Suck it Up

There isn't much we can agree on as a society, but I think we can all safely agree on this:  women's body fat is much lumpier than men's body fat.  Overweight men tend to have round bellies and rounded arms.  Overweight women have lumps and bumps in random places.  There are no straight or gently curved lines.  Instead,  we have random pockets of fat, peaks and valleys and cratered landscapes, without the benefit of fashionable tent-like clothing to cover it up.   

This might sound suspiciously like complaining.  And, although it is reason number 4,527,291 on the long list of reasons why in our society it is easier to be  a man, I am at this moment merely observing and being descriptive. 

A good number of women will tell you that along with penicillin and automatic dishwashers and airplanes and GPS, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century was the product known as "Spanx".  For a while, Spanx was the only game in town, now there are lots of similar competitors.    Spanx is, for the blissfully uninformed, the modern incarnation of the girdle.  They come in different lengths and colors, but the basic idea is that they are shaped like shorts (more like the top part of pantyhose) and compact all the gooey, lumpy fat into a smooth package.  Kind of like compression shorts.  So while the extra load still may be more rounded than you want it to be, at least it is simply rounded and not all bumpy like a gravel road after a meteor shower.

Of course, no product is perfect, and no product can replace the only diet which works long term, in my estimation, the 'eat less and exercise more' diet.  And no diet will help some of the genetic realities of the female form.  So while there are certain pants and skirts that I own that I cannot wear in public without the assistance of the above-described supportive undergarments, they aren't perfect. 

The legs give me the greatest grief.  Although I do have a lot of muscle in my thighs, the muscles are protected by an insulated layer of cushy fat.  This means that the bottom of the leg of the Spanx, meaning, where the compression ends, has a bit of a bulge underneath it where the uncompressed fat breathes a sigh of relief that it has not had to be squished all day.  Inevitably, this happy fat talks to its oppressed fat sisters above the line of demarcation between smooth/not smooth and the oppressed sisters rebel and demand to be set free.  This results in a gradual crawling upwards of the bottom of the shorts, so that by the end of the day they are rolled up into miniature inner tubes nestled between my thigh and hip.   Sometimes, if I am retaining water or my belly swells with a giant celebratory lunch for someone's birthday, the top elastic gives up standing proud and starts crawling down the slope of my gut.  This is a creepy feeling, and only seems to occur when I am doing something formal, like presenting a case in court, or speaking to a client.  It is an easily fixable problem, but I can't always find the time to fix it, so an unreasonable amount of brain power in professional situations is spent pretending like I don't feel my underwear crawling down my body.

Reading over this, it all looks ridiculous.  Why on Earth do I and my many friends do this to ourselves?  Probably the same reason we pluck hairs out of our body one by one or en masse with hot wax; the same reason we put sharpened pencils filled with grease paint a sixteenth of an inch from our actual eyeballs; and the same reason we are expected to both bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan: life ain't fair.  Get used to it.