You Don’t Need to Tell Me I’m Fat

 

Of course I’m overweight.  I don’t need my family to tell me that or my friends or even my doctor.  Every time I look in the mirror, I see an old fat man looking back at me.  You wish I wasn’t fat?  I wish I wasn’t old.  Although I have always been large, I have noticed it has become more of a problem in recent years.  Part of that is that I am older and losing weight is more of a problem the older one gets.  I remember when I was in my prime that I went on a severe diet and lost 60 or 70 pounds.  In fact, I did that on two separate occasions.  The weight loss was nice but the change in my overall personality was rather dangerous, even to my health.  Both times I put it all back on, plus some. 

I am heavier today that I have ever been.  I know it’s not good for my health.  My doctor will suggest in a very kind way (not judgmental at all) that for my own good I need to lose some weight.  Weight loss is a pretty simple formula—on paper.  I could share my “severe diet” but it’s something I really don’t recommend.  I understand the formula, burn more calories than you take in.  Usually that simply means reducing the amount of intake and increase the amount of physical activity.  I explained to an interested party that about the only exercise left to me today is walking.  “Then, you need to walk,” said the listener.  “I can’t walk,” I explained, further telling that I shuffle rather than walk and I do that with the aid of a cane and sometimes a walker.  I’ve gone to my doctor with such leg problems that he has offered to have someone take me back to my car in a wheelchair.  I declined the offer.

Would I like to be a hundred pounds lighter?  You bet.  Will that happen?  A few months ago I would have told you that was so unthinkable that I would not even want to speak of it.  Something has happened since then I can’t explain.  My walking became a little easier.  The pain in my legs and elsewhere diminished.  It didn’t go completely away, but it was better.  The pain in the knees became almost irrelevant to my overall functioning.  I felt better, walked better and was able to be more active.  I was able to walk a block and then a few blocks and eventually got up to a half a mile and then a mile.  I was able to get around outside doing things I had only thought of for the past few years.  I uncovered my old 1966 Mustang, put in a new battery and got it started.  I worked on the engine.  Crawling under the car, something I would not have attempted earlier, I was able to drain the gasoline from the tank to put fresher fuel.  I was able to remove the wheels and work on the brakes.  That involved getting down on the floor, lifting, squatting and stretching.  I was frankly amazed that I was able to do as much as I did and still get back up.

After a few months’ improvements, I went to the doctor for a scheduled exam.  My blood pressure was perfect, the cholesterol and triglycerides were improved from the previous six months and were near perfect, the blood sugar was perfect and I had lost nine pounds.  I believe he was feeling pretty good about his doctoring skills and then I explained that I had started taking Flax Seed Oil and that I credited the improvements to that.  He didn’t argue with me and told me to keep it up.

I don’t know that that is the reason I am doing better, nor do I know of anything else which could be responsible.  Right now, I feel better than I have in years.  My legs still get tired and over a day’s time they start hurting and the walking becomes difficult again.  Sometimes I even have to get out the cane for added strength and stability.  Yes, I have a lot of problems and I am sure it’s because I am fat.

I’ve always been fat.  I know because I was told often as a youngster, not by other kids but by a teacher.  I remember one time when I was about in the seventh or maybe the eighth grade we were looking at our science books at body types.  There were three line drawings of body types, depicting a skinny boy, a moderately larger boy and a much larger, obese boy.  I had a teacher who enjoyed putting me down, trying to make me feel less about myself.  He never failed to remind that I wasn’t much of an athlete (which I wasn’t) and tried to humiliate me whenever he could.

I remember a time when he was reviewing words with us and brought up the word “flammable”, giving its definition.  I asked what “inflammable” meant and he told me (and the class) there was no such word and that if there was it would mean “not able to burn.”  I told him that I was pretty sure I had seen it on the back of a gasoline tanker and he got a good laugh out of that, telling me I was imagining it.  Sometime later we were on a school bus on an outing that took us through town.  There in front of our bus was a small gasoline tanker with the word “inflammable” painted in large letters across the back.  All the kids saw it and pointed it out, explaining that was exactly what Hershel had said.  I didn’t say anything.  I was afraid of the man who had a history of what I perceived to be violence toward children—something tolerated and even encouraged back in those days.  That was why I never looked it up in a dictionary to prove him wrong.  Of course, today takes little effort to learn that “flammable” means “easily set on fire,” and “inflammable” means “easily set on fire.”

Ours was a small rural school which only went through the eighth grade.  We had only three teachers and he was one of them, serving as both a teacher and the principal.  Looking back on that school, we probably got just as good an education as anyone else, including our counterparts in town attending larger schools.  I think socially many of us were underdeveloped.  Years later, when I was no longer afraid of him and was not a threat to his children (and I came to view him as an equal—if not an underling), I asked him if they ever thought of the social difficulties we had when we left there and went into town to larger schools.  He said they understood it at the time but they didn’t know what to do about it.

Back to the line drawings of the body types—for some reason the teacher signaled me out for a question.  “Hershel,” he asked, “which one of those do you think you look like?”  I knew I wasn’t the skinny kid, but neither did I feel I was the obese.  “The middle one, I guess,” I answered.  He didn’t just snicker at the answer, it provoked a giant and hearty belly-laugh, accompanied with, “You might have been but you’re sure not now.”  And I sank a little lower in the desk.

I wish I had jumped up and said, “Why you g _ _  d _ _ _ ed, m _ _ _ _ _ f _ _ _ _ _ _ s _ _ of a b _ _ _ _, I’m in the eighth grade, I’m 5’ 6” tall and weigh less than a hundred pounds.  We can’t all be anorexic like your entire family.”  They were the kinds of people who could have eaten lard for every meal and never put on a pound.  His daughter was in my grade and he always wanted her to be the smartest person in class.  They worked at it.  Every year we would take achievement tests and I always beat her until our final year when she won first place and I won second.  (It really didn’t matter to me but my mother was always suspicious of those test results.)  I didn’t say all that to him because I didn’t have such a fine vocabulary back then, and I was afraid of him, and I was more afraid of my dad.

Looking back on those times, I was made to feel very poor about myself and it affected me in nearly every facet of my life.  He singlehandedly made me feel I was fat and that was treated as a moral failing.  We had an invitational basketball tournament at that school called the “PeeWee Tournament.”  To play in that tournament boys had to be less than one hundred pounds and the girls had to weigh less than ninety pounds.  I played in that tournament all the way through the eighth grade.  I do not think a kid standing 5’ 6”, weighing less than 100 pounds can be considered obese.  I would speculate that a hundred pounds would only look obese on a two year old.  I further recall being in the ninth grade when John Kennedy was President and we were subject to considerable physical fitness testing.  Only because of that event do I remember that I measured 5’ 9” tall and weighed 125 pounds.  That’s not obese either.  When I graduated high school, I stood 5’ 11” tall and weighed 165 pounds.  Neither is that obese.

I saw some bullies when I was a kid, but the only bullies I ever had attack me personally were school teachers.  Thank goodness they were the exception or I might never have completed school and gone on to college to earn degrees including a Master’s in Education and a Juris Doctorate.

Given all that, today I know that I am obese.  Medical terminology says I am “morbidly obese,” a term I would think they would have changed by now.  But, I lost nine pounds by not even trying.  Perhaps I will try this time.  Maybe I can lose twelve pounds by the next six month exam.  If I don’t try to lose 60 or 70 pounds in four months, perhaps I can lose it and keep it off this time.  Yes, I know my health would be far better off.  But, I still refuse to think it is a moral issue.