Hey there...whoever you might be. My guess is that if you found this blog you've had some kind of experience with being overweight or struggling with incorporating healthful choices into your daily routine. I am aware that these kinds of challenges do not make me unique. As a matter of fact, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle are becoming more and more common in our culture. It's just too easy to eat empty calories from a frozen one-skillet meal instead of nutrionally balanced, delicious, home cooked meals in our busy lives...to watch Biggest Loser on TV in your one free hour after a long day of work instead of treading to the gym for a quick workout...to work too hard for too long at a moderate to low paying job during the week and crash on the weekend from exhaustion than to balance and integrate healthful choices into each and every day. Perhaps I'm revealing more about my life than yours or anyone elses, but I refuse to believe that I'm that different or that my struggle isn't shared by lots of other people out there.
I must begin with a confession...I am a life-long fat girl. I have always been bigger than my peers for as long as I can remember. I was the only kid in kindergarten who couldn't use the swing that hung from the ceiling of our classroom because I was too big...by grade school I was regularly called "tub-of-lard" on the playground...by junior high it was clear that I wasn't exactly hot property in the eyes of the pimply, scrawny, silly boys that I was supposed to obsessively spend my time pining for...by high school I had learned that my keys to social and personal success were my intellect and my sense of humor instead of my looks or my affiliation with the popular girls or boys...by college I was busy smoking clove cigarettes, wearing black, baggy clothes that hid my every increasing waistline, and hanging out with my sullen, brooding, mostly unhappy art school friends who accepted me without much reservation, regardless of my size. When I arrived at my early 20's, I had completely internalized my identification as fat and felt as though I would always be the big, funny, smart girl that everybody liked by nobody really knew or loved for all that she was. And then, SHE happened...OPRAH happened.
Have you every made an unusual, split second decision that led to a life altering series of events? Perhaps you have and you simply don't know it or it hasn't quite played out yet. I did so in the fall of 1995...I actually wrote a letter to Oprah WInfrey after she aired a show in which she wheeled out a cart full of animal fat that was meant to be representational of the weight that she had recently lost on a liquid diet. I am not a person who writes letters to TV show hosts, I swear. However, my outrage at her arrogance, her grandiosity, and her irresponsibility, as well as the fact that I was working at an advertising agency directly across the street from Harpo Studios where I regularly saw her entering and exiting the workplace, led me to pen a scathing letter that I thought would disappear into obscurity. Apparently this letter was representational of thousands of other letters that were written after that show aired...at least that's what the producer said when she called me nearly 9 months later to invite me to Harpo studios to film an interview with other Oprah show producers about my experience of that show.
No comments:
Post a Comment