The Diet Logs

After about sixty years of obsessing about my weight, it finally occurred to me this week that I am never going to attain the “right weight”. When I was a child my mother crammed milkshakes and fat down my throat, along with the nastiest commercial weight aid EVER, Wate-On. It was like drinking very minty Milk of Magnesia (something else she forced on me periodically). Nosy, intrusive school teachers didn’t help the situation by making us state our weight out loud in class. Owning up to 86 lbs. in the eighth grade earned me the nickname “Turnpike” (not a curve in sight). The scarecrow that I was attained the magnificent height of 5′ 5 and 1/2″, and struggled to stay above 100 lbs. well into my 30’s.

Even in my 40’s, having leveled out at 115 lbs., the country doctor I visited wanted me to put on a few more pounds “for safety’s sake”. This was in the 1980’s. He explained that women especially need a little extra padding as they age, just in case they come down with a major illness. Like everyone else, my weight crept up little by little as the years advanced. Still, the only physician who ever advised me to lose a few pounds was the head of Orthopedics at Scripps Clinic. His motto was, “There’s no such thing as too thin”, but then he was a bone man. No other doctor has ever advised me to lose, even when I tipped the scales at 170 (and I’ve lost about an inch in height).

The right weight is a moving target, just like a safe cholesterol level. These are arbitrary figures that move according to the latest scientific studies’ results. Sometimes it’s simply a recasting of the same set of results, like the recent brouhaha which declares Americans are NOT as overweight as had been thought. Or rather, not as many of us are dangerously overweight because, oh, if you restrict the data, it looks like we don’t die sooner. In a couple of years, a competing study will issue opposite opinions.

I can’t weight any longer!

Georganna Hancock wrote this on April 27th, 2005 and filed it under Dieting, Weight Loss |