The Fat Thread

[€uroMeinke]

As I was keying out yet another response to the riding crop thread that had nothing to do with the OP, I thought I’d go ahead and start a thread where we could talk about Fat, being fat, getting fat, losing fat, living in a culture that is growing fatter.

To reiterate a bit, I’ve always been on the large side – or at least considered myself so, for as long as I can remember. In grade school this was cool, being bigger was status with my peers. At the time there were no concerns about health risks or attractiveness – heck these were the days when girls had cooties. Perhaps this early developmental experience of size=good set the original psychology and body image for the next 40 years as I gradually have increased my size over time to where I now have a BMI that classifies me as “obese.”

Now, as I mentioned in a previous post, when I look at some of my college photos I wonder what I was thinking at the time when I used these photos as evidence of my fatness – ah to be that “fat” again. So I have to wonder if my psychology at the time, my fat body image, helped me to perpetuate my growing size. I also wonder if this is the case with my overweight brethren, that message, or self doubts about one’s weight might be just the thing that helped sabotage any attempts to lose it.

And just to be clear, these musings aren’t a way for me to make excuses or shift blame for my weight gain, but rather for me it’s a way of trying to understand it. Clearly in our culture food is much more than just fuel. Our biology is wired for us to eat until sated, to stock up on fat to get us through the lean times so we might survive the next famine and keep warm through winter. Add to that the pure hedonism of food, one of the few carnal pleasure we can indulge in public – in our contemporary culture of abundance it’s small wonder we are growing ever larger.

But there are health risks to this, as well as the fear that it will prevent us from attracting a retaining a mate. And so like many others, I’d love to shed a few pounds. Intellectually I know it’s a matter of increased activity and reduced consumption, but for some reason this simple formula seems difficult for me to execute. For one there are food pleasures I have no desire to give up – and my experience tells me I don’t have to. Every time we’ve gone to France I’ve eaten well and lost weight, if I could but recreate that experience stateside, I feel I could achieve my diet Nirvana. Of course, this could just be another excuse…

At the end of the day I eat out a lot, and don’t exercise, lifestyle choices I’ve made with weighty consequences.