NOT Daddy Bashing...

...But... For a very long time I felt that I had been fat ALL MY LIFE! Granted. I was a little dumpling at 9 months.
Awww...look at those fat legs. (Brother BJ isn't all that little either is he?!)
...round face and chubby cheeks...
First grade photo with face not quite as round and those pretty Cherokee cheeks... (Don't look at the bangs - Mama said she cut them short so she didn't have to cut them as often - sheesh!)
WHAT?! My least favorite school photo. The 3rd grade with my hair pulled back in a ponytail and my head looking like a skinned onion.
One day, looking back at old photos...I realized...I WAS NOT FAT all my life. Not in those few school photos...not in 1966 at Garden of the Gods in Colorado.
Yes...my high school graduation in 1971 - and I was larger in 1970! I suppose it was during my high school weight battle that Daddy started calling me Crisco.

But look what happened to me in the mid-1970s!!
This was just a few months after Jonathan was born.
Then almost too skinny here.
1996 after Ron died...not bad...
Now...well...seven pounds and some odd ounces ago back in April.
What brought on this reminiscing about weight? I just finished reading Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed. No. No raunchy sex scenes.

Not much mirrored my life.

Then, on page 364 in the next to the last chapter, I started to cry. The main character's dad was cruel and mean. He actually poked his daughter with a tennis racket and told her that she was fat. "Men don't like fat women." My dad never did that, but he did call me Crisco. Is that the same thing?

I was the only girl with three brothers. I don't think Daddy really knew what to do with me. Sometimes he really didn't know what to do with his sons either...but that's their story.

His term of endearment for me...Crisco? A term that instills confidence in one's self??? I must've missed its intention.

Weiner's character writes a magazine article and states: "There were a thousand words that could have described me--smart, funny, kind, generous. But the word I picked--the word that I believed the world had picked for me--was fat." That's when I cried.

Then she writes: "The truth is this--I'm all right the way I am. I was all right all along."

I'm still on the exercise/diet program. For my health, I need to shed about 30 pounds. For me. No one else. Because...I am all right the way I am!