Don’t Cry, I’m Fat.

I’m fat. There’s no other way to say it and I’m not really big on sugar coating things, so there you go. I’m fat.

I’ve got rolls that would make a bakery jealous. I’ve got curves in all the right places and a lot of the wrong ones. Baby’s got back and some front. My arm flab is envied by flying squirrels everywhere. I. Am. Fat.

I’m not just fat in body; I’m fat in personality, too.

What I mean by that is even if I lost enough weight for society to deem me worthy (and that’s really never going to happen since I have these things called hips and shoulders and damned if BMI doesn’t account for that sort of thing), I would still have a big personality. I take up space. Give me room and get out of my way. Sometimes I think I need a bigger body just to contain this personality. Try to cram all of this into a skinny girl and it’s either going to overflow or bloat the body.

But back to being fat.

There’s some negative assumptions about my fat self that I’d like to correct. First of all, I don’t eat all the time. In fact, I actually have some troubles eating. Friends tease me about the fact that I can’t eat a lot at one time. One of my buddies pointed out once that his ten year old nephew ate more than I did. And it’s true. It’s like the ultimate joke on the fat girl: I’m fat, but can’t eat a lot. Go figure.

I don’t just eat junk. To be honest, lunches are probably the place that I slack the most on healthy eating, but dinner is a different story. I cook my own meals. I try to make them as fresh as possible. I look for ways to incorporate fruits and vegetables into my meals. I make that effort. I don’t eat a lot of fast food. Being broke helps, but even now that I have money, I’m still treating it as an occasional treat and not a go to staple. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth (I go through phases) and I don’t keep much in the way of salty snacks in my house because that’s the sort of thing I’m prone to binge on. I try to keep up the quality of the food I eat.

I don’t sit around all the time. I exercise. I try for five days a week, at least twenty mintues a day. My routine is currently in the process of being adjusted as I get used to working full time again. So far I’m just doing yoga and pilates, but I plan to work my previous workouts back into the mix: cardio kickboxing, belly dance, Latin dance, Brazillian dance, hip hop, and sculpting. Yeah, I like to dance and kick ass. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m not a slob. I may be fat, but I like the way I look for the most part. I like to dress this body that I have right now. I’ve been broke for too long and haven’t had the opportunity to invest in some new clothes, but believe me, that’s on my current to do list. I like to look good. I have style and I like to express it. It’s a struggle to find good looking clothes for my size because people are under this mistaken impression that fat people need to wear muumuus and while I’m not putting down muumuus, they’re just not for me.

Also, I’m bathe on a regular basis. Maybe I get a little sweatier during my workouts or maybe during hot days, but I can assure you, I don’t smell. I use this stuff called deodorant. Skinny people don’t have a corner on that market.

I know it offends a lot of people, but I’m okay being fat. They think that by saying that I’m giving up or choosing to be unhealthy. I’m not. I’m always looking to improve my health and if I do have a problem, my weight is probably going to be low on the cause list. Not getting regular check-ups, putting off going to the doctor, smoking for 16 years, they’ll be more likely to cause me problems than my weight.

And giving up? Please. I’m not giving up anything. Not my food and not my looks. Just because I don’t fit the norm and nobody’s going to be rushing to put me on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean I’ve given up. It means I’m rocking what I’ve got and doing it a little harder than you’re comfortable with, that’s all.

I don’t know what I weigh right now. The scale is broken (that joke just writes itself, really). I know at one point I lost forty pounds and I can say with some certainty that due to a variety of setbacks that I gained most, if not all of it back. And I think that maybe lately, I’ve lost a little of it. I’m not sure. I’ll know for sure when my pants start fitting better. That’s how I gauge my weight. How my clothes fit.

Of course, when my clothes start fitting a little big my first thought is always that they’re stretching out, not that I’m getting smaller.

I guess that’s because my body might shrink, but my personality still fills out my britches.