I was meeting my friend Sarah for our annual Christmas lunch. We’ve been friends since college, but even though we live just a couple of blocks from each other we only see each other at Christmas each year.
Since I’ve known Sarah she’s added 30 years and, easily 60 pounds. Our holiday lunches invariably include a 20-minute gripe session during which she complains about her weight and resolves to lose it in the New Year. I’ve heard it all before: Last year she told me about her New Year’s resolution while she ate cream of potato soup from a bread bowl, with a side of macaroni and cheese and a bag of potato chips. Talking about her weight gain depressed her, but she brightened when I suggested we split a brownie for dessert. (It was an 80/20 split — you do the math.)
This year, though, I noticed a difference in her. For one thing, she looked great although she was bigger than ever. She was also in a great mood, ordering a huge platter of fettuccini Alfredo. Usually she would tell me how fat she was with every bite she took, but this year there was not a single apology as she cleaned her plate. I was perplexed.
As it turns out, Sarah recently had an epiphany when she realized that she’s been trying to lose weight for her entire adult life. If it were going to happen, she reasoned, wouldn’t it have happened long before she was in her late 40’s? Soon after, she read a book by former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler who maintains that people are heavy because they eat more than people who are not heavy.
“Go figure,” she said. “It’s not my hormones and it’s not my metabolism and it’s not my thyroid. I just like to eat too much.”
This revelation changed her life – and her New Year’s resolutions — forever. Soon after, she read an article that said that heavy people appear, on average, 10 years younger than average-weight people do. Inspired, she decided that if she could not be thin, she was going to be the youngest looking fat person she could be, so she treated herself to some hair color and a smashing haircut.
There was no stopping her now. Sarah had always hated the way she looks and generally slouches and skulks and tries to be invisible. Now, however she resolved to stand tall and push her ample bosom forward. She also decided to get some decent clothing, abandoning her usual uniform of spandex leggings and oversized tee shirts.
Listening to my friend, it occurred to me that what she had was a New Year’s revolution: a total repudiation of her prior thought process. As Sarah ordered her dessert (“I don’t want to share, I want one of my own.”) she told me that the hard part of her epiphany was to understand that the people who love her aren’t going to love her any better if she loses weight, and that the people who judge her because of her weight aren’t worth having around in the first place.
I was glad that my friend is so happy with herself, and I wondered about the health risks of being heavy but I didn’t want to burst her bubble by asking her. The upshot of this New Year’s revolution is that I hope she will be way happier when she stops stressing about her weight. Maybe like all resolutions, these will fall by the wayside, but in the short term, she’s standing tall and proud and holding her chins up high.