Trolls Be Damned

By Valerie X Armstrong

“Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.”
― J.K. Rowling

 I have been fat since I can remember…Childhood pictures of me show me as a fat  baby, a fat toddler, a fat child, and a fat teen.  My brother was average size and my sister was thin.  I have no known medical cause for my fatness. I’ve always been physically active and not a big eater..My family didn’t have much money and food was sometimes scarce so we didn’t eat a lot.  My mom was a little heavy and dad was normal size.  I have seen pictures of other ancestors that were quite heavy. I have been on diets since I was ten or eleven years old.  I have lost and gained hundreds and hundreds of pounds.  My first substantial weight loss was fifty pounds.  It took me six months to reach goal. I was about fourteen or fifteen years old  and was put on an eight hundred calorie a day diet.  I stuck to it with out ever slipping off.  After I reached my goal weight, I went back to eating normally and all the weight came back in a couple of months.  I gave it another go in a year or so and lost another sixty pounds on a canned diet gimmick of the day called Metrecal…People were supposed to have four cans a day which totalled one thousand calories, but my doctor only allowed me three cans..totalling  seven hundred and fifty calories. They were chocolate shake type drinks with a medicinal after taste.  I had nothing else but water.  In six months I had reached goal again…And again as soon as I started eating the weight rushed back on.  The subsequent years were a combination of  using diet pills, joining weight loss clubs, hypnosis, abusing laxatives, exercising excessively, getting shots of pregnant mare’s urine, and buying every conceivable diet book and attempting them all to no lasting avail.

The first real success I ever had at losing weight and actually keeping it off was when I was around thirty. I lost one hundred and sixty five pounds in a year and a half by eating one thousand calories a day.  As I neared my goal, I had to cut to way below one thousand calories and exercise much more to arrive at the upper end of where the weight chart said I should be.  I looked skeletal, but the scale said I was still too heavy for my five foot seven inch medium frame.

I started teaching aerobics to pay for my gym membership and exercised several hours a day. I got a job demonstrating exercise machines and became their spokesperson.   I was back on laxatives and only eating about eight hundred calories a day or less..trying so hard to maintain my goal weight.  I did maintain that loss for nearly eight years…Then the weight just started coming back on it’s own, without my increasing my caloric intake or lessening my activity.  I went to my doctor and got checked for thyroid or other medical issues and I was deemed okay but  I was chastised for my weight gain.  Everyone was noticing my increasing size and was assuming that I was binging.  I quit going to out as much because I was doing everything according to my doctor’s food plan  but my body wasn’t cooperating.  I was mortified, as I had been on TV and radio and and there was a huge full page article about me in our local paper quoting me as saying, “I’ll never be fat again”.

I  have never given up trying to be a “healthy” weight.  I have been dieting over and over for years since then with substantial weight losses, but it invariably returns.  I eat healthy, lean meats and seafood in small portions, fresh fruits and veggies, rarely do I exceed fifteen hundred calories a day, yet my weight is ever on the increase unless I cut back to practically nothing. I don’t eat pre-packaged foods or “fast foods”…I get plenty of fiber and take vitamins…and get lots of exercise…I should by all current theories about why one is fat, be a stick figure.

My doctor recommends the Gastric Bypass, as he says it might alter my physiology so perhaps I won’t gain weight so easily,  but I have never had good luck with general anesthetics so I am concerned and have put off having it.  Another thing is, I feel fine, for my age…I look younger than my years, I’m active, my numbers (blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol) are where they should be.  I wouldn’t even know I had a “problem” if it weren’t for others telling me that I was too fat.  I’ve been told I was going to die young for so many years if I didn’t lose weight. I’m now too old to die young … so much for that crapola.

I was promped to write this because of all the pompous know- it -alls who write the nasty comments on the articles that promote size acceptance or any articles about fat and obesity .  Those guys don’t know squat, for all their pontificating…They are just parroting what some credentialed idiot has said.  Unless they have lived in a genetically fat body, they have no room to say a blasted word or offer their ignorant opinions…They are completely brainwashed by the media and are too stupid to realize it.  Losing weight is one thing…but keeping it off is another thing, altogether, when your body insists on staying at it’s natural high set point.  “They” say you can change your set point, but that is also a crock.

I’ve dealt with people like this all my life and my kids and grand kids are going through it now…I’m dedicating my life to try to enlighten people about genetic fatness.  I realize there are many causes of obesity and no one should ever be treated badly because of their size, but some people actually CAN lose weight and keep it off if they can find a method that works for them.  My concern is for those who have tried EVERYTHING and are still fat.  If willpower worked, or if eating correctly helped or activity or whatever, worked then I would be thin. I promise you that.  I have the worlds greatest willpower and tenacity.  I have lived this saga and I am here to tell you that all fat people are NOT the same.  Some of us are intended by nature to be fat…Period!  So shut up trolls or your karma might make your kids  or grand kids genetic fatties…Let’s see how you’d like that.