I have never been what you would call skinny, although when I look at younger pictures of myself, I look pretty slim for me. I have even had friends tell me I was tiny, although I think that is an exaggeration. Funny, though, even then I always felt fat.  We women do that to ourselves, don’t we?

I have done so many diets through the years.  I tried the Adkins diet until I almost destroyed my kidneys and my doctor ordered me to get off it.  I did lose inches on that diet, but the thing about it is, you gain the weight back and sometimes even more.  It is not a healthy diet.

When I lived in Richmond years ago, a friend and I took a weight loss  class at the YMCA once a week for a time.  We got recipes that included cauliflower pudding?!  That was awful.  There were some tuna recipes that weren’t too bad.  Neither of us lost any weight.

When we moved down here I took an exercise class and learned to run.  I did not like running and still don’t.  I did finally run a mile, but that is as far as I have ever run.  I don’t run anymore.

I gained weight with each baby and it became harder and harder to take it off.  Besides that, I love to eat and have a hearty appetite.  My mother was such a good cook that I always had good food to eat while growing up.  I was very active and spent most of my time outdoors playing so I stayed pretty slim.

Then I married and had to cook for a family and was always in the kitchen with food.  I cooked like my mother.  Foods that were high calorie and high in fat.  Not good for someone who puts on weight easily.  But I stayed relatively slim until I hit the big “M.”

I joined an exercise club that David had given to me as a gift for Christmas because I had asked for it.  David has never said anything about my weight.  He loves me thick or thin as I love him.  He’s had his issues with weight also.  I will have to tell you some time about the time when he was in the National Guard and he went away on his two week training sort of chunky and came back looking very thin and I thought something was the matter with him.  He had just decided to lose weight and cut down on eating while in the woods and the weight dropped off.  That’s what happens when men diet.  It’s so easy for them, it seems.

Anyway, I went to that exercise place for weeks and exercised like mad and guess what?   I lost not one pound and only three quarters of an inch on my waist.  I quit.  From that day I decided I was not going to be a slave of the scale any longer.  I have not weighed myself since that day and when I get weighed at the doctor’s office, I don’t look and tell the nurse not to tell me my weight because I don’t really care.  You don’t know how freeing it is when you aren’t thinking about food all the time and you aren’t fretting over that pound or two you gained.  I never worry about my weight any more.  It’s been decades and I still don’t have a clue how much I weigh.  Honest.  Cross my heart.

Weight came on and didn’t go off.  Then, something happened to my metabolism a couple of years ago and I started to lose weight for no reason at all.  I wasn’t sick, I just didn’t feel like eating much and I lost pant sizes it seemed overnight.  When I went to my regular doctor’s visit, he told me I had lost eighty pounds.  Eighty pounds!!!!!!!!  That’s a whole kid.  He asked me how I did it and I really couldn’t tell him. I still didn’t ask him how much I weighed.  I had begun the 10,000  steps a day walk routine and I believe that is how it happened. That is all I could think of.

I began to have people ask me how I lost weight and I couldn’t tell them.  It was really weird.  I had people commenting to me about how little I was.  For some strange reason that made me a little disturbed.  I didn’t like the attention.  I was still the same person.  I didn’t even care that much that I had lost weight other than I got to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe.

I walked daily and kept the weight off.  Then I pulled a muscle in my leg and could barely walk a mile.  I got lazy then and didn’t walk as much as I had been.  I had been walking five miles a day several times a week.  Now I have had to work up to three miles a day again because I am getting ready to walk a 5K on Thanksgiving Day.  I have walked two 5Ks this year.

I gained some of the weight back although not as much as I was and now I eat only two meals a day.  Breakfast and one when David gets home.  I hope when I go back to the doctor in March that he will say I have lost weight again.  I won’t weigh myself every day though.  I will never do that.

My downfall is that I like sweets.  David and I are both sweetaholics.  I could just eat sweets every day and be happy, but that wouldn’t be healthy, would it?  So I try to eat a salad every single day and lots of vegetable.

Do you struggle with weight?  Don’t allow it to become your whole world.  There is so much to enjoy in this world besides worrying about how other people think of us.  I have learned that the people who like me like me for myself not because I weigh a certain weight.  I can honestly say, I never look at a person and thought, wow, they are overweight.    In fact, I generally don’t even see if someone is overweight if they are a friend of mine.   Life is way too short to judge people by their weight.  A good heart can be enveloped in some fat and that’s okay with me.

My daddy was thin all his life and he still died of heart disease.  I think it’s hereditary, but so far, I have a really healthy heart.  I took a stress test years ago and passed it with flying colors.

What I am trying to say in this long commentary is that weight is not all that important in the scheme of things.  If you are grossly overweight, it might be good for you to lose some pounds for your health, but I see too many women worrying about a pound or two they have gained.  There are whole industries playing on women’s insecurities.  I refuse to play their game.

If you disagree with me, that’s okay too.  That’s what makes us all different.

Now I think I will go eat a piece of that pineapple upside down biscuit I made the other day.  Bye.

We had a porch when I was growing up.  A big porch that wrapped all around the front of the house.  We roller skated on that porch with skates you needed a key in order to fasten them onto your shoes.

I would swing on the porch swing while reading library books.  All the lazy Summer afternoon.  Back and forth.  Turn a page.  Back and forth.  Turn a page.

I would sit on the porch swing with my girlfriend eating suckers and kicking the swing higher and higher.  Sometimes my brothers would swing me so high I could touch the porch ceiling with my feet.  We lived dangerously!

Back when I was growing up right after Christopher Columbus discovered America, most of the houses in our small town had front porches.  David’s grandfather would sit out on his front porch at night and if my mother and I would drive by their house, all we could see was the light from his cigar as he sat in his rocking chair smoking and rocking.  “There’s Mr. Henley,”  my mother would say and all I could see was the ember from his cigar.  Somehow that was comforting to me.  To know Mr. Henley was sitting on his porch on a warm Summer’s evening enjoying his last cigar of the day.  All was well with the world.  One day Mr. Henley would become my grandfather-in-law.

On long Summer evenings, my mother, aunt and I and sometimes my sister, who lived down the road would sit out on our porch and I would swing while they sat in the glider and talked. The dogs would lay at our feet seeming to enjoy the company.   Sometimes we children would be playing hide and seek or kick the can while the adults talked.   Back then there was talk of flying saucers and every once in a while my mother would say she saw one and we would look at what was probably an air plane flying across the sky.  It would send shivers down my spine anyway.  Once a bat flew above our heads as we sat on the porch and we all would scream each time it would pass overhead.

David’s grandma sat on her front porch and watched the world go by.  She knew everything that was happening on her street.  People would walk by and say hello and sometimes stop in to talk.

Porch sitting is becoming a lost art.  Too many of the newer homes don’t even have a porch.  Just a little stoop or entryway, but nowhere to sit and wile away the hours.  People are too busy to porch sit, it seems.  I want porch sitting to come back.  You see your neighbors out in their yards, mowing the lawn and you smell the new mown grass.  You see the cars going by,  the train chugging down the track, the mailman bringing your mail, and the occasional fire truck or ambulance going to help someone.  Perhaps you would see a mother walking her baby, or a runner practicing for a marathon,  a child learning to ride his bicycle for the very first time or flowers being delivered to you.  I have seen all these from my front porch.

Sometimes you even see something you would hope you never see.  An accident.  One day years ago, a man ran into a tree in the front yard of our neighbor’s yard and I ran to call an ambulance.  Before we knew it there were twenty-three police cars(we counted them) and three ambulances in front of our house.  My children watched it all as they got the man out of the car and into the ambulance.  I watched from our front porch.  I never found out what happened to the man.  I hope he was all right.

One hot summer day as I sat on our porch I saw a raccoon on the road in front of our house acting like it was drunk. Cars swerved to miss it and then they began to stop.  I think the raccoon was rabid.  I kept the children inside.  Someone came from animal control and took it away.  Oh, yes, porch sitting can become intense at times.

David and I have been doing a lot of porch sitting this Summer.  Our new front porch is made for sitting and watching.  We watch the hummingbirds feed, a bird building her nest, the trucks going over the railroad tracks.  We watch friends and family pull into the drive for a visit.   We watch when they leave and sit and talk about our visit.  You don’t have to do anything special to learn to porch sit.  Just sit on a chair, a swing, a rocker or whatever you have to sit on and start to pay attention to the world around you.  It’s pretty amazing what you will see.  The people you might meet.  The friendships you might cement.  Give it a try.  Bye.