I play with words and phrases for a living, so I’ve come up with several that describe the state of my body.

I’m
Zaftig
Voluptuous
Round
Abundant
Curvy
Entirely boobs, hips and butt
Somewhat out of shape
A Big, Beautiful Woman

The list could go on and on but what it comes down to is that every word and phrase on that list is a vain attempt to avoid the one word that I don’t want to say or associate with myself in any way. That word, of course, is

FAT

The reality of the situation though, however little I may like it, is that I am fat. The other reality of the situation is that as much as I hate that word and being associated with it, being fat, and what I think that means, dictates almost every action I take in my life.

I hate having my picture taken because I’m fat.
I don’t like being in the spotlight because I’m fat.
I worry that people look at me funny when I exercise because I’m fat.
Nothing I wear ever looks nice because I’m fat.
I’m hesitant about meeting men because I’m fat.
I worry that people think I eat too much or I eat the wrong things because I’m fat.

Somehow I’ve let the shape and the weight of my body become the defining characteristic about me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m smart or funny or kind, it just matters what the number on the scale says and what size pants I step into in the morning. Instead of realizing that fat is not all I am, I’ve decided that my body size and shape is all that matters.

Quite frankly, that pisses me off. I’m mad at myself for thinking that way for so long, and I’m mad at a culture that tells us that size six is sexy and size sixteen is an abomination.

Of course, I also have to recognize that I do the judging thing as much as anyone else does. When I look for a date, I want George Clooney, not George Costanza. I don’t look past a person’s outer shell to see what’s inside anymore than anyone else does. So this certainly isn’t some holier than thou rant, I’d actually have to be holier than thou to pull that off. I guess, if it’s anything, it’s more of an examination of how I got to this point, and how I get out of it, and I’m taking anyone who reads this along for the ride.

All I really do know is that I’m not going to stop being unhappy with myself and my body size, I’m not going to stop being fat, until I figure out how I got to this point in the first place. Yes, some of it is as simple as I ate the wrong things and I didn’t exercise, but some of it is not. I’m going to have a go at figuring out the not so simple part. I’m hoping some of you will decide to take the journey with me.

I have to confess, my weight loss has slowed down a little.  I slacked off on exercising a bit.  I’m still trying to stay motivated and I know that my body is changing and getting healthier, but it’s become a little easier to find excuses for skipping a day of exercise or for eating something I know I really shouldn’t eat.  It is definitely possible to blame some of this issue on Winter.  It’s also possible to blame some of it on my personality.  I have a tendency to get in my own way when I’m about to accomplish something I really want and, after years of wanting to be thin and never getting there, I’m finally approaching that goal.  I have a ways to go, but I seem to have found a way to make my diet and exercise plan work for me.  I’d like to keep that going.

I suppose everyone hits this point at some time in their journey toward fitness.  The initial excitement of losing weight is over.  Exercise is now routine.  You’re tired of thinking about every bit of food that goes into your mouth and occasionally you’d rather just say screw it and have a pizza.  Your clothes are getting looser, but that just means you have to buy new clothes.  The newness has worn off and now it’s just your life.

What I’m wondering is what kept the rest of you going if and when you got to this point.  I know, at some point, I’ll start feeling like I’m really thin and that will give me a second wind that will help me get to my goal.  Right now I’m kind of in between and the pounds are a little harder to take off.  I guess what worries me most is that I’ll get discouraged and give up and before you know it I’ll be back where I was.  I don’t want that.

If any of you have any tips or advice to give me, now would be a great time.   I could really use them.

Also, as promised, I am giving away a cookbook today.  Last Monday I offered a Cooking Light Cookbook as a giveaway on this blog.  To enter, you had to leave a comment on this post.   Four people commented and I dropped their names into a hat and picked at random.

Congratulations, Betty Blue, you’re the winner of the cookbook.  Just drop me a line at kristines.25 at charter dot net and let me know where to send it.

There is a saying I’ve heard a million times. It goes something like this: “Inside every fat girl is a thin girl and a lot of chocolate.” I suppose the same could be said of fat guys, but like other things in our culture there is kind of a double standard when it comes to body size. Men can be overweight and they’re husky. Women can be slightly pudgy and they’re fat.

If I had to guess I’d say that there are very few people, especially very few women, who consciously set out to be fat. A lot of those women may say, as I did, that body size shouldn’t matter. A lot of those women may claim, as I did, that as long as they’re healthy they don’t care how they look. A lot of those may, as I did, condemn the men whose eyes glide past them to the size three blonde at the next table. Whether we like it or not, the ideal body image for women is not one that is overweight. Reality may hurt, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s reality.

To tell you the truth I’m not sure what my ideal body image would be. I’ve been, to varying degrees, overweight for a number of years. For me, fat was protection. If I’m overweight, I can’t attract men who might hurt me. If I’m overweight, I have a ready excuse for why I can’t compete in the beauty pageant of life. If I’m overweight than I can always fantasize about how awesome my life would be if I were a size six, without ever having to recognize that I’d still be facing a lot of the same problems I deal with now, I’d just be wearing smaller clothes.

My ideal body image also generally has nothing to do with how my body really is formed. In my mind I’m tall and slim and graceful. In reality I’m short and curvy. Basically I’m all boobs and booty and while both of those things might get smaller they aren’t going to go away entirely.

Right now I’m mostly just trying to concentrate on getting healthy and seeing losing weight as a nice side effect.  I don’t have issues with getting healthy.  I do have a few with losing weight and achieving some form of my ideal body image.  I will, however, say this.  Someday I’d like to be the women in the doorway that all the men are looking at with appreciation.

Someday, I will be.

It never fails.  I lose a few pounds and I suddenly feel like I’m a size two.  I know that isn’t the case.  I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, most of it water, and most of it as a result of getting my heart working normally again.  So, in reality, I have lost about 33 pounds but, also in reality, I’m down to the weight I was at before I got sick, which is still far too much for my height.  So, in my head, I know I’m still fat.  I haven’t lost 100 pounds overnight through some sort of benevolent magic. Still, in my heart, I’m preparing for my close up and waiting for heads to turn.

I know part of what I’m feeling right now is just the joy of being healthy.  At the worst of being ill, before I knew what was going on, all I knew is that my body and joints were swollen to bursting.  Bending my knee hurt.  I had no clothes that would fit me.  I couldn’t breathe and walking was an effort and I felt like a hotdog that had been stuffed into a casing that was much too small. 

Now I put my clothes on and they hang.  I can move with ease and walk without becoming breathless.  I’ve come to realize what a valuable thing being healthy is, and I won’t take it for granted again.  I’m going to do everything I can, including losing weight and exercising more consistently, so I can keep feeling like this.  Hospital stays and chronic illness don’t do it for me.  I want to feel this good for a long time to come.

So, I will keep doing what I’m doing, because I know that is working.  I am exercising more, and thinking about what I eat a lot more.  That is certainly leading me to make better choices and, as I see the benefits of those choices, it reinforces the need to keep making those kind of decisions.  I am finally learning to value myself and my health.  I’m also learning to see the beauty in who I am, both physically and mentally. 

And I have to say, that feels just fine!

I haven’t owned a scale in years.  If I had to make a prediction, I’d say it is very possible I won’t own one ever again.  I avoid scales whenever I can.  When I absolutely must be weighed, like at the doctor’s office, they all know that I won’t look at the scale and I don’t want to be told what it says. This may be a bit of an overcompensation on my part, but I lived with the tyranny of the number for too many years to willingly fall under the spell of the scale again.

If you’re properly to understand my dislike of facing the scale, I probably should give you a little background.  I didn’t start out life as an overweight person.  I really started putting on weight when I was fifteen.  There were a lot of reasons why that happened, and I’m sure I’ll deal with those in other posts.  What is germane to this one is the way my parents, both very fit, appearance conscious people, reacted to the fact that their daughter was becoming fat. 

First they tried forcing me to exercise.  They made me go to Weight Watchers.  They criticized every bit of food I put in my mouth and questioned everything I ate.   My worth, or so it seemed, hung on whether I’d dropped a pound or gained a pound.  Although I know it wasn’t really this way, I remember feeling like nothing mattered more than how much I weighed and how I looked. 

Needless to say, what the scale said took on immense importance.  I remember practically floating off the floor if I lost two pounds and sinking into abject gloom if I gained an ounce.   I lived and died by what the scale said, which only made me more unhappy, which led to me eating more, which led to getting unwanted results from the scale, which led to me being unhappy, which led to me eating more, which, well you can see where this is going.

When I finally left home and got my own place, one of the first things I did was banish the scale.   It was, I guess, a symbolic gesture.  Banishing the scale was my way of liberating myself from feeling that all that mattered about me was my weight.  It was also a good move.  It allowed me to free myself from the idea that my worth as a person depended on what number the scale showed me on any particular day.      

The scale disappeared from my life some years ago.  Now that I am making a commitment to get more fit and lose weight, I contemplated allowing it reentry into my life.  After thinking it over, I decided against it.  I can judge my weight loss by the fit of my clothes, my ability to exercise longer and harder and my increased stamina.  I want to exercise so I look and feel healthy, not so I can meet some arbitrary number on a scale.  I’ve finally learned that I’m much more than that number and I don’t want to ever forget that again.

There are a lot of days when I don’t feel fat.  I know, intellectually, I am fat.  My clothing size tells me so.  My body shape tells me so.  The fact that I get out of breath faster than I like when exerting myself tells me so.  My doctor and my family tell me so. My scale, should I have so evil a thing, would probably tell me so.    I know the reality, and that reality is that I weigh more than I should for my height and body type.  That’s a fact.

Still, there are days when I’ll be walking along a street, or puttering happily around my home and I’ll forget for a while that I weigh more than I want to weigh.  Somehow the reality switch in my head will flick from on to off and suddenly I feel as though I’m a mere sylph, a wisp of a woman who moves lightly on feet that barely touch the ground.   I fully expect men’s heads to turn and women to sigh in envy at the mere sight of my willowy gloriousness.  At least I expect that for a while.

 Then, inevitably, I’m confronted with my reflection.  Maybe it is in a shop window, or a passing glimpse of the expression on the face of someone passing by.  Suddenly, the reality switch flips back to on and I’m confronted with the me that exists today.  Reasonable, if slightly wacky, hair.  Terrific skin, pretty eyes.  Nice teeth.  Great curves,  but much more of them than is strictly necessary.  In an instant I go from skimming the ground with sylphlike grace to grumpily greeting gravity.  Fat people don’t skim, you see. They plod or, in extreme cases, waddle.

I like to imagine that what I feel in the moments that I forget reality is what it will feel like when I’m finally thin.  I love feeling that I want the world to look at me, and the expectation of admiration rather than censure that I think I will see in their gazes.  Most of the time, the reality is that I try to avoid standing out.  Most people who are overweight would probably tell you they do the same.  When you don’t like the way your body looks, you don’t want people to look at you.  It’s that simple.

For now, I try to hold on to that sylphlike, graceful feeling as much as I can.  I keep telling myself that, one day, I’ll be floating along barely touching the ground, feeling sexy and slender,  and then I’ll catch sight of myself, and I’ll continue on feeling exactly the same way.  I know it will take a lot of effort and work, but that’s a goal for which I’m willing to fight.