There have been a few moments when I wondered if, in a way, starting this blog was a valid idea: not because I don’t have anything to say or am too shy to say it, but because I know I am certainly not the one with the worst hardships behind me when it comes to weightloss. Thus, does this allow me to state my opinions all the same? Or should I just, as some say, “suck it up” and not open my virtual mouth, for “not being able to understand”?
I freely admit it, I’ve never been into the highest weight ranges. I have been overweight most of my life, starting from grad school to now, which makes me aware no matter what of the looks that other people gave me, of certain problems to find fitting clothes, and of not being thin and in good shape during my teenage years; when I was 14, I’d often dream of “the girls in the magazines”, or simply of other girls in my school, dreaming that one day I’d be thin as well, wishing that this one day could happen right now and without any effort on my part.
However, I can’t say nor am willing to pretend that I know what it is to be what is clinically called “obese” or “morbidly obese”. Even though, following the well-known BMI calculation formula, I’ve fallen into the lower ranges of the obese category when I was at my highest, not so long ago, I never had to cope with more than my pitiful little 75 kilograms. How could my words have any meaning in such circumstances? How do I dare writing about how it feels “to be fat”, when my own problems are so insignificant by comparison? And after all, how dare other, thinner people complain, when they have “only” 4 or 5 kgs to shed off? They should be happy with what they have, and so should I!
Well, no, for it occurred to me, through my own thinking and judgmental attitude, that no matter what, we all live it with difficulty, whether it is in accepting our appearance, in feeling physically weakened by the weight, or in having health problems due to it. Weight issues are always painful, in their own ways; and as long as they prevent us from fully accepting or simply being ourselves, indeed they are. It doesn’t matter whether one has10, 40 or 100 pounds to lose… whatever their amount, these pounds keep on poisoning us, until we finally find the inner strength to battle them for good, realizing that it’s not one miracle-diet that will remove them from our lives as if they had never existed.
I don’t even know how much exactly I have to lose - how could I, after all, I have never been fit for my age and size, in my whole life. Maybe 40, maybe 60? Does it even matter, in fact? There’s no doubt that the last pounds will be as difficult to shed as they are for a person who started with more or less weight to lose than I. There’s no doubt that I haven’t been able to wear what I wanted, that the clothes I was dreaming about would always look like potatoes bags on my body, that I had to cope with teenage girls pointing the finger and mocking me, with people gloating in their corner and making bets about how much I would eat daily “to be that fat”. I’ve began to feel how it could and would affect my health later on, and it frightened me. I acknowledged, finally, that I also deserved a chance at being thin, like anyone else, and that I was the only one to be able to take this decision and carry it to success.
All of us overweight people are more or less in the same boat here, no matter how much we have to lose. There’s no must-do, must-shut-up, must-suck-it-up; there’s only us, with our suffering, our problem, our attempts at solving it. We may all encounter the same obstacles, the cravings, the hunger pangs as we go through hypocaloric diets, the lack of time to properly exercise in our busy lives, the potential lack of support from friends and family who don’t really understand… It’s never easy.
We don’t need to shoot at each other because one has less pounds to lose than another. And I don’t have to be shy about my own battles; for me, they indeed are hard to win.
It’s already difficult enough as it is, isn’t it?
- Kery
