IN WHICH I’M NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME BUT DIVE IN, JUST THE SAME.
STATUS: Quit my horrible job: Check; Writing full time while promoting a book I’d published: Check; Cosmetic surgery planned: Check; Weight loss: In Progress.I found myself in the spring, buds blossoming around me, bees buzzing around them. A year of weight loss and belly dance, along with the burgeoning fertility of the season, combined with intense astrological influences involving Venus, planet of love, beauty and money, and Uranus, planet of surprise and change, in my fifth house of creativity and romance: a perfect storm of VA VA VOOM.
I was not only feeling an authentic sexual identity, but for the first time ever, extreme horniness; I was blooming as a woman, along with the flowers. Even as the Goddess Mother Nature was spreading her carpet of abundance, my inner goddess was spreading my petals — and thighs — to potential pollinators.
I’d achieved 60% of my planned weight loss; though it was never my aim to begin the dating game until I was completely finished, the new-found fecundity of the earth, and my resonance with it, propelled me into checking out the scene virtually, without commitment: online dating. Gingerly, I dipped one foot in, then the other, starting with OKCupid.com, because it’s free. Not only was I unwilling to invest money without checking out the quality of the men, but I had no intention of dating them immediately anyway. I was merely sending out feelers to scope out the scene — I knew from experience the type of men who go for “Big Beautiful Women” and though shrinking, as one of those still, I just wasn’t interested.
Obviously, self-love can extend to loving yourself at 400 pounds or any weight, and more power to people who have that capacity. Though some of them can authentically do that, I’m not sure I actually believe all “happy” fat people always believe their own hype. It looks to me like many are simply rationalizing their way to eating whatever they want; they have given up and are making the easy choice to not address a very, very challenging food addiction.
For my part, though I would have to fight temptation and old patterns just as hard as every other person with an eating disorder, I was utterly ready to trade my passion for pastries, my weakness, to the masculine délice I craved even more. There was no longer any competition between cookies, doughnuts, or Danish and the sizzling hot buns which loomed as my future binge of choice. Plus, moreover, I’d be burning calories in that feast to come, and in the most entertaining way possible.
Indeed, sadly, there just doesn’t seem to be any way around it. Once, at my highest weight, in a chic French cafe, I sat next to Hugh Grant and his fiancée at the time, the svelte Jemima Khan. I was mortified when Hugh glanced over to see me lustily scarfing down a crème brulée, which he himself had ordered. My dinner companions noted that Jemima did not have crème brulée, from which we drew a hard and fast corollary: you can have Hugh Grant, or you can have crème brulée, but you cannot have Hugh Grant AND crème brulée.
Let’s face it, fat physically broadcasts imbalance and poor health. The ancient Greek idea that beauty resides in balance resonates with most of us — our brains are programmed to see beauty in balance in any given context: art, gardens, clothing, visual design of any kind. Balance, moreover, is key to the beauty requisite to attracting the opposite sex, coming back to the idea I blogged about previously, that hot physical characteristics signalling sexual attraction fundamentally exist on a biological level, to perpetuate the species. For myself, the more unbalanced I had been emotionally, the more that lack of equilibrium reflected in an unbalanced body, which was not only ungainly and extremely uncomfortable to live in, but ungainly and uncomfortable to look at. But, as I so often do, I digress.
With more weight yet to be lost and only half serious, I created a profile on OKCupid.com. Body type: “curvy.” Wink, wink.
Yours truly,
