I don’t have the “ideal male body” by most people’s standards. I’m not muscular. My belly is very big. I’m not athletic at all. I sometimes have difficulty shaving my facial hair (although I never cut myself while shaving). I dislike haircuts to the point that I let my hair get very long and shaggy before I have my hair cut. I am physically clumsy.
However, I love my body.
Would losing some weight and building some muscle make me feel better, both emotionally and physically? Yes. However, I’m more than willing to embrace my less-than-ideal body, because I am who I am, and not everybody can have what a lot of people consider to be a “perfect” body.
Unlike a lot of overweight/obese people, I’ve been fortunate to have not been fat-shamed often, however, I have been fat-shamed by a couple of people. However, I’ve seen people who weigh a lot less than I do (especially women, although I’ve seen it done to men as well) fat-shamed by others on social media.
My advice to people who have been fat-shamed is simple: Love your body!
From top to bottom: normal color setting, blacklight, candle, halogen light, mercury vapor light. Photos taken by webcam built into laptop computer using ManyCam free program; various lighting settings are actually various ManyCam color settings.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I use a laptop computer that runs on the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.
I recently downloaded the free version of ManyCam (you can download it here; you’ll need a webcam either built into or plugged into your computer in order to use the program), and I was experimenting with the wide array of color settings that ManyCam provides.
What I did was take five webcam selfies in a dark room, one with a normal color setting, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit by a single blacklight, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit with a single candle, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit by a single halogen light, and one with a color setting designed to mimic a single mercury vapor light. You can see the results on the right side of this blog post.
I got the various RGB color codes for each of the lighting settings from this webpage. However, since the ManyCam color settings, located in the image tab at the bottom of the program window, utilize a set of four sliders (saturation, red, green, and blue) to adjust the color of the picture and doesn’t allow for entering RGB codes in order to adjust the color, I set the saturation to default by clicking the three-colored symbol to the left of the top-most of the four color sliders in the bottom right corner of the program window (if the four color sliders don’t appear, click the “image” tab on the left-hand side of the program window about two-thirds of the way down from the top of the window, and they should appear in the bottom right corner of the window), I made sure that the red, green, and blue sliders (each of these are marked with a small circle of the respective color to the left of the slider), are set to default (in order to check this, click the little circles to the left of the sliders). Next, I clicked on the “text” tab that is located four tabs to the right of the image tab and unchecked the “show ManyCam logo” (if this is already unchecked, leave it unchecked). Next, I set the photo/video option to photo (this is located immediately below the left-hand side of the webcam preview display located on the left-hand side of the page below the video/effects/gallery tabs, the photo button is to the right of a slider with a video button on the left end and a photo button on the right end) Next, I clicked the “image” tab again in order to display the color settings, which should appear in the bottom right part of the program window.
I then took a picture with the default color settings (in order to take a picture, click the big snapshot button immediately below the center of the webcam preview window). Next, I adjusted the color sliders to approximate a blacklight setting (the RGB code for that is 167, 0, 255, so I kept the blue slider at the default value, set the green slider as far left as it will go, and set the red slider approximately 65% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Next, I reset the color sliders to their defaults, and then adjusted the settings to approximate a candle setting (the RGB code for that is 255, 147, 41, so I kept the red slider at the default value, set the green slider approximately 58% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the blue slider approximately 16% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Next, I reset the color sliders to their defaults another time, and then adjusted the settings to approximate a halogen light setting (the RGB code for that is 255, 241, 224, so I kept the red slider at the default value, set the green slider to approximately 95% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the blue slider to approximately 88% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Finally, I reset the color sliders to their defaults one more time, then adjusted the settings to approximate a mercury vapor light setting (the RGB code for that is 216, 247, 255, so I kept the blue slier at the default value, set the green slider to approximately 97% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the red slider to approximately 85% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture.
I’ve decided to enter the MAYDAYin30 video contest that MAYDAY PAC, the Lawrence Lessig-led, crowd-funded SuperPAC that supports ending the culture of big-money politics in this country by, among other things, overturning the Citizens United v. FEC U.S. Supreme Court decision by a federal constitutional amendment.
My submission is a video supporting the campaign of Staci Appel, the Democratic U.S. House nominee in the 3rd Congressional District of Iowa. Appel, who has been endorsed by MAYDAY PAC. Staci supports amending the U.S. Constitution in order to overturn the Citizens United v. FEC U.S. Supreme Court decision and end the era of big-money campaigns and SuperPACs that can raise unlimited amounts of money from big-wig donors.
Here’s my video:
If you like my video and would like to see it aired as a TV ad on stations covering Central and Southwestern Iowa, you can vote for my video here!
The Progressive Midwesterner 