A Desire for the Comfort of Fullness

This summer I have been trying very hard not to gain back my Denver weight. I have been bringing my lunch and changing my portions and refusing cake (that one was actually pretty easy, what with it being associated with grief and loss and abandonment and all). I have been trying to drink less, exercise more. Gobble water like my life depended on it.

I was watching the movie "Spanglish" the other day and there was a little bit of dialogue that I had to go back over and write down. Because I think it is true. The narrator kid says it, dubbed over Tea Leoni, skinny like a skinned squirrel, running up the road.

"American women, I believe, actually feel the same as Hispanic women about weight. A desire for the comfort of fullness. And when that desire is suppressed for style, and deprivation allowed to rule, dieting, exercising American women become afraid with everything associated with being curvaceous, such as wantonness, lustfulness, sex, food, motherhood. All that is best in life."

A desire for the comfort of fullness.

And I have been noticing this. I bring my yummy salad to work and follow it with an orange, and I'm good for the rest of the afternoon. The small amount of food does what it is supposed to do. It keeps me alive, alert, without a headache. I don't feel drowsy and loaded down or bloated up. Perfect fine. But not full. Not solid and fed and full and sated. Not in that luscious way that good food can bring.

And it makes me kind of wonder . . . is it so bad to be bigger and rounder than those hikey bikey jumpy squirrel people? To truly taste luscious food? To drink wonderful liquor every once in a while? Is that really something that I should be mean to myself about?

A desire for the comfort of fullness.

Food. Life. Love. Wine. Beauty. Art. Creation. Friendships. Laughter. Good ideas. Grand vistas.

Long, languid afternoons, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood and watching the pine tree grow.

Indulgence can over indulge. Of course. . . . But too much deprivation and shoulds makes everything awful.