Years ago, from about my early teen years until I was in my early thirties, I myself obsessed about my weight. The way this took shape was either in my wallowing in the fact that I was just fat, and didn't care to do anything to lose weight, to my revelling in the fact that I was at my "optimum" weight, and wasn't it grand that I could easily fit into a size 12 (I'm 5'9, so that's about as low as my clothing size could go, realistically, unless I wanted to be a stick figure).

Although I never travelled the route of anorexia or bulimia, thankfully, in that period of time, I did constantly think about how much I weighed. Even the times that I allowed myself to just be fat were times that I was still allowing myself to focus on my weight, albeit in a reverse-double-fakeout kind of way, as in "I'm just going to be fat, and that's all there is to it" kind of way. I still thought about it all the time. Neither road was good for me.

I'd had the pressures from society to keep a slim figure since as far back as I could remember. As a "you'd be so beautiful if you lost some weight" type of girl, I was on every diet available and imaginable at the time, from Weight Watchers, to low-calorie, to Atkins (back in the seventies) to you name it, just depriving myself of food and then binging in a sodden night of ice cream, macaroni and cheese, a whole box of cookies, etc.

What changed that for me? I'm not exactly sure when my moment of catharsis came about (I think I just realized how ridiculous and futile it was), but it did, in my mid-thirties, and when it did, instead of just taking me down the road of being fat or not, I naturally lost about 40 pounds over the course of about a year and a half. Not through dieting, but by no longer stressing whether I was too fat, or too thin, or too anything. I just ate when I was hungry, and didn't when I wasn't. I stopped eating until I was in pain, and I stopped depriving myself of food just to "keep my figure". I just came to accept that my body was going to be a certain weight, probably naturally, and felt less compelled to diet and alternatively, to pig out after periods of deprivation.

While it's probably true that right now I could lose some weight, perhaps for my health, nevertheless, I will never go down the road of dieting for the sake of my appearance ever again. I'm not obese, nor am I skinny. I am okay with the way I look, although shopping is still amazingly challenging sometimes, but at the same time, I'm not in despair if my height makes me a size 20 at my current weight. Size 20, oh that's the fat size, you say? Well for me, with my fairly hippy structure and height, it'd probably be about the equivalent of a size 14 for someone who's 5'6". And I'm done stressing about that. I don't exercise much, which is something I do need to change, for other reasons, but otherwise, clothes that aren't dumpy are more accessible to me now than they were when I was a teenager, and I'm more inclined to accept the fact of my weight as just that. What I weigh.

Perhaps we need to re-examine the whys of our weight and its impact on our health, rather than examine it in terms of our appearance. And perhaps this needs to be less of a woman's issue, more of an issue of culture, and let the men take some of the heat for the obsession as well. Because it seems like it's still mostly women who obsess about this stuff, and overweight men can get away with so much more.

In addition, there's merit to the fact that other countries citizens don't necessarily stress this way, because in my experience, they eat differently than we do. Less emphasis on fast food, on conspicuous consumption, more emphasis on enjoying a meal for the pleasure of it. I do know that when you let go of the obsession, you tend to eat less, enjoy more, and gain less weight as a result.

..especially with this:

Sometimes I think that about five years of mild material deprivation would pull us-as-a-society back into balance and help us spare ourselves a wealth of bad behavior and bad conscience.

I shall get to work on this riiiiiiight awaaaaaaaaay.

>>:-)

Okay, Ms. Waldman, I came readily to your defense on the homework question, but this is a different matter. You are not among the legions of the hungry who might reasonably expect that any resplendent meal that comes their way might be the last for a while. You can have more whenever you want it. Whether you fall on a Thanksgiving meal like a starving Great Dane on a month's worth of Alpo is your own affair, perhaps your therapist's if you've got one...I bet the therapists of this nation are ready to projectile-vomit after listening to their clientele's post-holiday-blowout self-detestation...but I don't get why it's supposed to be of general interest. One more chapterette in the very long treatise called Sick American Attitudes toward Food. This brand of American angst has been going on for a very long time and is dreadfully stale by this time. Sometimes I think that about five years of mild material deprivation would pull us-as-a-society back into balance and help us spare ourselves a wealth of bad behavior and bad conscience. It's unfortunate, at least from that angle, that the shortage coming our way is most likely going to be a shortage of petrochemicals rather than sugar and meat.

In the interest of balance and justice, I also don't know why people are so intent on promoting wretched excess that they cook til they drop for these holidays. It's bad for everyone involved. This practice allows the host/hostess to watch the guests eat through his/her own haze of exhaustion, too tired to enjoy the company. I also don't get why people insist on preparing so much more than is necessary, or why such emphasis is placed on a great abundance of the kind of food that kills. My mother used to work herself to exhaustion and hysteria over holiday meals, and I decided it would be different when I could make it that way. Now I am the designated holiday hostess for my family and social circle, but as such I make the rules and choose the menu, and we're going to have turkey for the meat-eaters, lobster newburg (out of a can from the Vermont Country Store) for the fish-eaters, spinach, whipped potatoes, asparagus, and cheesecake. That is, a pleasant, sufficient, slightly opulent meal, and the pleasure of coming together on a holiday. Not the kind of blowout that will clog my guests' arteries or knock me on my ass with exhaustion for days thereafter, or send anyone reeling home queasy with self-hate.