mardecides

Work sucked. My baby girl is sick. My lower back is throbbing. And when I got home from work tonight, all I wanted was a large glass of wine and a pizza. Wanted it so badly I could taste it in my mouth and feel it in my tummy. And as I stood in the kitchen, rehashing my day with my husband, my little boy - dressed in feetie pajammas and smelling the comforting smell of his baby shampoo and lotion - hands me a handwritten note that says, “Sore you had a bad day. I hope you have a good day tmorow” signed with a heart and his name. It was like the storm cloud over my head moved away.  That one little note cleared away a day’s worth of crap.

I had a big salad for dinner instead. And I feel full in more ways than one tonight.

Perception is a funny thing. Some days, I look in the mirror and I see a pretty girl looking back at me. Too fat, yes, but still pretty. Other days, I look in the mirror and see a disgusting creature that looks like a haggard blob. I look at my boobs and wish for a fork lift. I look at my hanging gut and wish I could just slice off the fat rolls. I want to stretch my neck and never show my upper arms.  

But as I’ve been reading other blogs and looking at profiles, I constantly find myself thinking, “God, I only wish I weighed what this chick weighs and she thinks she needs to lose weight?!” Or, more commonly, I look at the profile pictures and I swear the women who’ve graciously accepted to be this cranky, smart-ass’s buddy are GORGEOUS. Simply beautiful. Take a look.  

Belle, whose model’s face makes me want to go clubbing with her. Lara, with her blinding, killer smile, has an energy that jumps off the page. Ashley’s perfect lips – I want your lip gloss secret! Julie’s silky hair and glowing skin looks so healthy. Jenn rocks a tank top I wish I could wear. And I’m pretty sure both Tammy and Rebecca could be eye models for L’Oreal. I have lash-envy something fierce. 

And I’m not posting this to get a whole bunch of compliments back. My point is about perception. I can so easily see beauty in others, but yet I had to force myself to post my own weight stats and a picture. I was ashamed. It’s shaming to be fat and feel ugly because it’s a reflection of what I’ve allowed to happen throughout the years.

But, I’m slowly starting to lose the shame because I realized that as I’m envying the profiles of other people here, other people are probably looking at me and my profile and seeing something beautiful that I can’t or something that I’ve lost sight of throughout the years too. It’s a two-way street. Or rather, a magic mirror. And that’s a beautiful, and motivating, thing.

Happy Mother’s Day. My gift to myself was not eating the homemade dinner rolls dripping with butter, not reaching for the bowl full of potatoes and carrots and only eating part of a small slice of ice cream cake. My Mother’s Day dinner was spring salad, vinagrette dressing (which is surprisingly tasty!), and zesty herb chicken breast. And while I missed the dinner rolls and the butter and the huge slice of cake and I also missed the buttered popcorn and pop at the movie yesterday, I didn’t miss feeling crappy about myself after eating it.  I didn’t miss the internal rationalization. I didn’t miss the stuffed feeling. In fact, I found myself thinking that next Mother’s Day, maybe my gift to myself would be something designer, in a single digit size. Who knows?

I’m boycotting Self magazine. I went for a relaxing massage (Happy Pre-Mother’s Day to me!), and out of the huge basketful of magazines to choose from in the waiting area, I fought my instinct to pick up People and thought a good step forward to fitness would be to read Self.  After flipping through page after page of slender, sexy bodies glowing with pride at their sleek selves, (and studying the “Find a Swimsuit Perfect For Your Body Type” while naively thinking “Wow, maybe they’ve come up with a flattering swimsuit for body type labeled Fat” only to realize I’d been had again) I stumbled on a “Getting Fit is Easy!” article. Since I was already cranky (ok, jealous), that just sent me right over the edge. 

Getting fit is not “easy.” Maybe it’s easy for those who are already fit, but then it’s not “getting fit” anymore, it’s “staying fit.” If getting fit were so very easy, as proclaimed by Self magazine, then there would not be people like me, fat and unfit. Right?  Easy is sitting on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy, munching on Ruffles, and guzzling a Pepsi. Easy is running through the McDonald’s drive-through because you’re stressed from work, bone tired, and have kids fighting in the backseat and the thought of going home to cook a nutritious meal (or at least a non-McDonald’s meal) makes you want to scream right along with your two-year-old. Easy is driving to the store even though you could probably walk but you don’t. Easy is convenience. Easy is getting fat. That was easy. It took very little effort on my part.  

Getting fit is hard and I haven’t met a success story yet that has told me otherwise. Losing weight and finding that healthy lifestyle after years and years of “easy” is damn hard. And I take issue with some sleek, hard-body magazine proclaiming it’s easy. That hurts. Telling me it’s easy is the first step to setting me up for failure. So from now on I’ll stick to People. At least they put weight loss success stories on their cover from time to time that inspire me. I kept one of those issues for months because the woman on the cover looked like me. Not her features, but I recognized her “Before” body. That was me. And when I read her journey to her “After” body, I could relate. I’d like to ask her if she thought it was “easy”.

My guess is I already know her answer.

Newsflash! It turns out Food is bad for me. Carbs, specifically. So I’m “On the Beach”, which is a cute little marketing slogan required to try to help you forget that this diet is not even close to being on a beach. Oh wait; it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle choice. They probably should have thought of that little nugget prior to calling it the “South Beach Diet”.  I think the SBD marketing team needs to do a focus group. I doubt tuna, beans and fat-free cottage cheese are what people think about when they hear “beach”.   You know what I want to make tonight for dinner? A heap of pasta with garlic bread. But instead, I’ll eat my lettuce with chicken and cottage cheese and pretend it’s soooo filling and good. Because I have this cute skirt I want to buy and wear before I’m too old to pull it off. Well, any skirt really, even an ugly one. And South Beach, for all my bitching, seems the most logical for my body and my body’s various quirks.  But, it turns out that sugar is bad too. And sugar doesn’t just reside in chocolate, cake (put those two together and there’s a ménage trios I’d be in to), candy and pop. Don’t forget fruit. Grapes and bananas are the new junk food in my life.  

So why am I fat? Is it the sugar? The carbs? The fat? The calories? The lack of consensus among nutritionists is confusing and irritating. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but this all seems to be a huge profitable marketing scheme. There’s a diet to support any eating habit or lack thereof. And don’t forget all the handy tools needed to get the full effects of these “lifestyle” changes that can be all mine for the low price of $$$ucker. Books, pedometers, calorie counters, journals, pre-packaged meals and “candy” (ha!), little digital mechanisms designed to come in handy at the grocery store until you realize you left it at home but even if you had remembered it, you still wouldn’t be able to figure out what numbers to plug in where.   But this is just me beating around the fat bush (ew, that sounds dirty). The logical and obvious answer is I am fat because of my lover.  My on-going love affair with Bad Food has made me fat. And I absolutely love Bad Food in large quantities. Chips, pizza, pop, chili dogs…mmm, so good. And Bad Food loves me so much that he wants to hang out with me All. The. Time. He has bonded to my chin, belly, upper arms, and thighs. Quite frankly, he’s getting annoyingly clingy.  So, I’m trying to break off my sordid affair with Bad Food and start a healthy relationship with his twin, Good Food, and maybe even fool around a little with his cousins, Exercise and Portion Control to keep it spicy. But, this love affair is so hard to let go. I have to stop thinking of all the good times we had!  Maybe if I play a bunch of Chicago (You’re the Inspiration, Hard Habit to Break, etc.) and think of all the times Bad Food let me down and pissed me off, it will help me move on… 

When asked why I want to lose weight, I feel that the “proper” answer is to say, “I want to be healthy! Losing X% of my body weight lowers my chance of developing heart disease and diabetes.” And various other health ailments overweight people face. And that’s a great reason for some people, maybe/probably most people, who are on a weight-loss journey. But frankly, I am not that type of fat gal.   Yes, I’d like to live longer, assuming my life is so fulfilling and happy that those extra years would be a gift rather than a curse. And yes, I want to be a healthy example for my kids and for my husband. Those are all very valid, solid and unselfish reasons and I’m not so blind that I don’t realize they are good ones, maybe even the best ones.  However, when I get right down to it, I can honestly say that I am mostly motivated to lose weight because I want to be and look thin.  Not model-thin or actress-thin, not even fighting-high-school-weight thin. But the kind of thin that turns heads and generates free drinks in bars, and looks hot out on the dance floor. The kind of thin that can wear awesome swimsuits and strappy tank tops and a little black dress that doesn’t look like a sleeping bag.  

Vanity plays a huge, major role in my desire to get off my fat ass and finally take a good hard look at myself and see the thin hottie I once was and could be again. And this doesn’t stem from self-esteem issues, at least not significantly. I’ve got gorgeous hair, pretty eyes, and a smile that can be sweet and sexy. I’m funny, smart, charming and make friends pretty easily. But, I’m over thirty years old and time is running out from a weight perspective. It only gets harder as the years go by. For years and years, I was complacent, actually defiant, about my weight (but that’s another post on its own). I’m married with two kids. And they’d love and admire me if I shaved my head and grew three times my current size. But that’s no excuse anymore. It’s not reason enough to stay fat just because I’m “loved anyway”. There’s something wrong with that way of thinking and I’ve finally realized it. But is vanity any better? Does it matter?

I want to be hot. I want my husband to be like, “Yeah, that hottie is coming home with me tonight.”  I am sick and tired of being fat. I am tired of seeing cute clothes and knowing that I can’t buy them in my size. I’m tired of buying overpriced “plus” size styles that, even though the designer’s intentions were good, fall far below the style mark of the smaller sizes. I’m tired of going out with my thin friends and feeling overlooked. I’m tired of heavy boobs that need unflattering bras, chubby knees, and thighs that not only meet, but overlap, and could hold a 2-liter bottle of pop between them snuggly.   I’m not saying that I don’t have the desire to be healthy too; and I absolutely look forward to the day when I could possibly stop taking medications for various ailments that my weight contributes to. I’m just saying that it’s not a huge motivator for me. I see all the commercials about diabetes and heart disease and I know it’s a possibility, that I could be next, but it doesn’t scare me to the gym. However, show me the camera panning on random fat people walking down the street during another “Obesity Epidemic” news story, and I’m suddenly upright with attention, regretting the bag of chips I just ate, and praying I wasn’t in the neighborhood when that clip was shot. So yeah. I’m so vain. But it’s motivating me into action. Finally. Welcome to the Vanity Show!