weight loss

The Women’s Locker Room


I’m not modest. No shock or even mild surprise there, eh?  Even when I was a fat teenager and awkward co-ed living in the dorm, I didn’t have a problem with nudity. Not really. When Will and I were first living together he asked me out of the blue one day if I ever put clothes on when I was inside the house. He was teasing me but only just. I don’t know if Rob is as taken aback by my clothing optional ways once the wee one is tucked in for the night but given the fact that the neighbors once had to ask his late wife, Shelley, to talk to him about the possibility of adding a towel or robe to his early morning attire, I highly doubt it.

 

The one place where one would think that au naturel would not be a problem is the changing room at the gym or the swimming pool, and maybe it is just a Canadian thing, but I have never been so weirded out by women’s reactions to my changing into and out of my running clothes. I embarrassed some woman again today at the DCC fitness center. I was about half dressed after showering when she rounded the corner of the locker bay and seeing me topless, did a half retreat, stuffed her jacket hurriedly into the closest locker and fled. This isn’t the first time I have gotten strange looks for changing in a changing room either. It’s happened several times. Always with much younger women. Even at the town’s public pool, I noticed that everyone changed in little cubicles that were most impractical for mothers with children due to their size and configuration. I asked Rob about this one night when his friend Chris was visiting and they both assured me that Canadian men at least, have no such problem with locker room nudity and neither knew of any cultural precedent for what I had experienced. Rob did mention to me later though that Shelley hadn’t any problem either with using a changing room for its assigned purpose but both his daughters made mad dashes for any privacy they could find when having to change in a public locker room. 

 

So, maybe it is a generational thing? That would be ironic. A generation of young women whose clothing is by design quite revealing, and not always in a flattering way, harbors a latent prudish streak. I guess that makes sense really. The chief complaint my female high school students had about P.E. class, which incidentally was the main reason so many of them failed, was that they wouldn’t dress out for class. Not because they were worried about getting sweaty or didn’t want to participate in the activities but because if they changed their clothes, someone would see them naked. Other female someones. Who would judge them. Negatively. Never mind that these were girls in clothing so tight and in some cases scanty that what they looked like was not really a mystery to anyone with even a half a mind to speculate about it.

 

Still, just another thing about Canada that I find perplexing. That and the fact that I have yet to walk into a washroom stall and find that the toilet seat hasn’t been liberally sprayed. 

Fat Girl Inside


DSC_0512

I was reading an interview with Lisa Delaney, the author of Former Fat Girl, today as I hunted down blogging ideas. The title of her book caught my eye because I too am a former fat girl and being such felt an immediate kinship. It may not be easy being green according to the song sung by a rather famous amphibian Muppet but his portly pink companion could have warbled an entire opera on the downside of being “pleasingingly plump”.

In the news this last week there have been many articles about a recent study that found, unsurprisingly, that diets do not work. There are no long term benefits for the vast majority of people who attempt to lose weight using the array of dieting methods that proliferate like e. coli on Canadian beef. Only a very small percentage of dieters will lose weight and keep it off for more than a year. The majority will gain it all back and then some. I didn’t need MSNBC to tell me this though. I know from firsthand experience. I was put on my first diet by a….I would like to say “well-meaning” pediatrician, but I think in retrospect he was a sexist pig. I was twelve and almost as tall as I am now and maybe about only about 10 lbs heavier. Which is to say, I wasn’t fat as much as in need of more exercise. I was pretty much at the weight my body has always gravitated towards regardless of my level of fitness. But in 1975 the baby boomers had yet no need of Lycra in their Levi’s and the clothing industry had not begun its vanity “re-sizing”, and I was shit outta luck. I didn’t lose much weight. 10 lbs maybe. Putting me curiously at about the weight I am now and which my mother, ironically, thinks is much too thin. At the time I wouldn’t have found the irony amusing even if I had known what irony was. I was the “fat girl” at school. The “unattractive sister/daughter” at home. I wore big clunky plastic framed glasses, and my mother commanded me to keep my hair as short as a boy’s because long hair “makes you look heavy”. I was forever being told that I had such a pretty face if only I would lose some weight. The backhanded compliment of choice for fat girls.

So I lost 10 lbs. My father was pleased. My mother “rewarded” me with a trip to the mall for new clothes (a dubious reward as I hated to shop for clothes) and my younger, thin as a stick sister got her nose bent out of shape when boys began to notice me. Older boys. I gained the weight back. And thus the pattern for the vicious circle of the next 15 years or so began to spin.

You see, you are always a fat girl inside. It doesn’t matter how much time has elapsed. The memories of taunting and name-calling. The dances you never got asked to. The horrible shopping experiences that would have reduced you to tears, if you were the kind who cried in front of people, and left your mother grim and tight-lipped. None of that ever goes away.

I started to lose weight when I went to college because I walked everywhere I went mainly and I was free of the meat and potato diet that my father’s preferences imposed on our family. At some point I started running and began to toy with weight lifting on and off. In my mid-twenties, I picked up martial arts and began to run in earnest despite the asthma that I was developing. By my thirties I exercised nearly every day of the week for a hour or two a day and recently, certain health conditions have compelled me to explore organic, meat-less and nearly dairy-free eating. I do all of this because I want to. Not to be thin. But. There is still a part of me that needs to check my weight often. That panics a little when clothes feel a bit snug. And that mentally shudders at the thought of gaining weight. Because you are always a fat girl inside. Always.