Written for the Daily O
The new fat woman gyan is, "You have to love yourself. The weight will just drop off you like butter." As confusing, contradictory and downright mental this advice sounds, it's the most common cheerleader chant you will hear when the race is a lung-crushing waddle-wobble towards size zero, or at least size one-less zero and the champion is the woman who didn't eat an entire cheesecake at one sitting.
Telling a fat woman she has to love herself is like telling people that Jesus was a nice man. Yes. Agreed. OK. Yes. ENOUGH ALREADY, you're not letting me listen to the sound of my jaws making like Godzilla on this cookie making like a high-rise apartment building in NYC! Learning to love myself. If only they had a class on that in school.
It would sure beat muhavare with Mrs. Mathur any day. But, like every other fat woman, I know for a fact, that once I lose weight, every single problem in my life will suddenly get solved. Being thin, will undo all the wrongs. Like the time my script didn't get selected. (If I was hot, my client would like my film.) Or the time my kid didn't get in to the school I had my heart set on. (If I was hot, they would totally choose me umm...my child.)
+So hey! If loving myself is all it takes, I can totally do that. I start by saying "I love you" to myself in the mirror but get distracted by the enlarged pores on my face. They're so huge, I mull, that they can be seen from Google Earth. So then I decide to be kind to myself. But that seems to demand that I serve myself huge helpings of dessert.
Finally, I realize, in a brain wave that destroys five cities, splashes Pluto and then comes and settles in a dripping mass on my head, I SHOULD MAKE A LIST.
1. I love myself because I'm so fat that if a snake bites me, I will be able to survive longer than if I was thin.
The End.
I write letters to myself but stop believing them when the urge to write fiction takes over and I have myself jumping from building to building in a bikini. I practice The Secret and stick up huge cutouts of my face on J. Lo's body but have to take them down when the maid begins to give me a wide berth.
I ask my friends to put down nice things about me but then, they're my friends, they always say nice things about me. Loving myself leads to a five kilo weight gain and a nasty lipstick mark on my mirror than smudges but can't be removed. Finally it hits me! I need to hate myself. Step one....
