The Obese Experience: Are You ReallyFat? Or Have You Ever Been ReallyFat? Well, I Have . . . .

It's not a nice word, is it? Defined as "grossly fat or overweight." It conjures up pictures of immense, lumpish men sitting on the beach, looking like grounded dirigibles. It's a word that invites scorn from skinny people.

And it's not a word I'd ever applied to myself . . . until recently. Of course before recently I knew that I needed to lose some fat. But when I looked in the mirror, I didn't see a gross, fat slob. I sucked my gut in a bit and thought that I didn't look all that bad. Nothing that couldn't be dealt with. But on one of my trips to the doctor the weigh in said I was over 270 pounds, and I knew that that couldn't be good. So I looked into it. And found that my "ideal healthy weight" was160 pounds, and the recommended weight range for my height was between 143 and 178 pounds.  As in one hundred pounds less than what I weighed, give or take a bit. And yes, that hurt. And yes, that seemed very dire.

And that is when I ran smack into the dreaded word: according to all of the versions of the ideal body weight calculator that I could find, I was obese. Not overweight. Not even fat. Obese. It was a humbling moment.

I wish I could say that I got right to work on it, but the truth is that I thought about it, obsessed about it, got depressed about it, and then resigned myself to it and forgot about it.

But then I got that stomach flu and threw up for a day and couldn't eat for another, and whilst pondering the emptiness of my stomach and my total lack of hunger, I thought, "Maybe this would be a good time to capitalize on the shrunken state of my stomach."

So ten weeks later I'm 30 pounds lighter, and I am actually starting to feel hopeful. Right now my goal is just to make it to the overweight category, which means 215 pounds. Which is "only" 15 pounds away. Which seems do-able. *

And after that . . . who knows? Just doing the best that I can do right now.



* And seems even more do-able at the moment. I finished my exercises for today (the whole routine now takes 50 minutes), took a shower, and stepped on the scale to get a naked weight. Here's what I saw:

So at least for a moment today * I was only 11.8 pounds away from not being "obese." Believe it or not, the idea of making it to "overweight" is extremely exciting.

* I've been at this weigh-in business long enough to know that hitting a weight one time doesn't make it real. But it's still a good sign, ennit?