Earlier this year, while happily rolling around in a friend’s chin-deep bathtub while house-sitting, I suddenly found I couldn’t get out of it.
I had visions of being found there a week later, turned into a prune, but I finally managed to get to my knees and walk out, my dignity completely destroyed.
Clearly, I need to get in shape; Frankly, at a size 18, I’m too fat and generally too heavy.
My arms never lift anything more strenuous than a glass of wine, but getting stuck in a bathtub has taken the shine off that only form of exercise.
So, reader, I have paid the ultimate price. With a heavy heart, thighs, and hips, I joined a gym (for about the cost of a week in the Maldives) for the first time in decades.
With a heavy heart, thighs and hips, Marion McGilvary joined a gym (about the cost of a week in the Maldives) for the first time in decades.
The gym in question, David Lloyd, is a posh franchise filled with plenty of people who could slide through a crack in the pavement if it weren’t for their toned muscles.
And I’m so far from my comfort zone that it’s barely visible on the horizon.
Can you imagine the ignominy of signing up for a Pilates class and being the only person who can’t stand on tiptoe without falling?
I stay back with the other veterans, so the delicious mummies can’t sympathize with us so openly while we gape at the instructor, always a few seconds behind.
I just can’t keep up: the rest of the class rises and falls like a stripper’s underwear, while I struggle to stand.
Once down on the mat, I roll around on the floor like a sunbathing seal while the skinny girls in front twist and turn like they’re made of elastic. The only elastic thing I have is my waist.
I tried yoga and couldn’t do any of the poses, not because I wasn’t flexible, but because I have so much extra padding around my middle that I couldn’t stretch enough. I had to pretend I had long Covid and arthritic knees.
As for the idea of spending a session on the machines or in the weight rooms? Forget it. When you know you’ll be scarlet, dripping, and panting within five minutes of getting on the treadmill, even on the slow setting, while all around you size six women and super-muscled men operate at top speed without breaking a sweat, well, let’s just say that nothing is more likely to make you feel like a conscious failure.
This fear of being judged by other gym-goers, whether real or imagined, is key to explaining why big people like me stay away, even though we’re the ones who need to get fit the most.
I tried yoga and couldn’t do any of the poses, not because I wasn’t flexible, but because I had so much extra padding around my middle that I couldn’t stretch enough, writes Marion McGilvary.
It wasn’t until I discovered water aerobics that I finally found my people. No one under 60 years old and not a single size under 16 in the pool. Hallelujah!
No stress, no tension, although I do wonder if the water suffers from 20 large women of a certain age with questionable pelvic floor muscles doing jumping jacks.
However, I am excited. So much so that the other day a breast popped out of my costume and bounced around for several seconds before I realized I had made an attempt to free myself.
But I know that the strength and fitness I’ll gain is limited with a little rocking, and unless I challenge the gym, I’ll be stuck in a doomed cycle of disappointment.
It’s left me wondering: why doesn’t a bright spark like WeightWatchers open a gym where people with substantial resources, like me, can go and work out among their own kind without feeling embarrassed?
At Marion’s new Fatness First, larger women would no longer need to exercise alone at home as outcasts
In the new Fatness First, larger women would no longer need to exercise alone at home as outcasts.
Instead, head somewhere nice and cozy where scales are prohibited and you’ll get a round of applause for hopping on the elliptical.
No one with a BMI under 30 would be allowed to join and there would be no messing around with the weights on the machines because some giant with biceps like Mr. T had been lifting a truck’s worth of weight before you.
We could all chat while gently pedaling downhill at 3 mph in neon Lycra without fear of being judged.
Sisters, we could moan doing squats. We could ‘ugh’ as we rolled on the mat and if we went too far and hit the person next to us, we could laugh at ourselves instead of being laughed at.
Although I fear this is just a pipe dream. Fatness today is an excessive social stigma.
So I guess I’ll just keep bobbing up and down David Lloyd’s pool with my own kind. And keep my wobbly parts firmly tied.