I was going through my closet this weekend and I came upon my stash.  These are the clothes I’m keeping until I’m thin enough to wear them.  They sit in a tidy pile on the top shelf of my closet.  Some of them have been there long enough to have dust on them.  I haven’t gotten thin enough to wear them yet.

Like a lot of overweight people, I’ve told myself for years that I was going to get thin “soon”.  Maybe it was next year, or next month, or certainly within the next six months, but I was going to get thin enough to wear those pants, or feel good in that dress, or be comfortable in that blouse.  Given that being thin was sure to happen soon, I kept all those clothes.  It would be a waste, I figured, to throw them out, since I would be able to wear them any day now.

For a lot of people who are fat, living is something that will happen sometime in the future.  You don’t buy pretty clothes now, because they won’t look right.  You put off taking a class or going to a party or trying that new sport because you don’t want everyone to see you as you are now, you want everyone to see you as you know you will be soon.   Life becomes a long exercise in waiting for a “when” that never quite arrives.

The hard truth is that whatever weight you are now is how it is, and the only thing that will change that is eating sensibly and getting more active.  Putting off doing something that scares you, or clinging to clothes that are too small, are simply ways to obscure that fact that you’re hoping that somehow, magically, you’ll get to where you want to be without having to do anything to get there.

We only get so much life.  In the end, I doubt there are many people who spend their last moments focused on their physical appearance.  They regret the trips they didn’t take, the people they didn’t meet, the challenges they failed to face.  If, right now, you’re spending your time saying you’ll do things when you’re thin, but you’re not doing anything to get that way, you’re not living you’re existing.  I’m also guessing your existence isn’t a lot of fun.

If I have one goal, even beyond the goal of getting thin, it is to stop letting how I look, or how I think I look, get in the way of living my life.  Maybe I’ll be the only fat one in the class or at the party, but at least I’ll be there living my life.  I’m guessing that will be a lot more fun than waiting for the perfect day when I’m the perfect size and can wear the perfect clothes. 

Oh, by the way, those clothes folded so neatly on the top shelf of my closet?  They’re going to Goodwill.  The way I figure it, life’s too short to waste time waiting, whether you’re a too small pair of pants, or a fat person who wants to be thin. 

It’s time to let go and live.

I’ve been sick for about the past week or so.  Actually, I’ve been sick for about the past month or so, but have contracted a more ferocious strain of whatever it was I had, and it has been kicking my behind for the past five days.  I’ve been coughing and hacking and running a fever and just generally feeling miserable.

One of the things I’ve noticed about being sick is the fact that it always turns me into the direction of my comfort foods.  That wouldn’t be a bad thing if I found comfort in broccoli or whole grain bread.  The problem is that my comfort foods, as I’m sure holds true for a lot of people, are generally foods that most dieticians would consider “bad” for you.  When I’m sick, as I am now, I want mashed potatoes and gravy, hot, runny cheese dips with chips, chocolate ice cream and cheesecake.  I want the foods that, at least to my mind, provide comfort.  After all, being sick is no fun.

When you’re sick it seems easier to ease back on the willpower a little.  After all, you deserve a little pampering.  So, at a time when you’re probably exercising less than usual, you’re also probably eating more calories than usual.  You don’t have to be a nutrition specialist to realize that is not the formula that will help you get fit and lose weight.

In my case, I tried to walk the middle ground.  I found a lower fat ice cream that I think has a good taste, so I bought some of that.  I didn’t make a big mound of mashed potatoes and gravy, I didn’t have cheesecake and I didn’t go for the Velveeta to make some cheese dip.  I picked one comfort food that I thought I could eat without doing grave damage to my goals, and I went with that food.  Granted, my bowls of ice cream are probably bigger than they would normally be, and I’d still probably be better off not eating ice cream at all but, under the circumstances, I feel I’ve made the right choice.

Hopefully my health will be back to normal soon and I can re-start my exercise program and pursue a more aggressive healthy eating plan.  Until then, I’ll indulge myself a little. 

After all, as everyone knows, when you’re sick you deserve a little pampering.  

For most of my life I have divided food into two categories.  There were “bad” foods and there were “good foods”.  “Bad” foods were any foods that had calories, sodium or fat in them.  They were also generally the foods I liked the best.  “Good” foods were foods that were low in calories, sodium and fat and which would presumably help me lose weight.   Instead of choosing food to eat based on whether or not I enjoyed it, I spent all my time demonizing some foods and elevating others to sainthood.

Obviously, when you have demon foods and saintly foods, your moral character and make-up is determined by which sorts of foods you eat.  If I was a “good” girl, I ate the “good” foods.  If I was a “bad” girl, I ate the “bad” foods.  A simple meal became a battle between virtue and sin, with, fortunately or unfortunately for me, depending on whether you look at food as an instrument of the devil or something to be enjoyed,  “bad” often winning out in the end. 

One of the things I’ve realized that I need to learn if I am to successfully lose weight is that no food is inheriently good or bad.  Sure eating a whole bag of potato chips probably won’t do you any good.  That could also be said if you ate a whole bag of potatoes.  Consuming mass quantities of anything isn’t going to help you if your goal is to get fit and lose weight.  The key isn’t dividing foods into cateogories of good and bad and then avoiding the bad foods like they want to take you out behind the gym on Saturday night.  The key is learning moderation and that any food can be part of your diet if you can control how much you eat.

Since I’ve come to that realization I’ve developed another way of determining what food to eat.  I call it the Moderation Test.  The test is simply this, if I have a certain food can I place a reasonable limit on what I eat?  If I can, the food is included in my eating plan.  If I can’t, than the food is banished.  It’s that simple.

I’ve found that it is easy to moderate my intake of most foods.  There are a few, however, that I simply can’t control and those have had to be banished from my diet.  One food is a particular pizza that a local pizza place makes.  It is called an Idaho Pizza, and is made with mashed potatoes, cheddar cheese, lots of crumbled bacon and real sour cream.  I lovingly call it heart attack in a box.  I adore this pizza, but I have absolutely no self control when I order one.  Obviously, this particular food is high in fat, sodium and calories.  It isn’t good for me, particularly if I eat the whole pizza in one sitting.  Despite knowing all this, I can’t seem to make myself impose portion control.  So, that particular food item is off my list.

The funny thing about all this is that I’m feeling much more comfortable with food since I developed a new way of looking at what I eat.  Foods that I know I can’t control are eliminated, which also eliminates me feeling guilty because I know I’ve overeaten, and generally eaten far to much of something that wasn’t healthy for me.  Every other food, however, is fair game, and I don’t have to judge myself for eating one piece of pizza or a small dish of ice cream.  I can control how much I eat, and I know I won’t overindulge, so I’m free to eat what I like. 

That, for those who may be wondering, is a very lovely feeling.

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.

At about this point in the blog I had intended to start talking about the great new exercise program I was setting up.  I planned to debate the pros and cons of morning vs. evening exercise, discuss methods of exercise that might work for me, and discuss how to motivate myself to exercise.  Obviously, if the goal is to lose weight, exercise and physical exertion must be part of the program.  There is, at present, just one problem with my exercise scheme.  I’m sick.

I picked up what my doctor calls a “severe viral respiratory infection” which causes me to cough like someone who has been smoking for forty years and to wheeze like a pump organ.  Add to that the quite unlovely quantity of fluid in my chest, and you’ll soon understand why my breathing is a bit compromised at the moment.  I’m fine as long as I don’t walk to fast or exert myself too much.  If I forget, and start taxing my body, I start wheezing and coughing until I see stars.  Obviously, I’m not going to get much exercise done in my present state.  

One of my plans was to start an exercise program at the start of the New Year.   I started whining about being sick on December 22nd and confidently expected I’d be over whatever I had by the start of 2008.  That has not turned out to be the case.  I’m not getting any worse, but I’m not getting any better, and the doctor is now saying it may take as much as a month for this virus to get out of my system.  So, in the meantime, I’m a bit stuck.

The theories on whether or not you should exercise when you’re under the weather seem to vary.  Most experts say that exercising while you have a mild cold or a headache is probably not going to do much harm.  If, however, you are battling an illness that is more severe, the prevailing recommendation seems to be to give your body time to heal.  Taxing a body that is already fighting off illness could lead to a more serious illness.

In my case, I plan to err on the side of caution.  I am prone to respiratory infections, and have had bronchitis and pneumonia.  I don’t care to have either of those again.  While I am serious about losing weight and getting more fit, I’m not so serious that I’m willing to jeopardize my health to do so.  Even if I can’t exercise, I can focus on eating better, identifying the times of day when I’m most prone to overeating and trying new, more healthy recipes.   I may have to wait a few weeks, but the exercise videos will still be there when my body is ready for them. 

In the end, I have to remember that I’m intending to lose weight and get fit to be healthier.  If the goal is health, I need to do what is best for my body in all situations, even when what I know to be best is keeping me from pursuing a goal.  Part of getting thin is respecting your body and listening to what it tells you.   Right now, my body is telling me it needs all available resources to fight off this virus.  

So, right now, instead of sweating, all I have to do is listen.

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.  

I considered the question of what this blog should be called for quite a while.   A lot of names were considered.  Personally, I loved “Live Free or Diet” but someone had already taken that domain.   I also liked “Such a Pretty Face” because I’ve heard that so many times, generally as part of the phrase “You have such a pretty face, you’d look fabulous if you just lost a little weight.”  Apparently other people had heard similar comments because that domain name was gone as well.  Finally, after I’d considered some additional names, the idea of calling this blog “When I’m Thin” popped into my head.  I knew there could be no other choice for a title.

I know it really isn’t so, but it seems I’ve been saying some version of “when I’m thin” for most of my life.  I’ll pursue singing, which I love to do, when I’m thin and feel more comfortable getting up in front of an audience.  I’ll start dressing up more when I’m thin and can feel good about wearing sexier clothes.  I’ll go out and work harder to meet that special man when I’m thin and feel better about my self.  The list of things I would do when I was thin was endless.  The problem was that I never got thin. 

The phrase “when I’m thin” works a lot like fat does.  It insulates you against all the things you’re too scared to do.  When I’m thin is always in the future, so you never have to worry about doing the things that frighten you today.   In a sense the fat becomes protection, since you’re waiting until you’re thin to have a life.

I finally realized I’d been saying “when I’m thin” for far too long.  If I really want to be thin, I have to work at it.  If I don’t want to be thin, I need to figure out why I think fat represents security.  Either way, I need to stop postponing my life, because I’m not getting any younger, and none of us have the luxury of reliving days that have already passed.   

This blog will chronicle the story of my journey.  You’ll get to see every step I take and watch as “when I’m thin” becomes ”now that I’m thin”.   Some of what I write here will be about weight loss and fitness.  Some of the posts will be about why I was fat and why I have fears about being thin.  I’ll probably occasionally gripe and cry about how much I hate all of this.  Hopefully I’ll occasionally be funny as well.  

To be honest, I’m not sure how this will end up.  I just know this is a journey I need to take, and I hope you’ll think it is worth coming along for the ride.