[Womanizer, Britney Spears]

Understand, please, that I'm not so much a BritBrit fan.  For some reason that stupid song is stuck in my head- that's the thing with her songs-- they have very catchy choruses repeated over and over.  You can have never intentionally listened to one of her songs and yet know 75% of the lyrics and the craptastic song gets in your head and it just doesn't leave.  Maximum lameness.

So I've been thinking about something- I'm on kind of a Friends kick, recording old episodes on my DVR, and one of the recent episodes (I watched it today) was a "flashback" episode to where Monica was supposedly fatter than fat.  The closing scene is her dancing around and it's supposed to be insanely hilarious to watch this fake-fat woman dance, and she falls down and can't get up because she's so fat.  All the while the fake audience is beside them there fake selves with uproarious laughter.

It's all ok, you know, because she's not fat anymore.  But I wondered, as Courtney Cox the actress flopped around and blatantly ridiculed obese people, how Courtney Cox the person felt about that.  I mean, she's mainly criticized for being too thin, but she seems like a pretty down to earth person who wouldn't think it terribly tasteful to make fat people feel even more horrible about themselves.  The producers of the show clearly didn't care, as they milked the "Monica used to be fat" storyline for 10 years.  They must have delighted in the irony, being that Courtney Cox is ridiculously thin.

It's just kind of sad.  I mean, it's kind of depressing to watch the show and have one of those scenes where the punchline is "Monica used to be REALLY fat" and then they cut to a flashback and "fat Monica", the one so huge that we laugh purely at the absurdity, and even in the fatsuit I have a solid hundred pounds on her.  Particularly sad is that the actress is so thin that they can't make her look as fat as I am.  And then it hits me- to Hollywood and the average viewer I am a joke.  A big, fat joke.

The good news is that, while I truly want to lose this weight and get my life back (or at least be able to restart it), I'm decently comfortable in my own skin. I know who I am, I know whose I am, and I know what I'm about.  But, to be quite blunt, I've been toying around with some ideas for a novel, and with that I've been trying to imagine how I might view the world were I not in a decently healthy place regarding my self-image.

Putting myself in that place, seeing fake-fat former-Monica falling to the ground and unable to lift her fake-fat self up, with a faux audience lost in riotous laughter, and viewing the scene as a mockery of anyone like "myself", I was pretty disturbed.  What a tragedy.  I know many young girls, 15-18, who are tortured in high school and convinced that they are worthless humans because they are obese.  This is carried into their adult years and they get into craptastic relationships with worthless guys who treat them terribly and everywhere they look they are reminded that thin = worthy of love and fat = worthy of loathing.  It makes my heart ache.

I am once again reminded that Jesus alone can take such a broken heart and make it whole, and only Christ can heal the wounds this world wages on young women's souls.  Even if said obese teens lose weight they still carry the internal scars, still look in the mirror and see a worthless fat person because they can never be thin enough, and their worth continues to be determined by their exterior and it's all empty and meaningless.

So, while I need to tell myself no when the desire to eat mindlessly or to feed the beast deep within arises, ultimately I need to remember what it means to actually know Christ and live out the gospel.  'Tisn't easy but I need to stay the course.

And that's that.

Hasta, kids.