Fatty and Skinny….

I’m getting fat.  Not fat, fat exactly, but fatter than I was.  Having said that, what do people consider fat?

I was always skinny.  The skinny bitch.  I didn’t think I was skinny, but I didn’t think I was fat.  I was just me and my size was just my size.   I was lean, yes but I didn’t think anything about it because, like I said, I was just me. 

So now, I am still me, just a bigger version of me than I was, when I was younger, so, am I fat?

No, not really, though I do have a spare tyre, my upper arms are definitely bigger and softer, my thighs are bigger too and they wobble, they didn’t used to wobble.  My ass, well let’s say, now I have an ass, so before I had a small ass, never the less, it was still an ass.  My face is rounder and I have more than one chin.  When I was the skinny bitch, I could, if I tried hard enough and put my face down towards my neck, make myself have more than one chin,

It is called skin, lean with pockets of fat cells in it and maybe some muscle.  I used to have muscle, when I was the skinny bitch.  I did lots of hand stands and cart wheels and other gymnastic tricks.  I loved gymnastics at school.  My friend and I were both good at it.  We were the skinny bitches.

We remained the skinny bitches even after we had children without even trying.

I went even thinner after my first baby, all that breastfeeding.  It gave her colic.  I thought it was what I was eating, so in the end I ate very little.  She still had colic.  I put her on the bottle as I had to eat and something had to give.  She took the bottle and the colic went, but the constipation came.  She still screamed in pain.

It was a lose-lose situation for her, and a win lose for me.  Win because I could now eat again, the cabbage, potatoes, salad cream etc. that everyone said was probably giving her colic.  I lost because she was still screaming and I felt it was my fault for putting her on the bottle and the poor child was still in pain….

I started to get fat when I was in my early 40’s.  Actually I think I started to change, ever so slightly, from my early 30’s, I think I gained about 7 pound from when I was in my teens.  I didn’t try to gain these pounds, they just arrived, slowly and without much encouragement or notice from me.  I was still a skinny bitch you see.

By my early 40’s I had gained another 7 pound.  Still I think I looked pretty good in the mirror, even though, that is a whole stone in a 10-year period.  I was beginning to ‘fill out’.  I was also noticing that my skin was changing, slightly.  I was getting fine lines and the elasticity was beginning to loosen I suppose.  That’s ok, it does that with age.

By my early 50’s I had gained another 14 pound and from 50 to 55 another 7 pound.  So from my teens I had gained two and a half stone and like they say, it crept up on me.

I am not blind.  I could see my body changing shape.  My face, rounder, my boobs fuller, my belly definitely fatter, my arms, my legs, my whole body.  Still, I was me.  I am not fat.  I am fatter than my skinny bitch days, yes, but I am not fat.  I don’t know when I will consider myself fat but I know this.  Some people, thinner than me, will look at me and say that I am fat. 

Some people, bigger than me, will look at me and say that I am skinny.

I will say, I have more fat on me than when I was skinny, but, I am still me and I am happy with who I am.  Like my skin that is ageing, my hair that is greying, my body is changing as it naturally does with age.

I am glad to be ageing, it means that I am alive and that I can chose, every day, what I do with my day.  I can choose to look in the mirror and say ‘hey, you are fifty something and still fabulous’ or I could criticise how I look and feel bad about myself.  I chose the former not the latter.

The moral of this story is, just because you are the size that you are, you have to decide whether or not, you are happy with you.  So long as you are healthy and have a healthy view of yourself in your own mind and can embrace your own body, wobbly bits and all, or bones and all, don’t let it consume you.

Other people will always have their opinions, it’s either colic or constipation, skinny bitch or fatty.  You decide, yourself, what label you want to put on you……