Alright, I admit it.  I’ve gone over the deep end.  I’ve become a one person American obesity epidemic.

Oh, I don’t have many of those childhood sad fat stories.  I don’t think I was overweight until I graduated from law school.  I’ll admit, I thought I was fat — but what’s a big butt black girl to think living in the lily-white suburbs.

When I was a kid, I was called chubby, but didn’t care much — just pass me the food.  When I moved to Connecticut, my teachers and peers told me I was fat, because I weighed one hundred pounds and wore a size three — in the fifth grade.

My maximum weight in high school was a whopping one hundred twenty five — and I though then I was fat.

Then I graduated from law school, and I started my cruise downhill.  Depression over one hundred ten thousand dollars of debt, unemployment, and boredom made way for some bad eating habits.  Bored, why not get a large mocha at Arabica, and maybe that pumpkin tart, too.  Home all day studying for the bar — why that cornbread looks good.  Pizza, ok, that too.  Chinese food, why not.  None of it was too bad by itself, but life on Shaker Square was one big meal.

When I left Ohio, I weighed one hundred and eighty two pounds — and I’m still there today, according to my official weigh in last week.

I’ll skip the intervening years and the different foods that filled up my time.  Suffice it to say, Los Angeles has a vast array of food and you can get fat on pupusas and pa jun as well. 

While reading Fatland a couple of months ago, I got the idea in my head that despite my skimpy health insurance — I should be able to find some kind of medically supervised weight loss plan.  Well, I found the plan — even though my individual Blue Cross plan doesn’t cover it — after all it’s crisis care, not health care, but I digress.

So, I’m going to spend my remaining unemployment check on ‘weight management,’ as they term it, at Cedars-Sinai.

Starting next Tuesday, I’ll be on the Very Low Calorie Diet with lovely processed, excuse me, pre-packaged food from Health Management Resources — the Optifast of the new generation.

I’ve never been on a diet, because I believe diets don’t work.  So, I’ll have to think of this as a lifestyle change.  Hmmm, I’ll keep you posted.

(more…)