Plus Size and Beautiful--Another Lie to Tell Ourselves

I don't know why the subject of weight is so on my mind that I need to blog about it. Well, I take that back. I sort of do know why. I recently found out that I am ten pounds more than I thought.  I don't have a scale. I have for years refused to step on the doctor's office scale, the one that is just inside the door before you get taken to a room to wait for the internist to see you. But the other day, for some reason, I allowed it. I won't tell you the number. The old number was bad enough. Frankly, it's embarrassing.

I take THAT back, oh, not the fact that I was weighed and it was, as an old radio show character,  Chester A. Riley, would say, "a revoltin' development", but the fact that my being weighed this past week was the reason I am writing about size.

Actually, the double speak word "Plus Size" has been roiling around my brain for some time. It has gotten triggered before, specifically when I have been shopping at Target. As one wheels through and past the women's clothes section, there is a mannequin wrapped in the latest cool garb. She is a plus size mannequin.



And try as I mightily have to appreciate her Rubenesque curvature, all I can muster in my mind is the word "fat". And then another word slips into consciousness, "disgusting".  And then, "Oh, God, do I look like that when I am walking around?" And then hoping I still fit into the 14-16 that has been my usual for about 25 years, which is already considered plus.


I just read that a Nike version of a plus size lady in a work out outfit has generated "controversy".



I appreciate that there has been an extreme for years that demands of women to be no more than a size 10, and even that is considered too large. Some of us are just not built small. But as in all things human, why must we go to another extreme to compensate? American women are simply too fat.  One article I read related to the Nike mannequin said that the average American woman of 5 foot 3 inches weighs something like 168 pounds. My friends. The word is fat. It is not healthy. It is not attractive. "Well, that's just you. And it's a prejudice." Well, look into your hearts, dear readers. How many of you, while professing publicly the beauty of the purely plump lady meeting you for dinner at a chic restaurant are thinking precisely the opposite? I have in mind a particular woman, wife to a well known handsome actor. Whenever I read one of those planted celebrity stories about the two of them out on the town, the writer gushes over the two of them, and how wonderful are their outfits and look. He looks wonderful in his outfit. She looks like a woman who has decided that she doesn't want to be attractive anymore when she was once very much so. And as to prejudice, then I am prejudiced against myself. My version of delusion is that though I am overweight, medically, they call it "obese", there isn't a lot of rolling fat. I am pretty darn solid. Well, except for the double chin, and there I can claim that it is merely a factor of being older, and even thin people have double chins.

"Zaftig".  There's a word.  One definition. "A nice rounded figure".  Another slightly more troubling definition, "plump". And now, we have "plus size".  I think I like "a nice rounded figure" better.
But the truth is that all of it is euphemism. And those women walking around with tight pants which emphasize bulge, and sleeveless shirts out of which sprout fleshy wings, are you really corpulent and proud?

Not everything we beings do ought to become a norm.

I eat too much. I eat the wrong things. I am fat. Now I have to be the one to change it. If I do, great, but if I don't, making it the new in thing isn't a good. Don't accommodate me; tell the truth. It might save a life.

I have been, since that weigh in, making an attempt, sometimes pitiful, at adjusting my diet. I have a long way to go. If I could weigh what I did in 1992, I will be delighted. A consummation devoutly to be wished.