Figuring it out!!

I have been full figured almost all my life-too full!! For a long time I had no idea why I couldn't look slim like all my other friends. I started relying on fad diets very early on - because I felt a quick fix was what I needed. My parents enrolled me for badminton and karate classes when I was in school, but somehow the weight just wouldn't come off. I actually felt invisible on many occasions, when people would just look past me as though being fat also made me invisible. On one occasion I heard one of the boys in my school call me a Road Roller...that's when I learnt to laugh at these jokes. Self-depreciating humour has always been one of my specialities since then. I also become an extrovert - became loud and a bit flamboyant, just to make sure no one would take advantage of the introvert I really was. The more troubled I felt, the louder and aggressive I became. All the while the shy person inside me was slowly retreating into a shell.

One of the basic flaws of self-depreciating humour is that somewhere along the way, you even begin to kid yourself into believing that barbs don't hurt anymore. You listen to random people coming up to you and giving you tips on how to lose weight and how much it will benefit you, people talking about how your weight affects you looks, makes you look older and crack fat jokes around you, you kind of tune off and a kind of numbness sets in. My cure for numbness - Ice cream! So it was more like a vicious cycle. Sadly, in all these taunts, barbed, veiled comments I never saw the motivation to lose weight and show these "well-wishers" that I can do it too. Had my moments where I would work out like crazy and eat well and lost tons of weight, but soon enough they would come back on again.

Then I think God took pity on me and decided to give my condition a proper medical name - PCOD!! Hurray!! Now I could tell these people exactly why I was how I was and if I said it the right way, could even make it sound like a grave debilitating illness. Now I would  have the last laugh...until I used this on my aunt. She looked at me sternly and said - L, this isn't a disease. It is a condition - a condition you have the power to control. So stop acting like you have 3 days to live and go do something about it...and while we are on the topic, if you feel bad when people talk about your weight, TELL THEM. They will stop. It is only when you laugh along that people think we can handle it. If you put yourself down, so will others. Do you understand? Properly chastised I decided to do something about my attitude before I did something about my weight. See how my lazy body comes up with ways to avoid working out.

Am still working on my attitude, but have also started working on my body. Years of pseudo-extrovertism is difficult to shed off and letting that shy, quiet person inside me to get the courage to see the light of day is still a work in progress.