Was reading through my old blog today and found a couple of things. Suddenly I do feel a little older than before. Most of it was due to the fact that many things have changed over the years. I’ve lost quite a fair bit of the naivety and innocence from the yester-years. Even the style that I write my blog entries in have changed.

While it used to be cheery and more bubbly in the past, all these have been replaced by a certain melancholy and maturity, at least in my thoughts and written expressions. It’s kinda weird, because I have never noticed it until now.

Suddenly I felt that I needed to come back up here to start blogging again and placing the different bookmarks in my life.

Saw the picture of this little letter that I received during union camp in 2002. Apparently we had this game called the “Secret Pal” where 2 people will anonymously write letters to each other, like a secret pal, and we’ll get to meet only on the last night of the camp.

The guy turned out to be a real prince charming, making it to the camp pageant, sans the manners and charisma. In my memory, he was a rather shy thing who couldn’t manage his emotions. I remember the dinner that we had during the last night at camp, and he was quiet. We exchanged a few words and found out that he actually lives very close by. I thought he would make a good friend and perhaps sometimes I could drop him off at school.

But apparently, he took it the wrong way and thought I was trying to go after him. Worst still, right after dinner, he found some excuse and tried to escape. (We were supposed to do an activity together after that) I tried to ask him for his number, just in case if we needed to do an activity after dinner, and he found some cockamimi excuse and said he’ll find me later.

That never happened.

Some time later, I heard some really hurtful stuff about how I was trying to go after him and I wasn’t the “Snow White”. I wasn’t the one who chose the nick ok. He’s a pageant boy and I’m a fat / ugly girl trying to go after him, who does she think she is? Sometimes you think these things only happen in the movies. Guess where they got their materials from?

A couple of months down the road, there was a rumour that he dropped out of school.

Funny that all these memories started streaming back into me. In the past, I would go all self bashing and whine in my misery. But for now, these memories really give me a deep insight of how I turned out the way I am. I am starting to see the fragments of anger, disappointment, poor image and hate that still lingers within the recesses of my mind. It’s pretty amazing that sometimes you think that you’ve gotten over some things, but you discover a new angle that you haven’t processed yet. The human mind is very very interesting, shall put some work into this.

Shall end off this entry with part deux of his letter.

Some of you might ask why do I want to lose weight? I look perfectly fine. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that my BMI was 25.  (I’ve always attributed it to heavy bones)

The truth is, I have never really been of normal weight for the last 20 years. Having been called names all the way till Secondary school, “Fatso, Ah Pui, Fat Fat, pang zi, pang mei, fatugly ….” It was terrible. Alongside with names, I had to endure my form teacher calling my name up year after year to single me out for a check up at the dreaded Ministry of Health. When the teacher called my name, I can hear the hurried whispers of my classmates in the background, “They are calling up all the fat people.”

Do you know what happens at Ministry of Health? They make you go through a urine test, weight test, height test and a fat test. I hated the fat test, where the nurse will take a pair of calipers and pinch the fats on your arms, thighs, stomach like really hard to measure the amount of fats you have on you. After the tests, you’ll be sent to a room with a doctor who will counsel you and tell you that you’ve been putting on weight. Somehow the counselling sessions never made me feel any better, in fact, I never felt worse each time I went through each session.

Of course there was the one story where I met an IRC friend in 1996. Something like a blind date. The moment he saw me, he turned around and started walking away. The naive me thought that he didn’t see me, so I walked quickly towards him. Guess what happened? He broke into a run.

Heh, I’ve so many fat traumas that I can write a book on them. Perhaps one day I would. I gradually put on weight all the way until JC year one where I peaked at 75kgs. Then one day during the start of my December holidays, I had an epiphany. I woke up out of the blue, put on my running shoes and ran 2.4km around the track beside my home. I continued the exercise 3 times a week for 4 weeks and I lost 2kgs. Then my weight started to drop gradually over the course of year and I hit 65kgs. And I stopped there.

I entered Uni and I ballooned up till 67kgs but I kept it under 70kg. It was only when I went to the US that I lost weight till 62kgs. It got really creepy when I graduated from varsity and I saw my weight slowly move upwards.

My last straw came when a friend and mentor of mine kept teasing me about my weight. I wasn’t offended, cause he’s like twice my size and I’m way past those traumas. But I was very present to how I wanted to experience what it is like to be slim once again. Or at least a normal size where I can buy clothes in a shop without the fear of spoiling them. What would that kind of feeling be like? It helped that a friend of mine, EY lost 30kgs under my dietitian friend.

The stars were aligned. Right after my mentor teased me, my dietitian friend happened to be in the room, and so I asked her to help me. That was how I got started.

The diet was interesting, I had enough food to keep me from going hungry, but not overly full. I could eat what I love, just that the portions are regulated. It’s great. I’ve only lost around 5kgs since I started, but I’ve become very aware of how much food my body really needs and I am sensitive to how my body reacts to certain foods.

I was supposed to lose 10kgs in 3 months but my progress is slow because while I am disciplined most of the times, there are bouts of time where my diet gets disrupted. Like going on an overseas trip where I had to eat to entertain my clients. Or going out for dinners with my friends and over-indulging a little. Ok more than little.

However, I’ve survived and managed to lose the 5kg. (5 more to go) I held back on blogging about this as I didn’t want to jinx the progress. But I was inspired to do this entry after I watched the movie, “To be fat like me.”

After many years of struggling with my weight issue, I think I’ve found a way to regulate it via my diet. It is very possible, and not very difficult at all if you can be disciplined about what you put into your mouth.

5 more kgs to go! Please wish me luck and discipline!

Finally can wear a tee that I bought when I was studying at Penn, 4 years ago

I’ve been somewhat of an awkward kid when I was growing up. I was a fat kid who weighed 48kgs by the time I was 10, 60kgs when I was 12 and peaked at 75kgs when I was 16.  I only started losing some weight when I was 17 due to a random epiphany that struck me and made me start running at the stadium beside me. Of course it helped that one of my bestest friends, Pearl, was the National 400m record holder in Singapore at that time and she was sweet enough to care and encourage someone, who was almost like an anti-thesis (because I never liked to exercise) to her existence as a national athlete, to exercise and be healthy. Being a fat kid was tough. I had many dreams and hopes but all of them were smashed to smithereens because of my larger-than-life physique. I would like to share a couple of incidences that I could still remember from my past…

Incident 1:

I loved to dance. I joined a chinese dance class at a community centre when I was in Primary 3 with my best friend. It was like freedom of expression and it felt great that I could execute several complicated moves with ease despite my weight. It was only natural that I went to sign up for the chinese dance class in primary school when they opened up for the primary 4 students and boy was I really excited during my first lesson….. The teacher lined us all up in a line, walked down the row smiling at the students and when she reached my side, her smile faded and she said,

“The class is full, you’re more suited for Indian dance, would you like to try Indian dance instead?”

Later on, I heard her whisper to somebody else,

“She’s too fat to be in chinese dance”.

That really hurt. The pain still lightly hinges on me as I started to recollect this memory. I was pushed into the Indian dance class where I was the only chinese in it. I tried to be brave and attended a couple of lessons telling myself that it was ok. I should be honored that I am a Chinese learning the Indian dance. But that does not take away the fact that I was deprived of that chance to be in something that I loved just because I cannot fit into the costumes that they have. I can still remember when I watched the girls go up the stage in their beautiful costumes, I dare not admire them too much in fear that someone might think that I don’t know my place. Eventually I quit the Indian dance but continued with my private chinese dance lessons and had a solo duet public performance with my best friend on stage.

That was the last performance I ever had as a Chinese dancer. I guess a part of me never really felt I was good enough to be one.

Incident 2:

Chinese dance class in Primary 6. I was trying to do a stunt, bend backwards and try to stand up straight from the bridge position. I kind of knew I couldn’t do it but I really wanted to, just so I can prove that I could. Unfortunately, I slipped because my lower back could not take my weight and I remember feeling something shift in my spine before falling to the floor. I had a slipped disc and I thought I was going to die because I could not really move. I cried my heart out not because of the pain, but because I kind of knew that I can never be a dancer again.

Incident 3:

I was in Brownies and at that point in time in Primary 5, my Sixer (leader of the pack) had just graduated from primary school and there were empty shoes to fill. I was really excited, completing my exercises and getting my chops to become a Sixer. Just as I was a few steps away, the school told me that TAF (Trim and Fit club – the evil club for all over weight kids – ironically spelled as FAT backwards) club exercises clashes with brownies class and I needed to quit my Brownies to join the FAT TAF club. That was yet another devastating blow to me. Never have I loved something so much only to have it taken away from me just because I was overweight. And well you guessed it, I never really dared to like any activity a lot for a long time to come. These 3 incidences were just some of the many that happened to me in my growing up years. I wouldn’t say that those years were bad, but I definitely had my fair share of knocks that made me into somebody very terribly shy and self conscious. I managed to overcome that step by step and lost some of the weight but that is another story by itself.

I just hope that this little bare-it-all could shed some light about how it really feels to be in the shoes of somebody who is fatter than the normal average person and hope that we can be a little bit more compassionate to the bigger people around as they do get the brunt end of things more often than their slimmer counterparts.

Feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email if you have a fat story that you would like to share too…