Monday, July 2, 2012

Does This Fish Make Me Look Fat?

I feel like lately I have been teetering on the fence between super-awesome and not-too-awesome.  It's been a bit of a rough eight months since I lost my job and my father in the same week last October. The last few months have been insightful, painful, filled with joy & sadness, unpredictable, freeing and completely weighty.  And I can experience all of this in one single day sometimes.

In between sending out resumes & being rejected and tending to my house & kids properly, I have fancied myself a creative type.  Working on quilts, baking bread and scones (which, side note, are pretty awesome), holding a make-shift daycamp in my house, writing, and adding to the many screenplays in my head (oddly, no studio has plucked them from my head and brought them to the big screen yet).  While we are getting desperate for another income, I have stayed quite strong throughout and am proud that I have found some fulfillment and creativity during this time.  And then my fat has to come in and ruin everything.


A larger fish would have been more slimming.
I was a skinny kid.  Developed early, so I was a pretty curvy teen-ager and 20 year old.  In my early twenties, I started gaining some weight.  I can recall my parents commenting on my weight gain when I had reached 137 pounds (if I could get within 20 pounds of that now, I'd be ecstatic).  And now I'm easily 50-60 pounds overweight.  I've now been heavy for around 20 years (if we want to count my obesity at 137 pounds) and it's been a struggle to get it under control most of the time.  The prescription I am on contributes to some weight gain, but I'm pretty sure my lack of exercise does too.

I think what gets my goat the most about being overweight is that it seems to overshadow many of the positive turns I've taken.  Having great kids, an incredible husband, awesome friends, a sense of humor, and the ability to stay strong in some intense times is somehow dimished by my size 16 jeans. 

I really want to wax on about the unfairness of it all, but I am going to continue on with the joyfulness I feel now.  I will still unabashedly go fishing in my flowerly, frilly swim suit with my kids.  And I will catch teeny tiny fish that make me appear even larger than I am.  But I will try (again) this summer to get the weight down.  I don't want my appearance to outweigh (literally!) anything else I do.  Brad wants me to write down my current weight and post it on the wall to track my weight loss, but I didn't want to share that with him.  I thought posting a picture of me in a swim suit on my blog made more sense.  So...in a few months, I will post another picture to show any changes in my shape and how I accomplished it.  Or I'll get a bigger fish.






1 comment:

  1. Man did this post ring true to me. My battle hasn't been quite as long but the fertility treatments 5-6 yrs ago just packed on the pounds coupled with a job change and I nearly died when I saw my moms face when she first saw me after a few months. Cried and cried. Now I'm just dealing with what I've been dealt and making the lifestyle changes to battle it. I've never had a junk food issue and tend to eat really clean but my portions got out of hand due to a bit of depression. Now I'm nearly out from the birth of my baby and I've got to up my exercise, blech! You not in this boat alone!!

    ReplyDelete