Nervous Nellie

It's me, Flo, here again. Since yesterday, I've been doing some thinking about my person. Since I gave myself a new name, I think I should also give her a name. You know, this could get really strange referring to her as "my person" all the time. So, after a night wherein she didn't sleep so hot, I've decided to call her Nellie. As in 'Nervous Nellie'.

Most of how Nellie lives life is just going along doing her thing day after day. She doesn't spend considerable amounts of time psycho-analyzing herself and asking 'why' she's doing this or that. Very few people do. But since I just lay around all day waiting to transform her next meal into pockets of stored *you-know-what*, I have time to think about 'why' she does what she does.

The answer to 'why' is not a simple one, believe me. After forty years with Nellie, I probably know her best. But where to begin? Today, let me just explain her new nickname.

Nellie has been nervous since the day she was born. Of course, nobody really noticed it until she was three or four years old, I suppose, but I always knew it was there. What started it? Well, I'm not medical doctor or psychologist, so I can't say with ultimate authority, but some obvious facts come to mind.

Even before Nellie's birth, her parents split up. Long story, full of he-said, she-said, but the bottom line is, Nellie's mom had a very unhappy, depressed, heart-breaking pregnancy. I believe that there is something to it, and even a few scientific studies have addressed this topic. Being very unhappy and depressed emotionally during pregnancy does have an effect on the fetus.

But go back even another generation, to Nellie's grandmother. Not that I ever knew her, mind you, but from what I've heard, now there was one nervous woman.

So right off the bat, Nellie had two strikes against her. Nervous genes and an unhappy gestation.
Nellie lived in relative bliss, unaware of her father's absence, during her infancy, but when by the age of five she'd been through two step-fathers and was on the verge of getting a third, you can just about imagine her insecurity and stress levels.

A stable childhood is the most important thing that parents can give their children. Nellie, to put it mildly, didn't have much of that.

Nellie's mom is someone who, both then and even now, still fights her own demons (we'll get to those another day), was also a rather strict disciplinarian with her children. I remember Nellie hiding in a corner of a room, dabbing a mosquito bite that she'd scratched till it bled. She was petrified that she'd be spanked for having scratched it. Hello? A mosquito bite?

But you get the idea. Nellie lived in a world of fear, uncertainty and confusion. And as a result of her genes, her environment and her history, she is by nature, a rather nervous individual. In her childhood, her mother always called her a "worry wart" because she worried incessantly about the smallest things. Will the storm blow our little trailer away? Will there be enough food? Will you come home tonight, Mommy?

As a teen, she turned to chewing her fingernails. Only sheer willpower allowed her to overcome that, but then she merely began chewing the insides of her lips (another surefire way to know if she's nervous even to this day). She worried herself into sickness on more than one occasion throughout her teens and for some years, survived on (then Rx) Tagamet and allergy shots.

An early, and failed, marriage set off every worry-wart tendency she had, leaving her overweight and stressed to the max again. Getting away from that situation helped immensely, but as anybody who's lived life knows, there's always another challenge right around the corner. Her peace was soon shattered by any number of challenges, and now is no exception.

So I think it should come as no surprise to you or me that she has taken to eating as a way to calm her nerves. What has she got to be 'nervous' about at this time in her life??

Well, things have been rough for Nellie. After leaving her first husband and being a single parent for many years, during which time she had to overcome quite a few emotional issues and grow as a person, she hooked up with her current husband.

Nice guy, he is. But in his own way, he contributes to Nellie's nervousness (more on that another day). And then they had children. Nellie only wanted one child more, so she could go back to work in 6 months. She hadn't been happy at home with her oldest child (now an adult) and wanted to avoid the emotional and creative slump she knew would come.

Unexpectedly, a second child followed almost immediately thereafter. Wow! Two babies in 2 years? Not only was that hard on her, physically, but it made it all the more difficult for her to work herself back out of the lovely layer of *you-know-what* that she gained during two pregnancies.

And here we are, more than five years later. Nellie, despite some attempts otherwise, is still home full-time with the children. She hasn't been without any creative outlets, having written two books that have been published, one of which was quite popular. She lives what many women wish they could live: the ideal life.

But still, she's nervous. Nervous about not being the main bread-winner any longer. This is a role she assumed for many years and was not comfortable giving up. She's nervous about money issues in the slumping economy. The children are about ready for school, but will she get a job? What if she doesn't?

And worst of all, her nervous eating has pretty much put her back, weight-wise, to where she was at the end of the last pregnancy.

NOW comes the revelation that I had in the middle of the night, when Nervous Nellie could not sleep. I, FLO, actually serve a very necessary purpose for Nellie. I help her stay *happy* to be home. Because she's self-conscious now about her weight, she's less inclined to avidly seek a job. And by not avidly pursuing job opportunities, she's resigning herself to staying home, which despite her revulsion of the idea (continuing to stay home indefinitely), it's comfortable and safe.

So you see, I am not the culprit here. She is purposely feeding me, making me store all those unnecessary calories.

The question is now... how to get her to change?

Well, that's no easy task, I'm sure. First thing to do is to keep identifying the reasons why Nellie does what she does. Nervousness, I suspect, is just one piece of the puzzle.

Stay tuned!

I Am, I Said

Like the Neil Diamond song, I am lost between two shores, or in my case, ideals. No, I'm not a transplanted New Yorker, but I am an unwanted part of my person's being, a stranger in my own land. And nobody, I mean nobody, has ever heard me speak at all (not even the chair... sorry Neil!). Until now.

I am neither welcomed nor appreciated. I am merely, as she calls me, fat. 'Fat' is such an ugly word. So my first order of business is to give myself a new name. A name that will not cause you to shrivel in disgust every time I refer to myself, or she to me. Hmmm, what shall I name myself? Portulence? Porcinity? Corpulence? Those all sound like something out of a sci-fi novel.

For the sake of simplicity, and due to the fact that *I* am the one in charge here, after all, I wish to call myself Floret. By definition, a bloom. Okay, I just knooooooow some of you are going to find some way of making fun of me no matter what my name. People always make fun of fat. But I don't care. Floret I am! You can call me Flo!

So here I am, Flo, and since my person's birth, I've been connected to my her for forty years now! Gosh, I don't feel that old. I've always been around, waiting in the wings, small bits of me, even when my person was in the best shape of her life! After all, the human body totally devoid of Flo would simply not work.

So you see, I have a scientific reason for being! I am actually, despite popular culture's take on me, necessary to the human body.

Without me, humans would have been extinct centuries ago. It was me who kept humans warm and fed them during lean times. In fact, I was once revered as a sign of prosperity!

Alas, times change, and now I am the object of repulsion. A sad, sad statement of our times.

I am one of the most efficient of systems in the human body as well. I have a vast network of storage centers and the most efficient means of grabbing those excess calories and carbs and saving them for another day. Call me a futurist, but it's true. Someday, my person might need me! So I take advantage of the good times and sock away as much as I can. Just in case. Not like I'm the "go out and sell your house and everything you own because the Mayans predicted the end of the world in just more than four years" type of futurist. But I'm realistic. I know that times could be tough someday. History has these patterns, you know...

Until some calamity strikes, however, she disapproves of me, yet feeds me nonetheless. Sounds a bit two-faced on her part, doesn't it? She'll whine and complain about me, then turn right around and give me a couple thousand (calories, that is) just to show me how much she dislikes me.

If you ask me, I'm not the culprit here. Yes, I'm the victim. And I'll prove it to you. Just keep reading!

How do you begin?

My fat is a muse. Well, perhaps it hasn't been before, but for this exercise, I'm going to let my fat do the talking. My fat no doubt has many things to tell me. I just haven't been listening. I'm not entirely sure what my fat is going to say to me in the coming weeks, and to be honest, I'm a bit nervous about it. It is going to lecture me? Demean me? Or beg me to keep it around for a lifetime?

This blog, as you may have guessed, is about fat. Fat in the food we eat, becoming fat in our veins, clogging our arteries, layering our gray matter with cells that will give us dementia sooner and heart disease for sure. So say the doctors.

And yet, despite all the potential risks to our frail bodies, we gorge on fat. We eat recklessly, because it is so easily available, and mostly inexpensive. What's a small order of golden loveliness at McD's cost? A mere dollar! A fraction of the cost of a gallon of gasoline any more! Even things that should be healthy carry hidden fats to our bodies. Foods that have NO fat in them can magically turn into fat once they enter our system!

Who is to blame? Where does it all end? We see newcast after newscast about obesity, read articles in magazines promising us that we can bust fat in fourteen days! But yet on average, we get fatter every year.

Maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Maybe instead of asking scientists to give us the reasons why we're fat, we should be asking our fat its reasons for sticking around. Maybe, just maybe, there's a good reason. A reason we've never thought of or, if we have, never accepted. Just maybe.

As for me, I'm in that classification of 'obese' based on my body's weight and height. I'm five foot, six-point-something inches and at age forty, weigh in at 205 pounds. Most people don't quite 'get' that number based on appearances; they tell me I don't look that heavy. Maybe they're just being nice?

Very few doctors differentiate the fact that not all people are built alike. My friend Gloria has teeny, tiny, lightweight bones like a bird. I have the bones of a heifer (proving that Darwin had it all wrong... we didn't descent from apes but cows and birds)! So, if per chance Gloria and I were the same height and were to each have the same measurements (waist, hips, etc), I would still step on the scale and weigh in at a good 20+ pounds more than she would.

So right up front, I'm annoyed by all the charts and BMI calculations that tell me that *I* should weigh 150 pounds or less. The last time I weighed in less than 150 pounds, my friends started to wonder if I'd become anorexic!

Because I feel the numbers are all skewed based on a body type that isn't realistic, I'm going to avoid numbers for now. So what? I'm 205 pounds. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that I can't zip any of my jeans, and have resorted to sweat pants. Summer is coming. This is not good!

So, I'm aiming for what Queen Latifah touts in her commercials for Jenny Craig (I have my own feelings about her doing those, but her message is spot on). I'm going for a "size healthier".

But if you *insist* on having a number here it is: 35 pounds. That what I need to lose. 35 pounds of back-breaking fat.

The hows and wherefores of weight loss are about as mystifying as trying to guess the winning lottery numbers. I haven't traditionally been one of those people who tries every fad diet or who reads every thing there is to read about dieting. I simply don't have time. This isn't to say that I don't spend a lot of small bytes of time assessing my weight and reminding myself that I must do something about it --- someday. Every time I shower, dress, change clothes and do laundry, I am reminded of the fact that my body has simply grown larger than is comfortable or healthy.

A friend of mine recently emailed a link to an article she read in Good Housekeeping. I'd never heard of the author before, Geneen Roth. The article was about emotional eating and why we do it. Of course, everybody in America has heard of binge eating. But not many of us have stopped to think of the real reasons why we do it. Here's a link to the article: http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/advice/stop-binge-eating

This article talked about how the author had started writing (as writing was her livelihood) about her fat and the relationship she had with her fat and why her fat, though repulsive and despised as it was, served a useful function in her life. While that sounds preposterous and a bit sadistic in a way, it makes perfect sense to me.

So I've thought about it a week and have decided to blog about my fat and in fact, I'm taking it a step further by handing over the reigns to my fat. Let the fat speak!. All 35 pounds of roly-poly, round the belly (thanks to two pregnancies late in my 30's), swaying listlessly under the arms (thanks to flavored coffee creamers), flopping over my kneecaps (thanks to Schwann's chocolate chip cookie dough) and squishing helplessly between my thighs (thanks to strawberry pop tarts) FAT.

Do I expect that this blogging will have a miracle effect on my food choices? Not really. Then why do it? Because expressing oneself on paper (here, on screen) can often bring to light thoughts and revelations that merely sitting around bemoaning ones flaws never will. I may not become thin again (seriously, I doubt I'll ever be thin again) but I may know myself better. And that, friends, is always a good thing.

So join me, if you wish, and share your thoughts about the same things that I'm thinking about. If you are journaling online about your fat's musings, then share your location!

Having had my say, I now turn the mic over to my closest companion; my fat!