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How I got fat - How I got
back

     
    A short, short story by R Bromfield
     
    Copyright © 2011 Bromfield
    Smashwords Edition
     
    It took me years and years to put on the sixty
pounds I wanted to get rid of. It was depressing. It wouldn't be
easy to lose. I hated looking at myself in the mirror - even a
little hand mirror. What were my good points? I had good skin. Big
deal. I had a great sense of humor. Yeah, I was making people laugh
all right - behind my back. I could make fabulous chocolate chip
almond cookies. What was the fun of that without someone to share
them with? I felt very alone. I'd tried to lose weight before and
managed to drop six or eight pounds, but then I always gained it
back - and more! Then the worst thing that can happen happened; the
only person in the world who I could possibly call a friend fell in
love and lost like twenty-five pounds overnight. At least it seemed
like overnight. I was jealous, and more lonely than ever. I didn't
think it would be a good idea to keep going on that way.
    I had to do something, but nothing worked; not
permanently. My friend lost more weight. What was she doing that
made this happen? She seemed so happy and didn't seem to care about
anything, which is understandable; she was in love. I wasn't in
love; I was depressed. But maybe if I did all the other things...
She went for walks a lot. When you're in love you do that. So I
decided to start walking whenever I could. If I had to take the car
to the grocery store I parked it waaaay out at the edge of the
parking lot instead of right near the entrance. Magically, I
stopped getting shopping cart dents in the doors. One Saturday,
when I knew the parking lot would be absolutely full, I left the
car at home and walked all the way to the mall. I was surprised to
find out that it was actually quicker that way and so I started
doing it once in a while even when the parking lot wasn't
full.
    Inside the mall there was a kind of
gravitational attraction to the food court; Taco Bell, McDonalds
and NY Fries. I'd read somewhere that we evolved from creatures
that had difficulty finding nourishment and staying warm. We could
get fruits and nuts okay but we really needed animal protein to
survive, so we slowly developed a way of storing fat for periods
when animal protein was scarce. The craving for fat was what kept
us alive. Today fat is available at every fast food joint and the
craving for it still exists. Pretty soon I realized that the fast
food industry is exploiting this ancient craving for fat because
they are only interested in their bottom line - not my bottom. I
resented the fact that these big corporations had control over my
butt, so I started taking the stairs to go up and around the whole
food court section. A great advantage of taking the stairs was that
I didn't have to stare at someone's ass all the way up on the
escalator.
    After a while it started to become a kind of
game. How could I beat those bastards that were making me feel the
way I did?
    I noticed something strange about the
supermarket; all the processed food is in the centre aisles and the
good food is around the outside. It was too hard at first to avoid
the centre aisles so I made myself a promise to read the whole
ingredients list of anything I wanted to buy from these aisles.
Most of it is so weird that I put half of it back on the shelf and
didn't buy it. I did other stuff too; I stopped making my famous
cookies; Instead of sitting at home I went, by myself, to the
movies; I met some people there who drank too much coffee and
talked too much all the time about making movies themselves. I
started to hang out with them. One guy said he was a writer, two
girls were going to be actors. Two other guys fought over which one
of them could direct. They were all great people but maybe a bit
pretentious; I don't think any of them ever really did anything
except go to school and work at part-time jobs. But I thought they
had a good idea. I couldn't act and I