I don’t feel like a fat girl anymore.

When I walk into the grocery store and see myself on the closed circuit security monitor hanging above the welcome mat, I know that average-sized girl in the black coat is me and I’m not surprised. I am surprised that I feel this way. Back when I started this journey, I was concerned a part of me would always think of myself as the fat girl.

I’ve read other weight-loss blogs where the authors have lost lots of weight and still have trouble thinking of themselves as a thin person. They are constantly surprised that they don’t have trouble fitting in chairs or cars. This weekend I attended a play and didn’t even think about the fact that I wasn’t spilling out of the seat or banging my knees into the head of the person in front of me, not until a larger man sat down two seats next to me and experienced all those problems. I feel very comfortable in my body and I believe my self-image pretty [...]

• Continue reading "My body, myself"

As much as I enjoy writing, I must admit the English language has many failings. For instance, why isn’t there a gender neutral pronoun besides “it”? Calling someone “it” is either derogatory or means he/she (see my problem here?) is an insane clown that lives in the sewers. You’ve got “he” and “she,” but no word to refer to someone when you don’t know his/her gender. Typically you end up pluralizing the entire sentence so you can use “they” which can be awkward and sometimes sounds stupid.

I also propose that we need a new word to describe someone who is not fat, but isn’t thin either. There are already words that have submitted their resumes for fulfilling this role in the English language, like “curvy” or “full-figured” or “healthy.” But they come off sounding like euphemisms for “fat” which in our culture is pretty much a euphemism for “ugly.” When I wrote about Tyra Banks a couple weeks ago I said she had “some meat on [her] bones” which sound like I’m comparing her to [...]

• Continue reading "An end to euphemisms"

I lost a round of grocery store Russian roulette this Saturday and ended up in the slowest of four open lines. The women two spots in front of me was having some sort of problem which required the general manager to descend from her high counter of postage stamps and money orders to swipe her magic pass card over the bar code scanner. I imagine her magic card allows her to do all sorts of forbidden things, like run the conveyor belt backwards and play solitaire on the register’s computer screen, or maybe it just lets her issue refunds.

While I was trying not to watch the man who had been behind me check out in the next lane over, I picked up the latest issue of People magazine featuring Tyra Banks, who weighs 161 pounds. How do I know Tyra Banks weighs 161 pounds? Because it’s right there on the cover in all caps, 72pt bold font, you fool! An excerpt of the article is here.

Previously I didn’t have much of an opinion [...]

• Continue reading "Hope in the check-out lane"

One of the things I like about the online community is that no one knows if you’re fat or thin, male or female, black or white or purple with pink polka dots, unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying, unless you took a nap in the same room as a toddler with magic markers. However, if you’re an asshole it becomes apparent pretty quickly, which it did when I was reading a TV blog many weeks ago.

On this blog there was a post about an actress donning a fat suit for a made-for-TV movie and one of the first comments was that fat people were outcasts by choice. The argument was that fat people choose not to exercise, choose to eat large portions, and choose to eat unhealthy foods. Thus they choose to be fat and are personally responsible for becoming the type of person that the world generally discriminates against.

Is being fat a choice? I’d have to say yes and no. But reflecting on my own period of being overweight, [...]

• Continue reading "Do we choose to be fat?"