Hindsight Chapter V

Hindsight Part V
June 21, 2011
Addictions are strange things… they never seem to go away… and food addiction is the worst addiction to have. If you’re an alcoholic, you never have to see a bottle of liquor if you don’t want to. If you’re a drug addict, and you manage to stay away from drugs and drug people, you can be okay. However, if you are addicted to food, it plagues you daily because you have to eat to live. There is no getting around seeing, cooking, eating food. In order to maintain weight loss, you have to develop a healthy attitude toward food and toward eating. You have to learn to “eat to live”, and avoid circumstances and people who “live to eat”. You know those people… the people who get up in the morning planning what they’re going to eat for breakfast before they even brush their teeth. As soon as they finish breakfast, they start planning lunch, and they spend the afternoon planning dinner. Some of them even plan meals a day ahead, not because they want to plan to cook, but rather because they can’t stop thinking about food. I give my sister a hard time about that because the one thing she loves to do is cook, and she is an expert at it. She watches cooking shows and collects cookbooks as a hobby. She did put some weight back on, but she is trying to get that weight back off. I only give her cookbooks that tell a story, just to keep her reading… even if she is reading about cooking.
I find it interesting that, in a country that is the most obese (fat) country in the world, there are so many cooking shows on television, and I watch them, mainly to find new ways to cook chicken and fish. What I have done, though, is condition myself only to eat when I am hungry. In fact, there are times when I get busy, like when I’m writing, that I simply forget to eat. I never thought that would happen to me, but it has happened, and in some ways, I’m glad about that. Maybe I should watch the television shows about weight loss… maybe that will help me to keep my mind focused on exercising. I don’t think so, though, because the “losers” always seem to look like they are in such pain. No pain, no gain, right? I am not into pain, but sometimes exercising, although painful, can be fun. I wonder why they never show the fun exercising. Where is Richard Simmons? I could really use a big dose of “sweating to the oldies”! I’m taking a Zuumba class, and having a blast. I don’t know how much weight I can lose doing this, but it sure is fun! I don’t know if the two men in the class (one of them is the teacher’s husband) would agree. They can’t seem to get their bodies to move like most of us women can, but I don’t think they need to. Men seem to be able to lose weight faster, anyway. When my son stopped playing football, and needed to lose weight, he just dropped 50 pounds, in less than six months.
When I was growing up, I admit I hid behind my weight. I was, in my own words, “big, bold, and brown”… a combination that proved to be my protection, and perhaps the cause of limited relationships with men. Individually, these “qualities” served as a deterrent, but collectively, they “deep-sixed” many advances men made toward me. Even now, I am told I have a “big presence”, that even though I am not fat, I seem much larger than I am, and that is, in some ways, by design. It’s not that I don’t want to be approached, but more about being more selective about anyone who approaches me. I love men who are confident, but not pushy or bossy, and men who like confident, independent women. Being fat almost assured that any man who approached me had to be confident… since men get teased terribly by their peers if they date fat women, and it takes a confident man to keep from folding under the pressure of the teasing. After all, most men like for their peers to admire their women, and if they’re dating a fat woman, the assumption is made that there must be something sinister, under the surface, which exists in the relationship. It is interesting that women don’t tease each other about dating fat men… but I know that most women have much different criteria for selecting men to date, or at least they used to. Now, the trend, especially among young women, is to date men with money, regardless of the way they look or the way they treat women and that speaks volumes about their self-esteem.
Young women tend to have a different, and not always complimentary, view of self-esteem. They put on the “front” that they like themselves, but they don’t take care of their bodies, or even try to make themselves look good, and that speaks to a real lack of self-esteem. It has become an everyday occurrence to see a young woman, walking around in public with rolls of fat hanging out from under ill-fitting clothing, and they seem to think this looks good. I was fat growing up, but I always tried to look good, even when it wasn’t so easy to find clothing that fit. Early on, the only major clothier for big, tall, and fat women was Lane Bryant, which operated mostly by mail-order, and their clothes had to be sent back several times in order to achieve a good fit. If I wanted an outfit for a particular occasion, I had to order months in advance, so that I’d have time to send things back, many times more than once. Finding a formal dress was a nightmare, because Lane Bryant didn’t sell those. When they finally opened a store in Richmond, things got a bit easier, but it still wasn’t perfect. Consequently, I made most of my clothes. I was well-known in the fabric stores from the time I was 12. By the 1980’s, there were more stores, Added Dimensions, Plus Sizes, and some others, that provided some more stylish clothing for big women. Today, there is no excuse for women to wear ill-fitting clothing, since you can even find great plus-sized clothes in WalMart. I guess the problems lie in not being able to admit what size you really wear, and wanting to wear what everyone else, all the small girls, wear. It is my belief that every woman (especially every big woman) should have a real friend that she takes with her when she goes shopping… the kind of friend who is not afraid to say, “Don’t even think about trying that on”, or “Take that off before anybody sees you!” Nobody really WANTS to look bad… especially if you’re fat. Where are the “fashion police” when fat women need them?