This last year has been challenging, not only for me but for many of you.  You have shared some very heartfelt stories.  It has  been tough financial times and it seems like many things have surfaced for all of us to face.. Maybe this is a good time for the 2012 prayer to be “Dear God, my prayer this year is for a fat bank account and a thin body, please don’t mix these up like you did last year! Amen. ” Well, on that note I am going to share mostly good things that came my way ( often via you) .

My first thought goes to a story I heard recently.  One of my customers was with her grand daughter on a cold day waiting with a group of her pre-school chums.  They were cold, so grandma decided to teach them the Hokey Pokey.  “Put your right foot in…..” A circle of tiny girls in pink and very energetic boys  did wild jumps when they “turned themselves about”.  They all screamed with glee and had to have elbows, hands and bare legs touched to prove how warm they now were.  That vision has stayed with me and makes me smile,but not more than my friends grand daughter who on an “adventure” to Starbucks with her classmates stated that she had a hot chocolate and the “allergics” had juice.

As I mentioned, every year I pick a project for self-improvement. For me that meant taking the time to let people know how great they were, customer service, personal issues, just anything I really liked about their behaviour.  The most surprising thing was just how truly moved most of these folks were.  I just told them what a gift they had for “whatever”. To one woman I mentioned how kind she was when  I  observed her help a senior.  I said to her she had an impressive way of handling the situation.  She told me no one had ever said that to her before.  I intend to write about this in detail at some point as I had so many encounters and what it taught me was  how little it takes to make a huge impact.  This really had very little to do with me, I just observed and acknowledged the deed.  It was so obvious how touched most recipients were.  I mistakenly thought this was just us everyday people who tend to get ignored but no… I told a doctor ( I actually said to her ” I need you to listen to me for a moment”) ,that alone got her attention.  I praised her for being a healer, having a  superior bedside manner, that she showed no judgement about the fat issue.  She stopped in her tracks, got very quiet and said no one had ever said anything like that to her and she would never forget it.

This thing I do every year came about because I refused to make New Year’s Resolutions about diets.  I choose words instead and then try to live up to them.  I don’t always do a splendid job but it does help me be mindful.  I recommend it as a project if you choose to do one.  One cannot actually fail at this, just going there will change you.  One year I chose kindness, I am not always kind but I always think about it and am more kind than I was before I took it on.  Stephanie ( my business partner) suggested I should try humility this year..ha!!!

I am open to suggestions for my 2012 word project and I do love all your quotes and items of interest you send to me.  Here are just a few of that came my way, hope you enjoy them.

For 2011 my favorite quote is “Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want” Jerry and Esther Hicks.   My favorite Tweet is from Jenny Ellison who wrote “Eating disorders are up among children in the USA. Congratulation anti-obesity crusades for teaching kids that healthy equals skinny”.  My favorite response when a woman of size was asked  “What are you hungry for?” her answer: Powerful life changing results!!!

As one of my long time customers said, maybe the Hokey Pokey IS what it is all about!

Merry Christmas

I know that kids today lead a much more sedentary lifestyle but let me tell you about my childhood.  I was born hungry…really, my mom said I wanted to eat (drink) from day one.  I came from a very active family.  I did all the sports, ice skated for years and battled my weight.  We did not even have TV until I was 12 years old.  My brother grew up exactly the same way and he is tall and slim.  Did I eat too much?  I don’t really know, I started to diet at 16 and well we all know what that does over time.  Thanks to my parents I grew up with great self esteem, some might say inflated….

I say all this because in my opinion there is still so much we don’t know…no computers in my day to keep me captive indoors.  We still have stats that say we are likely to gain weight back we lost, we still spend billions of dollars on weight loss and we are still fat.

I have no idea what the answers are.  I am in a position to know thousands of fat women and over the years there have been a small number who have maintained large losses. Most have not. That includes me.  I do know many women who have chosen to be healthier and are still plus sizes, I know women who have given up and those who continue to try new things.

I am very interested in what women of size think about this issue.  Where do we go from here?  What are you doing?  I have so much more to say on this subject, it is endless in my world.  I will keep you posted.

I decided I will instead applaud all the people who went downtown to clean up and all those who now speak of moving forward.

In my opinion, pushing up against a problem rarely works.  Finding alternates like positive action does.  Perhaps we should remind ourselves that those who will be “outed” for their  behaviour will be found accountable and let’s trust the police will deal with it.  Parents of these offenders may or may not be good parents but in the end the blame lies with the offender.  I was concerned when I overheard someone talking about retaliation against the parents of one of these kids. I do hope that calmness prevails and I trust that there are enough decent people in our city hoping for the same thing.

I thank all my customers from out of town who emailed, called or used facebook to check if we were ok.  You are the best as always and I join your well wishes for businesses downtown who were harmed.  There is a call to action here in the city to support those affected by going in and buying something.  I will do that ( wow, shopping to help out, I can handle that!)

It was sent to me by one of my customers and it certainly worth reading.

I do not know the original source of this, so if anyone knows, it would be interesting to have the information.

“There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout:

‘This is me damn it!

I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love!

I am a whole complex package,

Take me…or leave me.

Accept me- or walk away !

Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don’t fit your idea of who I should be

and don’t try to change me to fit your mold.

If I need to change, I alone will make that decision.’

When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad –

you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you.”

Stacey Charter

It never fails for me,  I start thinking about writing In My Opinion and things happen to inspire me.  In this case I spoke with two women on the same day who not only are customers but also friends.  They both had a similar theme, how can we change things in the world? One spoke of the abuse  and bullying fat kids suffer in school and the other felt there was just too much anger in this world.  Wow..

On the same day I received two you tube links. One  on “spontaneous culture” from Macy’s in Philidelphia and one on “spontaneous welcome” at Heathrow Airport.  I hope you have had a chance to experience one of these.  They are  easy to find on youtube.com.  Coming on the same day as my “how can we change the world” conversation,it had a profound effect on me.  These are popping up all over the world.  In the case of Macy’s, choirs and groups gathered on a specific day and were dispersed through the store.  At a given time an organ starts and in the middle of shoppers someone starts the “Hallaluhjah chorus”.  Many more join in to the total surprise of the shoppers.  I won’t say more except for me it was an incredible few minutes.  To me if felt joyful.  It also said to me that there are lots of people who feel like my two friends.  They found something to do to change the world for a few minutes.  It also felt a lot like hope. The one at Heathrow Airport was really interesting.  Same idea except these spontaneous singers greeted folks arriving in London.  It was amazing to watch.

I could hardly ignore the fact these things came to me all at once.  Can we change things this way?  I believe when we are in that sprit of joy great things can happen.  In my fairyland of a mind I see total equality, I imagine love of mankind instead of hate.  Those videos were a great lesson in the power of collective thought.  They really made me realize that people all over the world must be feeling what my friends expressed.  I love what they chose to do and it has made me really think of what I could do.  I do however promise not to sing……

I asked people at random what they thought they could do in a small way to make this a better world?  “Be kind” said one person, “give ice cream to sad people” said a very young girl in our store with her mom.  I loved that, works for me.. Love our differences said a man in his senior years.  I once read a great quote about accepting human variety but do we need more than acceptance??

I am going with the Italian proverb…After the game, the King and the Pawn go into the same box..

I have spent many years learning to like myself as I am. Seeing her reminds me to never forget that. My words of wisdom if you choose to use them are ” allow yourself a sense of well-being, you deserve it and it feels great”

Let me preface this by explaining that it rarely surprises me when I hear the way people talk about others, especially in the realm of the size issue.  I might also add that I am often the recipient of  ( be kind Suzanne) mindless comments.  One more thing, I have a firm grasp of who I am and what I really look like.  I have no delusions…That being said this is what started my week of the rant.

I was working with a customer for quite a while and in the course of our conversation she said to me about another person, “she is certainly as big as you are”. It really ticked me off and I was not fast on my feet for a comment.  It stayed on my mind all day and I was not sure what annoyed me the most.  I worked it out that if she had said “she is your size” that would not have bothered me even though I work hard at not using comparisons.  The real issue is that it seemed filled with judgment and that was a problem for me.  My customer was a woman of size so I wanted her to know better.  Looking back I now see she was struggling with her self image even though she was a smaller size.

Right on the heels of this a mother of a woman of size came in and said as loud as she could “my daughter is huge!!” She needs clothes because she is so depressed.  She is really big, I finally said how big ( for sizing purposes) and the answer was “half as big as you”.  I actually laughed because I knew right then I had something to learn.  I also said to the mother that it was little wonder her daughter was depressed if she talked to her like she did to me.  She was not impressed with me and left.

In the same week I had lunch with Kate Partridge who is the founder of Large As Life.  She is now a psychologist living in London Ontario.  I was asking her about her practice and one of the things she does is a workshop on “mindfulness”.  Well, seems it all starts fitting together.

I know about how important it is to me to be mindful of so many things.  It is something one has to first acknowledge and then start being aware.  No small feat.  With the kind of week I had it was yet another reminder that what you say and the words you use can have great impact, both good and bad.  It amazes me that even though I know these things I am constantly reminded to practice it.

Kate was saying it can be useful about what you eat and how you eat it.  She gave an example of one woman in one of her classes that decided she would pick her lunch meal and be mindful when she ate it.  Seems she ate the same thing nearly everyday. When she paid attention to every bite and the flavours and her enjoyment level she decided she really did not like it at all.  Interesting. I know it is the reason eating in front of the tv is not in our best interest, we tend to finish and then  are not  aware of how long it took to eat or how it tasted.  Really enjoying every mouthful and appreciating the meal seems good to me.

Well, I do believe when all is said and done that I needed to be reminded about my words and thoughts.  I have experienced some really remarkable changes in myself by correcting the chatter in my mind to reflect what I want.  It is just so easy to connect with the “I am so tired”,” I hate doing such and such”, “what a drag” “ this world is falling apart”. These are the kind of things we tend to also verbalize.  There are some that believe that we can create what we want with our words and thoughts.  I don’t know for sure if it is true but I do know that I prefer to be around people who are positive, I also feel better about almost everything when I work at being aware of my thoughts.  I have these chats with myself like oops cancel that thought I really mean……..

I love the expression that if all else fails be nice.  I try hard but given my age and my hot flash levels I cannot promise I will be so kind if I am confronted with judgment, especially about the size issue.  In fact it is on my agenda this year to combat judgment of any kind.  It is a never ending road of paying attention and catching oneself.

This is the best quote I found on the subject. “Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weakness more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.” Paul Valery

That was not the case with Ingrid. She scared me. I first met her at a Large as Life meeting, which for those of you who may not know was the very beginning of the plus size acceptance movement in Vancouver if not all of Canada.

It was one of those times for me when it took all of my courage to go to this event. Me in the company of other women of size?? We never traveled in packs those days. Little did I know that it would forever change the course of my life. An aside, we should do things that are a challenge or a bit scary.

Back to Ingrid, as fate would have it we were soon thrown together on a project ( yes, she got me right away). That was the beginning of a 30 year friendship. Ingrid was indeed one of those people who come into your life to teach you things you need to know. She taught me so much. What I liked about her and what scared me about her at the same time was she held her own council. She stood firmly in her own truth and was never a victim.

Ingrid became the editor of the Bolster, a newsletter for Large as Life that by the way is now in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives in Ottawa. In those days we did not have the luxury of computers and faxes were rare. Everything was cut and paste and hours of work. I still smile at all the work Ingrid did to make small figures look “chubby”. I was a contributing writer on the subject of fitness. I can still hear Ingrid saying to me “Magnolia, you will have to change paragraph one and add more information to the next sentence” and so on. I re-wrote, fixed and fixed again the things I submitted, muttering under my breath all the while. Yes my nickname is Magnolia. I know she saw in me the potential to do better and eventually I did.

Ingrid was also one of those women who supported all my efforts to speak about living life in the fat lane and always encouraged me to do tougher projects. Ingrid spent some time as head of women’s studies at Langara College. I knew I had made it in her eyes when she asked me to speak to her students. I must add that I had to submit to her a C.V. which she made me work on a few times and also I had to submit my outline, something I had never been asked to do before. I think it got re-worked at least three times.

In the beginning I believe I knew at some core level that as a mentor she would be there for me. I was also so lucky to meet her family, to spend time with her and her husband George in Summerland and to have had many a fine feast with her and friends.

There is just so much more to Ingrid Laue, she obtained her PhD in Germanic studies at UBC and taught German language, literature and Women’s studies at Langara. She is published in journals and newspapers and also wrote articles in Canadian Living. She was an amazing cook, a good singer, she traveled for years and so much more. She really did live life to the fullest.

Ingrid battled Diabetes for many years and in the end it won. She died on April 14^th, 2010.

How fortunate was I to have been one of the many people she influenced. I am so grateful I did tell her several years ago how much she did for me. She smiled and in Ingrid style said ” Magnolia, you did it”. I know for sure that she heard me loud and clear.

I attended Ingrid’s Celebration Of Life on May 16. I wanted to pass on an update, Jenny Ellison, a senior student at York University working on her Masters in Women’s Studies wrote her dissertation partially based on hours of interviews with many of us from Large as Life and also the writings in the “Bolster”, the Large As Life newsletter of which Ingrid was the editor. Jenny is worthy of more musings but for now, she contacted us many years ago after she found the Bolster in the Archives in Ottawa. She is from Toronto and has been to see us several times and she keeps it touch. Kate Partridge, founder of Large As Life was in Toronto a few days before the Celebration to hear Jenny present her dissertation. According to Kate she was amazing, her dissertation, LARGE AS LIFE, SELF-ACCEPTANCE AND THE FAT BODY IN CANADA was received by her Professors with great enthusiasm.( I do hope that is still the title of the dissertation, if not I will clarify when I can find out how we can all read it if we choose to do so.)

Kate spoke at Ingrid’s Celebration and read a letter from Jenny. For women of size, the work Ingrid did in those days will continue to live on and now be carried much further by the younger women like Jenny who have used our history to further our understanding of these issues.