Flight
Karen Wooton

I believe in flight. For most of my life I lived in a body large enough for two. While being large has become the mode in America, it still carries a wealth of shame. With all that weight, my knees and back were frequently in pain. I could not walk to the end of the driveway without breathing hard. There were many desks at school that I could not slide into. I could see the frustration, shock, or anger of a fellow passenger whose assigned seat was next to mine where I was overflowing. I hated that. It made me hungry. So I dreamed. I celebrated abundance and I cherished zaftig goddess figures so that being me was somehow okay. A Snickers made things better. Sometimes it took two.
I have been on every fad diet. I have lost hundreds of pounds. Well, I didn’t exactly lose them; I misplaced them. The best part of every diet was that fabulous return to normalcy when, weight lost, I could again eat like normal people eat. But I actually never ate like normal people eat. I wanted to believe I did, but that wasn’t the truth. Food was my narcotic. Food filled the hole in my soul. Food was celebration; it was comfort; it was anesthesia. Those lost pounds always found their way back, and were almost always joined by friends. I learned to buy pants with elastic waistbands and I would wear them until the constant chaffing between my legs wore holes in the fabric. I bought large flowing shirts with exotic prints so that I could look arty, but they were really to hide the abundance. Those shirts never really hid anything; all they did for me was maintain the lie that I was okay. I wasn’t okay. I was dying. All I knew were uncontrollable insulin, cholesterol, and blood pressure; unrelenting despair; and hopelessness.
I will never know why I had the epiphany. I don’t care. But one day I clearly understood that dying slowly was absurd. In that moment I knew I had to choose either life or death...and I chose life. Diets don’t work; they have never worked. I understood what I needed was a lifestyle change. So I changed what I ate and when I ate. I began to walk often in the sunshine. I learned to say “Thank You,” and time became my ally.
And then one day I realized I had left an entire person behind. I was wearing form-fitting clothing on a normal-sized body, and I realized I had been doing this for two years. oday, I continue to eat the way I did when I made the lifestyle change, and I continue to walk in the sunshine: four miles three times a week and once a year sixty miles in three days for a cause. But I remember the day I chose life, the day there was the seed of hope, the day I turned away from everything I knew and stepped into the unknown and was given wings.