I see fat people. They’re everywhere. They don’t even know they’re fat. And the worst part is…I used to be one of them.
A year ago I was surprised to discover I was fat. Middle-age spread had widened me so much I had a coastline instead of a waistline. I knew I was in trouble when I saw a picture of myself and thought, “Whoa! What was Marlon Brando doing in my living room?”
Thus motivated (and following the example of my loving wife who started her diet about two months earlier than mine) I found an on-line diet site and seriously contemplated losing weight. For two solid months I contemplated it. That didn’t seem to be doing any good. So I stopped contemplating and started dieting.
Which, when you think about it, is a weird concept. You don’t start a diet. You STOP eating. I think they call it “starting a diet” because calling nobody would do it if they called it what it really is….starving yourself.
Imagine this conversation at work.
“Hey Bob, you’re looking really good. What are you doing?”
“Starving myself to death.”
See? If Bob had said, “I’m on (insert-diet-fad-of-the-month-here),” he’d sound hip and trendy. When you’re just starving yourself, nobody wants to be your friend.
Including your stomach.
For the first week of the diet my stomach sent frequent emergency signals to my brain.
“Food! We need food down here! Open the mouth, chew, swallow. There’s plenty of food! Send some on down!”
My brain wasn’t moved. It had seen the Marlon Brando picture. So my stomach turned to a new strategy. It started sending out waves of pain.
My brain still wasn’t moved.
My stomach tried making loud and em brassing noises.
My brain held firm. It firmly believed that if we just kept from eating, the weight would melt away. Every morning we stepped on the scale and stared at the dial as any gambler who ever stared at the wheels of a slot-machine.
“Come on 195! Let me see it, baby!”
The scale wasn’t any friendlier than a slot machine…for the first couple of days. Finally the dial slowed a fraction of a second earlier than before and it stopped eight ounces below where it had been the day before.
“Honey! Look!” I shouted. “I lost weight! I’m a half-pound lighter!”
“No you’re not,” she called back. “I just didn’t starch your shirt today.”
After that I weighed myself in my underwear. Dieting suddenly wasn’t hard any more. The sight of my flabby body in the full-length bathroom mirror killed my appetite for most of the day.
After a time (three or four days on the calendar, several months according to my stomach) the scale started to move for real. I was loosing weight!
I felt like running out into the street to tell everyone. Two things stopped me: 1) I wasn’t ready to admit that I was dieting just yet, and 2) I was still in my underwear.
With the pounds sliding off (irregularly, but still sliding off) I was firmly in the first phase of dieting. This is the “I’m loosing weight and no one notices” phase.
The worst part of this phase is the fact that since no one knows you’re dieting, they continue to offer you food – especially at work. “Dough nut?” “Muffin?” “BBQ Ribs?” “Chateau briande with asparagus and hollandaise sauce?”
It’s insane. If I’d eaten everything that was offered to me, I’d have been as big as Marlon Brando. Oh. Yeah.
The “nobody notices” phase continues for approximately twenty pounds. By then I was down a pants size and my sport coats started to look like I’d been playing dress-up in Daddy’s closet. This was when people felt compelled to ask the obvious. “Are you losing weight?”
“Yes,” I said, with just a touch of smugness. “Twenty pounds so far.”
“You don’t say,” they’d answer. I could tell, though, the didn’t believe me. They did stop offering me food, though.
This short phase leads into the “you’re looking good phase”.
“Wow,” people said. “You’re loosing weight, you look good.”
This, of course, means I didn’t look good before, but they were all too polite to say anything. I didn’t mind. I was starting to see just how bad everyone else looked. I was too polite to mention it, though.
Looking back on it, this was the best phase of the diet. I was happy with me. Other people were happy with me. The only problem was linguistic. Let me explain.
When I was gaining weight, I realized one day that putting on my pants required approximately the same effort as squeezing a bowling ball into a sewer pipe. “Hmmm…” I said, “I must be outgrowing these pants.”
On the other hand, when I lost weight I had to staple to pants to my protruding hip bones to keep them up, there was no word to describe what happened. In-growing? Un-growing? You see? I think this happens so rarely that no one ever bothered to invent a word for it.
This brought me to the last phase of the diet. This is the phase where well-meaning meddlers say things like, “You’ve lost enough weight. You need to stop.”
“Umm…I stopped losing weight about two months ago.” (I know this because I keep my daily appointment with the scale only now my reflection is merely fish-belly white instead of being fish-belly white and flabby.)
I can’t worry about that, though. I’m too busy focusing on keeping the weight off so I don’t enter the non-diet phase of “What happened? You used to look so good?”
