Bowing down to work

Some things never occur to you until long after they happened. Case in point, while I was at my top weight it never occurred to me how much my weight had reduced my ability to bend over. I just had gotten into the habit of going down on my knees if any kind of work had to be done that involved picking things up from the floor, or working close to it. The reason for that was, of course, my protruding stomach that effectively squeezed off my breath had I tried to bend over instead, but the avoidance maneuvre of kneeling down had become so automatic that I didn´t even think about it any more.
Over the weekend, we´ve been visiting MIL who has a problem with moss that keeps growing on her tiled patio due to high humidity from a nearby river. After a relatively mild winter, it was time again for some scraping. The last time I did that, I went down on all fours, and ruined a pair of pants in the process because that green stuff gives you some very tenacious discolorations on your knees. This time, I took the scraper- bent forwards and scraped the stuff off, never touching knee to ground.  Only when I finished did I realize that I had done anything differently than before.
It´s the little things like that which make it worth recondensing the excess weight.
Bending over to pick up something. Sitting down in an armchair without being afraid of having it wedged to my bottom when getting up again. Sitting down on any chair without worrying about whether it will collapse.
For far too long, these were things I had resigned myself to being incapable of.
In my experience, there are so many things that I couldn´t do any more with my fat body, and which I can do again after recondensing the greater part of my excess weight, that I think that people who claim that there is no difference between being fat and being slim must be where I was. Up a river in Egypt, big time.
The thing being that even if I was in denial about how many things I couldn´t do any more, the limitations my body´s shape imposed on me didn´t disappear. I was, for all practical purposes, handicapped. Trying to find ways to work around the handicap was not changing the fact that I did, by doing so, not make it go away.
The most important thing for me was not giving up the hope of finding a way to recondense my extra pounds. For me, it was cutting out carbs and shrinking portion sizes that did the trick. For somebody else, it may be counting points, or whatever.
While I, as a now almost former fatty who did hear it all over the years, do think that shaming people because of their weight, or discriminating against them because of the shape of their bodies, is dead wrong, I still believe that encouraging them to find out a sustainable-for-them  way of getting to a more functional body shape isn´t the same thing as discriminating against them. A paraplegic, or a blind person, do generally not have the chance of doing something to make their handicap go away. We fatties, on the other hand, have a chance at making our physical situation better. Since there is, in my experience, not a one-fits-all solution that would allow each of us to take that chance, it´s up to each of us to be mindful about our bodies, experiment with different possibilities, and find the one that works for our bodies.
What everybody who wants to lose weight has to remember is that slower can be better. When I finally started to lose weight, one of my bigger fears was that I´d end up with my skin being too big for my body, necessitating cosmetic surgery. I am, after all, not so young any more that I could trust my skin to shrink back along with my weight. I´m glad to find myself, after losing, on average, half a pound a week for a total of over sixty pounds, without any turkey neck or excess skin folds. I´m certain the protein supplements I use helped there, too.
Finding out what works for you, and sticking to it.
It´s working for me, and it just may work for you. Whatever your shape.


Julia