The Fat Lady Sings By Natalie

Our Weight May Not Always Be As It Seems

There are plenty of diets which are used today some are proven to be healthy while some

are proved to be unhealthy. Natalie like a lot of other people give diets an unrealistic expectation

when it comes to losing weight. People want to believe that eating less calories will help them

lose weight, but some never stop to consider what can happen to the body when they take in little

calories than recommended. We also need to take a look at foods in which use chemicals which

have been known to cause cancer. Plus how the physical and emotional stress can also have an

impact on how the body digest food making it harder for anyone who is trying to lose weight or

at least to keep from gaining it.

In Natalie’s story “The Fat Lady Sings”, which was published in “The Oprah Magazine”

in August of 2002, she made many references about being on diets even starting at a young age.

At the age of nine after spending two, six week periods in the hospital Natalie explained that she

“expanded from an undernourished thinness into a moderate plumpness” (Kusz. 2002). We have

to wonder if she felt undernourished because she was getting a balanced diet while in the hospital

and different from what she was used to. Both Natalie and her younger sister were both

overweight so their mother fed them each an egg for breakfast, bread and bologna for dinner and

a minuscule dinner (Kusz. 2002). Based on what they were given to eat based on information on

the USDA Natalie or her sister would have been getting enough calories during the day based on

the diet their mother had them on. An egg has about seventy calories, while her lunch calories

were around three hundred and fifty-nine calo...

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...was not written

into her story, but she did write about all the crises she lived through.

I have personally found that when a person is trying to lose weight they often expect it to

drop it fast. Natalie also expected this as she writes about seeing a sudden weight loss at the

beginning, which she did not explain is that when you first diet you do in fact lose a few lbs. of

water weight before the lbs. start to slowly come off. During this time people start to see less and

less progress being made and they often just stop because they are not seeing the results they

want. Once she stopped struggling with her weight and simply chewed, swallowed, and pursued

in full consciousness” (Kusz, 2002). Mary Maxfield stated, “Trust yourself. Trust your body.

Meet your needs” (Graff, 2015) and once Natalie did that she felt she had become more fit than ever.