Cross-legged: (adj) having the legs crossed

The greatest gift that Mother Nature and Father God can impart to you is a weakness.

Without a weakness, you begin to believe you’re self-sufficient and don’t need help from any outside source. On top of that, you might just create deceitful interpretations of the truth when its proven that you are not “all that and a bag of chips.”

A weakness gives you the ability to know where to start working every single morning.

A weakness warns you that too much confidence is blustering wind with no lightning or rain.

A weakness makes you more compassionate to other people who happen to share a “soft spot” in their abilities—just like you.

A weakness is what makes you strong.

I do not know whether I was born fat, possess a fat gene—or if I’m just caught in the middle of some metabolic paradox.

But my obesity has created a weakness in my life.

Some people may consider it a weakness of my own making, or perhaps one created by my parents “making out.”

It doesn’t make any difference. I’ve had to base my journey on working around my girth—beginning at my birth.

Therefore, I can tell when one ounce leaves and seven pounds arrive to comfort my body over the loss.

I know when I’m on a good spin and when my health is being spun.

I don’t need a mirror to observe the “battle of the bulge.”

For you see, one of the ways I have always been able to tell whether I am beginning to move toward a more normal weight or traveling into the morbid regions of obesity is:

The simple action of crossing my legs.

Now, at this point every fat person in America reading this will howl with laughter, and every skinny-ass individual will turn and look quizzically at another scrawny person as if to say, “What does he mean?”

For when you’re fat, your thighs have grown a fondness for each other and are accustomed to being close. If you think about it, crossing your legs demands that these thighs develop autonomy. Also, your joints—which are essential for convincing one leg to go above the other—are sometimes jammed up with fat globules, which makes the process of crossing one’s legs quite athletic, if not painful.

Therefore, during times of weight loss, I have celebrated my victory with a leg-crossing—occasionally only able to maneuver the “wish bone variety,” where the right foot rests upon the left knee. But a few times, I was actually able to have the legs completely crossed—where the right knee appeared to be humping the left one.

When this has happened I have actually teared up—mostly because it was such a blessing to do such a simple thing.

But partially because being foreign to me, it was as uncomfortable as hell.

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