If you’ve been following along at home or know me in person,
you’ve already noticed that, over the past few years, I got fat. I started
getting fat when I stopped smoking cigarettes in 2012. I filled the void with
food, which satisfies my ongoing need to put something in my mouth repeatedly.
After the first fifteen pounds, I expressed concern about my weight gain to my
doctor.
“You’d have to gain a hundred
pounds for it to have the same effect on your health as smoking,” he assured
me. He was confident, and pleased that I’d taken an important step towards
better health. The poor fool didn’t realize I’d take it as a challenge.
Seriously, though, I didn’t mean to gain seventy pounds. It just kind of happened. Thirty
pounds ago, I downloaded My Fitness Pal onto my phone and did a really good job
of controlling my weight. Then I started grad school. I still did a pretty good
job during the first semester. Then I met Jim, and started to put on happy fat.
Then I lost my student ID and couldn’t get into the rec center to use the pool,
and things went downhill from there. I was busy, and stressed out, and it turns
out it’s really easy to eat while you’re studying and that eating is almost as
soothing for the nerves as smoking cigarettes. Honestly, when Trump won the
election I thought about taking up smoking again, but my friend Mark talked me
out of it. “There’s no need to be piling on more bad things,” he said, so I
kept not smoking and stayed fat.
But I don’t let it bother me. I figure if I’m going to make
a major change related to my body, it’d better be “accepting it as it is,” because
I wasn’t going to get better looking as I aged, anyway. My body is going to
gradually deteriorate until it dies, and the sooner I accept that, the better
off I am, probably. Mentally, at least.
Besides, I’m the good kind of fat. I’m Rubenesque. That
means I still look good with my clothes off. Now, if I can just learn to pose
for a photo without planting my feet super wide like a sumo wrestler, I’ll be
set.
If there’s one thing that I regret about getting fat, it’s
that it took me so long to realize I was attractive in the first place. I was
thin and super hot from the ages of fourteen to thirty, at least, but I didn’t
actually notice I was super hot until
I was like, twenty-eight. I walked around thinking I was average-looking, at
best, which is sad when you think about all the money I could’ve made as a
stripper. Guess I wasted that opportunity.
Way to go, Thin Me.
On the other hand, it’s in the past. Thin Me had some
obvious self-esteem issues, which Fat Me has addressed by eating them. In all seriousness,
I’m a lot happier as a fat person than I ever was as a thin person. I suffered
from non-diabetic hypoglycemia, the cure for which is apparently gaining about
thirty pounds (I’ve always been an overachiever). For years I was moody and
really unhappy a lot of the time, and I never realized until I got fat how much
of that was linked to my constantly-crashing blood sugar levels because, no
matter how much I ate, I could never seem to gain weight.
Guess I solved that problem.
