Happy fat

October 24, 2009

C.S. Lewis said, “You don’t have a soul.  You are a soul.  You have a body.”

There is a story in the news right now about a model who was allegedly fired from Ralph Lauren for her weight.  She is 5’10” tall and weighs a hefty 120 pounds.  No doubt about it.  She definitely has a weight problem.

A few years ago, I experienced a period of intense stress.  Despite my best efforts to eat three squares a day and many, many chocolate milkshakes, I lost a great deal of weight. 

The healthy weight range for a woman my height is between 130 and 170 pounds.  When my weight dropped to 129 pounds, my doctor became very concerned.  Blood tests revealed no thyroid imbalance.  I didn’t have cancer or diabetes.  I was simply wasting away.

I look back at the pictures of myself during that time and I am stunned by my skeletal frame.  I have always been scrawny, but this was different.  This was just gross. 

I hadn’t looked like that since junior high, when I grew five inches in one year and only gained three pounds.  My knee joints became so loose they popped out of place when I went bowling or tried dancing like Axl Rose.

 At 5’9½” tall, I am a half-inch shorter than the model who says she was fired because she was too fat to be beautiful.  While my doctor was testing me for lymphoma, I was nine pounds heavier than the model in question. 

According to the adorable blond kid in the movie Jerry Maguire, the human head weighs eight pounds.  Cut off my head, and I’d still have been too heavy to work for Ralph Lauren.

Things have since turned around for me.  With each new blessing in my life, I gain a little more weight.  I call it my happy fat, and it is a beautiful thing. 

I will probably always be gangly. But there is healthy, and there is unhealthy, and a person my height should not weigh less than 130 pounds.

Who makes these beauty rules?  Who looks at a starving girl and thinks that’s beautiful?  Who decides that 20 pounds under the medically recommended weight will sell more clothing?  The average American woman is a size 14.  Shouldn’t that be the size of the average model?

The answer, of course, is we make the rules.  We are the ones who respond to the advertising.  Maybe it makes us feel better to imagine that maybe, just maybe, if we eat only celery or limit our carbs we can one day look like a Ralph Lauren ad.  No one can accuse us of lacking optimism.

Not to rain on the parade, but we aren’t ever going to look like that.  Those models don’t even look like that!  I can personally testify that a woman who is 5’9½” tall who weighs less than 130 pounds does not look glamorous.  She looks like a corpse, and her doctor is concerned.

It’s called Photoshop, folks.  Unemployed?  Learn image editing and get a job at Ralph Lauren.  They may be firing models, but the graphic arts department is booming.

I have an even better idea.  Let’s stop letting fashion magazines make us feel guilty for every piece of chocolate.  Much to-do is made over the 25 percent of Americans suffering from obesity.  This is a serious disease that requires medical treatment. 

But what of the remaining 75 percent?  I say, enjoy your happy fat.  Eat dessert first once in a while.  Yes, it’s important to feed your body veggies.  But every now and then, your soul needs a chocolate milkshake.   

This article first appeared in the Lewistown News-Argus and the Sidney (Mont.) Herald on October 24, 2009.