Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

For  as long as I can remember I have struggled with my girlish figure.  Some time ago, I lost that girlish figure and was dropped rather unexpectedly into a "womanly" figure.  I have been blessed or cursed with body parts that have stemmed from the gene pool of my parents.  At times I feel like Mrs. Potato Head.

I look just like my mother.  I have her smile and that smile has been passed onto my niece.  I love my smile and am complimented on it often.  My upper torso belongs to the Beadle side of the family.  My Paternal grandmother was quite well endowed.  Unfortunately when they were putting Potato Beadle #2 together, they slapped my mother's side on the lower portion.  Wide hip bones and full figure thighs.  My feet, well it is hard to say, both of my parents  have large feet.

I am tall so I carry my weight fairly well, but as mother nature introduces herself to me, a movement has occurred. Fat cells have eaten up my skinny cells.  They have puddled in certain places like a glob of clay thrown on the wheel and left unattended.  Some one should have been molding that clay into this womanly figure and for a while it appeared they did, but the lunch wagon must have come a calling cause this masterpiece has been thrown off the wheel and left to congeal .

As a child, I didn't have a weight problem.  I walked six blocks to school and walked home for lunch, back to school and back home, only to grab my bike and ride it six blocks to play with my friends.  I rode my bike every where.  I told my mother I was never going to get fat.  She snickered.  She KNEW the gene pool was secretly waiting.

In April 1970, my parents moved us to the country. I rode a bus to school.  I packed a lunch and ate at school and I rode a bus home.  I lived on a lake and we had a cottage on a lake but you can only swim in Michigan for about 10 days a year.

I didn't have many friends and those I did make, lived too far to ride my bike to play.  So the pounds started to pack on.  Mother was a stay at home mom. She loved to bake cookies and cakes and have them waiting for us when we came home.  By the age of 14 I was pleasantly plump, similar to a turkey.  That awkward age where you are not sure if you are going to come through it pretty or pretty damn ugly.  It was the summer between middle school and high school.  Mother and I joined Weight Watchers for my first time.  Mind you, I have joined so many times since then I have lost track.

I think I lost about 30 pounds and I grew out of that awkward stage and into braces.  Heavy Metal, Metal Mouth, Tin Grin, you name it, kids called you it. I saw nothing wrong with my pearly whites, but  my Dad told me "someday you'll be happy that you wore them."  Yes Dad, I am cause I inherited your teeth! Under bites, cross bites, crooked teeth, missing teeth ( I had a tooth grow in the center of my upper jaw, they pulled it and my teeth shifted),

So there I was entering high school thirty pounds lighter, new haircut, new glasses and a full set of metal.  With all the bite issues my mouth was a major construction zone for FOUR YEARS!  Three months after I graduated from high school the braces were removed.

Now the good thing about braces is it limits you eating out in public. And wearing them in high school limits you eating anything in front of your fellow classmates as you could literally be wearing your PB&J all afternoon in your metal mesh. So keeping my weight off was easy.

And by now I was working.  I worked part time at an insurance agency and part time at night as a roller skating guard.  It was after I turned 35 that I noticed a change.  Pepsi, my favorite meal had to be substituted for Diet Coke. My meal of the day couldn't keep a baby wren from starving, but I had that "girlish figure."

I struggled with the scale.  We met each morning and some days I swore it was giving me the big raspberry!  There! See what happens when you eat a kernel of corn..devil's food! You've gained!  Women, why do we weigh ourselves every day?  It is torture but we do and we calibrate our scales to make sure they are right.  We don't want them to be off an ounce or two, it could throw us into the next pound that we've been trying to lose for a day.  For those of you that do not attend weight watchers, they weigh you to the ounce and you are damn happy when they  announce, "you are down 1/10 of a ounce!" Kool and the Gang appear singing, Celebration Time."  Lights flash, fellow dieters high five you...little do they know  you peed just before you got on the scale and within the hour you will be "fat" again.

As I've said, I've joined weight watchers several times.  I have seen the diet go from eating fish so many times a week to counting how many breads you ate and how many milk you drank to the new points PLUS system.  I have to say I like the new points plus but I was never any good in math, so tracking what I put in my mouth and adding the points up, well, sometimes, I fail.

I have joined weight watchers again.  I have a fantastic leader who is fun and motivates you to be a "winner, winner, no chicken dinner" kind of girl!  One chicken nibblet, OK,  whole chicken dinner, not so much.  So here I go, for the big prize in the sky...to gain back my "girlish" figure as I continue to gracefully age  in my "womanly" years