What I Learned from the Fat Years
Chapter Five: The Tyranny of the Body
When I was a young girl, and wasn't yet insulin resistant,
diets still worked for me. When my clothes got too tight, I
ate less and I lost weight. It wasn't easy and it was painful,
but at least it worked. In fact, I would even diet ahead of
time, in the months before bathing suit season or when
Thanksgiving was coming up on the calendar.
When my husband was still in his twenties, he could slim
down simply by giving up desserts for two weeks. I was
incredibly jealous of him, because I was getting to the point
where those extra pounds were increasingly hard to budge. I
could no longer assume I would be able to lose them when I
wanted to.
Diet doctors call this the weight plateaus we reach "set
points," and tell us that exercise is one key to budging them
because it increases our metabolic rate. In other words, if we
can get our engines running faster, we will use up more fuel
and drop those pounds.
But it's not as easy as it sounds. Riding a stationary bike
while watching morning TV made me realize how bad daytime
television really is, but it didn't do a darn thing for the
size of my thighs. Buying one of those complex home exercise
contraptions that you see advertised on late night cable TV
has made me realize how annoying those things can be to
dust. And you will need to dust them, because it's so painful
to use them that you'll be bedridden after several attempts.
I've come to the conclusion that I would have to jump rope
for about 6 hours a day to lose weight on an exercise regimen
alone. Since most of us hold down desk jobs, this would
severely interfere with making a living. If a higher aerobic
rate was necessary for losing weight, the only people who
could successfully diet would be aerobics instructors, and
they're all thin already.
When I was still fat, I remember sitting in a crowd of ladies
when we were all asked three questions: How many of us
visited the gym regularly, how many of us had personal
trainers and how many participated regularly in a sport? I was
the fattest person there, but I was the only one who raised
my hand all three times (I also raised it one time when I was
in another sort of crowd and we were asked if anyone in the
room had ever read a mystery novel where the butler actually
did it).
If I hit the health club as often as I should, I'd never have
time to read a book, go to a concert, or see a movie. My
body might shrink, but so would my brain.
A few years ago, only vigorous, daily exercise was considered
worthwhile. You had to get your heart rate up to a specific
rate and keep it there for a certain amount of time, otherwise
you might as well forget it. Some people even wore a
monitoring device when they used the stair step machine so
they could tell when they'd reached their optimum heart
rates. Now, after we've gone through all that trouble and the
expense of joining a gym, the experts have reversed
themselves yet again and decided that a brisk walk several
times a week will do the trick.
I lived in New York City when the mania for aerobic exercise
was at its height. People who couldn't afford apartments
were paying hundreds of dollars a month to join health clubs.
There were articles in the newspaper about whether
homeless people should be allowed to buy health club
memberships. In contrast to this, in many parts of the
country, people have to hop in their automobiles to go out
and purchase a single can of beer.
When I lived in San Antonio, most of the neighborhoods didn't
even have sidewalks, because nobody walked anywhere,
while in New York, you walked for miles every day in the
course of daily life, usually carrying a briefcase,
groceries and dry cleaning. Even if you took public
transportation, you had to walk a considerable distance to
get to a bus or subway stop. You usually had to walk a few
blocks even to hail a cab, and they never wanted to drop you
off at your door, since it was always on a one-way street
going the wrong way, there was too much traffic, etc. It's a
naturally aerobic environment.
In spite of this, I never met people who drove themselves
physically harder than New Yorkers. They jogged to the bus
stop and managed to jump on the bus just before it pulled
away from the curb, standing up all the way because the
seats were full. They had to use their calf and thigh muscles
like "sea legs" to stay upright as the bus moved through
traffic, as if they were sailors on a swaying deck. When they
reached their stop, they jumped off and jogged another two
blocks to the gym so as not to be late for their weight
training class. After the class, they spent an hour on the
stair-step machine, then maybe did a session with their
private trainer. They then went home to find the elevator
broken, so they had to walk up five flights of stairs to their
apartment.
I can't laugh at them too much because I've done this
myself. I even had a personal trainer who came to our
apartment for a few months. She would help us move the
couch and coffee table aside, then put us through our paces
right there on the living room rug.
I'm past the aerobics stage by now. I did those darn things
for 20 years, and I still have floppy inner thighs. I finally
said, "Enough!" I'm too old to spend a lot of time doing things
I hate. Some unpleasant things are unavoidable, like grocery
shopping and shaving your legs. Anything else is out.
Every once in awhile I decide that what I need to find is an
aerobic sport I really enjoy. The problem is, I'm not
athletic. I was the kid who claimed to have my period all the
time so I didn't have to put on a gym suit and play dodge
ball. I don't really understand how people can actually enjoy
activities like mountain climbing and kayaking.
I decided to take up tennis once, because it seemed to be a
sport that is played in so many sunny resorts. If so many
other people do it, I rationalized, I can learn to do it
too, and if so many people enjoy it, there must be something
fun about it. I even managed to find an extremely patient
teacher by stressing that I was really, no kidding, a beginner.
I pictured myself in tennis whites, stretching for the ball
under blue skies, somewhere in the Caribbean. Reality turned
out to be different. In New York, it's either to cold, too
hot or too polluted to play outdoors, so tennis is played in
giant "bubbles" that are held up by hot air machines. Most of
them are on the roofs of buildings, because real estate is so
valuable that every inch of available space is used for
something. In order to play tennis, you have the disorienting
experience of clutching your tennis racket while riding in an
elevator car with people in business suits.
There's what's probably an urban legend about the time one
of these tennis bubbles deflated while people were playing.
Firemen had to come and rescue everyone by cutting them
out of the bubble. They were able to find them because the
players all held up their racquets up in order to keep the
ceiling off their heads.
I remember my first lesson well. I swung at the ball and it
immediately disappeared. At first I thought I'd hit the tennis
version of a home run. I couldn't figure out where the ball
went, and neither could my teacher, until we both noticed
that it was stuck in the little "v" between the handle and
stringed section of my tennis racquet. The pro said there was
no way in the world I could have managed that if I'd been
trying to do it on purpose. It was the last ball I made contact
with for the rest of the lesson.
Next I decided the perfect exercise must be swimming. There
are no shin splints or blisters involved, because you are
gently cradled in water. However, swimming pools are rare in
big cities and when you do find a pool at a health club with a
membership you can afford, they put so much chlorine in it
that it turns your hair green. Plus there's so much to do
before and after that a swim can take up your whole day.
You've got to change clothes, shower before you go in the
pool, shower after you go in the pool, dry off, figure out what
to do with your wet bathing suit and blow dry your hair.
I once had a girlfriend with a green card, whose native
language was Spanish. She had an ID that worked in bars
because it had a fake birthday on it. It was a swim club
membership card from her native country and she was always
terrified that some bouncer was going to be Spanish-
speaking, because it said things like, "Be sure to wash your
private parts before going in the pool."
Swimming is great exercise if you can do it at home, and I did
have a pool at one time. With your own pool, you can even
swim in the nude, which is the ultimate luxury, like being a
dolphin. You might have to plant trees around your yard or
sneak into the water at night in order to do this, but it's
worth it.
The trouble with owning a pool is upkeep, which is why so
many people's pools look kind of green and cloudy. You've got
to find some sort of germ-killing agent to put in it that
doesn't kill you too. But before all that, you've got to
fill it with water.
I always just assumed you just turned the hose on and
waited a few days, but in most places, you can't do that. In
the city, your water bill would be astronomical and in the
country, you?ll burn out your well pump. I was devastated to
discover that we had to buy water. We tried to save money
by buying it from a local man who had bought a used pumper
truck from the volunteer fire department. He took the water
from a stream, but the pumper was rusty inside, so the water
had all kinds of weird-looking stuff in it. We had to clean the
water after the pool was filled, and spent a whole week
sucking out gunk and replacing the filters.
A pool is like a boat, it's for people who like to putter. You
have to hit the pool supplies shop for exotic chemicals at
least twice a month. We would dip a jar into the pool to get a
water sample, as if we were giving the swimming pool a drug
test, then take it to the pool shop to have it analyzed and
have the correct chemicals prescribed.
You can always swim in a lake, if you can find one nearby,
except that these days it's likely to be polluted. If you see
dead fish floating belly up, don't go in. And if your husband
unreels his fishing rod and catches a three-eyed pike, then
definitely don't go in.
You can swim in the ocean, if you can manage not to get
thrown back on shore by the waves. I've never managed
that. The best way to deal with the ocean is to sit inside an
inner tube and ride the waves, but there is no way this could
be called aerobic.
The next time you go on vacation or a business trip, stay at
a hotel with a nice pool so you can swim there. Except then
you'll have to reveal how you look in a bathing suit to all the
businessmen who are sitting around the pool talking on their
cell phones, and you may have to go up and down the
elevator with them as well.
The biggest problem with swimming is that you have to go
through the hell of buying a bathing suit. No matter how
much weight you?ve lost, if you're over 40, this is an
ordeal. I own a suit which I bought from a catalog that brags
about having practical bathing suits and it actually looks OK. I
rarely go swimming, so hopefully it will never wear out and I
will never gave to go through the trauma of buying another
one.
However, I must admit that throwing away my old lady
skirted swimsuit was one of the high points of my dieting
career. After the kind of effort that usually goes into major
CEO deals, I had finally found a swimsuit that looked good on
my overweight body (it was black, of course). So did I use it
to go swimming? Never! I never wore it because I was afraid
I'd never be able to find a replacement for it.
Trying on bathing suits in front of a three-way mirror in a
department store dressing room is one of the most humiliating
experiences in a woman's life. The synthetic fibers of the
average swimsuit clutch at your torso and reveal every bulge,
while your cellulite looks green under the fluorescent lights.
Why don't department stores invest in flattering lighting for
their dressing rooms? You can't even tell if the colors you're
trying on flatter your complexion, since everyone's skin looks
takes on a greenish cast under fluorescent lights.
Even though I'm no longer fat, I come out of the store after
trying on swimsuits thinking that I didn't know I looked quite
so bad. I can look nice in a dress, especially if it's low cut
and I'm leaning over a restaurant table in the glow of
candlelight, but in a swimsuit, I haven't got a chance. The
Victorians were right when they decided they weren't decent.
In those days, you not only changed in a little shack, you
swam in it too.
If you did venture out of the shack, the bathing costume you
wore had a long skirt, stockings, shoes, gloves and even a
little hat. This is more than most women wear to a cocktail
party these days.
We moved from this to the bikini in a hundred years, and I'm
not sure this represents progress. The bikini body is an ideal
that most women over 13 can't hope to attain. No woman
who has ever given birth can get into one, making it a
strange sort of statement against motherhood.
Even those string bean models in fashion magazines have to
suck in their guts in order to be photographed in one. If you
look closely, you can tell.
Once we rented a beach house for a week on an exotic
French island, and the thing I particularly liked about the
place was that the female owner had framed a tiny bikini
bathing suit and hung it on the wall. This was obviously
something she wore years ago and could no longer get into,
and hanging it on the wall like a work of art was a wonderfully
ironic statement. I never met her, but I know I'd like her.
I actually think the worst problem with bathing suits has to
do with the leg holes. They no longer make suits with those
little skirts attached (These are even hard for fat ladies to
find), so you have to get what is known as a "wax job" so
that your public hair doesn?t stick out and ruin the whole
effect.
I don't know why pubic hair isn't considered sexy, but it's
not, so out comes the razor. Except this is not an area that
takes well to being shaved. My legs complain enough and
they should be used to it by now, but shaving my pubes
results in lumps and bumps resulting in a kind of leprosy
effect.
I once experienced this effect, but on my lower legs, when I
tried to enter a country club pool after being treated for
chigger bites. It turns out that the only way to get rid of
chiggers, that burrow into your skin, is to suffocate them
with clear nail polish. After dabbing this all over my lower
extremities, I looked as if I had a horrible skin disease, so
when I entered the pool, everyone else in it immediately leapt
out of it.
As of this writing, I've never had a bikini wax. It would make
me nervous to present my private parts to another woman to
be waxed, but I'm sure I'll do it someday. It's bad enough to
present your feet to someone else for a pedicure! And I can't
imagine that any woman would be able to achieve the
contortions necessary to use wax on herself unless she was
still lithe enough to bite her toenails.
Social grooming is natural for primates; chimps are always
picking bugs off each other. Still, I don't think I could ask
anyone except my husband to do something that intimate to
my body, and I don't think he?d ever get the hang of it. This
is a guy who had to read a book in order to figure out how to
put up a towel rack, so I'm not going to allow him to attack
my private parts with a jar of hot wax.
I finally did find a sport I liked, which was racquet ball. My
husband and I would pull on our sweats, grab our racquets,
and go over to the gym to play several times a week. Walking
down the street, swinging my racket in its special zip-up
case, made me feel for the first time like I was an
authentically athletic person. I would sometimes stop at the
grocery store to pick up a few things on the way home when
I was still sweaty, in order to show off what a great athlete I
was. And I wasn't bad: I even beat my husband most of the
time.
But the ugly truth dawned one day, when the gym we played
at decided to hold a tournament. They matched players at
the same skill level, so that all the games would be fairly
fought. I was at the bottom level, because I hadn't been
playing for very long.
I lost every game I played. I was mostly paired with younger
people who had just taken up the sport, while I had been
playing three times a week for two years. My opponents had
a natural athleticism that seemed completely alien to me.
They somehow knew where the ball would be at all times and
managed to bring their rackets up to hit it, a feat that eluded
me.
After so much humiliation, I assumed my husband had been
letting me win all along. We've been married a long time, so
he has developed some skills in that department. He denied it
vigorously.
I think I was able to beat him because there is a kind of
symbiosis between us. In our relationship, we've learned
when to fight for what we want, and when to give in when
we're neutral. We're experts at wrangling over which movie to
see, what restaurant to go to or what kind of vacation to
take. Everything we do seems like two halves aiming to
somehow fit together to form a whole, so it made a sort of
cosmic sense that I would win about half the time at
racquetball.
Racquetball ended for us because of our knees. I wish
doctors would warn you about your knees when you
approach middle age, the same way they're constantly going
on about cholesterol. I remember a time when I actually took
my knees for granted! I never avoided taking the stairs or
squatting down to pull weeds.
We each have a knee that gives us trouble, and when we
play racquetball, our knees give us a lot of trouble. We
realized that it wasn't possible to play racquetball and
continue to use our knees in everyday life, so racquetball had
to go.
Now we walk. We don't walk if it's too cold or hot or rainy,
but we do get out for an hour or more almost every day.
When we lived in the suburbs, there were few sidewalks, so
we had to walk in the street and jump onto someone's lawn
quickly when an SUV came careening around the corner. One
time some nasty teens shot paintballs at us. Another time,
kids drove up in a truck and dumped a bucket of water on us.
My husband said I should be thankful it was only water,
because in his day it would have been something much
worse. It was as if the teenagers in that benighted 'burb
couldn't fathom the idea of adults taking some healthy
exercise.
During our walks, we share our memories and hopes for the
future. I've laid down some ground rules: The conversation
has to be pleasant. Walks are not only good for losing weight,
they can also leave you too tired to worry.
Researchers have recently discovered that jogging activates
the "fight or flight" hormones in your body, increasing tension
and elevating blood pressure. This is why jogging can actually
bring on heart disease, which is the very thing joggers are
trying to run away from.
Walking does the opposite, it causes the body to produce
more serotonin, which is the body's natural tranquilizer. This
what we get when we take Prozac, eat chocolate, or fall in
love. It's good for the blood pressure.
I've discovered an easy way to get exercise. I call it "pace
walking." When I find myself waiting, for instance, in stores
or in doctor's offices, I don't sit down, I take a walk. This
often happens when my husband is busy doing something
that doesn't interest me, like buying computer equipment,
negotiating a car lease or getting something repaired. I've
discovered that instead of sitting down during your wait, you
can "pace walk." You can walk back and forth in the store
aisles or execute nice big ovals through waiting room, you
can walk back and forth on the sidewalk outside. If anyone
asks what you're doing, tell them you're getting your
exercise. While I'm sometimes asked by store employees if
they can help me, when I explain that I'm doing laps, I've
never met anyone who didn't completely understand. It helps
to wear your sneakers everywhere, or at least carry them
with you, so you'll always be ready to pace walk.
Doctors now say that walking in small segments works as well
as prolonged exercise, but there's nothing as restful and
pleasant as a nice long walk. A few years ago, after some
business set-backs, we found ourselves back in my husband's
home town. We had to start life all over again in our mid-50's,
and this gave us a good reason to walk off our frustrations in
our new neighborhood while gazing at the sunset. That's a
catharsis you can't get on a treadmill.
When we lived in Brooklyn, people talked about how safe it
was to live in "Mafia neighborhoods," because everyone
always looked out for everyone else. Our neighborhood in
Texas was fille with old houses that had front porches. In the
days before air conditioning, when people used to sit out on
their porches at night, they feasted their snoopy eyes on
everyone else's business and kept the area safe from
intruders. If everyone got their exercise by walking around
their neighborhoods, it would produce the same results today.
Walking helps you to get to know your neighbors, if only by
sight, during the rare times they are out in their yards
instead of stuck out on the highway in a traffic jam or sitting
in front of the TV with a cold beer. It brings us mentally back
to a slower past, when walking was one of the major ways of
getting places.
If more people walked, maybe zoning boards would become
more flexible so we'd have places to walk to, like shopping
districts or parks. Right now, suburbia is strictly zoned into
commercial and non-commercial areas in most places, but it's
the mixture of the two that makes walking so rewarding.
That's why it's such a joy to walk in Europe, where you can
look in shop windows or stop to watch people playing with
their dogs in the park. Most American walkers only get to see
fences and closed garage doors. Most suburban
neighborhoods in the US are enclaves that are entered from a
busy highway, but at least we can still walk down those
streets and civilize them that way.
Walking is a great way to feel like you're part of a place.
Most of us drive home after work, fighting our way through
the traffic and running a few errands on the way, only to
confront loud cries of "What?s for dinner?" when we finally
arrive. After the dishes are done, we have other household
chores to do and maybe some work we've brought home from
the office. We go from our workplaces to our living rooms
without much thought about what's in between.
I remember visiting an old, walled city in Italy years ago. We
made the mistake of trying to drive our rental car to our hotel
during the hour every the evening when everyone leaves
their houses en masse and strolls through the streets. It isn't
anything official, it's just what everyone there has always
done at 5 p.m. every day. There were so many people in the
streets that we had to inch our car around them.
Imagine if that many people took to the streets every
evening in suburban America: What a different world it would
be. We could even march for peace at the same time.
Now that I'm no longer fat, I realize that during the fat years,
I had the wrong way of thinking about things. I would circle
the parking lot four times in order to find a space near the
door, when it's much healthier to walk. I would become
impatient when the elevator was slow, instead of being glad
to have a change for a nice aerobic workout on the stairs. I
would find excuses not to move or bend over, when the truth
is, these are God-give opportunities to move your body.
Aerobics are nothing but movements that mimic the
movements of life, and we go to the gym and sweat through
them because we're not doing enough of them in our
everyday lives. Now, whenever I have to wait, I
think, "Great, I can get some pace walking done." Whenever I
have a chore to do, I try to figure out how to do it using my
body to best advantage. Spots on the rug? Scrubbing them is
great for the upper arms. Weeds in the garden? Squatting
and standing up again is a great workout.
I remember hearing the phrase, "The whole is greater than
the sum of its parts" and wondering what the heck it meant. I
still haven't figured it out, but I do know that women tend to
worry about various parts of their bodies, rather than thinking
of ourselves as whole individuals. We decide that we like our
knees but hate our upper arms, or can't stand our inner
thighs but are happy with our rear ends, etc. Only in
moments of utter self-loathing, do we decide that we hate
everything about our bodies.
Let's start from the top. I used to have a "mushy" chin line,
the kind that made a slow, curving descent into my neck
instead of the sharp right angle I desired. There used to be
famous women who would only have their pictures taken in
profile. I could never be one of these ladies, since I barely
had a profile, but a little plastic surgery fixed the problem.
If you study the models in magazines, you'll notice that they
all have strongly defined chins. There is absolutely no
question about where their chin ends and their neck begins.
When you don't have that kind of bone structure, you tend
to gather fat under your chin and before you know it, you've
grown a second chin, right beneath the first one.
Lots of times we don't even notice it's happening. We tend to
keep our noses up when we look in the mirror to put on
lipstick or mascara, and we rarely catch a glimpse of our own
profiles. It usually takes a really unflattering photo send us
running to the plastic surgeon.
These doctors may not want to admit it, but there are
problems that can't be solved by surgery. Many fat women
find their upper backs have somehow gotten big (not fat and
fleshy, just big). Females grow up wanting to be compared to
delicate dolls rather than NFL fullbacks, so this is hard to
deal with.
And now let's examine one of my least favorite body parts:
the upper arms. I sure wish clothing designers would face up
to the fact that as we get older, our upper arms develop a
permanent jiggle, no matter how much we exercise them, and
we do not want to wear sleeveless clothes, even when they
come with cute little jackets to wear over them. If we're
having hot flashes, we may want to take those jackets off,
and we don't want anyone discovering what has become of
our upper arms.
Another problem that comes along at middle age is "butt
drop." Since it occurs out of sight, most women haven't
noticed they have it.
Basically, it comes down to this: your rear end deflates. Your
perky buttocks, which always looked like two cats fighting in
a bag when you walked down the street, have now become
totally flat. The fat just seems to give up and migrate
someplace else, usually around front to your stomach. My
mother-in-law wasn't always wise, but one thing she said
was true: "When you get older, everything moves to the
front."
I first began to notice this problem when I found that I had
trouble sitting on hard chairs for long periods of time. I
attributed this to the boring speeches I was listening to, but
then I realized it had to do with the fact that my rear end
was gone. The old familiar cushion just wasn't there anymore.
I began straining to look at my behind in the full-length
mirror. It was a hard territory to survey, until I remembered
to check it the next time I was near a 3-way mirror in a
department store dressing room.
That's when I saw it (or rather, I didn't). It was gone.
I began obsessively checking out the state of other women's
rear ends to see if the same thing had happened to them. I
remember riding in the back of a tour bus once, with a group
of women who were all over 40 and wearing pants. As I
trailed off the bus behind them, I checked them all out and
every single one of them was afflicted with butt drop. Their
pants were flat as a pancake in back.
It's not an area we're usually obsessed with, because we
have so many other parts of the body to worry about, like
our inner thighs. Also, it seems odd to worry about deflation,
when everything else on our bodies seems to be inflating.
There's a new plastic surgery technique where the doctor
removes fat from places where it's not wanted and injects it
into facial wrinkles. Eventually they may be able to fill
out our rear ends again, but it would probably take so long to
move the fat there from someplace else that we'd expire on
the operating table before the job was done.
If you can have silicone implants put in your breasts in order
to get that "dangling footballs" look that men seem to love,
maybe you can get buttock implants as well. It would make
sitting through our kids' graduations ceremonies on a folding
chair more bearable. The problem is, we have more important
areas we need to invest in, such as getting rid of that turkey
neck.
And how would you recover from the operation? You couldn't
sit up in bed and watch daytime TV or read romance novels,
which is the main reason to have elective surgery in the first
place. Would you have to lie in bed on your stomach for 2
weeks? Just how much are we willing to suffer for beauty,
anyway?
This is an important question for me, because I find that as I
get older, I wear mainly pants, since they eliminate with the
dreaded pantyhose problem. If you're tired of fighting with
those stretchy torture devices, you'll find yourself reaching
for your pants every time.
Second, they disguise those annoying little purplish-blue
patches that older women get on their legs. Most of us look
like we've been in a paintball war, and the enemy was using
purple.
Pants can also be worn with more comfortable shoes. You
can even get away with wearing socks and sneakers.
Now we come to the thighs. Mom was right, always keep
them firmly pressed together. She had another scenario in
mind, as I discovered the first time I found myself in the back
seat of a car with a sweating, groping boyfriend, but the
advice was sound, all the same. The backs of the thighs?
that's where that evil cellulite lurks. Cellulite seems to
exist mostly in France, where the women are all terribly thin.
It also didn't exist 20 years ago. The French seem to believe
you can scrub it away, if you pay enough for special creams
and lotions.
I do remember one time when I was thankful for the
existence of cellulite. I was at a baseball game with another
fairly round friend and our husbands and we both noticed a
young woman nearby who was flaunting her body in shorts
cut up to there, when she should have been paying attention
to the home runs. We were both worried that our husbands
would also stop paying attention to the home runs soon.
We went to the ladies room to talk it over and what do you
know, in walked Miss short-shorts. She gave us a desultory
glance, then bent over to tie her shoe and I saw it! It wasn't
yet full-blown, it was just sneaking up on her, but it was
plain as day: cellulite. Her thighs were getting all puckery in
back and she didn't even know it.
Fat women have two kinds of legs, either skinny legs or piano
legs. It's surprising how many fat ladies have skinny legs.
I've seen fat women with skinny legs wearing loose shirts
over shorts, but I don't think this fools anyone.
Piano legs present the opposite sort of problem. Even non-fat
women often have them. This is the reason that Hillary
Rodham Clinton did all her Senate campaigning in black
pantsuits.
Now we've finally made it down to the ankles. Can you circle
your ankle with your thumb and index finger and have them
touch? If not, you're probably big boned.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially since you're
too old to wear ankle bracelets any way. And you may not
have realized this, but it's mostly the skinny little old ladies
who become all stooped over from osteoporosis. Fat ladies
develop stronger bones because they've gotten thicker after
carrying all that weight for so many years. If you walk or do
other weight-bearing exercise, they strengthen even more.
Don't let anyone tell you there's nothing good about being fat.
Now your toes: nothing can be done about them. You either
have good toes, or you don't. I personally refuse to let
anyone look at my toes. In the summer, I wear the kind of
sandals that reveal as little as possible.
My toes are thankless little nuisances. They don't like nail
polish, and slough it off about an hour after a pedicure. They
have hair on them, so I actually have to shave my toes as
well as my legs. A few years ago, I had to get ingrown
toenails fixed on both my big toes, so now both nails are odd
trapezoidal shapes that look as if they're about to fly off my
feet.
Anyone who's determined to see my toes will have to either
shower with me or sleep with me, and then I hope he'll be too
busy to notice.
Related Entries:
11-Oct-2005: What I Learned From the Fat Years, Chapter Eight: The Ultimate Diet
10-Oct-2005: What I Learned from the Fat Years, Chapter Seven: The History of Fatness
09-Oct-2005: What I Learned from the Fat Years, Chapter Six: Clothes
07-Oct-2005: What I Learned From the Fat Years, Chapter Four: Sweets
06-Oct-2005: What I Learned From the Fat Years, Chapter Three: Fear of Food
05-Oct-2005: What I Learned from the Fat Years, Chapter Two: Rapid Gains
04-Oct-2005: What I Learned From the Fat Years, Chapter One: Fatness
