Some people find comfort and security in their fat. They carry it like a sign of abundance with their particular signature on it. They’ve got themselves covered, should they fall on hard times or hard times fall on them. It’s almost a pride thing.
There’s something satisfying about patting or smoothing down a fatty thigh covered with fabric, compared to a skinny one. Who wants to feel bones?
Muscles don’t give that same satisfaction of abundance, since they’re mostly grotesque, you only notice them when they’re flexing and signal being bound, unable to move swiftly with agility. There’s no comfort in that. Besides, fat comes easy, muscle doesn’t. You don’t have to worry about losing fat if you don’t use it. It’s an easy ride.
Some men when speaking about plump women say there’s more to hold onto – more to love. After all who wants to ride a skinny horse?
Having figured all this out, I decided to hang my hat of satisfaction onto something a bit more rewarding.
You can lose muscle fast, as many of us discovered during this pandemic. Most of us gained weight, and most of it was fat not muscle. We gained fat because we ate more than our bodies needed and we lost muscle because we weren’t active enough.
You really do lose strength power when you don’t exercise consistently. I could do a lot of squats when I did the squat challenge with Steph, but not so now. I didn’t keep it up, because I did too much, went beyond my capacity and then needed rest time and didn’t get back to it.
Looking back over the past few years I can say that walking can help in keeping you limber and keeping off excess fat, not necessarily weight. It stimulates all your systems helping with circulation, but go too far, too hard, too long and you put your body on high alert, which slows all the processes down that you wanted to accelerate.
I don’t go out much in the winter, because no one shovels their sidewalks except businesses. But I’m looking at a tread mill right in front of me that I rarely use. Why? It’s boring. Walking outside where there’s activity keeps me occupied. On the tread mill the focus is the walking and that inevitably becomes tedious.
Steve walked about five miles five days a week at his security job. He gained a lot of weight. Plus his job was stressful which added to the strain. So walking or engaging in any other exercise needs to be done in moderation – what’s moderate for you, not somebody else.
You know your body best and so does your body. It knows nothing about anybody else’s body except yours. That means you have a personal one-on-one relationship with it forever. Respect that loyalty to yourself. That’s important. Forget about everybody else’s fat or muscle, it’s not important to your well-being.
If you’ve become too comfortable with your fat and lack the motivation to unburden yourself from excess abundance, remember you can always gain back the fat if you don’t like the feeling or the look of less.
It’s like we tell people who cut their long hair short or shave their beard, at first you feel a little naked without it, but it will grow back if you want to keep the long hair, beard – or fat.
Try reducing the abundance you carry as your safeguard in times of trouble – too much abundance becomes as problematic as too little. We tend to overestimate what we need and end up hoarding the fat to the point of exhaustion. How much more can I pack on? When is enough enough? You just answered your own questions by asking them.
Yes, so start dumping. Get rid of the old outdated fat, and if you don’t like the slimmer but ample version of you, restock with new fresher fat – if that’s what all the other systems of your body want. Take a vote. Include every system. Do they all agree to restock? .
Gluttony equals exhaustion. The one thing about that sin (somebody else’s word not mine) is that you can’t hide it. I’m wondering if some of the fat we gained during the pandemic was a function of staying home where no one could see us, so the peer review when we socialize became essentially nonexistent. People care what they look like when they go out. They imagine how others will view them and what they’ll think. That’s normal behavior.
Then the curfews were lifted, the lights came on and WOW everybody got fat or fatter. And now that’s part of the conversation. Everybody’s noticing everybody else’s fat – and talking about it.
“To thine own self be true”. Your fat is yours and your body is loyal to you. Only the two of you can work in tandem to erase at least one adverse side effect of the pandemic – an overabundance of fat gain.
FAT-FREE CHEF™ 