Fat People Got No . . .

I've been thinking about my weight. For most of my life. Lately, I've wondered why. It's beginning to seem like a colossal waste of my time and energy. Here's what I'm thinking:

I have spent most of my life calling myself 10-20 pounds overweight-no matter what weight I've been, and believe you me, I weighed a lot less 25 years ago. I've lost 10-20 pounds at various times and almost always gained them back.

As a child in elementary school, I felt fat. My siblings would tease me, "Fat Pat/Sat on a cat / What do you think of that?" (I went by Patty back then). I would complain to my parents that I was fat and my dad would pet my head and tell me that I was "pleasingly plump." As I got into my teenage years and complained of being fat, my mother would tell me that men wanted women with a little "meat on their bones." (My mother was angular and thin and came of age in the more voluptuous 1940s). I believed my siblings and my own sense of my body over my parents' attempts to reassure me.

I carried that sense of being "too fat" into my adult life and have kept at least half an eye on my weight and what I ate for the last 20 years. Twenty years, people! That's just beginning to feel a bit ridiculous to me, that I should be unhappy with myself over something so fundamental. As I was listening to David Cook (yes, him again) sing Innocent by Our Lady Peace, I was struck by the line that talks about a woman for whom, "Every calorie's a war." I thought, "That's me," and I really don't want to be that way anymore.

I like to eat. I like to cook. I especially like to bake and then eat that. I also exercise at least 5 days a week, I can run a mile, I'm fit enough to hike and bike and do yoga and all the other activities I enjoy--and yet I carry around with me the sense that I'm wrong, that my body is wrong. I'm getting kind of sick of that feeling, so being the analytical type, I started trying to figure out why I told myself those messages.

Well, first, of course, there's the media. I'm heavier than almost any woman on TV or in magazines, unless they are plus-size models. I have fat on my body and my tummy is definitely not flat. I'd like to blame that on child bearing but it was always rounded. So, I don't fit the current fashion of female beauty. Is it the cultural brainwashing that has done me in? I decided to dig a little deeper, to see what messages I got from loved ones.

Well, you've heard about my siblings and my parents already. On the plus side, I'm married, and my husband does not seem to think I'm repulsive--far from it, if you know what I mean (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more) [Monty Python reference, for you young people. Check out BBC TV on Friday nights to catch reruns].

In fact, my husband calls models "boobs on a stick," which cracks me up. I've also heard the skinny women in Hollywood called "light bulb heads" because their heads look so big compared to their tiny bodies.

So, on the one hand I've got the media bombarding me with messages that I'm too fat to be attractive. On the other, I've got my husband (and the inferior men who preceded him) who found me yummy. Which side wins do you think? My real experiences with the real people in my real life? No, silly! The media wins of course! With a little help from what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls "the natural predator of the psyche" in her groundbreaking 1992 book, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

What Estes describes is as the "natural predator" is basically the out-of-control ego, that thinks it deserves all that it wants and that it is akin to the gods in beauty, power and might. Always striving for the "perfect" weight--and sacrificing peace of mind, self respect and sometimes health (fad diets, diet pills, eating disorders) to do so--can be seen as a kind of hubris, a trying to achieve a kind of perfection that is not humanly attainable.

Caveat: Being healthy is important; if you're too heavy it can have negative repercussions on your health. Nuff said. That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is the assumption that I, a human being, am perfectable. If I just try hard enough, and buy the right beauty products, I can achieve the approved standard of beauty. Two key words: Approved and achieve. Americans love successful people who achieve the goals, achieve results, achieve success in the realms our culture deems worthy (sports & entertainment, primarily). When we do achieve that success, we get approval (money, status, perks, a spot on a reality TV show, etc.).

When we don't, look out. We get public scorn and become the punchline for jokes. So the cultural stakes are high right now for being "overweight."

I've decided I don't want to play that game anymore. It's partly my age: I'm more comfortable with who I am and the consequences of the choices I make (i.e. I bake a lot of brownies, I eat a lot of brownies, I put on a lot of poundies). I'm also happily married and get affirmed in a million ways that I'm loved and desirable. It's also my age in that I'm in what I hope is only the middle of my life span and am realizing that I will never be young again and I can just let go of that and focus instead on what I want to do with the rest of my time on this planet. Weight-watching is not one of those things.

So, this very long post is to say to you all and to the universe that I'm letting go of my almost life-long obsession to be ever more beautiful and am willing to put that time and energy into far more worthy causes. Any suggestions?