“Imagine if there were a pill you could take to be able to eat whatever you wanted and not gain weight!”
Throughout my life, this was The Impossible Dream!
For a long time, obesity, or just…noticeable chubbiness was a rural vs. urban thing in our country. Where I grew up, everybody filled out as they got older. Only some little kids were skinny. We used to joke that with the adults, you could figger out their age by counting the rings (Y’know, like with trees…..
) I suffered terribly when I went away to school and found out that female adolescents weren’t s’posed to look like that, in fact it was risible. And ugly.
Maybe what, 5-6 years ago?— as we’ve discussed here before, we reached the exact opposite of that situation: “ body positivity”, which in practice meant the girls (and lotsa the young men) all got huge. In wedding photos the bride looked like the Pillsbury dough boy! In beach photos the bathing beauties looked like a buncha manatees. And they were told it was great, they were beautiful, healthy, Oh and woe to anybody who commented about it: this was now “body-shaming” and it was every bit as despicable as racism!
(I’ll leave aside for the moment the absolutely unprecedented situation we live in, where our biggest worry is accidentally ingesting too many calories rather than not getting enough. What other society ever experienced that, at ALL economic classes?)
About a year ago I began noticing, with relief, that the girls were slimming down again. Thank God! Because, no: fat is not healthy: I looked at these maidens in their ponderous pulchritude and saw knee and hip replacements and obesity-onset diabetes in their futures.
I think the unchecked obesity craze started with concerns about anorexia, and morphed into an all-in endorsement of gluttony! Oh yes. You don’t get THAT fat without a LOT of binge eating. I have been there. (As for the “fat is beautiful!” aspect of it, I admit I kinda envied that, feeling like I was born too early.)
I’ve struggled all my life with this. I have been 20 lbs thinner, and I’ve been 35 pounds fatter, than I am now. I’ve lost lotsa weight and gained it back, even though I was SOOOO much happier when I was thinner, I reveled in the secondary sexual gratification. I loved looking good in anything I wore. So why didn’t I GET thin and STAY thin? Well, eventually I kinda did, due to the pressure of life on the Philadelphia Main Line. It was a constant worry, though, a constant self-criticism. When I got pregnant, I immediately gained 12 lbs which I needn’t have gained, it was just such a relief to know that for awhile, being big would be a positive thing, people would admire it! I paid for that post-partum, my pregnancy 65 lbs gain was quickly sucked away by breastfeeding, EXCEPT for that last 12. That required work and discipline, but I was good at that, having done it dozens of times.
Eternal vigilance was the price of freedom (from the discomforts of obesity and the social opprobrium.) So now, when it appears that we HAVE that magical nostrum, I am BITTER! These people are getting slenderness for FREE! something I have always had to work at, pleased with me when I succeeded, absolutely despising myself when I lapsed!
It’s too good to be true, it hasta be! I asked my BMD, surely there must be long-term effects of these new drugs that we just don’t know about yet? These lazy young fools are like the Geishas who whitened their faces with lead-based powders and ended up with big lumpy tumors on their once-perfect cheeks, right? RIGHT???) Also, as of right now ( I think Trump is trying to change this) the drugs are expensive; I looked it up and one ad says Ozempic could be “as low as” $349 a month! And covered by Medicare/Medicaid only if prescribed for diabetes.
Also, they make you nauseated and give you diarrhea, AND, it’s “recommended” that you avoid sugar and fatty foods and alcohol.
Um ,yeah..who wants to eat a lot, with those symptoms, and with the prices of the ‘recommended” foods, like fresh fish, fresh fruits and vegetables ( it’s like an ad for Whole Foods.) And additionally, if you made those changes in diet, wouldncha likely lose weight anyway?
Anyway, it now seems pretty clear that all those celebrities who gained a ton and celebrated “body positivity” were just kidding. Or lying. Or making the best of a bad situation they’d gotten themselves into.
Now that it isn’t hard ( REALLY hard, requiring long-term self- discipline) to be slim, they’re ALL going for it! They’re expunging pictures of themselves in their former Reubensesque incarnations.
John Updike in his later years referred to himself so a “time traveler”. He meant that when you live long enough, you see metamorphoses in culture that you could never have imagined you’d see.
Tru dat, and so many of them, like the present resurgence of old-fashioned anti-semitism, are sad and terrifying.
THIS culture change is primarily…amusing. So far. Mos’ly. But I think I’ll stick to my “yo-yo” diet pattern.
It’s better than going straight up! And it may yet prove to be better, safer, SANER, than artificial pharmaceutical intervention.
(I can’t help hoping I’ll live to see that 
!)
