Newly fat?

Well, I for one am feeling newly fat, again, although I know I'm not really. The past few weeks of sporadic, rare feats of running, and stretches of poor eating choices, plus Aunt Flo, has added up to an extra 4 lbs. I'm trying not to freak out about it, but it's making me feel a little worse than I already do, with family emergencies and dramas and my schooling winding ever tighter into a big ball of overwhelming stress.

But today, finally, I ran again, and felt better. It's harder now that it's getting dark so quickly. I'm putting together strategies for how I can run on days that seem impossible. Some days ARE impossible: I leave before dark, I get home after dark, and I still have hours of homework to do before going to bed for a few hours of sleep. But others aren't quite as bad, like today, and I could get in a nice 5 miler before the sun set at 4:30. I can't run in my neighborhood after dark, not because I'm afraid of being mugged, but because there are no streetlights and my neighborhood has dangerously cracked sidewalks. I'm pretty sure I'll end up with a newly flattened nose if I try to brave the roads in the dark. So I either have to find a lighted running path somewhere, or find a way to run during the daytime, or run indoors, which is my LAST resort, and which I'll eventually have to start doing anyway, when it gets too snowy and icy to safely run.

I really liked that article that I posted below because I think all of us who have gotten close to goal weight and stayed there long enough to know people who didn't know us when we were MO have had these experiences. It's so weird for people to assume that they can talk smack about fat people because you aren't fat. It's really bad in health care, because you can get badly hurt taking care of the morbidly obese, so a lot of providers have a hostility toward fat people. It's sad, because of course we all deserve dignity and to be treated as a patient who deserves good care, not a liability or a burden. But people are people, even if they are doctors and nurses. It's going to be more of a problem, and I hope that my fellow health care professionals learn how to do their jobs without getting hurt and without treating patients poorly as the population grows more obese and needs more health care. (Of course, I hope the trend towards rising obesity rates starts to reverse. But it hasn't yet.) But even just among friends, it is weird when you overhear someone talking amongst their thin friends or coworkers and realize that you are hearing things you never would have heard when you were MO. People would make sure not to say them in your earshot. (Or sometimes they wouldn't...ouch.) At first it's exhilirating to be thought of as someone who was never obese. But then it's sickening, to realize the way many thin people think of fat people. I know that just because I was MO didn't mean I was lazy, or refused to exercise (I exercised more than most normal-weight people), or ate buckets of greasy junk food (I ate a sensible, vegetarian diet, much like I do now...just with more cookies and ice cream). And people who knew me wouldn't have thought those things either, I don't think, but people who didn't know me probably did.