One of my first memories of New York City is getting up really early one morning to go be an extra for the worst indie movie of all time.  At the time I lived in the back of a hair salon on 45th& 8th.  That’s right a hair salon, the cool spinning chair, the big alien looking blow drier that comes over your head.  As I walked through Time’s Square at 5 a.m. – I realized THIS was the worst time to be out.  Because every body around me were not early risers,  they were still up from the night before. 

 As I walked along, so hopeful in my New Life in the City.  My hair freshly groomed with products stolen from my apartment/hair salon. I was in that total hat-throwing-I’m-gonna-make-it-after-all moment when from behind me I heard low faint chants.

‘white girl with a fat ass, white girl with a fat ass, white girl with a FAT ass’ 

What can only be described as a your classic 80’s movie drunken homeless wino, was following me chanting.  And as I walked faster, hoping to God he wasn’t following me, my hurried movement only emphasized the jiggling momentum of said ASS and his chant reached a fevered pitch.

‘WHITE GIRL with a fat ass WHITE girl with a FAT ASS white girl WITH a FaaaTTTT ASSSSSSSS’

And no matter how fast I hauled my now infamous ass, I could not escape those words. I have continued to run but those words have followed me. 

Here I am on the precipice of a Holiday season.  My second adult relationship has crumbled around me without warning (or at least one that I would pay attention to) and I have once again been unceremoniously dumped right before the Christmas season.   At the same time, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am the heaviest I have ever been.  199 lbs.

Refusing to give in to this, and refusing to ever be 200 lbs.  I have to do something. 

Today was my company’s annual Thanksgiving feast and I dreaded going.  All that food. All that waste.  And if I don’t eat it, will it just get thrown away?  I have thought about food every day for as long as I can remember.  I can’t stand when things are wasted.  I dread holiday parties.  And I have made relationships more complicated with my food issues, guilty bad moods, and sugar crashes.  It has to stop.   

But what would make it different this time?  And when I watch food go to waste, what would help me take a pass? We all know there are starving children in ‘insert impoverished country here’

I read this fact on the America’s Second Harvest Website.

In a country of abundance, it’s hard to believe that Americans waste over 96 billion pounds of food in just one year while 25 million Americans go hungry.

So today, I decided that I would let go of whatever happened to all that food sitting in our company’s conference room.  I would enjoy my small portion of what I wanted to eat.  And instead of buying the afternoon Coffee Delight loaded with sugar and calories that perks me up and helps me to forget that I had 3 more hours in this stuffy office, today I will donate that $5 I would have spent to this site.

http://www.secondharvest.org/donate/one-dollar-equals-16-meals

I will do this instead of thinking about the Christmas I was going to spend with the family I thought might someday be my in-laws.

I will do this instead of worry about going down and snagging some of the Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch tomorrow.  Even though a part of me still does firmly believe that free food inherently has less calories.

I will do this instead of eating an entire tub of ice cream to avoid thinking about how the same friends (that just got married) who I spent a third-wheel Christmas with 3 years ago when I got dumped, are coming in tomorrow for what now will be a third-wheel Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow on the Wed before Thanksgiving – the kick off to the holiday season, I will weigh myself.  And post it here.  And I will keep posting it here, and figure out how my Fat Ass can save the world.

P.S. – I know the girl on the graphic doesn’t have a fat ass.  But who wants to see that, really?