It’s a bit oxymoronic, “growing thinner.” We think of growth when something gets bigger, not smaller, but that’s what’s happening to me. I’m growing thinner.
At 77 years old, I now weigh what I did as a Junior in High School, and then I considered myself plump, if not downright fat. I was a chunky kid; when I would shop with my mother to buy pants, I ended up with size “husky.” My older brother, never one to pass up a good opportunity, liked to say, “LB” – my initials – “stands for poundage.” In his rare affectionate moments, he called me Bloat.
It wasn’t easy being chunky. In the school locker room before and after Phys Ed, I was regularly told “you need a bra.” Luckily, I was not the fattest kid in school; Lloyd or Alan, both considerably heftier than I, would absorb most of the abuse. Using my quick wit and humor, I successfully deflected the taunts and shaming, but they penetrated and hurt, nonetheless.
When I went off to College at Rhode Island School of Design in 1966, they administered a physical examination. Don’t ask me why. I weighed 170 pounds at the time and was 5’9” tall. On the copy of the report, it classified me as “obese.”
Even in adulthood I’ve received my share of nasty comments. While attending a meeting here in town, I moved into a row of chairs towards an empty seat. “Excuse me, squeezing by,” I said to one gentleman and his wife. He responded, “Because you’re fat.” Nice.
Now friends and acquaintances are telling me it looks like I’ve lost weight, and it’s true, I have. “I’m perfecting my disappearing act,” I sometimes respond. Other times, I mention that I’m at my High School Junior weight. On my scale at home I’m down to 155 pounds and headed lower.
I enjoy cooking and have always made the meals at home. When the kids were young, I fed the four of us every day. I like to think I exposed them to foods they might have otherwise avoided, even when their sometimes response was “Yuck! Indian food!” In 1990 I went on to own and operate a B&B for thirteen years with my wife Norma and cooked a sumptuous breakfast for twelve strangers every morning. In the process, I got very hefty, topping out at 225 pounds and requiring pants with a 44-inch waist. Now I’m down to a 32.
I’m not sure how much weight I will eventually lose. In the end, of course, I will lose it all, like all of us. Mother Nature wants it all back, all the stuff I’ve begged and borrowed, right down to the last molecule, and she will get it. Even those molecules will be stripped down to their bare atoms over time and ultimately returned to the energy source from which they came. You’ve gotta like that in a closed system; absolutely everything gets recycled.
When I think of the time I spent feeling shame and witnessing the shaming of people we used to call “Fatty” it saddens me. Bodies come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Each of us finds ourselves here involuntarily but must nonetheless make our way through life, enduring or thriving as best we can. No operating manual is provided to us, just the conventions and habits of culture, and culture, sadly, can be quite cruel.
