Phat Girlz

I watched that movie last night, or a good part of it. It was sort of formulaic, and sort of creaked, but sort of not.

The plot, for those who don't know, is that Mo'nique plays a, well, fat girl. She is not happy about being fat, she has a skinny cousin and a medium-sized friend, she works in a department store and is an aspiring fashion designer. For larger women, needless to say.

Through a plot machination that I was out of the room for, she and her friends end up at a resort, where the two larger girls meet and entice visiting Nigerians. Being Nigerians, they are enchanted by the larger women. The friend, whose name escapes me, has a lot of sex with her Nigerian, and loses her librarian look. Mo'nique's Nigerian is a more fleshed-out character, and he falls hard for her, but she is unable to accept the fact that he can possibly love her just as she is. Gee, that sounds almost exactly like someone I know.

She manages to drive him off. She has a crise de avoirdupois, but decides to accept herself as she is. (They start forthwith to dress her more flatteringly after that point, interestingly). A very large Deus ex Machina gets her designs seen by someone who can help her, and she founds her clothing line, called "Thick Madame". There is a truly amazing scene of her mythical fashion show, with exclusively plus-sized models and attended almost exclusively by plus-sized women, of every hue. It ends with her going to Nigeria--well, she's got all that money now--with her friends, and looking up the impossibly good-looking Nigerian, who has been waiting for her all this time. The final scene is everyone sitting down for a meal, with the blessing including thanking God for the return of the American children, and the skinny cousin eating everything she can get her hands on so she can have a rich Nigerian, too.

Okay. This is a movie that was released and fell into obscurity, probably for two reasons. For one thing, it falls squarely into the category of a black movie, with most of the characters being black. I find it interesting in and of itself that very few white people will watch a black movie, one in their own language and set, at least mostly, in their own country, even though they'll go in droves to watch a movie in Chinese, say, with subtitles. For another thing, it deals with another marginalized segment of society, fat women.

It made a lot of interesting points. It commented on the penchant of successful young black men for skinny white blondes. It hinged a lot on the dearth of fashionable clothes for plus-sized women. It addressed American ideals of beauty, vs the ideals of beauty elsewhere in the world. And it dealt with the self-image problems that face larger women, including an inability to accept love, because they've persistantly been told that they're not deserving of it.

This movie isn't going to make me go off Weight Watchers. And I looked at Monique and I kept thinking, you'd be so much more comfortable, if you just lost a little weight--not a whole lot, just some. Just a little. You'd be able to move better. You'd be able to breathe better. On your long walk with your gorgeous Nigerian, you wouldn't be as out of breath. (These are all things I know from experience). But it is a point of view that needs to be addressed. And I admired Mo'nique for being willing to play scenes where she splayed her hands on her hips and belly and said, "This is not going away! Neither is this! I'm not going to change, so you should leave now, and stop playing me!" I also admired her for being willing to play the scene with her total breakdown about herself. She wasn't playing pretty, and I can promise you that a lot of that emotion was absolutely real.

No real conclusions from all of this, just that the movie was certainly, well, food for thought.

And here is an article I found about the movie, which I am copying since I can't figure out how to get the link in here....

With Mo'Nique as her muse, 'Phat Girlz' writer hits it big

John McMurtrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

Nnegest Likké was in the shower, rushing to get ready for a meeting, when the phone rang.

"Monique's on the line," her roommate called out.

"Monique? I don't know a Monique."

Likké got out of the shower and took the call: "Hey, sis, this is Mo!" said the voice on the other end.

Likké was still at a loss: "Mo who?"

Likké may have written a screenplay with Mo'Nique, the stand-up comic and actress, in mind, but she had no idea that her muse -- whom she had never met -- had somehow gotten a hold of her script.

Her identity finally established, Mo'Nique let Likké know why she was calling: "Girl, I got the script, and I got in the bathtub with it. I said, 'Oh, I'll read a few pages, then get out of the tub.' My bathwater went cold reading it -- I read it from beginning to end."

Then Mo'Nique spoke the words Likké had been dying to hear: "I'm down. Let's do it."

What had been a dream project of Likké's thus became reality. Not only did the Bay Area native sell her script for "Phat Girlz," but she also got to direct the movie -- something she had never done before.

"It's unbelievable, I'm overwhelmed," Likké, on the phone from Los Angeles, said about seeing her movie open in theaters nationwide last week. Made for only $2.5 million, "Phat Girlz" reached the coveted top 10 list at the box office, taking in $3.1 million over the weekend.

A bawdy comedy with melodramatic moments, "Phat Girlz" is a movie with a big heart and an unmistakable message: Jazmin (played by Mo'Nique) is a combative (though often funny) plus-size woman who comes into her own -- and finds love -- when she begins to take pride in who she is. A T-shirt she wears sums up her attitude: "Aint fat I'm sexy succulent."

Jazmin's emotional journey has similarities to the one Likké experienced.

"I always kind of felt like an underdog growing up," said Likké, who describes herself as being in her mid-30s. "One, for being kind of plus size, but also because I'm half Ethiopian. And growing up half African -- now it's a little better, but then it was tough. I got teased.

"From sixth grade to 11th grade," Likké added, "I went by the name of Kelly because I hated my name. I was trying to fit in."

Likké's parents met at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through their involvement in the civil rights movement. Her father, Senay Likké, who earned a doctorate at Cal in math and chemical engineering, became a revolutionary in his native Ethiopia; he was killed in the revolution in 1977.

Likké was raised in San Francisco until she was about 9 -- part of that time in a housing project -- then moved to East Oakland with her mother, Rosalind.

"People react differently to having self-esteem issues," Likké said, discussing her youth. "Mine was, 'I'm tough.' I thought it was cool to be tough and rebellious. And thank God I had my mom. ... My strong family support is what saved me."

After graduating from Oakland's Skyline High School and Georgia's historically black college Clark Atlanta University, Likké moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to pursue her love of screenwriting. To make money, she taught English and drama to high school students for a few years. Then she and a friend began a dating-advice show on public-access TV, which led to a job as a writer and producer for the reality TV show "Blind Date."

Likké has her mother to thank for suggesting Mo'Nique as her movie's lead. It was on one of her frequent visits to see her mother -- "definitely Oakland's my home still," Likké said -- that her mother sat her down to watch "The Queens of Comedy," a stand-up show featuring Mo'Nique.

" 'Oh, you have to watch this,' " Likké laughingly recalled her mother saying. "My mom, who's really prudish -- I was shocked because 'Queens of Comedy' is not for the faint of heart."

"Phat Girlz" centers on Mo'Nique, as Jazmin, meeting a man who loves her without reservation. That man, Tunde, is from Nigeria. (He's played by the devastatingly handsome and charming Jimmy Jean-Louis, a native of Haiti who has worked as a model.) Likké wanted this character to come from Africa because as a kid, she traveled to Ethiopia and Nigeria several times to see relatives, and "over there," she recalls, "they were always like, 'Oh, look at your body, you're so strong, you're so beautiful,' because I was bigger.

"It's not just a fantasy, it's a reality," Likké said. "They even have fattening rooms over in Nigeria where people are trying to get fat. And we're over here putting our fingers down our throats to throw up!"

Likké quickly added that she doesn't mean to promote being obese: "Fattening rooms are insane, but I think they're as insane as trying to be a size 5 when your natural size is a size 14. I think they're equally extreme.

"So what does it all mean?" she asked of these differences. "The bottom line is, love yourself -- fat, skinny, short, tall, whatever. Love yourself."

E-mail John McMurtrie at jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com.

You are Maryiln Monroe

A classic tortured beauty You're the dream girl of many men Yet they never seem to treat you right

What Famous Pinup Are You?

It's just a number

Women, me among them, spend an uncommon amount of time torturing themselves over numbers. Not the ones in their bank accounts or their checkbooks, either. They torture themselves over two particular numbers: dress size, and weight.

Let's address dress size first. It is a designation that enables you to pick out a piece of mass-produced clothing that will more or less fit you, on the first try. Note the more or less part. Dress sizes are not absolutes. They vary from maker to maker, from store to store, from design to design. We have to have sizes because not every one of us has her own personal dressmaker, who has a set of slopers made just for us, as well as a little notebook, where she notes our changing measurements, as well as any little physical abnormalities that affect fit, like maybe one hip is a little higher than the other, or you have a truly magnificent ass, but it lifts the hems of your skirts in the back. We have to be able to make a rough guess, so as not to try on every item in the store. Note the rough guess part.

Women put such importance on these numbers. They either bandy them about with pride ("I'm a 6, not an 8. No matter what, I'm just not an 8") or hide them guiltily, like scarlet letters. (Men don't get branded as a 42 long, by the way, their clothing has no size designations that are visible every time they take off their jackets).

But they're just numbers. A more expensive piece of clothing will allow you to take a smaller size, for two reasons. One is something called vanity sizing, which means that Ralph Lauren twigged on to the fact that more ladies will buy his somehwhat overpriced clothing if they can take a smaller number. So, he cuts them bigger, a woman says, oh, I'm a 2 in Lauren, I'm buying that, and presto, he's sold another piece of clothes. Also, a manufacturer whose name is still Lipschitz (the name Mr. Lauren was born with) might be wanting to get a few more pieces out of his bolt of fabric, so he'll instruct his cutters to crumple up the pattern pieces before they cut. They take up less room, he can get more garments out of a bolt, and you take an 8 instead of a 6. (Oh, I forgot, you're just not an 8. I'll try to keep that in mind).

Then there's whatever the hell manufacturers did to sizes over the course of my lifetime. Back somewhere in this blog, I said that I weighed 135 pounds when I graduated from high school. I was pretty cute, if I say so myself. I had this pair of jeans that I embroidered all over, as was the fashion of the day. (Class of '73, what can I say?) I saved them, probably because of all the embroidery, which was pretty hard work. I pulled them out a couple of months ago, to show my daughters. They looked tiny. I was dying to know what size I had taken, back then, at 135 pounds. They are size 11. They aren't even in the single digits. My daughters have taken every size jeans from 14 to 2, so I've seen all the sizes, and these didn't look like anything I recognized as an 11, not now. I held them up. "What size do you think these would be now?" I asked. The consensus was a 7, maybe a 5. So...three full sizes (possibly) smaller than the tag inside of them. How can we know what size we really are, when they keep changing them on us? Back when those jeans were made, there WAS no size 0. Allison Barnett, the skinniest, cheerleaderiest girl I knew, probably only took a 5 in those days. Or a 7, more likely. So size means nothing. NOTHING. It just aims you in the right direction.

Now, on to weight. Weight, although it can be high, or low, is also relative. I weigh a lot. I don't just weigh a lot right now, I always weigh a lot for how I look. Remember the doctor, who couldn't believe what the scale was telling him? It's always been that way. I have a sister-in-law who is, frankly, a mess. (Those who know me know I so seldom say that, but she is, truly). She's at a point where she claims she can't find a bra to fit her, and I would be willing to bet that she weighs less than I do right now. For me, it's that I'm a good solid peasant girl--like a Mullingar heifer, beef to the heels, to quote "Circle of Friends". So I weigh a lot. It's humbling; it teaches you not to get hung up on the number on the scale. It's all relative, as I said above. There is no point in beating ourselves up for who we are, what we weigh, saying we should weigh this, we should weigh that. The only should I seriously believe in is that we should embrace ourselves as we are. That's the only way we can get through our days, first of all, loving ourselves now, today, not next week, or in ten pounds or three sizes.

Look. In January I weighed 250 pounds and if I had been honest, I would have been taking a size 22. BUT: I got my hair done. I wore clothes that showed the good stuff off. I didn't really try to hide the not-so-good stuff, I just tried to distract from it. Self-assuredness is the best possible accessory. Today I weigh 222 pounds and take a size 18. Honestly, I'm pretty happy right now. I look good, and I'm getting compliments. I know that this is not where I should be stopping and I have no intention of doing that--but I'm embracing myself now. I'm trying to be the best 222 and size 18 Silke that there can be. That's all.

If all else fails, there are the old saws to fall back on. Look at what the body that you so malign can do, or has done. I've produced two daughters. I hiked in the New Mexico desert in what my friend refers to as high heels. (Not quite, but I was wearing stockings and a skirt, lol!) I can carry wood and shovel the driveway. I once dragged the better part of a tree that was blocking the road out of the way. I can carry my husband's tool box, which may not sound like much, but you've never lifted it. I may not be a waif or a willow, but I'm pretty good as I am. I might get better, you never know. But if I died tonight (God forbid) I would go out being fairly pleased with who I am.

And there would be good-looking clothes that fit to bury me in!

Weigh in day

That would be Mondays. It follows the weekend, you know, when one traditionally cuts loose.

Well, today I didn't lose any weight. I didn't gain any either, which was a miracle, considering that I spent the last week, on reflection, eating like a stevedore. A Weight Watchers stevedore, but a stevedore nonetheless.

So today I'm back on the wagon. Today I counted points punctiliously, and made the 0 point soup. (It's full of cabbage. We're all full of something else tonight...me more than most, since I was ravenous in the afternoon and had two cups of it). I made a cobbled-together faux crabmeat pizza for dinner, inspired by the shrimp and garlic pizza that was once ordered for me in the Canary Islands. It was pretty good--I mean the one tonight. The one in the Canary Islands was obviously pretty good, if I'm trying to duplicate it 15 years later. I managed to end with enough points to have a Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream cone, which I ate without a trace of guilt, since I had more than my 8 servings of vegetables, and even drank all my water today. It probably helped me get in my milk, in fact. So that was good.

This will sound like a rationalization, and may be, in part, but a week without a weight loss, when you have as much to lose as I have, isn't all that bad, or, put another way, isn't that much of a bad thing. It gives you a chance to catch up with yourself. It makes it possible to say, okay, this is who I am right now, this is where I'm at, instead of feeling like Alice, running as fast as you can, just to stay in the same place. I don't know, but it might be relaxing for those around me, having a chance to adjust to me this way, before I start on the next leg of the journey.

I talked to someone about my weight loss, who pointed out that I'm a quarter of the way there. I hadn't looked at it that way before, and that made me feel pretty good.

I'm feeling pretty good about myself today, to be absolutely revolting. I have clothes that fit me again, my hair looked pretty good, and the temperature went through the roof, and from last week's nor'easter, we almost got to 90 today, and it was bare legs weather. So that was fun. I pulled out sandals to wear, ones with crystal decorations, and I enjoyed being a girl.

Furthermore, I'm ready to be good again, ready to lose weight again, ready to go on again.

Kohl's

Strange to say, I think it just became my new favorite store. I went there yesterday hoping for not much (and actually, looking for a half-slip, which is a whole other story) and found that was where all the affordably priced clothes had gone.

Around here, Filene's turned into Macy's. Actually, G. Fox turned into Filene's, turned into Macy's. The switch from G. Fox (an old Hartford tradition) was not much; the switch from Filene's to Macy's was more. They changed all the brands. They decimated the women's department. They have more upscale stuff in Misses, I'll give you that, but unfortunately, I'm not in Misses, yet, and I liked having a choice in women's. Also, I liked having a choice of price points. And womens' sizes are tricky things. All brands are not created equal. You can get clothes that are really cute, and there are lines (Bandolino being one of them, and Bandolino being one of the brands that vanished) that carry the same items from petites to womens, but there are womens sizes that just look awful. So anyway, I went to Kohl's, poked around in the womens department and came home with two skirts. (This is another issue for me. I wear skirts. I look better in skirts, I feel better in skirts, my legs are definitely one of my strong points, and my stomach and butt are not--so remind me again, why would I be wearing something that accentuates my "problem areas" and covers up my strong points?) I actually came home with two skirts and two half-slips for less then $75, which also made me very happy. The skirts will do me nicely for the next six weeks or so, and I feel confident that I will be able to find more clothes that won't break the bank, if I just want something new once in a while.

Today is sort of a nothing day as far as weight loss goes--no spectacular successes, no spectacular failures. Though, on reflection, I may be selling myself short, because for one thing, I went to a funeral today, and managed to hold back at the buffet afterwards. Not that it was much of a buffet (I'm not being mean, but it wasn't) but when did that ever stop me before? I managed to eat a little, have a small dessert, and be done. Also, I learned a lesson I really didn't need about clothes, which is, if they fit, they're better. My black skirt may have had its last outing, and I was going to wear a black top with a square neck that was quite flattering, but a little on the va-va-voom side, so I decided against the Sicilian hootchie mama look and went for the black top that fits like a sack. Bad idea. Really bad idea. However, no one was looking at me, I was not even a sidelight at this funeral, so it really didn't matter.

It finally got to be spring here, so in the afternoon, I went shopping for ingredients for one of our favorite pasta meal salads. I like to eat normal stuff whenever I can, just tweaked a little bit, and this was a spectacular tweaking. This recipe originally came from "In Style" magazine, and it was served as a side at some chi-chi Los Angeles thing, but I've fiddled with it, and over time, it has become a household favorite. Here goes:

Orzo Salad
1/3 cup olive oil
1/4 (give or take) balsamic vinegar
chopped fresh tarragon to taste
salt and pepper to taste
2 oz. pine nuts (also known as pignoli, or, just to show off, snoba, in Arabic)
3 or 4 cloves fresh garlic, minced
1 lb tri-color orzo, or plain if you can't find tri-color
8 oz. chicken breast
6 oz. non-fat feta
1 package each frozen peas and frozen snow peas
1 large-ish cucumber
1 yellow or red pepper
3 or 4 scallions

Mix the oil, vinegar, tarragon, salt and pepper and set aside. If you're feeling particularly ambitious and are able to plan ahead (I'm not) you can mix this the night before and add two or three crushed garlic cloves, which you can discard later
Boil the orzo
Cook the chicken however you want--like the chicken salad recipe, all that counts is that it's not raw
brown the pine nuts and minced garlic in a dry, non-stick pan, stirring frequently
Mix the pine nuts, garlic, veggies, feta, and chicken, then add the oil and vinegar mixture
Add the orzo

This comes out to three points per cup, which is a LOT of orzo salad. Two cups makes a perfectly fine dinner. I sometimes add shrimp, which I won't tonight, because my father is still allergic, as he has been for the last 45 years or so. I don't think the shrimp would change the point value much, really...volume would offset added calories, if you get what I mean.

I told my daughter we were having this--it's one of her huge favorites--and she said, loudly, "Are you serious!!!!!" She was very happy.

Problem?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe. Mostly it's that I'm not being as rigid with myself as I have been, though this program doesn't require great rigidity. Last night was nibble, nibble, nibble, and tonight wasn't far off. Dipped into my flex points both days. Not far in, but far-ish. Not sure how I feel, other than full.

However, I had my ever-popular trigger around, my old friend meat. I remember now, this was an issue the last time I went to Weight Watchers. I am an unabashed carnivore. I love meat. This is very unfashionable to admit, and very nearly politically incorrect, but I do. I can have a house full of chocolate, and I have a piece or two. I can have a freezer full of ice cream, and I have no problem staying within my limits. Meat, though...I could crank through a pound of deli ham in no time, just me, the deli ham and a jar of mustard. I made a chicken curry salad last night (recipe to follow) because I wanted to have shrimp with the vodka sauce, my father can't eat shrimp, if I'm cooking a chicken breast, I might as well do a package, and so I had the chicken. I couldn't keep my fingers out of the salad. I made spaghetti with meat sauce for tonight (93% lean beef is like chicken, pointswise) and that was awfully good, too. I remember sitting at meetings, wanting to bring up my issue and feeling too ashamed to do it. Wanting to eat chocolate is cute, girly; wondering how you can manage to fit a 12 0z. sirloin makes you feel like you should be punching a time clock at the docks.

I am usually a good girl. I've made friends (well, nodding acquaintanceship) with soy. I can manage to not eat meat on Fridays in Lent, and this year I got through with only one lapse to macaroni and cheese. This week, though, is a killer. And I can't even blame it on my period, since that's getting more and more sporadic.

I just like meat. Beef best of all, chicken, pork not so much, and I love venison when I can get it, probably because I was more or less raised on it. Rare roast beef....yum.

So that seems to be this week's theme. I might make the famous 0-point soup again, though it looks as though we're finally getting out of soup weather.

Well, maybe this will be a week when I just spread the flex points out. I try to let each week on this program have its own character. Some weeks I stick very close to the program, and have a splurge at the end. Easter weekend I just tried to be careful, but more or less cut loose, though cutting loose looks a lot different these days, too. So this week will have its own character, and that will be all right, too.

Oh, and the chicken salad!

8 oz cooked chicken ( for this I just microwaved a couple of halved breasts, no need to brown them or anything fancy at all. Not raw is the main thing)
1/4 shredded coconut
1 oz. cashew pieces
1/4 cup raisins
capers to taste
2 Tbsp. light mayonaise
1/2 cup no-fat yogurt
scallions to taste, or onion, finely chopped

Shred or chop the chicken. Mix with the other ingredients, then add salt, coarse-ground pepper and curry powder to taste. The whole bowl, with those ingredients, is 16 points, so you can figure from there how much your serving is.

May I say: YUM

Up Until Now

Really, for about the last five years, I tried an experiment. I guess you could dignify it with the term of experiment. I decided to stop obsessing about my weight. I just decided to do it. I decided to eat what I wanted, when I wanted, and not when I didn't, and see what happened. I honestly believed that I would infinitely expand, like the blueberry girl in Willy Wonka. (I'm not trying to be mean here, but some people must infinitely expand, how would we get the really, really fat people otherwise? All I'm trying to say is that infinite expansion must be possible. Sort of.....)

What happened was that I topped out. I probably topped out at about 245, again, a guess, hampered by not weighing myself. I took a 20. (That woman up there, though is what I got when I googled "size 20" and she was in a Gaultier runway show). Those are really, really high numbers, but they at least stopped. I didn't go on to weigh even more, or take even bigger sizes. Once I topped out, I set to work at accepting myself. I bought nice clothes. I got my hair done. I wore high heels and sheer stockings, and even got a tattoo on my ankle. I was okay with myself. I realized (and realize even more now) that being out of breath climbing the stairs or walking around the town I work in was not a good thing, but it didn't bother me enough to do anything about it.

Topping out was a good thing, it really was. It made me accept myself, my weight, what I am and how I look. I truly think it was good for me. I had fat days and thin days, just like everyone else. I didn't wear certain things because they didn't flatter me, but I also didn't wear muumuus. In all honesty, I'm aided in that by the fact that I have a shape, even if it happens to be a big one. I'm a solid girl, not amorphous. (Though I had moments of that, notably during PMS. I was at a mall once with my younger daughter, and we were about to go to the women's department. "I feel perfectly amorphous," I complained. "What does that mean?" she asked. "Shapeless," I answered. She immediately looked very worried. "Do you think this is really the best time to be trying on clothes?") So I was okay with it.

And then, I guess, I got not okay with it. To be honest, I was creeping up. A loose-ish 20 looks okay on me, well, okay by certain standards. A tight 22, not so much. All the solidity, which I depend on a lot, in the world can't bail you out of size 22.

However, I joined Weight Watchers this time more to keep my older daughter company than anything else. She wanted to do it, and didn't think she could afford it, so I thought we could do a fiddle and do two for the price of one. We couldn't, so I joined too. For the first few weeks, my attitude was mostly, oh, well, we'll see what happens here. As the weight came off, I got more into it. So did she. We have Sunday afternoon grocery shopping trips, where we hit the supermarket with our points calculator, and search for low-point food. We have fun. We're bonding. She's lost 21 pounds, I think, of the 30 she wanted to lose (she's built a lot like me, but shorter, and so she certainly didn't look obese, but she looks amazing now. Delectable in fact. She's 22. Of course she looks delectable!) and wants to submit her story as a success story to Weight Watchers and get a makeover. I think she has a shot at it. I also said that her number 1 tip would be to have your mother do all your cooking for you!

I like the online version of this for a couple of reasons. I hated hauling myself off to a meeting. After a while I had internalized everything they had to say, and honestly, unless you've got a special group for people losing 100+, when someone stands up and says, I went from 145 to 130 and everyone applauds, you just want to throw up in the corner. Truthfully. The other thing I like is that I'm not tied to the tyranny of the scale on weigh-in day. I can have a salt-shakers worth of sodium the night before and know that I didn't really gain (or not lose) three pounds in a day. I weigh myself every day now, which, far from making me crazy, gives me the long view. My weigh-in day is Monday, but I lose my weight in the middle of the week. So, if I've been consistent about following the program (which I have so far), I can cut myself some slack and enter the weight from the day before, if I know that it was honestly that far down.

Well, I got off the topic of controlled vs. uncontrolled eating, which was what this was supposed to be about, and I need to go make my dinner (whole wheat penne with vodka sauce and shrimp, undressed asparagus on the side) but I would like to say this: I think that controlled eating makes us crazy. We give away our power as women. We devote far too much time to worrying about what we're putting in our mouths, and not enough time to whatever else is going on--the things that give us joy. I have always (even when I was actively doing it) found diets to be acts of negation, not suffiiciently proactive for me.

More later....but for now: go eat something that makes you happy. Just don't eat all of it.

Great Diets I Have Known

Strangely enough, for someone who's been occupied with her weight (I'm not going to say struggled, because I don't always struggle with it) almost all of her life, I haven't been on that many diets. I think that may be because for the most part, I think they're nonsense.

I started gaining weight, or not looking like society's norm, in about 2nd grade. Not a clue why, really, I was as active as the other kids, rode my bike, lived with my skate key around my neck, all of it. My daughter began to gain at about the same time, so I'm going with genetic predisposition. Whatever, that's when it started.

My mother was slender. Not skinny, but slender. I don't look like her, not one little bit. I'm my father all over. This drove her crazy, and either because of her own inner demons, or society's pressures or something I don't know about, she equated slenderness of body with purity of character. This isn't true, of course, but she thought so, and so that made it so. So I heard quite a bit about it over the years. Some nice, some not so...let's just say that a lot of the time my self-esteem took a beating, but I didn't lose any weight because of it.

I began to lose weight the last two marking periods of my senior year. I think the gym teacher was getting bored with us--she had been our gym teacher since we were in 7th grade, and we had done just about everything possible to do in a gym. (This was in the days when you had gym--I want to say every single day, unfailingly). So, for the last part of our senior year, she let us do gym projects. They could be nearly anything, as I recall, and losing weight was one of them. For whatever reason, I chose that one. I weighted 150 pounds, and I lost 15 pounds, to weigh 135. I looked good. My classmates said things like "No one could call you chubby any more." I didn't lose it very healthily--I skipped lunch, and other things teenage girls do. I didn't go to the prom, in spite of it, but I enjoyed short skirts and platform shoes, and all that stuff. It was good. I kept the weight off through the summer, too, but fall arrived and with it college, and maybe the freshman 15, maybe more--I have never been very big on weighing myself, so I didn't.

The next time I lost weight was in the spring of my junior year, as I was in the second semester of my junior year abroad. I had a schedule of classes that dragged me all over the city I studied in. The layout of the town made bus service nearly impossible, so I walked. I figured out at one point, that I was walking nearly 5 miles a day, what with one thing and another, and this is a town with big steep hills (imagine a steep hill. Now imagine one twice as steep as that, and you've probably got it. I lived at the top of one, so every trip out ended with a trudge up the hill. I do know how to conserve my energy when climbing steep hills, though--!) so the workouts were twice what they would have been. I didn't have a scale there, but I dropped about a clothing size. I bought a white denim skirt in size 42, (German) which is about a 12. Not bad for me. Various things happened to me when I came home, including a pregnancy....I gained weight. The pregnancy never came to fruition, but the weight stayed.

The next time was when I moved to New York. This was absolutely not a diet, but I think New York is the world's greatest free gym. I walked everywhere in Manhattan, being way too cheap to pay $0.50 to go 10 blocks, and then the subways themselves...no elevators, no escalators, long, long platforms--I lost weight. I don't know how much. I had a bunch of size 13 skirts, I remember, and I looked pretty delectable. I was 22. Of course I looked delectable. My weight bounced around during my time in New York, but another great diet arrived in the spring (do we sense a trend here?) of 1980.

I decided to lose weight. I didn't own a scale, and didn't buy one. I went exclusively on how my clothes fit me. I probably dropped twenty pounds, at a guess, because I went down two sizes. It helped that the New York City Transit Authority went on strike, and I began walking to and from work--two hours each way. It was quite nice, actually; my route took me over the Brooklyn Bridge. That ended when I got a separated tendon in my foot from all that walking, but the strike ended not long after that. I know what I weighed at the end, though, because I went to the doctor for my foot. He weighed me and the result was 165. He couldn't believe it--I didn't look like whatever his conception of 165 was. He told me I needed to lose 30 pounds. I shrugged. I was pretty damned happy with my home-made diet and my undefined weight loss.

Two more things came out of that diet. I saw my friend Susan, after a long absence, and she looked at me and said, "You're so thin!" (Susan has struggled herself, over the years). And, a while after the diet ended, and I was settling in to being the weight I was, I was out with a girlfriend one night, drinking. We were in Maxwell's Plum, which, for those who don't know, was a pick-up joint extraordinaire. The decor was hyper-Victorian, and the clientele was on the prowl. Not much was going on for us that night, but it was crowded, and so we were sharing a barstool. The guy next to me got up and left, and since at that place there was no way of knowing who was with whom, I looked at the woman who had been next to him, mentally shrugged and sat down. She never opened her mouth. He came back, then, having apparently only been to the men's room. He looked at me, and said to her, "I guess you have to be fast around here." Pause. "It's okay, though, she has enough to put on the seat." Oh, I thought, not with me you don't. I probably wouldn't have been so pissed if I hadn't just lost a bunch of weight, but really, this was for nothing, it was to make himself look good in front of her. So....I thought that anything I said would just sound stupid and defensive, so I looked around for something else. Well, this guy had a fresh, unopened pack of cigarettes on the bar, and a fresh mug of beer. So...I picked up the pack of cigarettes, opened them, shook out half of them, and stuffed them in his beer. Then I shook out the other half and stuffed them in his beer, too. No one said a word. The bartender just got him a fresh beer. I told my girlfriend we should go and we left. I'm willing to bet he at least thought twice before he put down another woman.

I lost weight after my first daughter was born. I was nursing; it was fairly easy. Also, I walked every night. Huh, funny how that works.

I gained and lost, gained and lost, but not a lot. Then we moved to Germany, where the tyranny of thinness is truly alarming. It's different than here. Men openly say that they won't date a woman who weighs more than 50 kilos. (110 pounds). Men follow their women into dressing rooms and tell them what to buy. Fat people are sometimes openly mocked on the street. One of the biggest women's magazines has a diet that they run every January--they give you a total of four weeks of menus, shopping lists, before and after stories, the whole nine yards. I did the Brigitte Diet one year. I lost weight, quite a bit of it--I want to say about 16 kilos--better than 35 pounds. It was a restrictive diet, though, and very much, "If this is a chicory salad, it must be Tuesday." To this day, there are some vegetables I only know the names of in German, because I only bought them for the diet. The best thing was that someone else had made up the menus, so there were no leftovers. The worst things were the boredom, the brownness of the food (LOTS of whole grains) and the gas. The diet ended one Saturday morning, in town, when I ate an apricot Danish. I had followed it to the letter for more than two months, but there was no margin for error--and with the Danish, it was done. I held on to that weight loss for a while, I forget how long.

Then, nearly 10 years ago, I guess, I went to Weight Watchers. It was pretty good. I lost a bunch of weight, but due to the fact that, honest, I don't obsess over my weight, I don't remember where I started, where I ended, or how much I lost. I think just shy of 40 pounds, though, because I remember buying a 40 pound bag of grass seed and thinking I used to weigh that much more. I'm not sure why I stopped, other than that I hit a plateau, got bored and very tired of counting points.

That more or less brings us up the present. After 3o pounds is sort of unknown territory. I'm a different woman, though, this time, and my life is different. Also, I'm writing this blog, so I'm dealing with issues, and not just blindly losing weight. So, it may work better. Also, the Weight Watchers program is very good, and better than it was ten years ago. There's a lot of room for indulgence in this plan, which is good. I will not stick to a plan that makes me give up Quarterpounders and chocolate cake, and this one doesn't.

So, we'll see.

Clothes

Or, clothe, as Dr. Koppel used to call them. But I digress.

This is not about what size I take, or will take, or want to take. This is also not about complaining about the lack of nice clothes for women of size, which is what one of the threads on the WW board was about. I don't know where those women live, where they shop, or what their budgets are, but I never owned a flowered muumuu in my life and have no intention of starting. The closest I ever came to that was a black flowered dress, and that came from April Cornell, was not by any stretch of the imagination a muumuu, and I might even wear it again, you can never tell.

No, this is about the fact that while I'm losing weight, I have no clothes, or more or less none, and no hope of building a wardrobe until I'm done.

One of the great pleasures of my life is dressing up. I love making up outfits. I love looking nice. I love finding bargains--my Jones New York polka dot skirt, for example, that should have cost more than $100 that I got for $20 at the end of the season and that I've probably worn nearly once a week since then. My tuxedo coat...that I tracked and tracked, as it got cheaper and cheaper, and that makes M's eyes light up when I wear it. Other things. I never, or almost never buy anything full price. I save things forever. I have no problem wearing something from five years ago with something new. I had a wardrobe. It looked good on me. I got compliments. I have good taste, I dress well, and I never kow-towed to being a plus size. My sense of style never changed, and frankly, while we don't have as much choice as our smaller sisters, plus-size women have never had it so good.

So now...my clothes don't fit. My tuxedo jacket has had its last outing. It's sliding off me. (So is my nightgown, but that's in bed, and a little bit of bare shoulder there isn't necessarily the worst thing, even if the nightgown has Scotty dogs on it). My skirts are all falling off. The only thing that keeps half of them up is my Caesarean pooch. They make me look fatter than I am, though, by being too big and sort of amorphous. Since this is an on-going process, there's no point in buying a lot of new clothes. (And I'd like to meet these women who lose weight and say that they loved buying a new wardrobe once a month).

I've decided I'm going to try to do this: buy a black skirt, a denim skirt and a pair of jeans for each size. Tops, especially knit ones, can go longer. (I am damned if I'm taking the WW website's advice and buying cargo pants, tight, and wearing them till they're loose. Not me. Someone else might want to do that, but not me). This makes for an exceedingly boring wardrobe, but one that will keep me covered, literally and figuratively, and not cost too much money.

My bedroom is a sea of clothes, but they're gradually migrating from the active piles to the give-away piles. My sister-in-law can go through the give-away piles--she's engaged in losing weight, too--and the rest can go to the Salvation army.

I have some things that I put away, that I couldn't bear to part with. So, my yellow double-breasted jacket with the shawl collar will get quite a bit of action, if it ever decides to be spring. My olive and red blouse, again with a shawl collar (do I sense a trend?) is waiting for me and will fit me before too much longer. However, by then the red skirt won't fit, but the skirt I made to wear with it might. This is so confusing. Everything made of cloth is in a state of perpetual flux for me.

I have one favorite that I actually bought in two sizes. I can get into the smaller one now, so that's fun, and gives me an option. I ordered a skirt that will hopefully go for a couple of months. My jeans jackets (I have three, one red, one white, one denim) will fit for quite a while, and if I get desperate, there are always outlets.

But I hate this. I hate not knowning what to wear when I get up in the morning. It's complicated by not remembering where I was when I left off losing weight the last time, so I can't predict when this or that will fit.

Also what I have ahead of me, though I have no idea when, is the great womens/misses issue. There is a point where you make the transition from womens sizes to misses, which is lovely, but it involves a period of time where absolutely nothing fits. The smallest womens, usually 14, is too big, or looks funny. The largest misses, usually 16, is too small, or looks funny. It has to do with distribution, of course. And while you're losing, you're not redistributing. There will be a period of time where I will be able to have no new clothes.

I'm not interested in size as a value judgement. All I want is to have clothes that make me happy and flatter me. I had them, probably after I lost 10 pounds. I don't really have them any more. And, it could be as long as a year till I can work on building a new wardrobe. Of coures, the consolation prize will be that I will be able to choose from a much larger selection. For some reason, I'm really, really looking forward to shopping at Anthropoligie, even though I think it's insanely overpriced and pretentious. That's a goal, at the moment. I want to hit the sales racks. And... I have to be honest...Adrienne Vitadinni, but that's for an entirely different reason, and one that can be dealt with in another blog. The reason is not all that good, and to indulge it might be a little crazy, but I've long since given up pretending to be governed solely by logic.

Shoes, usually my refuge, are not, at least not right now. Your feet change size, too. I seem to be between an 8 and an 8 1/2, with, you guessed it, nothing fitting. I'm sliding out of some shoes, don't fit in others.

Pantyhose is more or less the only good thing, really! I can take unalloyed pleasure in being able to pull them right the way up, and having them not slide down. Somehow, that seems like something very unimportant to be taking pleasure in.

Today Katharine saw me and told me how much thinner I look. She's the first one. It took 27 pounds, lol.

I don't know. Today I'm ending up with points left, I had trouble consuming them all, though I'm sure a little ice cream will do the trick. Also on Monday I'm going to lose a point, which, honestly, isn't going to bother me at all.

I had a discussion about how profoundly odd I feel with Katharine, who could relate from her other side of the story place, being a former anorexic. It is VERY odd, indeed, and even though I enjoy the feeling of being thinner, it's still weird. So maybe I really am wrapping myself in fat to keep myself safe. Maybe I am buffering myself from the world. Or maybe I just really like Quarterpounders with cheese, or maybe a little bit of both. But as I said today, "Come on! I'm SHRINKING!! Tell me that's not strange." It creeps me out, and always has, that extreme thinness is rewarded in our society. So did I gain weight out of contrariness?

Although, to be honest, food is a drug, but the weight gain is a side effect of the drug, not the goal. And my treat last night was to eat the rest of my enchilada while standing over the sink reading...one of my favorites. It felt good to be "out of control" again, even if it was a controlled out of control.

So here I am. I've lost 27 pounds, putting me at 223. I've started to tell my weight, at least a little. It's not thin by anyone's standards, except maybe a Samoan's, but it's less then it was. I've lost 10% of my body weight. My goal at the moment is 145, but I'm sort of thinking it might be nice to go to 125, which has always been my ideal weight...and is 10 pounds less than I've ever weighed as anything even approaching an adult.

I bought size 18 jeans yesterday. Okay, it was a women's 18, and they were stretch, but they were Levis for the first time ever, and that made me feel sort of good. I tried on a size 18 skirt and it fit, and the Liz Claiborne size 18 "tablecloth" skirt that I've had stashed forever, fits, too. I don't mind those things, and I was pissed when the 18's at Lane Bryant still wouldn't fit, but it's still strange.

Who does this make me? Who am I while I do this? I made my weight part of my identity, because if you don't do that, you're sunk, but now that I'm changing my weight, what does that do to my identity? Who am I? I've been that particular person for so very long that I can't imagine being someone else. It's like when I think about losing M--I've been connected to him for so long now, who would I be without him? And who am I without the weight? And if I'm me, now, 27 pounds later, who was I before? If this is good, was that bad? And if less than this is going to be better, is this bad, too? Not good? Good for now, but not for ever?

And then there's the getting pissed part. It's going to come soon, about when I hit a size 16 (even women's). Men are going to start noticing me again (at least I hope so, at least I sort of hope so, if that makes any sense--because even though it pisses me off, I still like it) and then I'm going to get pissed, because I'm still the same person I was before. Maybe. Maybe not. I am a person now who is able to deny herself immediate gratification for a later good, which is certainly a good thing, but I'm not always sure that self-denial is the absolute best thing, either. When it becomes self-denial for self-denial's sake, then that's not good. But so far I seem to be able to stay away from that. But in any case, I'll get pissed. I'm the same girl I always was, but now I'm worth looking twice at? HUH. Maybe you're not looking twice at. Maybe I'll show you. Maybe I'll just gain some weight and we can see what you're made of. Love me, love my fat. Something like that.


A couple of days ago, maybe a week ago, I was able to bend down in the shower and grab my ankles. I know I couldn't have done that before. Buckling shoes with ankle straps is much easier. My necklace is hanging lower on my neck. (Maybe it will eventually dangle in my cleavage, much to M's delight, I imagine). MY SHOES ARE GETTING TOO BIG. Tell me that's not odd! My proportion in relation to the world is changing. I feel like Alice through the looking glass.

When I weighed myself on Friday morning and found that I had lost 2 more pounds, I had nothing more intelligent to say than "Holy shit." I think I think that each increment of weight loss is the end, I'm going to stop there, be that person, and it will be the end. That doesn't happen. I keep losing, and I will for a while, hopefully, probably, and will until I reach my goal.

If I stop at 145, I'll probably be an 8. That's so scary. I've never been an 8, not even as a teenager (because they've revised the sizes in the time since then). My size 20 skirt will swim on me.