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From Mensagenda - August 2003
Partly Cloudy - That's Not My Butt
by Karen Cyson
That’s Not My Butt
This is how shallow I am: Last month,
when a local metro paper did a profile on
overweight people and their plans to lose
weight and get in shape, I ran around my
kitchen, clutching the paper and shouting,
“——— —— is fat!, ——— —— is fat!” I
was all alone at the time — no witnesses.
OK. Perhaps this is not the most mature
thing I could have done. Tough. Seeing this
person overweight was a cathartic experience
for me.
Thirty-five years ago, back in junior
high times, I was standing in her kitchen
with my gang-of-eight (you know how girls
are at that age, they rove in packs), when
her grandmother pointed to me and asked,
“Who’s the fat one?”
Hmm. Who indeed? At 5’6" and 140
pounds, I wore a junior size 11. I was not
exactly Cass Elliot. But I was larger than
her granddaughter who was just a smidge
over five feet and maybe weighed 100
pounds when wet.
Until that point my major appearance
issues centered on whether I should wear
Yardley Goodmorning or Goodnight Slicker
lip gloss and if I should tuck my striped
poorboy sweater into my vinyl miniskirt.
(Anyone wanting to know just how unattractive
any of these looks need only cast a
glance at teenage girls today. They’re wearing
the same stuff. It didn’t look good in
1968 and it doesn’t look any better the
second time around. I just have enough
sense not to dig mine out for an encore.)
Suddenly I now had weight issues. They
were compounded a few years later by the
mother of my high school boyfriend, who
made me quite aware that, in her not-sohumble
opinion, short girls were in some
way better. She was and is about 5'. “And,”
she would continue,”isn’t Dorothy Hamill
the cutest thing with her big glasses and
short bob?” as I’d sit there silently with my
waist-length hair and perfect vision.
The list of ways I could “improve” myself
was growing. It now included: lose
weight, cut legs off at ankles, shave head,
and develop myopia. Is it any wonder girls
develop image problems? Should we be
surprised that they have weight issues?
Compound it all with the magazines (Seventeen,
Glamour, Cosmo, et al) and it’s a
miracle any of us survive, much less thrive.
Well, I did survive. But as part of my
“quarter-life crisis” I did manage to gain
100 pounds. How? Over 15 years this
amounts to overeating by 63.89
(kilo)calories per day. To put this in perspective,
one DoubleStuff Oreo, a basic
food-measurement unit, has 70
(kilo)calories. Less than one cookie per day
x 15 years = 100 pounds.
It took me two years to get rid of (not
lose) the pounds. In an ah-ha moment it
came to me that we are programed to “find”
whatever we lose: keys, gloves, mittens
(those three little kittens get pie when they
find their mittens), and ... weight.
The pounds have stayed gone (not lost)
for the most (least?) part. Do I still have
image problems? Whoa, baby. You shoulda
seen me yesterday when the July Mensa
Bulletin arrived. On page 23 is a picture of a
belly dancing class I attended at the 2002
AG in Scottsdale. I did a little more kitchen
screaming when, at first, I thought the
woman with her back to the camera was
me. Were my arms like that? Was that my
butt? Then...whew...I noticed “me,” the real
me, off to the left in the photo. Yippee! It’s
not my butt!
So maybe I’m not quite over the whole
body image issue. One nice feature about
being self-employed is that I can work out
all these neuroses in the privacy of my own
home as long as the windows are closed.
And, since I’m home and have the
time, I’m going to do a little sleuthing and
find my old friend, contact her, and wish
her well. The paper said she’d hit 170
pounds, so she’s going to need a lot of
support. The sins of the grandmother need
not be visited on the innocent granddaughter,
especially 35 years later.
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