INTRODUCTION TO "I HATE BEING FAT!"
When did it begin? When did the fat start creeping into my body?
I think it was in my fifties, piling on even more in my sixties, and now, voila! In my seventies I’m ten-ton Annie!
I ask myself what made the difference in weight
between my first forty-nine years and the last twenty-two? And right off
the bat I can see it is my activity level and my lifestyle.
Growing up I was extremely active in school,
sports and cheer-leading, band, choir, group activities, church activities,
working for my dad in his store, constantly on the go, walking all over the
place, running from home to school to town and back again, dating, looking and
feeling my best at all times ... won best figure in my Junior or Senior Class -
don't remember which one.
Then as a young adult throughout my forties,
wife and mother (several times), with full time jobs outside the home . . .
again, the high activity level continued. Add to that a newly acquired night
life, singing, dancing, partying … and you have more activity.
Food wasn’t an issue during those years. I ate
when I was hungry and ate whatever I wanted.
It didn’t seem to matter, on looking back, whether I ate cheese and
crackers, sandwiches, cake, pie, salads, fish & meats, fruit, bread, pizza,
spaghetti, mac & cheese, and so forth.
I didn’t gain weight.
Cheeseburgers galore, didn’t matter.
Then … in my early fifties, I decided to drop
out of the workforce and traipse off to god knows what and where with a new man
in my life. This was after my kids were
raised and had their own lives and families, lived elsewhere. I was single, divorced, and living on my own
in L.A., had a fabulous job with a major advertising firm. But one day I quit
my fabulous job for a man.
My new boyfriend was moving to Arizona, across
the river from Laughlin, Nevada, and wanted me to go with him. The first red flag should have been the fact he didn’t
have a job, the second red flag was when he asked me to pay the moving expenses
and pay the deposits on the condo and utilities in Bullhead City.
Even though I was in my early fifties at the
time, I was still in good physical shape. Was a size eight, no flab, felt
good. Loved life.
Needless to say, that excursion lasted only four
months. He never got a job, would rather play pool for money all day and night, and I was
doing all I could to pay the rent by working for a temp agency. The day came
when I packed up a U-Haul with my belongings, left him a ‘dear John’, and
returned to California. I lived in the U-Haul for the next week till I rented a room in Brentwood and signed on with a temp agency in West L.A.
But I never got back into the swing of things.
My momentum was lost. I was in my 50s, wasn't a spring chicken anymore. I tried several jobs offered by friends, but nothing
gelled. Finally I landed a singing gig in Bakersfield with an old friend piano
player.
It was
then that I met a man from England which began my instant foray into the British
segment. But it wasn’t till several years
later that I moved to England, married the man and left him, and since then, over twenty
years ago, my focus has been my writing.
Any work I’ve done since then has been primarily in the creative world and
basically on my own time.
So there we go, there it is. On my own time. And that’s when the fat really started creeping onto my frame. You see, my activity level decreased even more, while my
stress level increased.
After I left the man in England and returned to
California, I met and married an old friend whose life was in community theatre. As it
turned out, that became the most stressful time of my life. More
fat.
I ended that relationship a couple years later and in the past nine years I’ve focused on full-time writing and have started a publishing
company. I’m the happiest I’ve been in
years, just me and my three cats, but I’ve become more sedentary due to writing
more, sitting at the computer more, or lazing in front of the TV more, and reading more. I spend more hours sitting or lying down than standing and walking.
And it keeps comin' on, fat and more fat.
By the way, how many times have you read a book
by a person who has such will-power and restraint from the moment a diet begins
and they lose their weight seemingly effortlessly? Is there really such a
person? Do they really tell the truth about their trek to skinnydom? Are they
leaving out their false starts and falls from the wagon along the way?
Well, I’m telling it all here, I’m tellin’ it
like it is.
To be continued . . .
