The Secret Life of Fat People

One day my boss and I were walking to a restaurant for lunch and it was quite cold. He made some remark about how bitter it was, and I concurred. In response to my comment, he mentioned that I might be warmer if I "zipped up". He said this because I was wearing my coat, but it was hanging open. Of course, what he did not know, as a person of average weight, was that I couldn't zip it up because I was too fat for it to fit properly.

Sometimes I think that the part of the world which has never been obese doesn't realize the level of suffering on a daily basis and on every level that very fat people endure. They can't conceptualize the myriad challenges that we face from clothes that won't fit right to shoe-tying to worrying about fitting into chairs. My boss is a wonderful and sensitive person. I have no doubt that he was completely oblivious as to why I didn't zip up my coat because the only reason he wouldn't have done so was that he forgot or was being careless. People tend to see the world through their own perspective and don't inhabit the reality of others without being forced to do so for one reason or another. They're not aware of "the secret life of fat people" and all the little embarrassments and humiliations we fear and endure. Of course, many of them could hardly care. They think we deserve to suffer for being such "lazy", "weak-willed", and "out-of-control" "pigs".

One of my fondest wishes come next winter is that I will finally have lost enough weight to zip up my coat. This past winter, my coat fit around my upper body with inches to spare, but is still at about 8 inches too small around my lower body. My disproportionate weight loss is troublesome in this regard, but I'm hoping the fat cells in my stomach and behind will finally relent and allow themselves to shrink by the time the harsh chill is back with a vengeance.

So Many Cells

In dealing with my hard-to-discern progress, I've been trying to conceptualize how the changes in my body occur. Since I likely still weigh over 300 lbs. (perhaps considerably more, it's hard to know), I've been mulling over the effect of the loss of just one pound on the entire mass of me.

My guess based on my calorie counting, exercise, and likely base level calorie number maintenance for a person of my current size, is that I'm under-eating by as much as 1500 calories a day, possibly a bit more or a bit less. That means I'm probably losing somewhere over 2 lb.s a week, and about 10 lbs. a month.

I can't recall if I've mentioned this fact before, but the number of fat cells in your body is set by a certain age (around your late teens). I will always have a lot of fat cells unless I have surgery, which I have no plans to do. Looking at my size, and considering the number of fat cells in my body, I'm thinking of just how little impact 1 lb. of cell shrinkage is going to have on such a vast number of fat cells. There is a lot of territory to cover and the distribution of 1 lb. is going to be infinitesimal and impossible to notice.

This may sound discouraging, but it is not. It actually encourages patience. I know that I can't see a difference in a week, but I will see a difference in a month or two. I have to give my body a chance to shrink in a leap because it's unrealistic to expect it to shrink in baby steps. I have to give it time because there's so much ground to cover. It's a little like tiling a vast space one tiny tile at a time. At first, you feel like you'll never get it all covered, but as the months go by, you have covered a wall, then another, and in a few years, the room is nearly done. Those inches become feet, and the feet become yards.

This conceptualization has helped me become a little more patient with the process during this period of "FWB" (fat without benefits). I'm hoping the sense can stick with me as time goes by.