I look like I’m missing one leg, but I don’t look pregnant. Mission starting to be accomplished. This was from a huge party at a friend’s house which included plenty of eating and drinking and I allowed myself to be un-self-conscious about my consumption for that one day. Of course I changed clothes four or five times before leaving, but that was just for comfort’s sake because I knew it was going to be an all-day gathering. True to form, I left the house at 9 a.m. and returned at 11:30 p.m.

The only negative moment I had regarding my body image was when a silly, drunken woman staggered up to me and my 30something friend, waggled her finger at both of us and said, “you’re both in your forties, right?” I am in my forties, but nobody ever guesses that. Ever. My friend corrected her, and rather than apologizing she then proceeded to slur out a boring tale of her boyfriend leaving his socks on the floor and how it’s hard to put up with that when you get to a certain age even though she looks so young and everyone thinks she’s 28.

That was the only unintentionally interesting part of the story, because she had that leathery hard bitten look that women get when they’ve been sitting in the sun and smoking cigarettes since the ’70s and no one could possibly have mistaken her for being under 50. It was both rude and sad at the same time; she never would have mentioned her alleged youthful appearance or her boyfriend if it wasn’t some way of trying to boost herself up at our expense, since to her eyes we were both old and (as far as she knew) sans boyfriends.

My only thought: as long as women are this petty to other women, and as long as women make the mistakes of basing their entire sense of value on a relationship with a man and a false idea of youthfulness, a woman will never be leader of the free world!

(N.B. that started out in a drunken unprocessed state as: “this is why Hillary didn’t win”.)

It’s like I have two voices now; the one that’s proud to have a waist and the other one that says, “what are you going to do now, get all pretty just to satisfy cultural demands and  then let some bastards come along and abuse you again?”   It’s hard to face,  the remembering I talked about in the last post;  the strongest memory is not of being thin or being pretty, but of being devastatingly unhappy, more than at any other time, more than when I was broke or unemployed or homeless. 

Holy crap.  Regardless of my body shape, I certainly have a fat story!

There’s a tremendous morass around money and food for me; it of course relates to the basic Freudian over-identifying of money with father and food with mother, and having been through phases of going severely without one or the other - one by choice, one by default - it seems the less money I have, the more food I want. I wonder if other people have the same experiences??

I used to be beautiful. Now I go out with my friends and I’m THE FAT ONE. I never really am aware of it until someone emails me the pictures. However, on March 29 at the event you see above, there were so many pictures taken that it finally gave me the shock and the wake up call I needed. And wake up calls don’t come much louder than this:

 

 

 

I’m not pregnant. Hell, I’m menopausing.

 

So I have to do something, obviously, because I’m sick sick sick of being unhealthy and feeling terrible about myself. The first thing I did was start using my gym membership which had been gathering dust for a month or so. I got brave and weighed myself.

 

173 pounds. That was a lot less than I expected so it gave me a lift right then and there.

Then I went to the gym again. Right away I noticed I was sleeping better, and that’s a big deal. I’m working on cutting out sugary food because it makes me crazy, not to mention fat. Next, I will get a waist measurement and set some goals.

Baby steps. For a grown woman who has had it up to here with looking like a big fat baby.