Fat Girls Are Hungrier

Especially when they've lost all their weight.

It's like somehow they've found a way to convert all the stores of shiny, blubby, white fat into a bottomless well of motivation and hunger.

They fight harder. They're the ones meticulously picking out the fat in the fried rice, the ones you mistake for demons right at the front of spinning class, the ones who have sworn off puffy sleeves lest they highlight their imaginary fat arms. And the amazing thing is that they do it consistently. Ie. for the rest of their lives. They have taken a vow, a pledge to the inner fat girl to never ever be fat again. Whatever it takes to never ever EVER return to what they were once before.

I have never ever seen so much self control. Not even in a monk who's accidentally swallowed a Viagra pill.

I am amazed at the kind of commitment and dedication. I mean, we can all diet, and we have. Sometimes they last a few a days before we get withdrawal symptoms and reach for the sugar bowl. If we are lucky, a few months, in which case we may lose a couple of pounds but then someone offers us a glistening KFC and in a moment of weakness, we reach out and inhale it. Sometimes even a year if we suffered a major heartbreak and need a new figure to match our new 'outlook' in life but in comes someone new and off we are again, having cake. But to keep at it year in and year out, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE...well, that's like being married to your diet.

These days, they call it a lifestyle change. You're not on a diet, you have merely changed your eating lifestyle. Oh crap, if you're cutting down sugar, cutting down fat, eating low fat mayo and all the rest of it, it sounds like a damn diet to me!

Apart from vanity, which I think all women are guilty of, I really believe that this will to ward off the fat stems from far deeper. It goes way back to childhood days or teenage years when these girls were big. When boys bypassed them for thinner girls, when parents and relatives made their weight a topic at the dinner table to the laughter and delight of others. When they couldn't finish the race because they were huffing and puffing too much. When they couldn't wear mini skirts and halter necks when everybody else was. When in photos they appeared so big next to the regular-sized person they look like they were superimposed. It does things to your mind and leaves scars that in time, become as much a part of you as your DNA.

The irony is that it's these very memories that sting so much that now serve as the very impetus to keeps these girls going - to run the extra mile, to wait another hour before the next meal, to forego the baby doll no matter how adorable.

What I find commendable is that they've taken the negative and turned it into the positive. And as cliched as that sounds, it's what life is all about isn't it? They're in it for the long run. It's not just some fad diet they embarked on, but a lifelong commitment.

To all the fat girls gone thin, a standing ovation from me. Well done! Fight hunger with hunger!

Note: At the other end of the spectrum, you will find girls like me. The fat girls on the fence. The ones who have not taken the vow but who want to be thin just as much. They also have their fair share of fat memories and scars but somehow just can't find the hunger to fight the hunger. As a result, we yo-you our way through our adult lives, swinging from the end of a self-imposd pendulum as it brings us from fat to chubby to thin and back to chubby and fat again. And so it continues to swing, year in year out. Who would have thought French fries and chocolate cake could cause so much trouble!