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Fat loss, anyone?
Back fat and other atrocities (published 10/2003)
May 17, 2008
Don’t you hate it when you discover you had something green hung in your teeth during the entire party? Or that your zipper was unzipped, or– and I have actually done this - you wore your shirt inside out. (In my defense, it was a plain t-shirt.)
Yes, we all know the feelings of disbelief and mortification these events inspire. Loved ones look away and act as if they are unrelated, while friends laugh their - well, they laugh a lot.
If you are a proper, organized person, you may not have a chance to experience these feelings with any regularity. What a shame! I have found a way to summon those emotions without fail. All you need is a 3-way mirror.
I made my discovery recently while shopping for an outfit to wear to an evening wedding. Most of my sparkly clothes come from the “more is more” school of thought: yards of fabric cascading into many layers, baggy fit, and heavens! no skin showing. Oh, and did I mention the color black?
Well, I have dropped a few pounds (too few, as it turns out) in the past months and I decided I needed a kicky little number to celebrate – something shorter than ankle-grazing, something minus a few layers, and definitely something not black. I embarked on an outfit search made tolerable only by occasional sips of a cheeky cabernet.
It was during a foray into a dressing room with a three-way mirror that I discovered the horror that has been following me. Literally. My back. This was worse than spinach in my teeth.
Stuff back there was not nearly as streamlined by weight loss as I had thought. And by stuff, I mean that area between armpit and waist. Well, and on down, too, if you want complete truth in reporting. The mirror revealed what my husband would not – that my outfits weren’t the only thing draping on my body. Isn’t there a saying about hindsight being 20/20? This was one hindsight that would be better at say, 20/300.
My eye-opening little shopping trip saved us money, since I decided that my old Stevie Nicks outfits are perfect for the wedding after all – the more fabric the better, in fact! But it got me thinking, too. And by thinking, I mean fantasizing.
One of my favorite fantasies, other than that one involving Antonio and a white shirt with big sleeves, is what I like to call the bacon principle of fat loss (two concepts not usually associated with each other): lying in the sun melts the fat off the body, much like fat rendered from a piece of bacon in frying pan. Heat me up, add some sun block, and I’m a couple of sizes smaller in a matter of hours.
But I decided I needed variety in my fantasies. My good buddy, Lylan, joined me in my mental foray into the impossible. We decided it would be neat if we could just move the fat around with a little manipulation.
My favorite destination for the fat would be the floor, of course. Just push that stuff on down, out the feet and we’re good. Maybe I could shoot some north if I wanted to va-voom for an evening outfit, but mostly, I would send it south.
Even better, we decided it might be nice if you could just stick one of those maple sugar plug things in a thigh or hip (or thip area), and tap that fat, as it were. Drain it right on out. If trees can do it, why can’t we? We’re way more evolved. (Note: Men, use an engine metaphor here – drain the oil kind of thing. Or maybe a keg would be more appropriate than a tree for fat-tapping in your fantasy.)
But Lylan was sleep-deprived that day, and she figured that even if we could reconfigure the fat so easily, it wouldn’t make us happy. We’d drip some on the carpet, we wouldn’t get both sides even, or heck, the whole process would wind up being just as annoying as shaving your legs.
So it looks like I’ll be heading to the wedding in one of my long, flowing black outfits, but at least it will be right side out and zipper-less. I’ll just be very careful around the spinach dip.
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