I’m fat. I’m not pleasingly plump, womanly or plus sized. I’m fat. F-a-t. Fat. Period.
Okay. I am big and beautiful. But that’s as far as I’ll go with the euphemisms.
If it weren’t for all the health problems, I wouldn’t mind being fat. Fat doesn’t bother me. I think John Goodman is sexy. So was Orson Welles (that voice — rrrrrooowwwllll!). Fat people have lives like anyone else, including love lives. If you don’t get a heart attack or a stroke or die of diabetes or some other dread disease brought about by food, you can have a long, full life as a fat person. Some of my best friends are fat people. We’re a lot of fun to hang around with.
I can’t speak for other overweight people, but the best way to get me on a diet is if one of my doctors hits me over the head with the fact that I need to go on one:
“Kathy, if you were to cross the street and get hit by a truck, it would be the truck that would be demolished, not you.”
That was my oncologist speaking.
Even then, I have to think about it for a couple of months before I can persuade myself to cut down on all the food I hold dear.
Once I start, though, I am determined to see it through. This determination tends to wane after about a week with little or no frozen yogurt, linguine with marinara sauce, hummus, cinnamon babka, provolone cheese, big globs of peanut butter or double chocolate muffins.
My Diet Journal would probably go something like this:
DAY ONE: Oh boy! My body is getting rid of all those silly toxins and I feel GOOD! I must have been to the bathroom ten times so far today, and it’s only noon. I didn’t know I had so much water in me. Let’s see. For lunch I will have a big bowl of romaine lettuce with carrots, cucumbers and diced celery, with exactly three ounces of water-packed tuna and exactly one tablespoon of low-fat dressing. No bread. For dessert: an orange. Yummy!
DAY TWO: I’m still a little hungry after that teeny-tiny mostly veggie dinner and teeny-tiny, boring, tasteless breakfast, but hungry is GOOD! It means the diet is working. I know. I’ll go to the gym and get on the treadmill. That’ll keep me busy so I won’t think about being hungry.
DAY THREE: Maybe if I sleep all day I won’t want to eat.
DAY FOUR: I gained half a pound! How did that happen? I’ve been living on lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and diced celery for three days! I’ve been to the bathroom so much that the toilet threatened to go on strike! YOU DON’T GAIN HALF A POUND FROM EATING FREAKIN’ LETTUCE AND PEEING EVERY TWO HOURS! I’m being cheated!
DAY FIVE: I had a nice long telephone chat with the leader of my weekly meeting, and now I’m calm again. I will stick this out, and I’ll like it because it’s such a fun diet. All those smiling people on the website know how much fun it is, and they should know. This will be my lifestyle from now on. I will find other things to do besides eating edible food and force myself to enjoy my life, if it kills me. Now, where did I put the lettuce?
DAY SIX: Ice cream! Ice cream! I want ice cream! On top of a big piece of Tiramisù. After a dinner of Linguine Carbonara and Chicken Parmigiana. If I don’t get some real food soon, I can’t be held responsible for what I’ll do. I’m thinking of going to that damned diet meeting place and shooting everyone with Reddy Whip. That’ll show them!
DAY SEVEN: After spending the night in the slammer for spraying ten women and one man with a can of frozen whipped cream, I am back home, peacefully enjoying a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Greek Frozen Yogurt.
I’m back!
Is it normal to salivate when reading?
I sort of had the opposite experience – over a year ago I had to go gluten-free. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The food choices are either inedible or so boring that I have actually lost weight. But I lost it because I lost the will to eat.
Please help me.
The only time I lost the will to eat for an extended period was when I had an attack of salmonella. Unfortunately, my stomach healed and the appetite came right back.
Gluten-free! Oy veh! I feel for you!
Too funny. And building on your comment above, I think of it this way:
Climate change will screw up crop production.
Shortages and famines will envelop the land.
The scrawny, collar-bone-showing supermodels will bite the dust first due to a lack of reserves.
The rest of us will point, laugh, and say “Yup.”
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that! 🙂
Sleeping definitely stops me from eating. Now if eating ever stopped me from sleeping, we would have a situation of sorts!
I have often been told that I go through life half asleep, but that’s not the same thing, right?
Ha ha ha! That was great! Except for the part where I totally identified with your diet diary and suffered a breakdown at the thought of trying to do that again…
I look at it this way:
We fatties are at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Our ability to gain weight if we even think of food served our ancestors very well in those frequent times of shortages and famines. Their excess padding served them well in those frequent times of food shortages, or when Dad didn’t feel like going out and staring death in the face just to bring some meat home.
So now we’re all trying to reverse that whole process and be thin. Strange!