Too Hot To Handle

As a Fat person, there is one thing I feel more often than anything else: Hot.

And, no. I am not going to give you a Big is Beautiful speech here. Not because big isn’t beautiful but because that’s not what I mean. I mean that since I’ve gotten Fat I feel like I am being cooked sous vide style: a slow death by boiling in my own blood. Every single day. It now makes total sense to me why animals run around every fall cramming acorns and berries down their throats. Fat truly is a most remarkable insulator.

Now that I am Fat, I prefer to keep my house at a crisp 60-65 degrees. Luckily that’s easy to do in Monterey— all I have to do is make my house a burglar’s dream by leaving all the windows open and forgetting about them. And sometimes I am still hot. Whenever I go to anyone else’s house I immediately feel a sense of panic about the temperature. If I have visited your home since I’ve been Fat, there is a 100% chance that I pretended to go to the bathroom so I could mess with your thermostat.

One place where there is no escaping the heat is at home in bed. I sleep with cooling gel pillows, bamboo sheets, very thin covers, and all the windows open, and more nights than not I wake up in a pool of sweat. I now set an extra pair of pajamas next to my bed just in case I need to change in the middle of the night and escape to the dry side of the bed. In addition to my two dogs, there are two people who sleep in my bed every night: me and the sweaty imprint of me that I’m trying to kick away from. It’s not a harmonious coupling and I cannot wait to get divorced.

For the most part, though, I can get through a day with my dignity in tact. But there was one day my fleshy snowsuit beat me down hard: the one and only day I ever tried hot yoga. I have a friend who swore by hot yoga and desperately wanted me to join her. I tried to explain that every day already felt like hot yoga to me, but she slowly wore me down until I joined her for a class. Who knows? The fact that I was arriving already soaked in sweat might give me some kind of advantage.

I knew it was a mistake the second I walked in the door. It was a packed class and everyone was squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, head to foot. With that many people in the room it was uncomfortable before class even started, and it quickly became not about yoga for me, but about survival. To this day I have no idea how those people managed a single pose. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. At one point I smacked my own face when my sweaty hands refused to grip each other.

“Accept your limitations”, the instructor crooned. “Be kind to yourself.”

Standing in the middle of the room on the edge of a major panic attack, I did the only thing I could think to do. I clambered over all the bodies, through puddles of sweat on the wood floor, until I reached a big window on the far wall.

“Look deeply into your innermost self”, the instructor warned. “Find your edge and respect it.”

To my classmates’ horror, I flung open the window, ruining their cesspool, and stuck my head outside into the cold winter air. “I found my edge”, I announced. “And I respect it.”