It's not over till the fat lady sings....

Last night, my friend Sheila sent me an email after I posted my last blog:

little, fat, funny girl............If you don't change your title I will do something drastic......... well I will think of what I will do. You are not not not......... a little fat funny girl...... now come on....
how about le petite funny bunny....... smaller but larger than life........

She's not the only one who has mentioned my use of the word 'fat' and to be upset by it. I use that word a lot, often to describe myself, or I make reference to the 'fat girl' clothes shops etc.

I'm struggling to understand why everyone has so much trouble with my use of this term. I AM FAT!

Actually, the proper term is probably 'obese' but that's not funny at all...

According to the standard scale for these things based on my age, and height, and allowing for my 'big bones' (my bones aren't big...truly how big do you think the bones are of someone who is 5ft 2) I should weigh between 55-60kgs... the last time I weighed in that low I was probably prepubescent.

The year I turned 11 and those female hormones started to kick in, I chubbed up... I developed breasts pretty much from the get go, so I never got to wear all those pretty little bra's that young girls wear... Mum took me off to Myers and I was fitted for a proper bra (my, the embarrassment of a middle age woman with cold hands feeling me up in front of my mother!) in my final year at Primary School... and came back to school in the afternoon and showed all the boys behind the shelter sheds... but that's another story...

I'm not as fat as I've been, and certainly I've been thinner... we've all done the yo-yo of diets and I've tried them all... well most of them anyway... with varying degrees of success but I don't stay that way... or in order for me to stay that way I'd have to deny myself pretty much everything that I think is good in this life ... like butter, and icecream, and chocolate and wine and carb's - I could do a whole blog on the miracle of pasta, bread and potatoes!

So I stopped dieting quite awhile ago and as a result, I don't yo-yo anymore, if anything, I've slowly lost a bit of weight over the last 5 years, without even knowing why. I will occasionally rationalise my dairy and chocolate and alcohol compulsions, not because I feel fat, but that I feel unwell.

Though it's a cruel twist of nature, that when suffering from pms and bloat and fluid retention, the one thing I crave more than anything else is cookies and cream icecream...

I'm a big girl... well actually I'm not a big girl... I'm little... hence the Little, Fat, Funny Girl... as my Mum says - I'm not overweight, I'm under tall... but I'm also lush, and curvaceous, and voluptuous and womanly... and I sort of like that about myself now... though I didn't always... but I've learnt that often we are each our harshest critic...

When helping to organise my 20 year school reunion a few years ago, I caught up with a couple of boys that I knew at Primary School and High School, and it was interesting their take on me back then.

• One boy announced at the dinner that he can recall clearly his first sight of me, his first day at his new school, Age 10. He said "You were standing out of the front of the school and you were wearing an orange hot pants suit, and you had black patent leather boots on, and you had the chubbiest legs I've ever seen" (I can remember that outfit, I was in a public speaking competition and Mum had lent me her clothes... I had a funky Mum!) I was mortified that he would say this, not just to me, but to a table full of former classmates until he said... "I thought you were the cutest thing I've ever seen, and used to dream about you and your chubby legs..."
• And then another boy, who had been part of a group of boys and girls that had hung out together through most of my high school years, blurted out to me as I walked across the carpark of a local hotel to meet him for a drink 20+ years later... "I'm so glad you're not hiding yourself anymore" and when I raised my eyebrows at him and said what? Said "you used to wear all these loose smocks, and big, baggy jumpers that covered everything and all I wanted to do was know what was underneath all of that.. you have no idea the number of conversations that us boys had about you"

It was that and other experiences that have made me reassess who I am, and to try to gain a bit of comfort and acceptance about who I am... which includes all of me... including the outer casing...

As long as I am healthy, and that I continue to feel good about myself it should be my right to use the "F.." word as often as I want to... and I'm gunna... so there...

The Fat Lady singing... We are family, McDonalds, KFC and me...