Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

November 7 2006

Fat

I bet I'm not the only woman who rearranged her schedule yesterday to watch Kirstie Alley strut her (considerably less voluminous) stuff on Oprah yesterday. And whether you believe she only weighed 220 pounds when she started or not, there is no arguing with the fact that at 55 years of age, and after a mighty big weight loss, the woman looks great.

I wouldn't want her thighs, but she wouldn't want my belly.

Body stuff is hard. It's hard when the battle to maintain a reasonable weight is a private matter between a woman, her scale, and the refrigerator, and it has to be harder when it takes place in a more public way. After all, I'm pretty sure no one googled "fat Taming" yesterday, and I was fascinated by the "fat Oprah" search I did. It's just not the number on the scale, either.

Kirstie says that at this point, she feels comfortable in her own skin. If so, she's got me beat, at least in terms of the relationship between my sense of self and my perception of the body I lug around. This is what Kirstie said on the day she appeared on national TV in a bikini, and I spent the morning at Sears looking for some variation on a girdle designed to make me look less fat.

From the Oprah website:

I don't think women ever feel like we're good enough," she says. "We don't feel like we're thin enough or pretty enough or smart enough or work hard enough … We all are good enough and we look good enough and we are not our bodies, you know?

I found the magical undergarment, btw. I don't know that I can wear it for more than an hour at a time, but after putting it on, I definitely understood why even fat Oprah doesn't look all jiggly on TV. Neither one of us would appear on TV wearing a bikini, like Kirstie did, but, maybe we don't have to.

That bit of self-knowledge may be as close to seeing myself as "good enough" I'm likely to get.

de.lici.ous tags:blog, oprah, fat, kirstie, tv, self-image, weightloss