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 don’t eat a lot of salt.  Salt has been banned since about the same time as my surgery.

I watch the fat.  I watch the sugar.  I try to eat more fruits and vegetables and brown rice and less cheese and bacon and eggs.  It feels sometimes like I’ve given up everything that tastes good or is fun to eat.

It’s a common paradox that a lot of people face.  Some people try to find substitutes for the high fat, high sodium foods they enjoyed.  Others simply bar certain foods or types of foods from their lives entirely, thinking, I would guess, that not being tempted is the only route to health.  Other people, like me, revamp their diets entirely, but cling to that one small thing they just can’t bear to let go.

For me that thing is dark chocolate.   I love the stuff.  Luckily, as it turns out, it can also be good for you in small doses.

The Cleveland Clinic, the very clinic where I had my last surgery, has this to say on the subject of heart health and dark chocolate:

Flavanols are the main type of flavonoid found in cocoa and chocolate. In addition to having antioxidant qualities, research indicates that flavanols have other positive influences on vascular health, such as lowering blood pressure and improving blood flow to the brain and heart, making blood platelets less sticky and able to clot, and lowering cholesterol.

According to other studies, eating dark chocolate can help lower stress,  increase the amount of antioxidants in your blood and  help reduce chronic inflammation.   Obviously, the amount of dark chocolate that is eaten has to be watched because the health benefits can be overwhelmed by the excess calories.   Medical experts universally agree that carrying extra weight is detrimental, so the amount of dark chocolate in a person’s diet should be limited.

For me, dark chocolate adds a bit of indulgence to a diet that often feels anything but indulgent.  By nature I’m a meat and potatoes, slap on the sour cream and cheese, bring on the chocolate kind of girl.  I’ve had to learn to revamp my diet quite a lot and most of what I eat now isn’t exactly in line with my natural inclinations.  Dark chocolate, in moderation, is one thing that tastes rich and exactly as it should.  A small amount satisfies my sweet tooth without expanding my waistline.  The fact that it also has health benefits is just the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, looking clean and neat isn’t enough for me.  I want to wear clothes that flatter my shape.  I want to look well put together and, dare I say it, even fashionable.  I want to know how to be well turned out and proud of how I look, and I want to know how to do that without spending a fortune.   I need guidance, and so, as I often do, I turned to the Internet to see what was out there.   That’s when and where I found Cardigan Empire.

I love this blog so much I’d marry it.  There are a lot of reasons to love this blog, but one of the most prominent, at least for me, is this post.  I’ve made the resolution to dress better after I lose weight more times than I can count, which effectively postpones looking fashionable and pretty until sometime in the future.   As Reachel says, you deserve to be beautiful now, and dressing for your body type will help you find your good points no matter what size your body is at the moment.

For  those people who are anything but fashion savvy, this blog is a godsend.  Cardigan Empire gives instructions for determining your body type, tips on how to celebrate your best features, and ideas for how to dress your body, whatever shape it may be.  Best of all, there’s no judgment here.  No one body type or size is better than another, and the glories and tribulations of all body types are addressed.

For someone like me, who has spent years thinking her body was too big, the idea that even big bodies can be fashionable and sexy and pretty is kind of like being given the key to a jail cell.  While I won’t stop working to lose weight and get in shape, since I believe that will be healthier for me,  I am now also working to accept that my body is fine and should be celebrated just the way it is right now.  One way I’m going to find that acceptance is to keep reading Cardigan Empire.

It is, after all, clear I have a lot to learn.

I would guess that I’m not the first overweight person that uses food as a coping mechanism.  Food has always been easy for me, especially when emotions were hard.  Food never let me down, was always reliable and was always there, in easy reach, often before I asked for it.  When personal relationships were rocky, when jobs or education or romance didn’t work out,  when I felt stressed or when the world just felt too demanding, food was a comfort, something simple  that seemed to soothe the rough edges.

Dealing with the rest of the world could be hard.  Food was easy.

One of the thing that I’m trying to do as I work toward getting healthy, both physically and mentally, is to figure out why I do what I do.  Some may argue that this leads me to some excessive naval gazing, but I find it helpful.  I’ve started to stop and think before I pick up that phone and order a pizza or before I eat that whole bag of chips.  I stop now and ask myself why I want to eat what I think I want to eat, and often the answer isn’t hunger.  Often the answer is I’m mad, or I’m sad, or I’m lonely.  Very rarely is the answer I’m achieving things or I’m content or I’m happy.

I’m starting to discover that part of the answer I’m seeking isn’t stuffing my feelings by stuffing myself.  I need to let myself feel what I feel and I need to express those feelings when appropriate.  That’s a hard thing for me to do, but I’m working on doing it more often.

And that, surprisingly enough, feels good.

Now, however, it is a new year and a new start.  The good news is that most of my muscle tone has held up pretty well.  The bad news is that the pneumonia really sucked away a lot of my stamina.  It didn’t do my breathing any good either.  That means I have some ground to make up.  Some of the gains I made have now been lost, but I guess I just have to accept that.  As I generally say after any of my health adventures, it could have been worse.

I have started to get back into exercising and I’m also working on getting my eating back into shape.  Over the next few weeks I plan to share a lot of what I’m doing here on this blog.  I have some new theories about eating and a few ideas about exercise as well.  I also got some new exercise DVDs I want to review, some of which I liked, and some of which weren’t for me.

I’m looking forward to a new year and a new start on meeting my weight loss goals.  If I have any say in it, 2010 is going to be a successful and  less weighty year.

One of the foods I loved when I was a kid was s’mores.  I loved toasting the marshmallow, even though I almost always would get impatient and burn it about halfway through.  I loved using the graham cracker to pull my burnt black marshmallow off the stick and I loved the melting squares of Hershey bar that generally got all over my fingers.  It was great taking that first bite, oozing with chocolate and marshmallow, knowing that I’d probably end up with a sticky face and sticky fingers, but already eager to burn my next marshmallow and start all over again.

There was just something about the taste and texture of this treat that felt right to me.  Although nowdays I’d probably want to use Dove Dark Chocolate and multi-grain graham crackers, back in the day I just perfectly satisfied with good old Hershey’s chocolate and whatever graham crackers were first on the shelf at the store.  What we used didn’t matter, what mattered was the taste and the fun we had making the treats.

I think, if I’m honest, it was the fun we had that made the food taste so good.  When I remember making s’mores I remember that I wasn’t worrying about the calorie content or if eating the treat would make me fat.  In my childhood memories, no one is chiding me for eating too many, or warning me about the fattening nature of the treat.  Instead, we’re all sitting around a campfire, roasting marshmallows, laughing when they burn, and sucking sticky fingers after munching down another s’more.

I guess in the end, it isn’t the food that makes the experience, it was the experience that made the food.  I want to try to remember what it felt like to eat something just for the sake of eating it, with no concern for any of the things that I now worry about every time I take a bite.  My guess is that recreating this feeling will allow me to put healthier foods on my list of favorites.

And, if not, there’s always s’mores.

Some of you may already know from this blog that I have been working on finding someone to date.  I’ve put my profile up on several dating sites and I’ve been perusing the boy buffet, seeing what’s out there, and hoping to find a tempting dish I can call my own.   If you’d asked me when I first started this I’d have told you that looks shouldn’t matter and, for me, wouldn’t matter.  I was interested in kindness and intelligence and wit.  A few pounds here or there wouldn’t make any difference.  I would have believed I meant it too.

I’ve spent most of my adult life railing against men who expected every woman to be a size six with breasts the size of flotation devices and perfectly sculpted bodies.  It was so unfair, I’d cry, that men were so blind that they couldn’t see beyond a few extra pounds to the awesome person underneath.  Why were women held up to such unrealistic standards, I’d whine.  Why were men so unable to see inner beauty and so obsessed with outer beauty?  Didn’t they know that compassion and wit and intelligence counted for so much more?

When I started my search for Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Try It Out and See What Happens,  I was looking for kindness and wit and intelligence.  It was only as I rejected guy after guy that I realized I was also looking for George Clooney, or the nearest equivalent in my neighborhood.  I wanted the guy with the six pack abs and the roguish grin.  I didn’t want the guy who was carrying an extra 100 pounds and looked like his most strenuous exercise was walking to and from the fridge.  I was, to my dismay, doing exactly the things I’d condemned men for all these years.

I guess, at last, I’m starting to see that I’m just like everyone else, and that I have the same prejudices that everyone else has.  I may not like it, but I certainly can’t condemn others for doing what I’m doing myself.  The only thing I can do is try and be less of a hypocrite and live up to the standards I’ve tried to set for others.

They say people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Tonight, my glass house has a few broken windows.

Since I’ve been working on losing weight, one of the things I’ve had to do is a lot of discovering which parts of me were, metaphorically speaking, the elephant, and which were not.  I’ve had to chip away not only at fat, but at a lot of old beliefs that were keeping the fat in place.  Finding the metaphorical elephant has occurred both on the physical and the mental level, and so far it’s been an interesting experience.

On the physical level it’s been about discovering the body that was hidden under the flab.  I’m learning that I’ll always have boobs and hips, but that I’m built more in a classical hourglass shape, with a smaller waist than I would have imagined I’d have.  I’m starting to see definition in my jawline, my shoulders and my calves.  When I flex my muscles you can actually see muscles now.  I’m still adjusting to the idea that my body has parts that are admirable, even pretty.  The more I work on getting fit, the more I see that the sculpture I’m creating may actually be a thing of beauty by the time I get to the end.

While I’m sculpting the outer shell, I’ve also had to do a lot of peeling away on the inside.  I’ve harbored a lot of hatred for my body over the years.  It peeled and cracked and itched.  It reacted badly to sun and heat.  My head had migraines, my eyes didn’t work right, my spine was curved and my heart had fits.   I spent a lot of time dwelling on what my body couldn’t or wouldn’t do, and not much time thinking how incredible it was that, after I’d neglected it for so long, it did anything at all.  After many years of neglect and hatred, I’m learning to let those feelings go and value myself.   It’s a slow process, and I still have days when a litany of “you’re fat, stupid and no one will love you” plays in my head, but those days are getting fewer and farther between.

Mostly, right now, I’m just enjoying the process of becoming.  I’m still a half formed sculpture, but I keep chipping away.  I know eventually I’ll chip away everything that doesn’t need to be, and all that will be left is an authentic and healthy me.

I’ve found I have two types of comfort food.  One type is the meals that I ate when I was a kid.  Beef stew and biscuts.  A big pot of chicken noodle or beef barley soup.  Pot roast.  These are meals I remember my Mom making, and almost all of them have a specific memory attached.  Beef stew was a Winter meal, something filling to warm you when it was cold out.  Soup was our Sunday meal.  A big pot sat on the stove and bread warmed in the oven while everyone watched football.  Supper was whenever you wanted it and the pot of soup seemed bottomless, there was always enough for one more bowl.  Pot roast was a family gathering meal, with tender flavorful potatoes and carrots and lovely rich gravy.   Food was an occasion, and certain meals went with certain times.  To this day, there are some foods that only seem right when eaten in certain circumstances.

The other type of comfort food is the type that simply satisfies some craving for me.  Sometimes it is something sweet.  I also have a great affection for cheesy, greasy food.  Nachos are a particular favorite,  as is Idaho pizza.  There’s just something about the combination of flavors and textures that works for me.  I’m not sure what it is, but for me those foods are fun and uniquely satisfying.  They provide a sense of fulfillment that other foods just don’t give me.

When we start working to lose weight, one of the first things that often goes is all the foods that give us comfort.  While I fully applaud the efforts to eat healthy, and firmly agree that nutrition should be considered and eating wisely should be pursued, I also think there’s a place for the foods that fill that empty space that has nothing to do with hunger.  There should be room for the comfort foods, and they should be eaten without guilt or remorse, but in moderation.  Whether we like it or not, food is often about comfort, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.  If we can accept that, and not beat ourselves up about it, eating well becomes that much easier.

One of the things I realized, while I was examining my attitudes, was one simple and pretty shocking, at least for me, fact:  food isn’t fun any more.

I’ve always had kind of a love affair with food.  I enjoy cooking and am pretty good at it.  I could anticipate a great dining out experience for days, contemplating what I’d have, anticipating how marvelous it would be.  I loved the tastes and textures of food and the how voluptuous and sensual a meal could be.  I loved the simple warmth of a bowl of beef stew and the cheesy goodness of an omelet.  I love the diner breakfast and the gourmet restaurant dinner and everything in between.  Food had a lot of roles in my life, and one of them was to be fun.

Gradually, however, as health and weight issues have occurred, food stopped being fun and became work.  First I had to worry if I was eating too much.  Then I had to count calories.  Then I had to worry about sodium and fiber and sugar.  Everything became about counting and measuring and obsessing and planning.  Eating wasn’t an enjoyable experience anymore, it had become more like an algebra equation or a chemistry experiment.  There were days when I almost wished I could have some sort of science fiction food pill that would fill me up without me having to eat anything at all.

In my past weight loss attempts, right about now is when I would say the hell with it and give up.  I don’t want to measure and weigh and obsess.  I don’t want my meals to be about everything but flavor and pleasure.  I do want to be healthy and I do want to be thin, but I also want to believe that I can be both those things while having nutritional  food I enjoy.  Those goals just can’t be mutually exclusive.

Since I control my attitude, and my progress toward my goals, I’ve decided it is up to me to make food fun again.  One of the ways I’m going to do that is with this blog.  I’m starting a series here called Fun Food Friday.  Every Friday I’ll discuss some aspect of how to make food fun.  Maybe it will be a recipe.  I might discuss setting up a food theme party.  Maybe I’ll talk about table decorations, or my favorite food from when I was a kid.  The idea is to take food out of the drudgery category and make it a joyous part of my life again.

I hope you’ll join me for Fun Food Friday.  After all part of the fun of food is sharing it with others.