Identity … Boon? Advantage?

I looked at a thesaurus to find the opposite of “crisis,” but nothing fits perfectly.  The fact is, I am having a bit of an identity crisis, but in a good way, so it’s not really a crisis.

When you’re fat for as long as I was, it becomes a part of your identity.  I was always the funny fat guy, and it was not at all uncommon for the “funny” and the “fat” to go hand-in-hand.  I have a lot of good fat jokes in my repertoire, and I have always enjoyed putting people at ease with self-deprecating jokes.  (Of course, I’ve also gotten secret enjoyment out of occasionally making people uneasy with my self-deprecation, but not as much.)  I’ve always had a ton of different nicknames — it seems like everyone I know calls me something different — but a lot of those nicknames have something to do with my size, either directly or indirectly.

So for nearly 30 years, my size has been a part of who I am.  Back when I was huge, when I would fantasize about losing weight, I’d picture it happening suddenly, going from fat to not-fat in a drastic change.  It never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t know when I wasn’t fat anymore.

But that’s where we are.  I don’t know if I’m fat or not.  In part of my mind, I still am.  I still make fat jokes once in a while, but I’ve realized that I have to be careful of offending people who are bigger than me.  People bigger than me?  That concept didn’t make any sense to me a year ago.  I was always the biggest guy in the room, so I could say anything I wanted to.

I’m not at my target weight yet.  I probably want to lose another 40 pounds of fat, or thereabouts.  According to BMI (which I don’t believe in even a little bit), I am still Severely Obese or some garbage like that.  According to body-fat percentage (which I do believe in), I am still Obese, but I’m getting closer and closer to average.  So yeah, technically speaking, I am still “fat.”  And when I look in the mirror, I still see a fat guy.  I can see the improvement, for sure, but I think I see it worse than it is.

But what I am starting to accept, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, is that I am kind of normal sized.  I’m overweight the way most Americans are, instead of the way most guests on daytime talk shows about obesity are.  You know when they do a story on the news about obesity, and they’ll show footage of fat people walking on the street, but they don’t show their faces?  I used to be so scared that someday I would show up on one of those.  But now, that won’t happen, because I’m not that kind of fat.

But I have to admit, it throws me off a little bit.  Being fat wasn’t necessarily a part of my identity that I loved, but I didn’t really hate it either.  I hated the unhealthiness of being fat, but I didn’t hate being fat.  (I don’t know if that makes sense anywhere outside my brain or not.)  So while I am super pleased and excited to be experiencing all the benefits that come from being healthy, the identity part is pretty weird.  There are people I’ve met recently who are blown away to discover that I used to be 400 pounds, but their blown-away-ness blows me away a little bit.

I don’t know if there’s a grand thesis to this post or not.  This is something I’m currently grappling with, not one of those situations where I explain the issue and then explain how I resolved it.  I’m apparently not fat anymore, at least not abnormally so.  And that is going to take some getting used to.