Month: September 2019

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Don’t you hate it when slim people call fat people fat?

The one challenge I may not win in this lifetime is the battle of the bulge.  I am one of the 40 percent of Americans deemed overweight or obese.  Like my fellow fatties, I’ve had a lifelong love affair with food—I, like they, don’t eat to live but live to eat.  The only time I remember being lithe, thin without a care in the world, oblivious to how I looked but very much aware of the joie de vivre, was … second grade.  But the following summer, nature played a cruel trick on me as I morphed into a totally different body.  Teachers did not recognize me.  I had been short the previous year but grew to second tallest girl in class [I ended up a short woman], gained at least 20 pounds more than my Brady Bunch peers, and had to wear a bra.  Everybody started calling me fat: family, friends, strangers, teachers, doctors.  What must that have done to my 8-year-old psyche?

I kept a brave front like I didn’t care, but that emotional wound never healed.  I became self deprecating, first to make fun of myself before anyone else had a chance.  I suffer from fat mentality.  It’s a real thing.  Like every fat person, I eat when depressed, angry, happy, sad, lonely, socializing, mourning, and celebrating.  Doesn’t everybody?

When our peers manage to grow older while keeping weight off, we who are fat adults aren’t fooling anyone.  We gotta problem, and everybody who sees us knows it.  Obviously we eat more, a lot more, and exercise less, a lot less if at all, than the nonfat people.  Doctors have been telling us the key to weight loss is eat less and exercise more.  Oscar-winning Texas actor Matthew McConaughey gave a great bit of advice to his remarkable weight loss playing an AIDS victim: Don’t eat.  He actually stopped eating, and the weight just melted off.  Who am I kidding?  I can’t not eat.  I’ll pass out.  Besides, food tastes so good.  Remember that slogan to help us girls lose weight in the ’70s: Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels?  I’ll never know the comparison.

Fat people know all about dieting; it works sort of, takes a very long time, and then our old habits and natural inclination are welcomed back into our lives like a dear loving friend with whom we had unkindly kicked to the curb.  Oh how we personify our relationship with food.  Obesity is at the root an emotional problem first and a physical or metabolic challenge second.

So when comedian Bill Maher recently sermonized, as he tends to do at the end of his weekly HBO show “Real Time,” about America’s fat problem, he was preaching to me, reaching my guilty soul.  I’m a fellow Democrat, and Bill and I see eye to eye on practically everything—he more cynical, I more optimistic, yet the same politics.  When he presented the sobering statistic that every year 40,000 Americans die of gunshot wounds while 300,000 of us die from obesity, he got me.  Must get back to seriously dieting again and exercising.  Must make myself think before any morsel of food enters my mouth.  I get this way every once in awhile: join a gym and am faithful to exercise and diet.  Then I go through slumps, mostly due to loss of income.  The gym membership has been the first to go in 30 years of experienced job loss or salary reductions.  But to get Maher off my back, I once again joined a health club.  It’s new and ten minutes away, so I have no excuse.  I mulled it over for a year, dreading it but wanting and needing it simultaneously.  That’s how we fat folks roll.

Carry that weight

I never liked exercising when I was a kid.  I didn’t like breathing in cold air and pushing my heart rate and body which easily tired.  I preferred lounging indoors all summer and after school watching TV or listening to radio or records.  I was a plump child of the ’70s.  My peers were active and enjoyed playing outdoors.  The 99 percent of them were slim and appeared to be having the time of their lives.  I was envious watching on the sidelines, self conscious of fat legs; everyone told me I had fat legs.  And the bra thing meant I’d never be a runner.  That’s what I always dreamed of being: an elegant runner.  But it wasn’t meant to be.  Walking by boys at school, I’d hear “Boom, boom” or “Flop, flop.”  I’d rather no one see me try to exercise.

The first time I got serious about joining a gym, a women’s gym, and giving it everything I had, I was 21.  I ate hardly anything: a half sandwich for lunch with an apple, a spoon of vegetables and a quarter serving of the main dish with a salad, no sweets just fruit except on Friday nights I allowed myself one diet fudge Popsicle.  Even I was surprised at my will power.  It took three months, exercising three days a week including sitting in the sauna afterwards.  But some weight came off.  I was so proud of myself.  I was a size smaller, weight lost mostly in the chest, heh heh.  I weighed 120 pounds.  When I told everyone I’d lost 13 pounds, they looked at me like they couldn’t see a difference, like I still had a long way to go.  No congratulations for my effort either.  I felt good and healthy and the right size but continued to try to break 120, exercising more, eating less.  Then job loss, no more health club exercising, and succumbing to all the temptations of chips and sweets.  I gained what I lost and then some.

Back then the physician charts allowed a short woman to weigh no more than 100 pounds, maybe as much as 107. I weighed 102 in 4th grade. Through the decades, I noticed in the exam rooms the weight charts have changed and now permit a higher range, even allowing for body sizes based on a specific measurement between the two bones of the elbow.  I am right between small and average.  Sometimes I weighed within the guidelines, sometimes not, OK mostly not.

What I didn’t know through all those decades of adult dieting and gymning with alternate nights to Jane Fonda videos was as we grow older, say 40 and 50, the weight is really hard to lose—I’d say impossible.  My doctor says extremely hard.  So now I find myself in a losing battle.  We’re supposed to eat a third less than we did in our 20s and 30s.  Oh now they tell us.  I never heard that before in my life.  And we’re supposed to exercise even more, like every single day for an hour.  Where do we find the time?  So a couple of years ago in yet another attempt at physical fitness, I turned to exercising in the morning, first thing, arising at 4 a.m.  Did I lose weight?  No.  But I didn’t gain any either.  And I felt better, like I had accomplished something.  Losing weight—and God knows I need to—is not the goal as much as keeping active and maintaining muscle.  The Silver Sneaker Club could be in my future except they exercise at 10 a.m. on weekdays when I’m working.

The day of the expanding man

Bill Maher blames America’s fat epidemic on junk food.  We who are fat eat too much of it when we shouldn’t eat any.  So we can be hard on ourselves about what we eat, how much, and why we’re eating it.  Maher proposed bringing back fat shaming, theorizing that’s how he got a grip on alcoholism or drinking too much.  Yeah well.  Overeating is not alcoholism or drug addiction in only one way: We’re not out of our minds and blacking out while overindulging in ice cream or chips or candy or pizza.  Or … are we?  Oh my God, overeating is exactly the same as being an alcoholic or drug addict!  We’re food junkies!!  We got an addiction we just can’t lick, a monkey on the back, a crutch we try to hide.  Damnit, the world knows our addiction with just one look: We’re fat.  We can’t hide our secret through mint breath and cologne, long sleeves and black clothes.

Maybe … being fat is some kind of gift from God.  Everyone knows our problem, our big fat problem with food and stuff.  Most adults know what it’s like to be overweight and to diet.  Half of Americans manage to stay at a healthy weight, so why not we who are heavy?  Maybe Maher is right about being fat shamed.  But all those years ago in childhood, being called fat, fatty or fats didn’t stop me one bit from eating too much of the wrong things.  I consumed even more candy, chips and soft drinks—tastes so good.  I just wanted to be left alone and didn’t want anybody scolding me about what to eat and not eat or say how pretty I’d be if I’d just lose weight.  Today when I look at pictures of myself back then, I don’t see a fat girl at all.  I see a kid who was perfectly healthy, even well adjusted considering.  That’s because I’m used to seeing kids today, many of whom are morbidly obese, and seeing the same as adults and even actors doing well in this day and age.  Americans are just ‘letting themselves go,’ to paraphrase my mother when she talked about people who gained too much weight and didn’t care anymore.

The way Americans are going to get a grip on our deadly obesity epidemic is going to take every single one of us helping each other.  First, our restaurants can serve half orders of everything.  Short people like me don’t need a full size of anything.  Our junk food industry—and it is a multi-multi-billion-dollar business—could change the way they overly mass produce.  I never bought their ‘it’s about choice’ theory so they keep stocking fresh snack cakes and cookies 24/7 in grocery and convenience stores nationwide.  Sure we who are fat need to practice self control and less overindulgence when it comes to the food we eat.  But shouldn’t something we all know is junk food be illegal?  Like cigarettes, junk food will decline, and Americans will be healthier.

Our freedoms come with consequences.  We’ve learned it with free speech when hate speech is allowed, religion with every weird group allowed to worship as they choose, and now all the foodstuffs we’re allowed to eat.  Narcotics are illegal or regulated, but alcohol is legal.  We all know people who consume either or both and do or don’t have a problem.  Some are addicts, but most are not.  Being free to eat whatever we want when we want is killing us as obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.  All of us who are fat need help from others and not just ourselves.  A revealing book I read was Eat This, Not That, where I learned a big salad meal at a restaurant has 1,200 calories while a sandwich has half or less.  All the things I have been eating to try not to gain weight turn out to be the most fattening: salads, flatbread, wraps.  How can this be?!  It makes no sense, but one reason some of us are fat is we know nothing about food—the thing we love most in the world.

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What’s black and white and red all over?

What were they thinking—our white American ancestors who bought and traded African slaves starting 400 years ago?  That has always been the silent question throughout the 20th century, louder with each passing decade, crossing into the 21st century to the historically significant anniversary year of 2019.  And the same ‘what were they thinking?’ question will surely be asked by future Americans 200 years from now about our indulgences, attitudes, prejudices, tolerance, action and apathy—perhaps on the subject of caring for our planet and all living creatures.  Future Americans will not understand our proud dusty cowboy mentality of yesteryear when good men took care of their own, even to the detriment of all others.

The reason our white American ancestors got involved in the slave trade is because Western European man believed his culture, religion, art, music, food, dance, architecture, agriculture, fashions, customs and traditions were the highest achievements ever produced in the world, the epitome of sophistication, most certainly ordained by God Himself.  Those who ventured from Europe to explore other nations returned convinced the Western way of life was the best.  No other culture in the world ever produced the refined music of Bach or Mozart, the perfect art of Rembrandt, the magnificent sculpture of Michelangelo, or the genius of da Vinci.  Most of all, the Bible itself through the words of Jesus Christ charged Christians to go out into the world and save the human masses, baptizing each one into Christianity, saving their souls from eternal damnation.       

Self assured God was on their side, our white ancestors seized land across the Atlantic, far away from where they belonged way up north, land they knew in their own terms ‘belonged’ to other people, another race.  Through purchase, trade and deals and eventually broken promises, lies and battles to the bloody death, this is the story of America.  There is no denying our brutal and unjust history.  While these cultural battles were ongoing, early Americans brought over thousands of Africans, crushing their primitive culture like they did the natives of this land renamed America.

The descendants of Western Europe who peopled American colonies were thinking this: people with dark skin were sub human and were created to perform labor like building roads, neo Roman buildings and ornate plantation homes; growing crops; butchering; cooking; cleaning; sewing; wet nursing—you name it.  The Bible clearly states some are slaves and some are masters.  This was the rationale of 18th century white Americans especially if they had money.

The races lived close together, however, interacting daily for decades, lifelong, each knowing their place.  Surely they saw humanity in each other regardless of skin color.  They both bled red blood, would bruise if hit or slapped.  They had the same human needs of food, water, shelter, clothing, companionship, sex.  They both reproduced.

Whites were dominant, blacks submissive.  There are documented cases of slave owners at the time of their death setting their slaves free and of slaves going to court to legally challenge their enslavement and insist upon their freedom.  Sometimes slaves were granted freedom by a judge.  It didn’t take long for northern American cities to consider slavery an abomination.  The South took to the issue with great complexity.  The United States was divided by progressive and antiquated cultures.  The only solution became the Civil War, when all our war dead were Americans.  Even President Lincoln considered sending African Americans back to Africa, anything to save the Union.  But African Americans were not Africans, more white culturally and in every other way than tribal Africans.  The ways of their ancestors were lost and forgotten as their new way of life was accepted even if enslaved.

African American slaves were clever.  See, they always knew they really weren’t slaves.  No one is.  They were free like God made all humans.  There were the Underground Railroad, abolitionists, clever field hollers and work songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Get on Board” that were code on how to escape, and patchwork quilts carefully crafted with scenes and symbols showing the way to freedom.  They also were a people who kept their family history in great detail, teaching it orally to their children.  They adopted the Bible and Christianity, attending their separate churches, and through the Gospel foresaw change culminating in their freedom not in the afterlife but here on earth.

Slavery in America was long ago, another time and another era that we just don’t and can’t understand.  But the civil rights movement was not long ago.  In many ways after the Civil War, blacks were treated worse than they were as slaves.  Many families had to leave the South, only to be met with prejudices and bigotry by northern whites, too.  World wars and military action in Korea and Vietnam had a lot to do with ushering in civil rights as the military began to integrate white and black troops.  It’s been a long struggle for African Americans toward personal and collective freedom and then acknowledged human rights by American society still dominated by the culture of white privilege.

More than likely America is now in the age of the last white hope as one more man plays president for awhile, mostly to overturn laws and policies enacted by his predecessor who was the first African-American president.  In coming to terms with American history, the painful truth is the intentional and pervasive cruelty of white people toward other people, all the other people on the planet.  The excuse is the absolute certitude of Western man who once roamed the earth and sea and believed all to be in his domain—like God surveying His creation.  So why Americans of certain European heritage would enslave Africans a few centuries ago is perfectly clear today to us, their descendents. They believed they were gods.