How I Got Fat

Reflecting with Humor

When I was a little girl, I wore a size 6x. That was considered one of the chubby sizes. I was ashamed. Next thing I know I was enrolled in an exercise class with older women. Well, they were old to me. Anybody over the age of 12 was old to me.

I hated that class.

Every week they would measure my waist. I tried to estimate how much I’d sucked in my stomach the last time and make an improvement on it this time. Maybe they knew.

There were a couple of exercises where I would fart. That was embarrassing. But they wouldn’t let me stop. The one where you lie on your back with one or the other leg in the air and then twist to the side so that your toes touch the floor. Then, there was the one where you bend at the waist and touch your fingers to the floor. Come to think of it, I think I might have been farting with all of the exercises.

My father told me years later he would reach over and rattle one of his desk drawers at work. They had heavy-duty military-issue metal desks. It made enough noise to cover the sound of his farts.

There were a couple of machines in the exercise room they wouldn’t let me use. I suppose because I was so young. My favorite one was like a belt sander thing that you put around your waist and it jiggled the you know what out of you. There was another one that had a whole bunch of knobby spindles on it that rotated.

That was where you stood astride of it, and it was supposed to tone up the insides of your thighs. I think cellulite hadn’t been discovered yet but toning of muscles had. Then, there was the box. Only your head stuck out and the lady inside got all steamed up.

Years later my mother bought one of the belt sander exercise machines. I tried it once, but I didn’t like it. If you tried talking while it was on your teeth rattled and you sounded funny. When I was a teenager, I bought a pink plastic blow-up suit that was supposed to create a sauna-like effect. It worked but the toned results only lasted until the next time you had a glass of water.

I couldn’t stop eating. I don’t remember anybody asking me to watch what I ate. I also ate all the baby’s cookies. They were on the top shelf in the kitchen. I had to drag the chair over to the counter, climb up on it, and nibble away at them. I tried not to take too many at a time, so my mother would not notice.

I loved it when I was allowed to do the dishes a couple of years later. I had to stand on one of the chairs because the sink was too high for me. I also ate all the leftover food on everybody’s plates. I don’t know why. I was hungry, I suppose. Nobody ever called me on it.

Sneaky eater.

When I was 12 my mother went on the Mayo diet. Low calories stuff. 1,000 calories a day. I went on it too. It got to be too much trouble because I wasn’t in charge of my food yet. I do remember a piece of bologna would do the trick in a pinch. They were 100 calories a slice. If you ate 10 of them a day and that’s all you ate, then you could get to 1,000 calories easily. It sounded logical to me then.

When my father got assigned to other places for training or war my mother would go on diets. When she first met my father, she had an 18-inch waist. My dad could put his hands around her waist and his fingers would touch. I loved hearing those stories. When she went to college her hair started falling out. I think she said she ate hamburgers all the time and had a vitamin A deficiency.

Hah, good information through Spirit (for once). She just told me that it was vitamin D that she wasn’t getting enough of. The problem sometimes with talking to spirit is that the specific information coming through might not be interpreted correctly. I looked it up on Google and the search result said it was a vitamin D deficiency that causes hair loss. Hey, one for the team! Fist pumping. Thanks, Mom.

You are welcome, Sweetie.

Ah, Mom. Why was I so messed up?

We all were. We all were. But you’re doing better now, right?

Yeah, I’m only a 2X now. Mom?

Yes?

How come I can’t stop crying every time you talk to me?

Well, you weren’t able to properly mourn me when I died. I didn’t want anybody there anyway. Hey, tell the story about your father singing in the hospital.

Really?

Yes. You do it so well.

Okay. I love you.

I love you too.

Okay, so if you are wondering, I am a channel. When Spirit speaks, I usually put their stuff in a bold italics font. My stuff is in the regular font. That was my mother coming to visit above which I thought was really nice. I don’t think our grief ever really ends. It’s part of our growth, too, I think. But it does get easier as the years go by. I think my mom has been gone for over 20 years or more. I’ve outlived her by 4 years. Anyway, enough of that.

So, here’s how the story goes. My mother went suddenly. She was complaining of being tired and a month and a half later she died of colon cancer. Toward the end, she went blind and blew up because I think her kidneys were failing too.

There are all sorts of things that give out on a person at the end. It was difficult for anybody to say until years later what exactly went wrong. At least it was years before I knew. Personally? I think my father had a lot to do with it. But that’s another story for a different time.

This time, though, my sister told me the story. She was sitting with Mom in her hospital room. They could hear my father coming toward them in the hallway. He was singing at the top of his lungs, “When you get to Heaven, punch a hole and pull me through.” Over and over again. Next verse. Better than the first. Mom squeezed my sister’s hand and whispered to her, “Please, make him stop.”

My father was diagnosed with bipolar later in life. He’d been that way for years and everybody just thought he was mean. Well, he was mean, but he also was bipolar. The problem was that he didn’t think the doctors had the right diagnosis and he didn’t like to take his medication. So, he would go through these phases where he would almost bankrupt the family.

My sex talk with him was him telling me a joke. That sex talk came about 3 years too late anyway. I didn’t get the joke until I returned home from college the first time. I laughed and told him I’d just gotten the joke he told me four months earlier. I said, “Too late now, Dad.” You should have seen his face.

Dennis said he never minded when Dad went manic. Especially if it was around Christmas time. That just meant an extra deluxe present.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, being overweight. I didn’t mention that I became bulimic when I was 16 years old. That lasted a good 20 years. Nobody knew. It was a shameful secret.

I stopped when I started channeling in 1993 when I was 35 years old with the help of Spirit. It wasn’t a secret anymore, so I quit. It was hard and I ended up gaining an awful lot of weight. I’m doing better these days, but like I said I’m a 2X at times. Sometimes, as old as some of my clothes are a 2X stretched might as well be a 3X.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I asked the nurse what I should do. She said to watch what I ate. I almost took her head off. “You are asking a person who was bulimic for 20 years to watch what they eat? What’s wrong with you?”

And that’s how I got fat.