Why am I fat?

That’s a weighty (every pun intended) question.

I’m the kind who wants to think it’s because I really like the taste of food. Some people like to build model airplanes. I like to eat.

Other times I cite family and geographical history. I live in the South, and just today I saw a report about how fat we all are down here. All I have to do to know that's true is look around me, starting with my own family.

I can remember sitting at the lunch table with my mother and aunts, eating something good and fatty. Or gooey. Or crispy. Anyway, something sinfully good, as we would always label it. We knew it was sinful to eat like that, but it was the only vice my Southern Baptist aunts and Pentecostal mother would ever own up to.

“What do you think we should have with the pork chops for supper tonight?” my Aunt Estelle would ask my mother, right in mid-bite of a cathead biscuit.

“How ‘bout some mash potatoes, field peas with fatback, and cornbread,” my mother would reply, chomping on her fried chicken thigh. "We can make some gravy with the pork chop drippings."

How could a person live with this family – one who talked about supper at the lunch table – and not end up overweight? How could the daughter of a woman who collected Southern Living cookbooks – and actually used them – not have a belly shaped like a basketball?

Add to that the couch potato tendencies that run deep in my family, and hardly anybody would escape with any kind of figure at all, except round.

And yet, I know it’s more than this.

I am resolved that this is the last time I’ll ever need to lose weight; that I’ll get rid of it this time and it will be gone for good. I’ve found the answer, I truly believe, with Paul McKenna’s Four Golden Rules (see previous post) and I’m never going back.

But I’ve got to look a little deeper if I really want this to work. The rules are simple enough, and I can easily follow them, but that really doesn’t matter when my self-sabotage reflex kicks in. And I realize that I do have something inside of me – not just in the external taste of food or family history – that wants me to stay fat.

I was a puny young child, but along about puberty I began to plump up. This is not unusual. Pre-adolescence is a scary time, and sometimes you just want to hide. I found refuge in the food that was readily available at my house. Not only did it comfort this changing person I was becoming, but it helped me to avoid so many scary situations. I was the kind who turned into a trembling zombie if a boy so much as looked at me, so I can only conclude that subconsciously I wanted to make sure they didn’t look.

The funny thing is, looking back, I wasn’t really all that fat. But because I felt fat and ugly, I ensured myself immunity from the whole boy-and-girl thing that I just didn’t feel I was ready to handle. Sure, I wanted a boyfriend. I dreamed about it all the time. But daydreams were safe, and always turned out the way I wanted them to. A real boy was an entirely different matter.

Despite this, though, I did manage to meet a sweet, shy boy at the tender age of 17 (both of us) and marry him at 18. We lived more or less happily ever after for just under 27 years. I’d like to say he had a mid-life crisis and ran off with his secretary, but these stories are always more complicated than that. Suffice it to say the fairy tale ended. So I found myself at age 45, on my own for the first time ever, and really fat.

That was over 13 years ago. I found out that I actually like living alone. I learned there is life after divorce. I have friends and I’m happy.

And fat. Oh yes, through thick and thin, I’ve been fat.

My weight has fluctuated through the years, of course. What woman’s doesn’t? I have had periods of nearly normal weight several times throughout my adulthood, and for about three years in my early 30s I lost a significant amount and was actually thin by most anyone’s standards outside of Hollywood.

But here’s what I’ve discovered. Every time I’ve lost enough weight to begin feeling good about myself, some inner girl who wants attention from the guys comes out. She wanted it way back at 13, but was afraid of it, so she pushed it away with food. Funny thing is, that girl is still there. She still wants to push it away with food, and she still wants to be what Paris Hilton would call “Hot”.

And those two diabolically opposed sides are always at war.

I’ll be 59 in just a few weeks. You’d think that frivolous little Miley Cyrus wannabee would be dead and buried by now. But, no, as I’m discovering through the shedding of an estimated 30 pounds or so, the girl lives on. She wants what she wants.

She wants a guy’s eyes to follow her all the way down the street and she wants to hide behind food and fat. And she wants both these things at the same time.

McKenna has a technique, where he asks you to acknowledge that each side of you – the side that wants to lose weight and the side that wants to stay fat – both have your best interests at heart.

The side that wants to lose weight wants you to be healthy and look better and be able to buy clothes in the front of the store, instead of having to trudge all the way back to the furthest corner where they hide the “big girl” sizes.

The side that wants to stay fat wants to protect you from all the scary things that we fear can happen to skinny girls: heartache and heartbreak and even, in many cases for those who have had terrible pasts, abuse and rape.

He says to imagine a side of you in each hand, and acknowledge they both exist. Then he tells you to bring the two sides together and pull them to your chest. This is intended to incorporate your two sides and help you to stop self-sabotaging.

Have I done it yet? Well, no, but so far I haven’t really needed to. That little girl has just barely begun to raise her head at this point. Maybe the grandma in me will prevail this time. After all, the “boys” are all old men now, if not already dead, so the little girl may just not be that interested. Maybe she’ll acknowledge that her time has passed, never to return, and just quietly go away.

Maybe.

But if she insists on waking up and doing battle, then I will do what McKenna says. It sounds kind of silly, but everything else he’s told me to do has worked beautifully, so I’ll just have to trust him on this one.

Food tastes good. That’s undeniable.

And I was raised to love it. That’s a given fact.

But that’s not the whole story, and acknowledging that may help me lose weight and keep it off for good.