It’s not about changing my looks. It’s about maintaining what I have. Like my weight. I can’t stand it even if I gain one pound. That makes me go out of my way to lose it.
I weigh myself every morning, a habit I got into when I was a chubby little girl and the people in my family called me fatty and fatso. It was a horrible time with people watching what I ate and commenting that I ate too much. And even though that was so, they’d still tell me to clean my plate, don’t waste food, think of all the starving children in Europe. There was no easy way out of it.
Luckily the pounds seemed to roll off when I entered puberty, but that didn’t end my weight fetish. Once I saw the pounds going down and the scale numbers reducing, I wanted to keep that happening: no more cookies, no more ice cream, no more desserts of any kind, no more bread, no more fried foods, no in between meal snacks – the restrictions just went on and on until there was no joy in eating anything anymore.
Exercise came next. I didn’t play sports as a little girl. The girls jumped rope and played hopscotch and walked back and forth to school as our form of exercise. But after we moved to the suburbs I had to ride my bike to school and back for a total of four miles a day, and I played on a couple of teams. That managed to trim my legs down pretty quickly and the rest of me followed suit. It was my puberty time, so I was exercising enough to lose some of those lousy excess pounds. And so I continued exercising the rest of my life.
Clothing was another problem. My mother managed to buy me the ugliest clothes during my chubby days. I remember a brown corduroy skirt and a brown plaid shirt that I had to wear almost every day since she didn’t want to waist money buying me a lot of clothes in those days. Then when I began losing some pounds she bought me more – I was more worth it.
Luckily my fatty days didn’t last too long – since my tonsillectomy at age four til age eleven – and I began to look like the other girls I went to school with.
But those days taught me huge life lessons: what and what not to eat, what and what not to wear, and to exercise – things that affected me for the rest of my life. Even now that I’m past eighty. So when I gained a pound this week, I wanted it off right away. This morning my scale rewarded me with one less pound. I don’t need to lose anymore. I’ll just keep the looks I have.
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