This Round Life

A few weeks shy of thirty, I’m finally making peace with my arms. It’s been a long and bumpy road to acceptance – and there may be some backsliding – but, for the time being, we’ve formed a truce. I get to wear sleeveless dresses and my arms get exposure to the sun (turns out they didn’t like being pale and pasty either).

It started about a month ago when I spotted a woman seated two theatre rows ahead of me wearing a tank top. She was larger than I am but she didn’t look self conscious at all. I would have been fretting and fidgeting; I would have been trying to make sure my bat wings got the least amount of exposure possible. In stark contrast, she looked comfortable – what’s more, she looked good.

A week later I bought a sleeveless dress and gave myself permission to wear it; two weeks later, I bought a bathing suit; a few days after that, I wore the suit in public.

It seems that accepting one small thing (my arms) has set of some sort of chain reaction. I may not be perfectly happy with my body but I’m feeling more comfortable baring parts of it in public. My body hasn’t gotten smaller or firmer – if anything, the opposite is true – and that has me feeling tremendously optimistic that this will be the kind of comfort that’s hard won and slow to fade away.

Intuitive eating is – if you’ll pardon my language – a bitch. Human beings are not, by nature, known as creatures of restraint. Observe the wrapper and plastic spork in the garbage can next to my desk – they may look innocent but they’re really the signs of a war.

The war goes something like this:

Stomach: I’m hungry
Brain: You can wait.
Stomach: But you’re dragging me to the gym. I’ll crash during your workout. You know what that means.
Brain: ...
Stomach: Yes, that’s right, you’ll binge on junk food waiting for supper to cook because you waited too long to feed me.
Brain: Bastard!
Stomach: What if we compromised? What if you got a tiger brownie and only ate half.
Brain: Trickery.
Stomach: I swear I’ll stop you after a few bites. I won’t let you eat the whole thing.

I inevitably get the brownie. The halfway point comes and I pause. I could wrap it up, save the rest for tomorrow. I could take it home to my boyfriend or toss it in the trash. I could do any one of those things, but I don’t. Once I take that first bite it’s in for a penny, in for a pound.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons for this. I grew up in the era of starving children in China. I’ve also got a healthy attachment to my money and want to get bang for my buck. Lastly, I just have a problem with impulse control. It’s not that I don’t know when I’m full, it’s that I can’t seem to care when food is in my hands.

I know I’m not alone. Fat people, skinny people, old people, young people – most of them do the same thing, though perhaps not as frequently as I do.

One solution would be smaller portion sizes. It’s a suggestion which is tossed out with frequency but most of the onerous is placed on the consumer – don’t clean your plate, ask for a doggie bag, split desert (I’ve split desert, it’s easier than you’d imagine and not the loss of satisfaction you might think).

I’m in favour of smaller portion sizes instead of outright banishment (after all, what’s life if you never get to have chocolate?) but I wish the food and beverage industries would get into the act and cut down the quantity of food in individual packages. Going from big to slightly less big sizes (remember the size of a bag of chips in the early 80’s?) won’t be an easy sell. If I’m used to getting a brownie the size of a slice of pie, I’ll probably feel cheated if it gets cut in half. It would take a period of adjustment and consumer resentment but it might be worth it.