The Biggest Loser (ie Me)

I’m on a diet. Can I just say, BLEH! to that, by the way. It isn’t fun, it isn’t thrilling, but it is something that needs to be done. I’ve had several warning signs that this needed to happen, but I ignored them for as long as I could.I figured, hey, these clothes still fit…never mind that they were maternity clothes. Yeah.

I told myself, no buying new clothes until you lose a few! No wasting money on this collection of “fat clothes” that are only going to be used for maybe a month or two until I’m back on track. And one month stretches into, oh, twelve or so, and you need to replace your fat clothes because they’re old and threadbare.

But the final kicker was that dreaded electronic device, the camcorder. You can fool yourself on most days. You can dodge pictures all you want (and I am an expert). You can only catch glances in the one mirror in the house that still makes you look skinny, and hence, maintain the delusion that you are not in fact, huge.

But some events do not allow you to dodge the bullet, and once you have kids the documentation process is sometimes beyond your control. For instance, kids’ birthdays- in my case, my oldest kid’s second birthday party. There were three camcorders present, and multiple cameras. I thought I had done a decent job avoiding the lens, but I was to be proven sadly wrong.

A few hours after the party guests filed home, my father excitedly plugged his camcorder into the TV (the big screen- oh, the horror) and wanted to watch the footage. Ah yes, toddlers running amuk, very cute…there’s the cake…and there’s the petting zoo, how cute….the goat, the chicken, the pot bellied pig, the other pot bellied pig…wait, there was only one pot bellied pig…oh my GOD, that’s me. Oh ##$#$@$@#$@.

As the camera slowly panned, and panned, and continued to pan across the expanse of my rear end, I realized no matter how much black I wore, there was no escaping the reality that had become my expanded real estate. And this is how I found myself in my weekly dieter’s support meeting group, a meeting echoed thousands of times across the country every day of the week.

I call it “Fat Class”, though this is rather misleading. It’s actually “Non Fat Class”, right, because the last thing I need to learn is how to get fatter. And although I rolled my eyes privately at the idea that I need someone to tell me what I already know- eat less, exercise more- I’ll be damned if it doesn’t actually help. I feel a camaraderie with my fellow dieters, who understand just how hard it is to stay out of the break room at work, who pass on tips for low calorie recipes, who cheer each other on in this most annoying but necessary of journeys. Fat knows no racial or socioeconomic boundaries, and we have people from all walks of life in the class, all jonesing for taquitos. What are you going to do.

After one person shared how she watches QVC while walking on the treadmill, our group leader cautioned us that it is common to replace one addiction with another. I filed that little tidbit away but didn’t think anything of it, until today, after the third time the UPS man rang the doorbell. Hmmm. A box from Bathed and Infused, some tarts from 4 Fat Cats…my subconscious picked out every damn foody smell in the catalog and now my house smells like buttercream. And it smells delicious. I’ll take what I can get.

I don’t have any phone numbers programmed into my cell phone yet, no emergency numbers labeled “In case of food emergency” where I can call my buddy and ask them to pull me from the brink of the bakery aisle before I take the spectacular leap. I am strong. But I will say, if the Krispy Kreme down the street hadn’t have gone out of business a month or two ago, this may have had a different ending.

Viva la diet!