Confession Time

I don't want to write any catch-up posts. The idea completely bores me. And frankly, I can't even remember what has happened these past several months of my life. I was supposed to write about December in my next post. Here is what I remember about December 2010 -- we had Christmas. We decided to simplify the gift giving which was absolutely the right thing to do. My in-laws let me put together and run a Christmas Eve program at their house. It was nice. The end.

Which is not exactly true, but I am just not excited at the idea of revisiting each month from Dec. 2010 to May 2011 in excruciatingly boring detail. So sue me. Pictures from that time frame are posted on Facebook. They tell a lot of the story.

One other important thing from December -- I confirmed I was pregnant. With Jane. She's cute. Her pictures are on Facebook, too. She'll arrive sometime around August 12.

But now it's time for true confessions -- within the past two weeks, I have turned into a total Drop Dead Diva addict. (I can picture my sister, Jen, cringing right now as I write about a TV show. I know, it's lame, but bear with me.) I always wanted to watch it, but we got rid of cable not too long after it came on TV and I dodged the bullet. But then Season 1 ended up on Netflix Instant and I finally caved and watched it -- the whole season in like two or three days. Which is just sad. And then I looked online and found out all of the season 2 episodes were on the Lifetime site. And I got through them really fast. Okay, again, I admit -- sad. This is a horrible waste of my time. I've been doing a lot of that lately, unfortunately.

Anyway, the premise of the show, if you don't know, is that this aspiring model dies in a car accident, but her soul comes back to earth in the body of a short, overweight attorney named Jane and she has to adjust to a new body, a new life and deal with working with her beloved, who doesn't know she is hanging out in Jane's body. You can see why this would appeal to me. But it's just gotten me thinking even more about weight and body image issues, which I think about pretty much constantly anyway. Because it's always in my face and because my doctor is on my case about the weight I've gained while pregnant and because I am happy to be a big fat pregnant lady instead of just a regular big fat lady because I feel much less embarrassed and ashamed to leave the house than I did 6 months ago but also unhappy because I feel like I can't do anything about my weight right now and everything I have been trying to do to keep my weight down has apparently been a huge failure since I have now gained 13 pounds this pregnancy and I just feel like giving up.

So Jane is a big girl. Overweight is a generous term as it's pretty obvious to me that, medically, she is obese. She is also very pretty, an amazing singer, smart, kind, and great at her job. In addition to watching the Season 2 episodes, I've also been reading the comments that people have posted about certain episodes. For a while there, Jane was dating this cute guy and one of the commenters posted something about how they thought this guy was so great because he could look past the outer shell and into the heart of a woman.

And I cannot tell you how much that comment bugged me. Why is there this assumption that if you are overweight or fat or obese or whatever that no man in their right mind could possibly ever be physically attracted to you, but only want to be with you because he was noble enough to look past the outer shell and find out that under all those layers of fat there's a heart of gold? That's just nonsense and it frankly does not make a big girl like me feel very good about herself. I realize that most men are not physically attracted to large girls, but that doesn't mean no man is. Maybe this guy dating Jane didn't have to look past the outer shell at all, but liked the outer shell and who she is as a person, too. Is that so unbelievable? It shouldn't be, because it happens. It definitely happens.  Ask Josh. He's quite attracted to me and he dated and liked other big girls long before he ever met me. And I don't think Josh is the only guy in the world who feels okay with big girls.

Some other commenter felt the need to berate the show for showing big as beautiful and promoting an unhealthy lifestyle and portraying thin as "bad" (which it totally doesn't do, by the way). Here's my response to that -- blah, blah, blah.

I live in a world that basically tells me every single day that I am a deeply flawed burden to society because of my weight. People make a bunch of assumptions about me and my health because of my weight. I mean, come on -- I don't even want to leave the house because I am afraid of what people think of me when they see me. It's ridiculous. And it's wrong. A little over a month ago, a brother in our ward gave a talk about the Word of Wisdom. He was talking about when he was a young convert and the only member in his family and he came to church every Sunday smelling like cigarette smoke because his sister was a chain smoker and how some other people in the ward, it seemed to him, were bothered by it and were perhaps judging him because of it. He talked to his bishop about it and his bishop said something like, "Can you imagine how much the chapel would reek if all of our sins smelled like cigarette smoke?"

And that's how I feel about being fat. Yes, I have a weakness when it comes to food and exercise and it means that I don't look the way I would like to or how other people apparently would like me to. But can you imagine how hideous we would all be if all of our weaknesses and sins took a toll on our physical appearance like a weakness for fatty, sugary foods does? If the worst thing you have to say about me is that I eat too much and don't exercise enough, I'll take it (although, frankly, it means you don't know me that well). In reality, I have much more serious issues I need to work through in order to become a better person, things much more important than losing the 60 pounds that I need to. And I am willing to bet that if I were 60 pounds overweight the rest of my life, but served and loved my fellow man, lived a life of faith, kept the commandments, took care of my family to the best of my ability, and took advantage of the atonement of Jesus Christ by repenting and relying on His mercy, that I could still make it to the Celestial Kingdom. I'm not trying to excuse myself from acknowledging and working on my health issues; I just want to propose that perhaps we as a society (and many members of the Church are guilty of this) have become disproportionately concerned about weight and physical health as opposed to other things that should concern us much more. Society overlooks, excuses and praises a multitude of sins and immorality, but if you're a fatty, well, that's just bad, bad, bad. I'm over it.

But not really. But I am trying to be. Because I think focusing on my weight is a distraction from the things I really need to be focusing on -- I am not loving and serving my fellow man as I should or keeping the commandments as well as I should or taking care of my family as well as I should or seeking the kind of relationship with my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ that I should have. And those are the things that truly matter. Those are the things that will make me a worthy person. Those are the things that will make me beautiful. Even if I am fat.