I separated from my first husband in December 1993. At the time we had a small country pub so our personal lives were very public (when you’re a publican you eat, live, and breathe your work). The reaction when I assembled my staff to break the news to them the morning my husband moved out was, apart from tears, overwhelming disbelief.
“But you’re the perfect couple!” they had said.
“No”, I thought, “We’re just good actors.”
Now I’m going to put this out there, and I may get howled down, but I believe that if you meet a truly happy morbidly obese, obese, or even just overweight, person, then you have met a bloody good actor!
There are enough normal weight people out there who aren’t happy with their size. I think that fat people (and I use the term to categorise people who are obese to whatever degree) who are OK with their size have just beaten themselves, or been beaten, into submission. Either that, or they are just kidding themselves.
They are genuinely not happy with their weight or size.
I defy anyone to put their hand on their heart and say, “I am truly happy with being 20+% above my normal healthy weight range.”
Let’s put aside, shall we, the self-image; self-confidence; and manifest other psychological issues that accompany obesity? Let’s look at the health issues for starters.
What health risks are increased by obesity? Where to begin?
Let’s just list a few:
- Insulin resistance
- High blood pressure
- Atherosclerosis (plaque inside your blood vessels)
- Cardiovascular disease
- Stroke
- Breast, endometrial, and colon cancers
- Type 2 diabetes
- Gall bladder disease
- Polycystic ovarian syndrome (ovarian cysts & absence of ovulation)
- Osteoarthritis and back pain
- Gout
- Cataracts
- Sleep apnoea
- Stress incontinence
The fact is, obesity isn’t our first choice. If we could change it we would. Chronic pain is not normal. Aches and pain when your stand up to walk, or just stand up; or lie down; or sit.
Shortness of breath walking up stairs, or just up the street, or leaning over to do up your shoe laces (if you can reach at all).
Struggling to reach around to scratch your back, do up your bra, or even to wipe your bum.
Sitting in an airplane and both arm rests work their way up so your hips and thighs can take every inch of space between you and your neighbour. This is the part I would hate even more than wondering whether I had wiped my bum properly!
Being pushed to the front of group photos because you are the shortest, but knowing that this will make you look exponentially larger than everyone else!
And the clincher for me, given that I was considered one of the ‘fit fat’, causing my climbing party to be on the side of Mount Phan Xi Pan after dark because you are too short and fat to make it up the ridge line without
significant discomfort, and then opting out of the summit attempt next day so you don’t cause any more inconvenience to people who have been incredibly patient with you.
OK, that probably sounds like such a first world problem, but that was the turning point for me. It was the first time in my life, at 48 years old, that being short and fat had stopped me from doing anything.
And that’s me in a nutshell!
Outwardly a pocket rocket (for rather large pockets). Fast, furious, fitter than most. Driven! Active! Out there! Supremely confident!
BULLHSIT!
The truth is, virtually none of the above represented the person I was.
Like I said, I’m a good actor.
Rewind 20 years to December 1993. I was 110 kgs when I separated from my first husband. That’s double my current weight. And just to allay any immediate fears, our separation had nothing to do with my weight. J is a far better man than that.
Anyway, a small aside. In the two weeks immediately after the separation I couldn’t eat. I would feel hungry, think about food, and immediately want to vomit. So in those two weeks I ate two sandwiches. I lost 10 kgs and nobody noticed a thing.
Nearly two years later I applied for a position with Australia Post. My mum’s postie had told her of some new jobs coming up so Mum took me out to the letter box to meet the postie. Bless her (the postie that is), she was so honest. “Well, you’re too fat to be a postie, but we have some night sorting jobs going”. The upper weight limit for a postie was 93 kgs.
I was somewhere between 93 and 100 kgs, I think about 95 kgs at the point. But, hell, I was out of work, seriously in need of a job after drinking my way through grieving over J (but that’s another story), and it’s not like I wasn’t accustomed to working all night!
So I became one of the inaugural members of the Mackay DC nightsorting team.
It turns out that night shift suited me. I would eat a main meal at night; nothing during my shift; nothing before going to bed in the morning; a meal when I got out of bed; then dinner and back to work. I wasn’t consciously dieting, I was just eating when I was hungry. My attitude to food changed from it being a significant part of my life, an event even, to treating it like fuel for a car. When I was low on fuel I ate. I lost 25 kgs over the next couple of years. For the first time in 10 years I was overweight, instead of being obese.
Not only that, I went to university. I wouldn’t say that sorting mail every night is mind-numbing, but I was certainly lacking intellectual stimulation. That may sound snobbish, but that’s just the way it is.
Six years after separating from J I was living in Brisbane, my career was on the up and up, and my weight was relatively stable, between 70 and 75 kgs.
I was pretty happy.
A couple of years went by. I found myself in another serious relationship, so serious in fact that we are now married. Over the course of the next 14 years by weight fluctuated.
The first time I had married, in 1985, I dropped 10 kgs (and stopped biting my finger nails) to get married. I briefly (very briefly) flirted with a weight in the low 60 kgs. During my first marriage my weight fluctuated through a 50 kg range. At one stage I lost 20 odd kgs to come back down to 72 kgs. Someone asked J what it was like to be married to a new woman.
I looked good, and I felt good. But it didn’t last. As you already know, I was 110 kgs when we separated.
When P moved in I was still in the 70 kgs, but that didn’t last. My weight hurdy gurdy started rolling on again. We married in 2004, and again I lost 15 kgs, this time to get down to 80 kgs to get married.
At my peak, just before my sleeve surgery, I was nearly 100 kgs again, and again in the ‘morbidly’ obese category.
In the meantime, with my weight over 90 kgs, I had trekked to Gaumukh, the geographical start of the Ganges River in India. I had also summited Mount Kilimanjaro, among other feats of endurance and fitness.
I compensated for being fat by being fit (well, fit for a fat person). In fact, I just never saw myself as fat. I knew I was fat, and I wasn’t happy about it. I was just in denial. If I was fit and healthy, how could being fat be bad?
Well, a body riddled with Osteoarthritis is one bad thing. And staring down the barrel of at least one knee replacement, despite having lost over 40 kgs, is testament to the strain you put on your body when you consistently carry excessive weight.
I guess the point of this ramble is that sometimes we need a shock to make us realise that things have to change. No-one ever told me I was fat. In fact, people would tell me quite the opposite. I think that is because I never acted fat. No matter how I felt, when I stood up to walk I would walk straight and tall, no limping (except in extreme circumstances when by dodgy right ankle was playing up). I was determined to look fit and healthy. You see some fat people shuffle or waddle. I strode.
I would also not let my weight get in the way of physical activity. I could walk farther than most. I could walk up and down the 338 stairs in my building, not just once, but five times, carrying a pack. I was over 90 kgs when I summited Kili. The odds were well and truly against me on that one.
When I was behind the bar I was faster than any of my staff and could outwork anyone.
Sheer bloody minded determination!
I could outwork, outwalk, outlast people younger and thinner than me. I am guessing, however, that many of those thinner people still have cartilage left in their knees.
I don’t.
When I told one of my work colleagues of my plan to have the LSG she was supportive (outwardly) but was privately wondering why I was doing it. In her view, I didn’t need to lose weight.
Outwardly I walked the walk and talked the talk of a thin person. But inwardly I was desperately unhappy. I so wanted to be thin. When I was a teenager the boys weren’t interested in me beyond being one of the boys. I even asked a good ‘mate’ to escort me to make my debut. He refused. Needless to say, I was never formally presented to society. Instead I watched all my thin friends, looking beautiful in their white gowns, waltzing around the McKenna Hall with their black-tied partners.
Don’t get me wrong, I was popular, well liked, and well treated. I just wasn’t ‘desirable’. So my strategy for dealing with my overweight was to be as good, or better, in every other way. One of my catch phrases was that I never got a job because of my looks, it was always my ability and my personality that got me through.
Apart from being a high achiever, I was funny, engaging, and incredibly positive, despite being desperately sad.
When I write this I reflect on just how sad it all was. Hey, I don’t think I am any more screwed up than your average normal weight person, it’s just that my hang-ups were likely to kill me in the long run.
I also believe I have a predisposition to extreme behaviour. My father, in his younger days, was an over-eating alcoholic who had to be the hardest drinking, hardest working, hardest this, hardest that…
Talk about being my father’s daughter! Dad was an illegitimate child, shunned by his mother’s family, who strove all his life for acceptance.
I was fat, and strove all my life for acceptance.
We did it by compensating in nearly every other aspect of our lives.
Sad, but true.
So when I got back from Vietnam in 2012, after having failed to summit Phan Xi Pan because I was too fat, I was fairly pissed off, and with my knees almost totally shot, I had to accept that the charade had to end.
I was fat and needed to lose weight.
But how was I going to do it?
The rest, as they say, is history…
