Occasionally, when I throw some words out there in a blog post they come back to me like a boomerang, you know? My head sends them down through my fingertips onto the page, but it’s like a carbon copy of them gets stuck inside my head and that usually means that there’s another knot in my thought process which is demanding to be unpicked.

I made a throwaway comment the other day about blaming everything in my life that had ever gone wrong on the fact that I was fat. And that got me thinking. What am I going to blame when I get to Skinny Town if the shit hits the fan?

Yeah well that happened because I’m f…. oh.

The fact is, I’ve spent most of my life either putting weight on or taking weight off, so being fat was always within touching distance and therefore fair game where blame was concerned. My boy crush doesn’t fancy me..? Well there’s a surprise…it’s because I’m fat. Why did I marry this arsehole? Well all the decent blokes were out of my league, because I’m fat. I didn’t get an interview for that job I really liked the look of…yeah they were probably put off because I’m fat. They must have smelled it on my resume.

Isn’t that strange? I can’t think of a single other catch-all reason that would account for so many things going tits up where I wouldn’t have banished it from my life immediately – what a millstone to have around my neck, right? The omnipresent threat of failure, purely down to the size of my arse.  And yet, despite being utterly convinced that being fat was the root of all evil, I stayed fat. Got fatter, even. I mean seriously.

Unless. Maybe I secretly found it useful? If you think about it, I had at my disposal a well polished reason why I couldn’t do…whatever. Why something hadn’t worked out. Anything or everything, it didn’t really matter. I was fat, so no wonder…

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and admit that there have been times where being fat has served a purpose…it’s been useful, you know as in it provided a genuine excuse not to do something I didn’t want to do. My boy wanted to zip-wire off a mountain in Wales a couple of years ago, and he wanted me to do it with him…yeah, right, good luck with that. Sorry love, I can’t…I’m too fat. And for once I was grateful for my extra arse.

I suppose it’s about taking responsibility isn’t it? Being accountable for stuff rather than blaming the blubber. I didn’t get the job because I wasn’t good enough. My bad. I married a dickhead because I was chasing a fairy tale and I was dumb enough to imagine that despite all the red-flag-waving-in-my-face warning signs, he was really a good sort. My judgement was off…more than once, as it happens. My bad.

Someone once said to me that when they got to Skinny Town after carrying a lot of extra weight for years, they were disappointed to find that everything in their life didn’t get better immediately. And I get that…being skinny doesn’t guarantee entry into some kind of charmed life where no shit hits the fan ever. I just need to be prepared to apportion responsibility for things not going my way in the right place instead of leaping by default to the because I’m fat bucket.

It’s all good…I’ve got a good year to practice that before I cross the county line 🙂

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