My Fat Realisation

I am allowed to call myself a fat pig. I am allowed to think it, embrace it and hate it all at once.

My fat gut kind of grew on me. It stretched and expanded through four pregnancies, deflated, reacted outwardly with midnight feasts of vegemite on toast.

Did I tell you that there is only one real way to eat vegemite on toast? OK lets quickly span across to the kitchen, this won’t take long then we can get on with talking more about my gut that would inevitably be moulded, sculptured and lean.

I’m standing now in my old open kitchen in an old open house. It brought me much pleasure in the dark of night to clang about in the squeaky timber cupboards to find the cheap old toaster. So I have put my apron on and I am going to tell you the delicious secret to cooking and eating copious amounts of toast with vegemite: 

·      *Toasted bread not too overdone, as soon as it pops you need to burn your fingers and get it on that plate. 

·      *The butter should simultaneously be smothered and melting to every last edge (there is a real art to this). 

·      *The vegemite is the delicate process.  Intricately and modest black smears of vegemite should disperse over the butter, not too much now.

·      *Don’t bother cutting it in half or squares, it will be digested before your mind realises just how many pieces you have aggressively gulped down!

 

 

OK so got side tracked there.  Sorry about that.

 

So the blatant question is: Am I still fat now? No, I don’t think so, but I am still not happy.  Always the bloody way huh? 

Did I reach my goal?  Yes I did.  The numerical weight value we all dread whether it is in kilograms or pounds or stones is one of those things we don’t dare admit to or discuss openly.  It’s a quick cringe as we jump on the scales; we close one eye and hope that somehow that endless cake in the fridge just went straight through us and not on our guts.  Pre-weighing in consisted of me stumbling to the loo to pee or poo to try and make a difference in what the scales had to tell me. 

“Bad news, your still fat darling!” The scales would yell as they clicked and landed onto numbers I will not utter here (we will save those for later shall we? Mwhahahaha).

Or you don’t get on the scales at all, your one of THOSE people who say “I don’t believe in it. It’s just a number; you go by how your clothes feel” even though you’re slowly buying bigger sizes because “they are making clothes smaller these days” you say in your nasally or mumbling voice as you storm out of the clothes shop.    I have no idea why my attention is on you now; I am here to talk about me and then we will get to you.

How did I reach my goal? I get that question all the time.  The next question you will ask me is “What diet did you do?”  “Can you give me your diet plan?” “Can you tell me what exercise I should be doing?” that will come with time.  Stay with me here.  I just ask that you stick it out.  If you have failed at this whole losing weight thing then at least don’t fail at reading this.  What have you got to lose? So your next question is:

Why did I decide that being fat was not for me?  I can answer that for you right now.

 

We all have a sad story.  Each of us can compare notes, confer and judge out of 10 who will win the saddest story. Hold up a trauma scorecard I reckon I score an 8 by all considered accounts. I am THAT person that people say, “Wow how do you go on?” “You’re such a brave person”. Blah, blah, blah not that I am discounting the comments of loved ones and people who know me.  But what do you do?  Give up? I guess some people do.  I have tried to give up many a times.  No I haven’t tried to slash my wrists or gauge my eye out with a spoon, I am talking here just about emotional health or whatever that means. 

So we all have a moment of realization.  My realisation of fatness came at a very trendy outdoor bar.  I had spent a great deal of time getting ready that evening; I wore a gorgeous black sparkling top and skirt with a pair of sexy satin heels. Makeup and hair took forever; my hazel eyes were dressed in a smoky haze with lashes to die for. I was very pleased with how I looked that evening.

As my sexy satin heels hit the polished timber floors I focused on my careful meander to the open-air bar via sleek lines of illuminated sunken pools. I took my concentration from my awkward walk in heels and smiled through fairy lit trees where lanterns hung from branches in the balmy warmth of the Australian tropics.  I did fall over later that night, 6^th glass of wine in hand; mouthing wrong slurry words to a song I did not know in front of a band that tried desperately to ignore me.

Anyway back to my awesome entry into this bar.  I remember sitting under those beautiful magically lit trees and met some locals, one of which turned out to be a great conversationalist, can’t remember what we talked about come to think of it.

She was comparing people, who knows why or how many drinks she had already downed.  So she pointed to a lady standing at the bar, my initial glance was this woman at the bar was HUGE, ok heavy set, ‘solid’… I will try to be nice about it.

The great conversationalist sitting next to me then proceeded to compare my size to this heavyset woman at the bar and I was mortified. I checked if her pointing finger was actually on target or if she meant the petite lady standing next to her.  Right at that moment, the band had stopped playing, movement around me ceased, drinks were airborne mid-gulp, the pointing finger relentlessly still on that huge woman. The bullet of reality pierced my self-esteem and my shield of denial into a thousand pieces.  The conversationalist wasn’t so great after all, good at raving on, not so good at seeing my face contort into shock as time and energy around us had not really stood still after all, but within me it truly had for a moment in time.

The conversationalist had no intention of hurting my feelings, nor had she known she had done so.  However I never did find out her name, she became the pivotal stranger that changed my life forever. 

As I took my clothing off that night, probably in a drunken stupor, I remember closing one eye so not to see double and stumbling over the label on my removed skirt. Size 24.  WTF? How did that happen?  I just thought clothing was progressively getting tighter, getting made smaller.

That night, I followed the labels instructions and hung myself out to drip dry.  I came to the realisation that I was fat, that I needed to change otherwise I would get premature illnesses and my body would eventually buckle under the weight, in order to fight harder to stay alive.  So what?  “We have to die sometime”, I can hear you say, oh stop you! Ruining my rant ;)  “Wouldn’t it be better to die young enjoying life?”  How do you enjoy life with your family if you can’t run around after them without your chest tightening, your throat dry and gasping for air?  The people who love you could have spent way more time with you if you had just looked after yourself. Don’t make me get out the stick.

Some people don’t get a choice at all.

8 months prior to that pivotal night with the conversationalist, I was delivering morphine via an infusion to my almost 4-year-old son.  He was cheyne stoking, or in non-medical words had a ‘death rattle’.  It’s the rattle some people get when death is imminent.  It doesn’t cause any pain; it’s just a part of the dying process for some. He was at home, with his older siblings, his family, the local catholic principal prayed over him, our friend and funeral director laughing and joking in the background with my husband, the doctor sat in the old open kitchen drawing up more morphine while she made soothing conversation with extended relatives and the community nurse could be heard from one of the backrooms helping my daughter stick stickers and draw bright coloured rainbows. My son died the next morning, at 9am. Incurable and aggressive brain stem tumour diagnosed only 4 months before in May 2009.

Life stopped. Numbness crept up on me silently and the heavy blanket relentlessly suffocated any joy.  Weight flew further out of my control, food went in, wine went in and nothing went out.

Following many months of:

·      Brutal drinking

·      A broken nose

·      A number of weeks off work and

·      A house move to an awesome resort

I finally woke up to myself after meeting the conversationalist.  I suppose I did have a hangover that needed some tender loving care first of all, but after that I donned my fat swim pants and headed for the complex lap pool that nestled itself nicely between beautiful coconut palms alongside a swanky gym. 

It’s time to bring out the big guns, the tools that helped me get started and not to give up..