A fat person waiting to get out

"Heavy" is my guilty pleasure. I DVR it and watch it in the afternoons while there's no one around but me. "Hoarders" has much the same appeal, but for totally different reasons.

Hoarders I don't understand. If I had my dogs, my photo albums and possibly my new laptop, my house could vanish and I wouldn't be distraught. Even the treasured heirlooms from my grandparents, while they couldn't be replaced, would receive only the appropriate amount of mourning. It's just stuff and, in general, stuff can be replaced. The attachment to everything and inability to throw away even trash is beyond me.

The people on "Heavy" are a different story. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

You see, I'm fat. No, it's not a joke if you know me. In my head, I'm a big person. All 5'6" of me, which weighed in this morning at 128.8 lbs. Even in loose size 6 jeans, my ribs visible through a small knit shirt, I'll never see myself as skinny. I understand the addiction of food and guard against it like an alcoholic working his 12-step program. When I fall off the wagon with a box of Krispy Kreme chocolate covered creme filled donuts, or a Papa John's pizza on occasion, I "pick up a white chip" and start over.

When I watch the morbidly obese people on "Heavy" trying to figure out how their lives got so out of whack and how to get them back, that's a pain I understand. But unlike many of them, I know the source of my food issues. I just can't get rid of them.

In my early school years I was an average and often sickly child. I spent the summer between the third and fourth grades sick with tonsilitis and the measles. Just before school started, I had my tonsils removed. Before that school year ended, I was bigger than everyone in my class but two girls. I couldn't stop my growth or my early puberty, but I hated it, and it couldn't have come at a worse time. Just at the age when I'm forming my own body image, I'm big, even if only for a few years. Add to this that my dad's new name for me was "Tubby" and I often wonder how I avoided becoming anorexic. Probably just because the bathroom was too close to the kitchen and my parents' room for any sneak purging and clean your plate was still the golden rule.

Instead, I languished through middle school and most of high school, outside the social loop. I made my own clothes, cut my own hair, was a total nerd and had few friends. By the sixth grade the only boy who wanted to be my boyfriend was shorter and far heavier than me. It seemed boys were nothing but a painful fantasy. By high school, I was a grade ahead of my peers and knew virtually no one. I was enough of an outsider at school that the lack of popularity seldom bothered me, and I never really knew what the popular kids might have thought of me. If a boy had expressed any interest in me, I'd have never seen the signals after being an outsider for so long. I was a senior before I had a boyfriend and even then I was playing the game without knowing the rules.

Somehow, I never really noticed when the other kids caught up or even passed me. Although thinking back I remember not being tall any more, I still remember that I felt bigger, fatter than the people around me. Looking at old pictures, however, I can see that wasn't really true. Even pictures from those most painful years, seen from the distance of age, reveal a kid who doesn't look like I thought I did.

Watching "Heavy," I see people who struggle with some of the same issues I did, but with such a different outcome. I cheer for their success at the same time that I wonder how they ever veered so far into territory that they probably at some point feared. I strengthen my resolve never to go down that path.

Walking miles each day, mixing Zumba, weights and yoga with my daily activities, and monitoring my diet with an energy that would exhaust less driven people may mean that becoming morbidly obese isn't likely to be part of my future. At the same time, understanding the seduction of food means I know that there could be a danger should there be a big change in my life.

And it means that while you may see a small person, needlessly obsessed with her diet, or imagine a person who can eat anything, my reality is a little different.

Somehow, I'm containing a fat woman who's waiting for the first sign of weakness to get out.

Self inflicted

My husband and I stopped for a quick dinner last week at one of the local restaurants serving a buffet and fell into what is an all too common discussion of health -- or more specifically, obesity.
Two rather large women came in, apparently mother and daughter, with a younger child in tow and settled in to round their plates with multiple helpings of Chinese food. The child, well below teen years, matched them round for round.

While our health care system preaches to us and lawsuits try to get compensation for high fat diet choices, the problem continues to grow -- literally -- and whatever our size, if we have health insurance, we're paying for it.

Many insurance companies are tacking on penalties for smokers, and if we're destined to continue dealing with the legal mess of health insurance, they should do the same for obesity or even being significantly overweight. In fact, while you might manage to lie about your tobacco use (altho at a former employer that was a firing offense), any visit to your physician will quickly reveal the truth behind the numbers.

Why further penalize people struggling with weight? Think about it. Many of them are not struggling. They're either wallowing in it (I can't do anything about it) by eating any and everything their heart desires or pretending it's not a health issue. At the same time they're racking up health care expenses for diabetes, heart disease and joint ailments. They're becoming disabled because their bodies can't carry them around in any functional way, and then they can watch TV and eat full time. And who pays for those trips to the doctor? Everyone with insurance or, once they have none themselves, everyone who pays taxes to support Medicaid. Then they wind up with free medical care. Once they're disabled, it's on the rest of us to support them. Yet it's an accepted and often multi-generational thing. And really, when you're struggling with weight issues, other than self determination, wouldn't some financial incentive help? It would at least keep you from buying a dozen donuts or something.

Then there's the fact that our society encourages it. You can buy a burger meal, complete with fries, softdrink, and all the fat your body can stand, much cheaper than a salad, despite the fact that hamburger is $3 a pound and lettuce a dollar a head. If you go to a restaurant, you don't have the option of getting a smaller serving unless you're a child or senior citizen, and then you're choices are limited. So you get this huge plate of food and you "by gosh don't want to waste a $12 meal, and who wants to fool with asking for carry outs besides it's the same calories later, so you may as well eat it now." Why can't good restaurants offer a smaller plate? Who said servings had to be so big or cost so much? And if they can design diet meals and ship them to you for $11 a day, why can't a restaurant serve them for just a bit more?

Sure, in a perfect world we'd all grow a garden of vegetables in our back yard or some community lot and have healthy food to eat, and we'd fix our meals at home, but we're a long way from a perfect world. As long as we're trying to squeeze several incomes and a lot of extracurricular activities into our days, we don't have time for either option. So we're going to eat out or buy what we can afford that's quick at the grocery store.

And while we blog on the Internet and read a dozen papers on line every day, we don't think we have time for exercise and fall into a reverse trap on physical fitness, thinking we need a $2,000 piece of equipment or a gym membership for a perfect body and if we can't have that we may as well stay on the couch and watch TV, when the truth is, walking is the best exercise and all we really need is a good pair of shoes and some commitment. (And that's what we're really lacking.)

Sure, some people really struggle with weight issues. They're working with their physicians, support groups, or personal trainers to address them. I give them credit and hope they reach their healthy goals. For the rest, it's a self-inflicted ailment that I'm tired of subsidizing.