The 400-pound woman

I went to the grocery store this afternoon. While I was in the canned goods aisle trying to find the Rotel tomatoes for my turkey/vegetable chili, I noticed a young woman in front of me on the other side of the aisle. She was looking at cans of Ravioli. What caught my eye was this woman probably weighed about 400 pounds.

I could see her face from the side, and her back. She was wearing black sweatpants and a big grey sweatshirt. I noticed when she bent over to get a can of Ravioli from the bottom shelf she had great difficulty standing up. Her shirt came up and her pants slid down to display about six inches of flesh on her lower back. 

My heart went out to her. I wanted to run to her and hug her and tell it was okay. I wanted to help her. I could see how hard she was struggling just to walk, just to grocery shop. Of course, I didn't do anything except turn away so as not to embarrass her.

You see the thing that most people don't know about me is I could easily weigh 400 pounds or more. I wasn't your normal needs-to-lose-100-pounds individual when I started this weight loss process. Most people I know that are 100 pounds overweight are aghast when they see someone very large, such as the woman I saw today. I've heard them say things like "oh, I could never get that fat!".

Not me, because I know I could gain 200 or 300 pounds. It would be very easy for me to do that with my old food habits. Whatever it is that causes a person to gorge themselves on food to the point that they're killing themselves, I have that sickness. It scares the daylights out me to know this about myself. It's a fear that lives within me knowing that at any minute I could slip and slide right back into morbid obesity, except that next time it might not be just 100 pounds.

It's a scary thought but maybe because I know this about myself, maybe I can fight it. I'm giving it my best shot, trying to think of food as sustenance, trying to think like a thin person. I'm trying to make food not the most important thing in my life, following the philosophy of eating to live and not living to eat.

I'm still thinking about that young woman in the store buying canned Chef Boyardee Ravioli. I wish there had been some way for me to connect with her, some way to help her. She looked sad and lonely, like she could use a friend. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do except walk away.