I was a fat kid.  When I say that, I don’t mean pleasingly plump, or chubby.  I mean fat.  At thirteen, I was 4′ 10″ and a women’s size 14.  A bookworm with glasses, poor, unable to afford anything approaching current fashion, and with no compensatory social skills, I was the object of all the adolescent torture you can imagine associated with that profile.  I hated junior high school with a passion. 

To complete the pretty picture, I was hunchbacked.  A large benign tumor was slowly strangling my spine at the cervical vertebrae, forcing my shoulders in a perpetual slump.  Ask me to show you the scar someday.  But, by some weird magic, after the tumor was removed, in the late spring before high school, I not only dropped weight like I was throwing stones out of my pockets, I shot up over six inches in the course of a few short months.  By 10th grade, I was within two inches of my full current height (5′ 7″), and about 98 lbs.  I think I dropped five sizes. 

Equally magic, with the new profile, the torment stopped.  I was elected to Student Council.  People said hello in the hall and invited me to parties.  But instead of being relieved, I was disgusted.  I was the same person I was.  I had done nothing, suffered nothing, given up nothing to be suddenly slim, and yet I was treated like a completely new animal.  It tainted my opinion forever of the weight (pardon the pun) that our popular culture places on appearance.  This distrust was only deepened by a short stint working for the high-end cosmetic industry after I dropped out of college, to the point where I simply refused to care whether I was or was not in fashion, and decided never to bank my future on how I looked.  I dress for business when I have to for my career, but I have thankfully chosen a profession where admiration is faceless – most of my colleagues know me mainly through my name on scholarly papers.  I have moments of depression when petty-minded people have made comments about my appearance; too many childhoods hurts and snubs are evoked not to feel a bit of sting.  But, by and large, they are only moments.  I don’t judge myself by those standards.  I don’t judge my friends by them either.  People are beautiful or not beautiful to me by their words and actions, not by their weight or what they wear.  I know ‘that world’.  I have experienced it.  I hate it.

I would like to say that I battled the weight all my life, but that is not true, either.  I have not been that heroic.  Just after my first marriage at 23, my weight settled at a proportionate place for my height, and I hovered around a size 8 or 10 for over a decade.  Athletic since college, a runner since grad school, I have never really had to fight my weight until after my 37th birthday when a combination of three SCA reigns, good New Orleans cooking, knee injuries and plain ole middle age, started a five year slow upward creep that hit its peak just after Harry was born.  I am the heaviest and largest I have been since childhood.

This has come as a bit of a shock, because I have resolutely refused to own a scale or full-length mirror.  I was stunned to see myself in a photo several months ago.  The person I saw was not the vision of the person I carry in my head.  Shocking a discovery as it was, by and large, it still didn’t affect my day-to-day life in any way.

Except one.

I had pre-eclampsia with Harry, and my blood pressure stubbornly stayed elevated much longer after his birth than it had any right to.  My liver enzymes rose with the blood pressure, and I had a moment of fear that I would leave a son that would never grow to know the mother that loved him so intensely.  It was an irrational fear, but one that recurs with every health scare I have had since.  In the months immediately before my son’s birth, I watched my mother struggle with the aftermath of breast cancer.  She had her last radiation treatment the day he was born.  In the sixteen months since he arrived, I have agonized through three cancer scares myself, all proving thankfully benign.  But my parents are in poor health, and my mind strays to a not-to-distant future where I may be caring for them at the same time I am raising my son – my son whose very promise of life my mother clung to during the dark days of chemotherapy.  I want to live to see the same light in my grandchildren.  I want to live to see them and be healthy enough that Harry does not lie awake with the same worries and concerns that make my nights restless. I don’t want him to feel the fear that worms its way insidiously into my thoughts as I watch my “younger” parents age.

And this means I have to start caring a little bit more about what the scale says.  Heck, it means I had to go and actually buy one.  I have to actually use that expensive stationary bike sitting in my living room. I have to get my 42-year-old ass outside once in a while and back in my armor.  Nothing like beating men half your age into submission to work up a good sweat and lose a few pounds.  To give you an idea about how seriously I am taking this, I have actually spent money on a diet.  Me.  A notorious skinflint.  I amaze even myself.

So far, it’s working.  I have dropped five pounds in less than two weeks, but that’s a drop in the bucket.  And I am fighting not only middle age, but decades of deliberate not-caring.  Old habits are hard to break.  I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Or just look for me in one of those Nutrisystem ads.