Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

I’m not the one who has coined that term; I’ve notably seen Corinne from Phit-n-Phat and Lisa Delaney (author of Secrets of a Former Fat Girl) use it. But I like it: it perfectly summarizes something I’m not the only one to struggle with, either constantly or at times only.

People who have always been thin, and find themselves overweight due to a medication, for instance, or a suddenly defective thyroid, or any other kind of reason, may have trouble identifying themselves with this new weight, this new body that doesn’t correspond their inner thinking anymore. On the other hand, the same thing seems to happen to us: when we have been obese for a long, long time (years or even decades), doesn’t it make sense that we too have trouble identifying ourselves with a thinner self–as if it was too good to be true, or a sort of dream which we will sooner or later wake up from, much to our dismay?

And that’s Fat Girl thinking.

I realized this again recently. It doesn’t happen to me all the time, perhaps because even at my highest, I wouldn’t let my weight totally dictate my behaviours, but the struggle is still real, and it’s not always easy nor evident to ‘catch myself up’ in time. Examples of what I’m trying to convey here include:

• Thinking that you’re taking more room than you actually do, and therefore walking with your arms slightly apart from your body, moving around carefully to not bump into a chair…
• Picking the XXL size (or whatever other big size exist in your country) on the clothes rack in the store, only to finally have to go for a S or a M because, duh, that’s what you are now.
• Thinking twice about accepting an invitation in restaurant X because you don’t remember you can fit their booths now.
• Not daring to undergo a specific activity (rollercoaster, a sport…) because you’re convinced you’re too fat to do it, when in fact your size is normal.
• Being convinced that you can’t perform this or that move/beat this or that time on the treadmill at the gym/lift that much weight because ‘a fat person cannot do that/will look ridiculous’.
• And so on. There are countless examples around there, I’m sure any of us can find his/her own, and we don’t even have to look that far.

Actually, the clothes bit was something I went through not even one week ago. I was ordering a T-shirt online, and was about to hit the checkout button when it suddenly occurred to me that I had input XL in the size box. Which would just have looked ridiculous on my frame, especially if we consider that I tend to wear T-shirts under other clothes and not alone, and that I don’t want to have to tuck tons of spare fabric into my pants if I can prevent it. I remembered someone telling me that the particular brand I was ordering from tended to cut their sizes small, but this still didn’t warrant a XL, so I input M. I could even have gotten away with a S, to be honest (I’ve got my T-shirt now), because my boobs are not that big anymore, but M will do just fine all the same. Anyway. How come I’m automatically attracted to bigger sizes that I used to wear 30 lbs. ago, if I may say so? Rationnally, I know I don’t need such sizes anymore. And yet my mind, if left on auto-pilot, will still veer towards those.

Does this happen to you as well? Do you find it difficult to battle this kind of thinking? Does it make you do silly little things as well, such as having to fill an order form again, send an article of clothing back, go back four times to the same rack to at last pick the right size? Does it get worse, actually causing you to pass on funny/interesting things in life because the old way of thinking is telling you: “you’re not able to do that, you’re too fat”?

I know I’m not the only one. I’ve seen it around. And I bet all of us who ’suffer’ from this, even if from time to time only, do find it aggravating.

Especially if it makes us miss on important stuff…

- A perplexed Kery

• Phit-n-Phat
• Secrets of a Former Fat Girl