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Why are people so obsessed with FAT? Or are they fearful of loosing their popularity if they become fat? The truth is, as I know it, when our cards are dealt in advance (before we are born) and depending on the last shuffle as we are “chosen” to be born, our hand (of cards) is given to us at birth.: male, perfect built, excellent physique AND male, weak physique, weak built.
Female: perfectly shaped body, all right proportions AND female, uneven body physique, weakness of body and mind to keep fit.
In case you have not guessed immediately, the paragraph I wrote above is written out of my frustration with the subject. That is what I do sometimes: beating around the bush. Only right now this bush has some thorns I have to stop and investigate. They are very special chocolates individually wrapped in a perfect ball of shiny gold and red paper, with a beautiful head of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart centered in the middle. This is such esthetically presented little work of art that it would be disrespectful to open it.
As I am unable to write something sensible about fat, my best move is to, very carefully, open this ball, making sure that I do not tear Wolfgang Amadeus handsome head. My mission is not just simply tear the paper and eat the chocolate, I need to examine the contents inside and find out how fat or non fat is the stuff Mozart is hiding inside. Few frustrating seconds later a plain chocolate ball is revealed, looking rather ordinary. I feel cheated because the wrapping is so exquisite and inside so ordinary. Good, than I will not add any fat to my borderline physique. On the second thought, since I went through all the trouble, I might as well find out what this ball tastes like.
Oh, no! This is so delicious! One bite into the chocolate and I am instantly transferred into the land of pleasure. The chocolate is just the cover for the Marzipan mixed with dark chocolate and raspberries. What an extraordinary mixture of tastes, so pleasing, it is whispering to me: Now you found something you really like. Forget about those nasty people talking about fat. It is our time to enjoy your life. Why not go and get few more of Mozart-kugeln? You will be much more content.
This time I listen to the friendly whisper and, without any guilt, I reward myself with little Mozart whenever I feel blue. It works! It works better than any diet or any “effort” to avoid fat. Nothing feels as fulfilling as the little Mozart. However, there is one problem: Once when you have one you just must have one more. Strangely enough as you eat more, more you feel like having more.
Naturally, I am going to stop eating them right now. Right?
Nancy Slonim Aronie, along with filmmaking partners Liz Witham and Ken Wentworth of Film-Truth Productions, are thrilled to announce that they’ve partnered with SnagFilms to release “A Certain Kind of Beauty” to a worldwide audience. The feature-length film (68 mins) is about Nancy’s son Dan Aronie, and was filmed in part by Nancy, and features the entire Aronie family. The film premiered at Silverdocs, the AFI/Discovery Channel Film Festival, and has been shown around the world. You can now watch the film from the comfort of your own living room by going to http://film-truth.com/snagfilms.
Please help Nancy and Film-Truth Productions to spread the word about the film and help raise awareness about mutiple sclerosis by following the instructions on that page beneath the film player!
I didn’t think I had gotten that fluffy until my Levis disagreed with me. Knee deep into another winter of my discontent, o joy, I thought. ‘161 pounds’, the scale said; ‘Crapola’, I said. I knew there was a reason I don’t use one of these things unless my doctor makes me. No matter what it says I’m not going to like it so why ask for aggravation? I am so much more than a number on a scale the commercial says. The problem is the scale is agreeing, it’s telling me I am so much more than the last time I was weighed it’s beginning to bug me. The excuses about gaining muscles from the car carrier are going over like a lead balloon. Why do I never hear about males going through this?
Is it just me? My prism has been permanently warped since I was sixteen. I get it. I know instinctively not to trust my own opinion of how I look. At 5’8” and 115 pounds I thought I was fat. I was also 18 and hospitalized with a staph infection lodged in my spine. By then almost 2 years of exercise and poor nutrition compromised my immune system. I was too weak to fight the infection. My hair got very thin. The bottom half of the bone had been chewed away to the point where the bone could have snapped, leaving me in a wheelchair. Luckily, antibiotics prevailed and the bone regrew.
The upside about landing in the hospital is that people finally stop arguing. The downside is that hospitals can’t fix everything.
This circles me back to today’s ancient baggage. The plain truth is that I am physically warped, too. Neurotic me managed a healthy pregnancy. I now have a five month old baby girl, and stretch marks, ginormous boobs and a smiley face row of stitches where I really didn’t want one. I look like I have an extra lip with a goatee.
In my opinion, I should have lost all the weight and then some like I fantasized and regained the abs of my thirties. Who cares if I’m forty and exhausted? So what if dieting can stir up some old demons and bad habits? I should have bounced back like a new breast implant after twelve, maybe sixteen weeks, shouldn’t I? Where’s my cape and phone booth (do they even still have those anymore?)? Whaddya mean welcome to the ranks of everyone else?? How did I get sucked into this lunacy?
More to the point, how do I pull out of the vortex? Our daughter doesn’t need my neuroses, she can develop her own. I have an obligation to hide my own my own hypocrisy and set a healthy example, don’t I? She is an adorable baby, not that I’m biased, and that includes both sets of chubby cheeks. Why can’t we all learn to see ourselves like loving mothers would?
Claire, for the record, you are gorgeous, and you always will be.
I’m short. This alone, does not bother me. Sometimes, my short stature is actually an asset. My son is also small. I know this is difficult for a boy. At eleven, he is at an age when these things matter. Kids call him names. At one point, I had to tell him that yes, he is a bit on the short side and he might as well accept it. But I also pointed out that much of the world is, in my opinion, abnormally tall.
I talk about height, because height and weight often go together. On me, those extra pounds show up like fingerprints on a sun-lit window. Fortunately, for my son, he’s compact and muscular, with chiseled shoulders and a rock-hard six-pack. I wish I had his physique.
I remember the pain of shopping in the “chubbet” section of Sears. What masochistic son-of-a-bitch came up with that term? I suffered through this humiliation while growing up in a family of extremely petite women.
But when I look back at my high school pictures, I think to myself, “What the hell was I worried about?” Not thin by any means, but certainly not fat. I was healthy, energetic, sexual and happy.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we worship a Hollywood standard that any sane person would realize is unattainable? And when these women reach their late 40’s, they don a neck that looks like Tom the Turkey, and an upper lip that has you wondering, “What happened to their face? Was it dental work?” All this, in an attempt to attain some false sense of youth and beauty.
I’d still like to lose 10 pounds. But now, rather than focus on vanity, I’m worried about cholesterol and glucose and whatever else I can obsess over, as I watch television commercials featuring every illness known to man, selling drugs that have more side effects than cocaine, while creating pharmaceutical companies fat with cash.
Perhaps it is the extra fat on my once-petite frame that is attracting the animals. Perhaps they sense a tasty bite in my rippling waistline, my dumpling thighs. In the past two months, I have been attacked by a dog, chased by a buffalo, and bitten by a mouse.
All right, the buffalo didn’t really chase me. He got loose from my neighbor’s house and was just running away, in my direction. They got him back by luring him with a coffee can of food. “Come on, Butter!” the young man crooned, shaking the can. “Come on home!” Yes, a buffalo named Butter, in my saga of fat. It only fits.
I’ve put on about 30 pounds in the past year. I don’t know how it happened.
Okay, I do. Pert and energetic Judy Roberts, whose smile alone has melted grief-hardened hearts, made a donation for a local youth fundraiser: a loaf of homemade bread every week for a year. Cinnamon bread, wheat loaves, buttery white bread. And rolls – plain, sausage, or cheese. Judy’s bread was nurture and care in the form of flour and yeast. She would deliver it wrapped in newspaper, still warm, and leave it on my kitchen table. Sometimes I’d catch her and we’d have a glass of wine or a cup of homemade soup, and chat about her own journey of loss. Cancer took her husband Freddie last year, and she said the baking was therapy for her. I said that eating it was therapy for me.
But that’s only one reason for the fat. Empty Nest has brought a new life of traveling for Bill and me. In the past, we’d watch our weight at home, and blow it on trips, eating for pure fun. So what if we just ate breakfast? That smells heavenly! Let’s split one! Well now we are traveling every month, and our travel habits, well- ingrained by now, are killing us.
Then there are the usual culprits: menopause and hormones – or lack thereof. “Women your age don’t metabolize like they once did,” my doctor told me. “Well hell, doctor!” I told him. “I need my nervous energy! I want my old nail-biting, foot-jiggling, lip-chewing, nonstop-talking metabolism back!”
But then I think: Do I? Really? One thing I love about this age is the “So what?” of it. So what if my dogs are smelly? So what if my flower beds aren’t tidy? So what if I don’t want to leave the house all day? I wish that I could add to the new philosophy, “So what if I am fatter?” Right now I still can’t.
So I’ll visit Weight –Watchers, eat salads with fat-free dressing, exercise every day. I’ll weigh each morning, just to remind myself that I am, technically speaking, obese. I’ll avoid putting on a bathing suit, and I’ll wear flowing dresses rather than jeans. I’ll pray for discipline, and paradoxically, for a focus on the spiritual rather than the physical. And next year I’ll write another essay called “Fat,” and see if the material is any different.
That Fat always has to have the last word. And, much to my dismay, That Fat is usually right. That Fat has been my greatest adversary and my most needed Savior. For so long That Fat has been repeatedly telling me that the wisest route to travel would be the one that leads me to self- acceptance. “Yeah, I know. Not exactly a news flash,” I snottily retort. Without missing a beat That Fat replies, “You know ABOUT acceptance… But you do not yet KNOOOOW acceptance. The sooner you get this, really get this, the sooner you will love living in the body of you and the freer you will feel to fully be you!” replied That Fat. “And one day you will thank me for being a part of you.” “Oy,” I thought. “That Fat, such smugitude. Can you even believe?” But Truth be told, such wisdom too. And I should have believed.
From the day I popped out of the womb and into this world, That Fat has been there with me. And was That Fat ever cute when she was little! That Baby Fat was most adored and even admired, as I recall. “My little cherub,” my Mom would say in that one-of-a-kind Mommy-Baby way. Then she would sing to us, hug us tight and smooch us all up. I and That Baby Fat were a match made in cherubic heaven. I wordlessly loved That Baby Fat. She and I were one…
Throughout my childhood, That Fat sort of shrunk and smoothed out on my growing little girl body. I was a lean, little athlete – swinging from branches and jungle gyms, climbing up tree after tree, bouncing on trampolines/beds and somersaulting from room to room. Movement, movement, movement … my body just needed movement!! So That Fat shrunk and shrunk some more. I had just enough of That Fat to provide my body with the slightest bit of padding. That Fat seemed to be unperturbed and obliging, resigned to being a part of one very hyperactive Being. That Fat was not getting much attention back then. But, as That Fat would say, “I really don’t need to be noticed or acknowledged to be happy. I am just happy to be… “
Well, needed or not, That Fat did start getting attention. Little by little, from Jr. High to High School, That Fat became more and more of a focal point in my life. Adolescence alone was enough of a contributing factor. Add competitive Gymnastics into the mix and you now have a stew of judgment, criticism and self-consciousness. Not a very nurturing stew at all. That Fat went along with my ever-growing obsession, bearing the slings and arrows I would regularly launch with an unusual blend of courage and indifference. That Fat was permitted only in certain places on the body of me and only in finite amounts at that. As Julie the Gymnast became more and more of my identity, That Fat became less and less present. By age 17 That Fat was nowhere to be found.
From the far reaches of my consciousness That Fat would sometimes remind me, ”It’s OUR body, you know. And like it or not, I am necessary. More than you realize, you need me.” “Oh, yeah? You think you have a say in this matter?” I challenged. “Then take this starvation! And take that over-working out! Now you see just how undesirable and unnecessary you really are.” And away went That Fat. My all-encompassing need to be as thin as possible, out-weighed That Fat’s need to be on the body of me. So That Fat gathered up my pain and my shame and disappeared, bearing it’s banishment with patience and honor.
That Fat surfaced here and there throughout college and into my twenties and thirties. That Fat would reappear whenever I let my guard down with that same reminder, “I am necessary. And you need me.” I found this to be highly irritating and utterly ignorable. I ran marathons, I lifted weights, I fasted… I beat That Fat into submission. I was dominating That Fat – until the body of me got sick, really sick. All of my defenses were shot, my dukes were down, and I was forced to surrender. That Fat slowly returned, happily smoothing out the angles of me, gratefully shaping me from a girl into a woman. This was no act of defiance by That Fat. But rather it was a long-awaited return to duty. Like a bear unnaturally forced into hibernation for one too many winters, That Fat joyously emerged delighted with the light of day. That Fat was once again free, and it was finally time for the body of me to welcome That Fat back. Now it was I who had no choice.
So I called a truce with That Fat to which That Fat countered, “You certainly were embattled with me, but I was always at peace with you.” I got it. I finally got it. And I continue to get it. As I peeled away the layers of That Fat, I uncovered many an issue in That Fat’s tissues. That Fat had protected me all of those years from fully feeling those devastating breaks in my heart, those piercing wounds to my spirit and those horrendous assaults on my innocence. No matter how viciously I had criticized That Fat, That Fat still protected, soothed and healed me. No matter what.
And here’s the kicker — That Fat was right! This acceptance thing really does work! After almost 49 trips around the sun I can sincerely say that I and That Fat have become friends. Ironically, as a result of That Fat’s letting-go teachings, there’s not a whole lot of That Fat to be found. That Fat is OK with this. At 101 pounds of fun, I now live peacefully and trustingly in this body of me. I no longer obsess about That Fat’s presence in my life. I focus on matters of actual importance like giving generously from my overflowing, joyous and grateful heart, loving and treasuring those precious 2- and 4-leggers in my world and living in my unique and abundant Jul-ish ways.
That Fat and I continue to co-exist peacefully with a renewed and much needed sense of mutual respect. Just the other day I admitted to That Fat that my way of thinking had been erroneous, to say the least. In actuality, That Fat’s advice had been sound after all. That Fat lovingly replied, “I told you so… .” And there you have it! That Fat really did have the last word, this is true. But this time, I’m actually listening.
