How I got Fat - How I got Back

How I got fat - How I gotback

A short, short story by R Bromfield

Copyright © 2011 Bromfield

Smashwords Edition

It took me years and years to put on the sixtypounds I wanted to get rid of. It was depressing. It wouldn't beeasy to lose. I hated looking at myself in the mirror - even alittle hand mirror. What were my good points? I had good skin. Bigdeal. I had a great sense of humor. Yeah, I was making people laughall right - behind my back. I could make fabulous chocolate chipalmond cookies. What was the fun of that without someone to sharethem with? I felt very alone. I'd tried to lose weight before andmanaged to drop six or eight pounds, but then I always gained itback - and more! Then the worst thing that can happen happened; theonly person in the world who I could possibly call a friend fell inlove and lost like twenty-five pounds overnight. At least it seemedlike overnight. I was jealous, and more lonely than ever. I didn'tthink it would be a good idea to keep going on that way.

I had to do something, but nothing worked; notpermanently. My friend lost more weight. What was she doing thatmade this happen? She seemed so happy and didn't seem to care aboutanything, which is understandable; she was in love. I wasn't inlove; I was depressed. But maybe if I did all the other things...She went for walks a lot. When you're in love you do that. So Idecided to start walking whenever I could. If I had to take the carto the grocery store I parked it waaaay out at the edge of theparking lot instead of right near the entrance. Magically, Istopped getting shopping cart dents in the doors. One Saturday,when I knew the parking lot would be absolutely full, I left thecar at home and walked all the way to the mall. I was surprised tofind out that it was actually quicker that way and so I starteddoing it once in a while even when the parking lot wasn'tfull.

Inside the mall there was a kind ofgravitational attraction to the food court; Taco Bell, McDonaldsand NY Fries. I'd read somewhere that we evolved from creaturesthat had difficulty finding nourishment and staying warm. We couldget fruits and nuts okay but we really needed animal protein tosurvive, so we slowly developed a way of storing fat for periodswhen animal protein was scarce. The craving for fat was what keptus alive. Today fat is available at every fast food joint and thecraving for it still exists. Pretty soon I realized that the fastfood industry is exploiting this ancient craving for fat becausethey are only interested in their bottom line - not my bottom. Iresented the fact that these big corporations had control over mybutt, so I started taking the stairs to go up and around the wholefood court section. A great advantage of taking the stairs was thatI didn't have to stare at someone's ass all the way up on theescalator.

After a while it started to become a kind ofgame. How could I beat those bastards that were making me feel theway I did?

I noticed something strange about thesupermarket; all the processed food is in the centre aisles and thegood food is around the outside. It was too hard at first to avoidthe centre aisles so I made myself a promise to read the wholeingredients list of anything I wanted to buy from these aisles.Most of it is so weird that I put half of it back on the shelf anddidn't buy it. I did other stuff too; I stopped making my famouscookies; Instead of sitting at home I went, by myself, to themovies; I met some people there who drank too much coffee andtalked too much all the time about making movies themselves. Istarted to hang out with them. One guy said he was a writer, twogirls were going to be actors. Two other guys fought over which oneof them could direct. They were all great people but maybe a bitpretentious; I don't think any of them ever really did anythingexcept go to school and work at part-time jobs. But I thought theyhad a good idea. I couldn't act and I didn't know how to write amovie script but I started getting up really early in the morningand writing a story of my own on my laptop. I set aside three orfour hours every morning for that and then went about doing all theother stuff I had to do each day. After a while I didn't even haveto set the alarm. It was kind of exciting to get up and startrecording all the things I though up about my imaginarycharacters.

I kept meeting up with the movie crew too -that's what I called them, the movie crew. I got lots of ideas formy story from them because all they did all the time wastalk.

Finally, one day, one of them said to me "Hey,you've lost weight." It was weird but after that they kind of lostinterest in me. Maybe they only let me into their group in thefirst place because I was fat. But it was true; I had lost weight.I hadn't weighed myself for weeks and weeks but I could rememberwhat my weight used to be all right; it was all I thought aboutback then. I was shocked to find out that I'd lost six pounds. Itwasn't much but it hadn't been hard to do either.

I kept doing what I'd been doing and getting upearly in the morning to write my totally made up story and goingfor walks. I met other people and last week I went on a date; thefirst one in... God, I don't want to think how long it's been. Itwas fun. We're going out again tonight.

Now, it took a while but so far I think I'velost almost fifty pounds. I'm not sure because I don't weightmyself like everyday any more. I didn't lose it by obsessing aboutevery pound, struggling with diets, swallowing handfuls of pills orhuffing