Weight tolerance.

First of all I want to make it clear I am in no way criticizing anybody's reasons or methods for weight loss. I'm not saying I'm better or anything. I'm just pondering.

I've been reading a lot of blogs -- reading and writing distract me from my stupid moping over my ex, at least somewhat. In my reading I keep coming across things that I find I sort of struggle to relate to.

The big one is people talking about how heavy and uncomfortable and tired they feel fat, how hard things are every day. They talk about pain, especially in their back, hips, ankles, and feet. They talk about those things being alleviated as they lose weight. I've been over 200 pounds for at least ten years (with a couple of dips), probably more like 12. Half of that time, I've been over 250, and at least a quarter of it I've been over 275 pounds. The most discomfort I've had was last year when I felt sore around my ribcage when I woke up, which I thought was probably from fat pressing on my internal organs. (Of course, I weigh more now and it's not happening.)

Other than that, I haven't had the kind of pains the obese normally have (or are expected to have). When I was hating myself and blaming everything on my weight I thought my foot and ankle pains were from my weight -- until I realized that even my thinnest coworkers were constantly complaining about the same pains. Waitressing just beats you up. And when I have lost significant amounts of weight, like the time I got down to 187 ... I didn't feel any differently. Nothing hurt any more or less.

I suspect the fact that I've been fat to some extent or the other has a lot to do with that. I've always been relatively active - walking to catch buses, riding horses and herding goats, waitressing, trotting across campus (the last seven months I have been a lazy ass, though). As my weight has increased my muscles have adapted, and my ligaments and tendons have as well. So I've just never felt like normal daily tasks are painful or overyl tiring or really uncomfortable. Life is hard because life is hard, my flab has nothing to do with it.

In fact, until I started blog surfing, I always thought of those problems as affecting people at much higher weights than I'm at. When I weighed around 260 pounds, my father suggested that I have some sort of weight loss surgery - and I laughed at him and told him that was ridiculous. I would never have imagined that someone around my size/my weight would be willing to have plastic implanted in them, or have their internal organs re-arranged. One of my favorite bloggers had a lapband put in at about twenty pounds higher than my current weight, and I still can't wrap my brain around the idea. And yet as I surf around, I find more and more people at my weight or lower who have had these drastic surgeries. And it just blows my mind. Again, this isn't a criticism - just personally eye-opening.

In less randomly blathering news, I ate well today!