Week Three: Fat People Are Harder to Kidnap

Taking a sip of her lemonade from a mall kiosk, she glanced at the many people strolling by. So many people... so many attitudes and styles... so many different body types... so many overweight individuals... plain, cotton knits and patterned polyesters alike clinging tightly to every curve, showing every bulge and highlighting each fold of fat.

Puffy arms and dimpled elbows protruding from sleeves too small to contain them. Rotund knees overshadowed by excess heaviness topped by shorts which constantly rode up the legs. Plump no-longer-waist lines overflowing the desperate attempt of pants' waistbands to contain.

How could any self-respecting person display themselves in public when they looked like that?! Didn't they know how sloppy their appearance was? Didn't they care at all?

Well, at least she would never look like that... never in a million years!

And yet, here it is but a few years later and I am coming to grips with that very mindset I once held.

How is it that morbidly obese people can go out in public looking the way they do? I know now. How can one get to such an alarming amount of extra weight? I know now. Do the overweight care how their clothing doesn't fit? I know now they do.

In less than one year, I came to learn just how it is that a self-respecting human being can accumulate so much excess weight, how they can go out in public wearing ill-fitting clothing, and the utter secret shame that accompanies such a state of being.

I am always shocked every time I see my reflection in a mirror. In my mind's eye, I am a little overweight, but not that bad. Clothing is a little tight in some places, but it covers all the undesirable bulges. Anything I can't see behind me is never thought of - i.e., my derriere is not THAT big. Of course, not having a full-length mirror for two years only aids and abets the existence of this mentally-smaller state of being.

About a year ago while in my car, I had turned around to deal with something in the back seat. As I redirected my gaze to the front of the car, I glanced over my still-twisted body. There was a large pile of black cloth tucked next to me and I idly wondered where it had come from. It was then, in a truly surreal moment, that I realized that unknown lump of black cloth was ME!!

My most recent (and most sobering) shock occurred this past Friday. The ever-loving companion of my heart had desired that I purchase some article of clothing in which I would feel beautiful. Later that day, I found myself trying on a handful of tops in front of a - you guessed it - full-length mirror.

As a person who has always had a horror of wearing clothing that showed any undesirable bump, lump, or roll of fat, I was shocked to realize that I was judging the tops, not on the basis of whether they completely masked my various lumps, but on which one looked less tight and thereby, passable.

I had accepted all my unnecessary bulges and rolls as a norm and had given up on the idea that some item of clothing existed which would veil them all (unless I were to take up wearing bedsheets). In that moment, beholding the mass of drooping skin, dimples, and fat rolls reflected so coldly in the mirror before me, I realized I had become one of the generic obese people with ill-fitting clothing I had so often observed and pitied.

I now no longer wonder how people get to this state of excess or how they can live weighing that much or how they can appear in public looking like that... I am living it.

Hopefully, the difference between me and that generic obese person is what I am DOING about the situation. I am not a victim and this state of being CAN and MUST be changed.