whole morning’s worth of heat in it… because we started doing this routine when I was approximately 4 years of age.

Say what you will about that – especially since it was a couple of decades ago – but I grew up believing that I was supposed to have straight hair, and this suffering was how I was supposed to get it. If ever my kitchen (you know what the kitchen is) was even remotely curly, my Mom was quick on the draw. “Um, what’s goin’ on with your natural? Come here, let me hit those naps real quick.” I never thought twice about it. That was Mom, for crying out loud. I pretty much worshipped the ground she walked on – always well dressed, properly put together, never a hair out of place – surely, she knew what she was talkin’ about.

I, much like most of the little Black girls in my area, grew up coveting straight hair.  Considering how difficult this was to maintain for girls like me with the most all-the-way-live-kinks and coils, this also made us resent anything that got in the way of us ruining that straight hair. Gym class was almost always indoors, and forget about getting us in any kind of swimming pool.

Eventually, all that hair pressing left my hair pretty lifeless. Horribly split ends, breaking off like nobody’s business.. I actually remember people clowning me about it. I didn’t really know any better. I just knew I needed to have straight hair, and I was succumbing to what I needed in order to get it.

It got worse once I entered high school. After having moved to my new neighborhood where all the hair was not only straight, but blond and long.. my mother and I dug all throughout the city to find a hairdresser who could help me at least accomplish the long and straight part. As a high schooler, I was in the salon weekly, spending $40 for a wash/rinse/press… and $80 once a month for my relaxer. Two hundred dollars a month to acquire this look that I had coveted since I was four years old.

Needless to say, I grew up prioritizing an inordinate amount of time strictly to straight hair. Never knew (or considered) why I did, why I needed to… never asked any questions. Just fell in line.

Hindsight is most certainly 20/20, though.

College-aged me... approximately 250lbs.

I started gaining weight somewhere around the fourth grade. I can’t help but wonder why no one was equally “quick on the draw” checking me about my weight instead of my hair. I wonder why I never prioritized an “inordinate amount of time strictly to” my physical and emotional fitness instead of… hair. I wonder why a more fit physique wasn’t “coveted” the same way straight hair was coveted. It just seemed like I wanted those things that seemed easiest to acquire – just spend your morning getting burned by the stove and you, too, can have straight hair just like “the rest of society.”I guess “being fit and healthy” wasn’t that easy to achieve.

When you grow up putting such a high priority on hair, it means that at some point, you start cutting things out to protect that priority. I can recall taking an F for a semester of PE because I wasn’t getting in any pool. (After an uber expensive hair treatment? No thanks.) I can recall walking the “one mile speed test” because I didn’t want to sweat… and I was out there for almost 18 minutes to do it. In college, I took a geography class that required not only hiking but kayaking… and I gave my professor hell the entire time, complaining that I “was going to have to take out a student loan to keep up my hair if he was going to have us out with Mother Nature every other darn day.” I dealt with it in order to get my “A,” but that was about it.

When I first started working out – as in, complete newbie status – I can remember stopping on the elliptical the moment I felt liquid on my forehead. I was literally allergic to sweat. It wasn’t until one night I happened to be at the gym the same time as The Cleaner was on, accidentally stayed on the elliptical the entire episode, jumped on the scale and saw that I lost a pound of water weight that I literally said “Man, f– this hair.” That was the end of that for me. Every night, I was wearing my sweaty shirt as a badge of honor.“Yes, that’s right, I broke it dowwwwwwwwwn on that there machine! I’m that chick!” I’ve been over it, since.

I don't remember even taking this picture, which means there might've been wine involved.

I listen to conversations that other women have about their hair, and I always keep quiet… though more often than not, I’m the one they want to hear from. Not because I’m anybody special, but because the assumption is that this is a hurdle I’ve encountered before. I don’t really have any popular or easy answers for them, which is why I usually keep quiet. I could say, “Why is straight hair such a big deal to y’all, anyway?” but that’d only be met with laughter and “Um, anyways…” and I’d rather not get extra indignant and say “What if you swapped your hair with your body in your list of priorities? This wouldn’t even be an issue then, would it? You’d be doing what you gotta do to make your hair work without interfering with your gym routine… not just doing what you can at the gym to feel like you did something, and protecting your hair investment.” That’d certainly ruin the mood. Instead, I just shrug my shoulders. Everyone has their “come to fitness” moment at different points of their lives.. I don’t know that a social gathering is the proper place to try to evoke someone’s moment without their consent.

In my mind, my priorities have shifted. They’ve shifted to the point where I find it hard to understand the logic anymore. If I’m going to devote my every sunrise to something, it’s going to be my health. If I’m going to go the extra mile for anything, it’s going to be my body. I’ve even decided to be a little vain about it. If I experience pain on a regular basis or a regular burn… it’ll be because I’m workin’ hard on getting my abs cut right or building my fit booty. To me, if I let my priorities switch back to what they were, then I’m going to start gaining weight. I don’t want that.

The usual me... if I'm going somewhere where my braids won't suffice.

Somewhere along the line, too many of us have grown to prioritize something as minor league as our hair over the major league issues, like health. It’s considered unnecessary vanity if I take pride in my abs or my legs (I’m showing off, and deserving of the catty conversation behind my back), but my hair better be on point or… I’m deserving of the catty conversation behind my back. You’re clowned for having “bad hair,” and – not saying you should be clowned for a “bad body” – praised for staying on top of your hair and not having a strand out of place. Hour long conversations can be had about hair products that are healthy for our hair.. “but what’s healthy for our bodies?” Silence.

Maybe I’m just hella skeptical… and I can accept that. But there’s a serious problem with the fact that we can figure out a thousand ways to keep our hair in tip top shape – some of us sitting with mayonnaise, avocado, egg, kool-aid and dill pickle mixtures on our heads because we heard it’ll make it “grow” – but no one’s willing to give healthy living a shot, trying different things to keep our bodies in tip top shape. Something is very wrong when it makes sense to allow something like hair to get in the way of our pursuit of health.

The wild thing about it, really, is that I don’t have any answers. For me, I haven’t put a flat iron to my head in almost ten months. My loved ones don’t even bother asking me to do otherwise. Folks know when it’s me running in the neighborhood because there’s usually about a foot worth of ‘fro bouncing behind me. If I have somewhere to go, I even occasionally jazz it up and put something in my hair. I spend too much time being active to want to sit around protecting a hairstyle. I just prefer to focus my efforts on my body.. and the more I do that, the more I find that others focus their attentions there, too. “For get her hair, did you see her body? Dang!” I’m OK with that. I put in the work, I shifted my priorities there.. that’s what I want… even if I’m rockin’ an attention-grabber like below.

Me... right now. Clipped in the back, up off my neck, breeze blowin' through my scalp? Winner.

To my knowledge Chris Rock’s movie, Good Hair, doesn’t have a fitness element to it, no. Although I did catch a clip of Raven-Symone (I think?) saying that our hair prevents us from “doing certain things,” I’m not sure if the topic will be in there. I’ve asked a couple of people who have seen private screenings thus far, and no one has unequivocally told me “Yes.”

To me, that’s… funny.

For a number of reasons.

Make no mistake about it, I’ve said on here that I wear relaxed tresses. My own hair is a third of the way down my back, extremely thick, and I usually toss it up in a ponytail. I used to wear sew-ins, because they allowed me to do some insane things to my hair, still look good, and not manage to burn all of my hair off. For me, as well as a number of women, relaxing our hair is a manageability issue.

And, really.. I’ve got to admit: it’s absolutely a manageability issue for me because although I relax regularly, I still have the luxury of being able to rock my ‘fro. Quite frankly, I’m not interested in flat ironing my hair every day. Not in the least.

However, the conversation that this movie is forcing us to have involves the Black standard of female beauty. IS there a premium placed on women with straight hair? Is this a healthy concept for us? By healthy, I don’t mean health-wise, but more so in terms of what it says to us about ourselves? Don’t worry, this isn’t about to turn into a rant of natural vs relaxed.

I can’t help but wonder, though. What is out there that is so powerful, it can convince our girlfriends to spend a whole DAY in the salon to get their hair styled, but it’s too rough to spend a half hour a day walking? Where is the message that tells us we must spend THOUSANDS of dollars each year caring for our hair, sacrificing entire days in beauty salons, and why isn’t the message of being more physically fit getting through? Can someone measure the strength of THAT message for me?

What is it? I mean, if I look at the TV, the same images of women with straight, shiny, silky hair also contain images of women with stick thin figures and single-digit dress sizes. If I look at a magazine ad of a woman with gorgeous straight hair with long curls, she’s more often than not going to be rail thin. I’m not saying that “rail thin” is the way to be by ANY means, but I’m hoping to illustrate a point here. If the small figures are found in the same places we find the images of women with straight hair… why isn’t the message convincing Black women to put forth a gang of effort into losing weight getting through?

Now, I can’t identify or verify these numbers, but check this out:

Unfortunately, 46% of African American men and 57% of African American women are sedentary, with no time scheduled for exercise. – Lottie’s Health N Wellness

No time scheduled for exercise, but all the time in the world for the almighty touch-up?

Listen, I’m not railing against women who DO hit the salon at 6AM waiting to make sure they’re out by 2PM. I’m railing against women who can get up at 6AM for a hair appointment, while loudly complaining about having no time for the gym. A half hour a day walking helped me lose 18lbs in one month. Maybe we overestimate what it takes to actually invest in our personal health. Maybe because we get so few tidbits of advice on how to care for our physical selves, we’ve let commercials and infomercials and trainers with something to sell educate us improperly. Maybe we’ve been led to believe that it requires more than we can afford in time as well as money. Maybe, baby.

I think it’s funny that the movie could very well NOT address fitness in the slightest. Is it because the topic is wholly uncomfortable for at least 79% of us to talk about? Is it too much to think about why we find such comfort in seeing heavier set women in our community? Before someone tries to take offense, don’t take my words as saying there is something offensive to society’s sensibilities by having overweight women around. I’m saying that there’s something that makes it acceptable for us to live an unhealthy lifestyle, but would make us sacrifice a whole day (in some cases, a whole weekend) for different hair.

What is it going to take for us to re-educate and enlighten ourselves? Will it take our men to start openly and loudly shunning overweight women, as opposed to still giving us attention? Is that what it will boil down to, to get us to focus equal-if-not-more attention on our physical health? What are your thoughts?

There’s that looming debate over why women of color are so adamant about having straight hair. Some assumption that it is so thoroughly related to societal definitions of beauty, European standards of attractiveness, and has nothing to do with who we were born to be. Yeah, well makeup, spanx, and high heels have nothing to do with who we were born to be, either… and we ALL partake in one or the other of those. So… I’m not interested in discussing why women choose to chemically straighten their hair.

What I AM interested in is what the deciding factor is in the decision between choosing perfect hair and working toward a perfect body. Seriously. I asked my male friends about this, and each one said to me something to the effect of, “I’d rather my girl have a great body and a jacked up head, than beautifully straight hair and a jacked up body.” Besides, there’s some kind of debate about the type of men that a natural-haired sista will attract, anyhow.

Make no mistake about it – I’m NOT natural. In fact, I’ve done my own relaxers since I was a sophomore in high school, and keep my hair healthy all by my lonesome. It is thick, 2-3 inches away from my bra strap, and well… let’s just say that to the average person, I STILL look like I’m natural. However… because I know what my head would look like otherwise, I’m grateful for the relaxer. I go from looking like a lion to a lamb – still a little wooly but much better than the alternative – and that has nothing to do with any external factors. It’s just not what I prefer to sleep on, comb through, or see in a mirror.

Having admitted my own plight with my hair, I will tell you.. I’m not willing to let something as meaningless as hair get in the way of my goals for my personal health. I won’t act like it’s easy for every woman to make that kind of statement. I can’t imagine what women in more corporate settings go through, especially since once upon a time.. it was considered acceptable to call “afrocentric” hair a “corporate don’t.” I work for myself, so I set my own rules. Being beholden to the beauty standards of someone that might not understand the “limitations” of your culture is stressful to say the least. However, it simply cannot serve as an excuse for not taking care of ourselves. Maybe, in the future, I can find links for attractive hairstyles that are manageable and conducive to a good workout regimen.

I won’t lie.. I need ‘em too. I wear my hair in either two pixie braids or a giant afro puff all day. LOL.

All of that typing was a pre-cursor to this video, about women of color and how we allow our hair to get in the way of our health and well-being. The newscaster, Robin Robinson of Fox Chicago, made a pretty daring move in going against what her viewers are used to and wearing a style that they may not be accustomed to seeing. I think that’s pretty bold, and although I kind of snickered at her “benefits of wearing ethnic hairstyles – thank goodness there is one” line (because even though I know it’s received poorly, I felt her pain), I hope she chooses to stick with it.

What are your thoughts? Do tell!