The Rubbing Together of My Thighs: A Few Words About Fat

“My long-running if shallow rumination on women and weight, women and fat, women and body image really began in the college dorms of the University of Georgia at Athens, and continues to this day, though my desire to keep moving, and fast, most of my life, has spared me much of others’ deep, tortuous meditation upon obesity. Obviously—if you’ve been paying attention here—I take fat a bit more lightly than many of my sisters. I don’t actually like being fat. I don’t like it when my thighs rub together. It has zip to do with politics or aesthetics, though: it has to do with how I feel.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.”—Erma Bombeck

“Mámá was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she’d cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatio sauce.”―Nenia Campbell, Locked and Loaded

“You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”
―Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns Fifty

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—12/9/2013—For years—Nay, for decades—I have kept a record of my daily weight. A little obsessive, you say? A little? Anyone who knows me in what I call The Analog World knows that I am more than a little obsessive.

Analyze my DNA, and you’ll probably find I share about half of it with the Border Collie.

My husband would concur: I round up salt and pepper shakers on the table when we eat out—I’d probably even do it at Le Bernardin, helpfully stack used plates for our servers and, usually, finish one sort of foodstuff at a time. The collie and I, as well, are both noted for our “strong eye.” I can head off a morsel descending from a spouse’s mustache at 40mph, catching it in mid-air. OK: so he did not know he was marrying a member of the herding group, but I do have my uses, in the laundry room, for example.

So, I weigh myself and check my percentage of body fat, or “adiposity,” as well, daily. I don’t make too big a deal of the numbers if they remain within certain limits (even Border Collies allow their sheep some range), but I go something resembling berserk if my weight goes over 135 (or under 115, though that’s a far rarer occurrence) and my adiposity creeps up towards and beyond 20 percent.

A couple of times, over the past 15 years, during periods of great stress or illness, my weight and percentage of body fat have both gone off the reservation simultaneously which, for me, means c. 145 pounds and 25 percent, respectively.

This will not stand.

Just after I married and moved to New Jersey from South Carolina, leaving everything I knew for the man I loved (including my Clemson, SC gym and my rock-solid, elfin trainer, Andrea, also part Border Collie), I ballooned up to c. 150. At the time, I lacked a scale that measured adiposity (lucky me), but I was neither working out nor walking, I was keeping up with my spouse in terms of daily caloric intake (big mistake for someone two thirds his size) and, one day, in the autumn, I found myself in the Saks Fifth Avenue parking lot, inside my SUV, consuming an entire, five-pound box of Godiva truffles, alone.

By the handful. Crying.

Side note: Every year, like clockwork, I note in the little log-book I’ve kept of my weight since my move up here, I gain weight in the fall, and then lose it, going into winter—once I have taken on, in shock, the fact that I’m eating entire boxes of chocolate in the car.

I call this The Cro Magnon/Squirrel-sees-Acorn Effect, as I honestly believe that, as the leaves fall, and the temperatures drop, some primitive part of my brain dictates, Yea demands, that I rapidly trowel on some lard, always around my hips, theoretically enough to get through a mini-ice age. It’s as though I’m thrown back some 43,000 years every September, morph into a cave woman, and start throwing back sides of aurochs and hocks of cave bear. Yeeee-hahhhhh!

But, looking at my little record of weights and measures again, I can see that, by December, I’ve usually managed, once again, to evolve into someone who recognizes an elliptical on sight and can get past Godiva’s and over to Weight Watcher’s without stopping en route for a top-up of truffles.

I joined Weight Watcher’s with my mother back near the beginning of recorded time, when all we were permitted to consume between meetings was iceberg lettuce and Fresca. Let me tell you, the current points plan is, to me, like Dante’s Paradiso by comparison, and I quote: “While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based around different classifications of sin [read: original Weight Watcher’s plan], the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude) and the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity).” And 26 points a day (plus 49 free points per week) spells Charity, big time. (And “Costco” brownies; and unlimited fruit: world-without-end Charity compared to Weight Watcher’s c. 1975.)

In The Analog World, not many have ever known me as a “fat” person, or even an overweight person but, I can assure you, I have proof that, for the first ten years of my life, before my family moved from Pasadena to post-Civil-War Greece, I was entirely too well-padded, especially when it came to my thighs.

My mother and father had “come up” during their country’s Great Depression—both had experienced hunger and serious illness (diphtheria and tuberculosis)—they had managed to produce only one precious child (a notoriously picky eater, if addicted to chocolate), and food became my reward for hours of diligent study (and surviving ballet and piano and tennis lessons, etc.). I was on academic scholarship from the first grade straight through graduate school, never smoked or drank so . . . what was left in which to over-indulge? See’s chocolates and rocky road ice-cream, I fear.

At nine, I knew what it was to have round, pink little thighs that rubbed together and chafed . . . and this is not a nice feeling, especially in sweltering southern California, in tennis shorts.

Greece, of course, a three-year-long inability to find pasteurized milk, and amoebic dysentery abruptly turned me into a ten-to-13-year-old-sylph who could eat and not keep down anything, but I never forgot those thighs. It’s a body memory that stays with one, and I would experience it again, in college, which I entered at 15. Talk about stress! And my dorm had vending machines that dispensed only such things as Peanut Butter Crackers, Moon Pies and Classic Coke (there was no other Coke back then).

My long-running if shallow rumination on women and weight, women and fat, women and body image really began in the college dorms of the University of Georgia at Athens, and continues to this day, though my desire to keep moving, and fast, most of my life, has spared me much of others’ deep, tortuous meditation upon obesity.

Obviously—if you’ve been paying attention here—I take fat a bit more lightly than many of my sisters. I don’t actually like being fat. I don’t like it when my thighs rub together. It has zip to do with politics or aesthetics, though: it has to do with how I feel. I don’t like carrying the weight, the extra weight, around. It has always felt “not-me.” To be 5’7” (at least, until my neurosurgeon fused a half-inch off my frame), and to weigh more than 135 pounds, is to be carrying around something actually not-self; something that needs shedding; baggage.

What I like even more than chocolate is to be able to move; to be free to get into my Yoga asana with ease (without having to negotiate an extra pound or two of Godiva-turned-flesh on bicep or hamstring or calf). I like the body’s sweet ease; its own natural grace. And I know in my bones what that grace feels like; its precise proportions.

If I do embody a soupçon of Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Oh, yes, I may well have some in there with my Border Collie and Cro Magnon/Squirrel, considering all the imagery to which I’ve been exposed Lo these 62 years, then it has more to do with wanting to feel like the Masai than look like Angelina Jolie.

I was born an androgynous creature. I’m long-boned, tall, and small-breasted, and it’s towards that idealized image that I gravitate. The Masai women—like Olympian Artemis and Atalanta—are my inborn archetypes. Not Demeter. Not Athena. Not Aphrodite, who would always be looking for her 36-Double-D bra.

Once, long ago, in Paris’s Orly International airport, I saw a group of tribal Masai in traditional dress. Awaiting their flight, they were not sitting, like most of the rest of us, or milling about, or reading. Instead, they were jumping up and down in place—over and over and over. They were no taller than I, but they were as straight as their spears, which they carried, in those days before 9/11. They were straight and light and buoyant on their large, wide feet. They seemed not even to bend at the knee before lifting off and up.

I felt, for a moment, with my own cropped hair and flat chest and long shanks, as though I’d like just to sidle over and leap with them. Leap!

We’re not meant to sit in these chairs, you know. Sit in these chairs or eat boxes of chocolates in SUVs in parking lots by ourselves. We’re not meant to weigh more at 62 than we did at 49 (and I don’t: I weigh ten pounds less now than I did in that UGa dorm room). We’re meant to . . . leap, and go on leaping.

Note: The image of the Masai women used to illustrate this column derives from http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2988532.