ummertime makes my heart sad.

With the season in pre-full swing, I am amazed daily at the girls that flit around me in forced concepts of attractiveness.

I am surrounded by beautiful women trying to be beautiful.

Quit it.

Every magazine cover I see in the summer touts a thin woman in sparse clothing smiling at a headline that says something like "Ten days to a better beach body," or "The ultimate workout for leaner legs."

Let me tell you magazine kids just where to stick that article, then what to do with it. Your workouts will never make my legs lean.

After a long day's classes and time in the office, my friends and I usually go to the Intramural Center to work out our frustrations on the equipment there.

Often I look at the women around me, and then wonder which one is there for her health, and which girl is there because she feels unattractive. I want to hug the girls that feel like they are not pretty. It just isn't true.

I work out because I am out of shape. I do not feel healthy, so I run on the elliptical machine and lift weights and do a million crunches. With camp and kids looming just ahead, I am going to need all of the strength I can build.

I work out for my health because I already feel attractive, even though nobody has accused me of being thin.

I am a hefty girl, and I have come to accept that. Sure, I want to look cute in a halter top, or delicate and fairy-like in a gauze skirt, but it will just never happen. I'm doughy, fluffy.

The dictionary says the definition of curvaceous is "having the curves of a full or voluptuous figure."

I am a curvaceous woman. Deal with it.

Even in high school, when I marched five, or more, hours a day, ate three square and balanced meals, drank gallons of water and never touched a Little Debbie's anything, I was still a size 12. Some women are built like me.

Recently I watched the Adam Sandler movie "Spanglish." I am not fortunate enough to remember the exact line, but in an early part of the movie, the narrator explains that all women have a desire to be full. I believe that whole-heartedly. It is more important to be happy than be thin, I think.

True beauty is on the inside. Coincidence that is where your stomach is? I think not.

When a body craves chocolate or cheesecake, the more that craving is denied the stronger it becomes.

I would much rather share a bite of my cheesecake than see a girl sinfully binging while her strict, skinny friend drools nearby.

It isn't worth it. Share my cheesecake.

Summer is overrated. Beach body is overrated. Health is good, and if that includes thin, more power to you. If it doesn't, don't worry. You are not alone.

Women of Tech, of Louisiana, you are beautiful. Believe me.

Sharon Moore is a junior journalism major from Simsboro, and serves as senior news editor for The Tech Talk. E-mail comments to sem010@latech.edu.