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You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool
You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool
You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool
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You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool

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From the bestselling, award-winning author of You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start In The Morning, comes another collection of hilarious observations that will resonate with women, mothers, and girlfriends everywhere

In her newest wickedly irreverent humor collection, Celia Rivenbark cracks up while getting her downward facing dog on, pines for a world in which every mom gets to behave like Betty Draper and wonders why everybody's so excited about the Science Fair when there aren't even any rides. In it you'll find essays on such topics as:

- Menopause Spurs Thoughts of Death and Turkey

- I Dreamed a Dream That My Lashes Were Long

- Twitter Woes: I've Got Plenty of Characters, Just No Character

- Movie To-Do List: Cook Like Julia, Adopt Really Big Kid

- Charlie Bit Your Finger? Good! And other thoughts on the virus that is YouTube

And much more! For any woman who longs for the good old days when Jane Fonda in legwarmers was the only one who saw you exercise, YOU DON'T SWEAT MUCH FOR A FAT GIRL is comfort food in book form.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 16, 2011
ISBN9781429984522
You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool
Author

Celia Rivenbark

Celia Rivenbark is the author of the award-winning bestsellers Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank; Bless Your Heart, Tramp; Belle Weather; and You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start in the Morning. We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Born and raised in Duplin County, North Carolina, Rivenbark grew up in a small house “with a red barn out back that was populated by a couple of dozen lanky and unvaccinated cats.” She started out writing for her hometown paper. She writes a weekly, nationally syndicated humor column for the Myrtle Beach Sun News. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Rating: 3.749999991304348 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this book of hilarious essays, Rivenbark, a Wilmington, NC native who used to write a syndicated column, writes about the joys of yoga, Twitter for Southerners, dropping off children in Nebraska, the Learning Channel, the Snuggie, Chinese bachelors, Menopause, and other topics.Rivenbark signs up for yoga just to have an hour where no one is asking her do something, like clean the house, cook meals, or help with homework. However, she discovers an interesting study from Denmark "that women who have skinny thighs have twice the risk for heart disease as us normal women." This study came out at about the same time as a "Time magazine cover story on "The Myth of Exercise" in which a very learned scholar wrote that, while it's good for you, exercise won't make you lose weight. If fact...exercise can actually lead to weight gain because of the notion that you're entitled to wolf down a platter of nachos the size of a hubcap at On the Boarder after a half hour workout on the Spawn of Satan, I mean, elliptical machine."As a Southerner, Rivenbark, has had a lot of trouble in the land of Twitter. "Because everyone knows that Southerners lean toward being a bit long-winded, verbose, wordy, overwrought, and dense when it comes to written communication." How do you confine yourself not to 140 words, but 140 characters? She compares tweeting to trying to write haiku "the Japanese art of hair weaving in thirteen words." She also talks about how she once had fashion model Kathy Ireland as a tweet follower, until something she said upset her. For a while, in Nebraska, you could drop off your child, of any age, to a designated area, such as a hospital, and leave them for others to take care of. This became a problem when people from as far away as Florida began dropping off their surly teens off and the system became overwhelmed. She suggests using this as a threat for your kids when they act up, because what is there in Nebraska, but lots of corn?In the Learning Channel essay, she talks about Octomom looking for a show for her and her brood. "Ok, she's got fourteen kids, no job, and no husband, but she's going to council others? This is like getting relationship advise from Chris Brown." They would fit right in with some of the other crazy things they show, like the Duggers, where the sex advise is "sex is a lot like Legos", My Monkey Baby, and I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. "TLC, which used to stand for The Learning Channel but now stands for Titillating Losers for Cash."The South doesn't take the cold very well. They'll close school for one threat of a snowflake or delay it if its too cold outside. "We Southerners aren't built to endure cold. We are gently creatures that look best in sundresses and skin that is dewy with humidity." Also, there's like only one guy with a truck to shovel the snow from the streets, which is why when it snows everything comes to a standstill. When she receives a Snuggie for a gift, she scoffs, until she tries it on and realizes how warm it makes her feel in the coldest of winter days.In China, the one child per household, set up to lower birthrates in a country that is overpopulated, has now backfired. "...in about ten years, there will be approximately twenty-four million Chinese men who won't be able to find a wife." Also, Chinese elderly population will explode. The Chinese women must be loving this, because now they hold all the cards. So, Rivenbark suggests that Chinese men up their game and follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama who on date night, takes his wife out to dinner and the opera. Even on his night out with the guys when he's going to go to an NBA game, he still takes Michelle out for a very fancy dinner out. Today, the church is crossing a line and telling parishioners to make love with their spouses every night. "Now I totally get you'd do that in Kansas, because once basketball season winds down, really what else is there to do?...But Florida? Did they shut down Disney and nobody told me." But the church isn't the only ones dealing with sex. The CIA is dealing Viagra to Arab Princes for information on the Taliban. The Princes, with all of their wives to satisfy, eat it up.Rivenbark, in peri-menopause, says that "many women in my situation try to learn as much as they can about this stage of life. Some even embrace and try to celebrate this phase, which can include insomnia, memory loss, night sweats, fatigue, and memory loss (ha). I like to call these women crazy."This book, as all are her books, is funny as hell in a very Southern way. She touches on subjects that everyone can relate to, even if they don't admit it. I still have one Celia Rivenbark book to read and I can't wait. I hope she writes more, since her she quit writing columns to write books. She is a true Southern Belle.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I had a lot of issues with You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl (which I received at no cost from the publisher via the Goodreads First Reads program). First, Mrs. Rivenbark doesn't appear to be terribly bright. At one point she goes on about how she became anemic, which she apparently thinks means that she has hardly any blood. Some of her ignorant statements made me cringe but some of them she was clearly just proud of. For example:"I got news for the New Yorker: I don't even get half those black-and-white cartoons you're so proud of."Congratulations. I'm not sure you should be bragging about that, though. She's also a huge fan of racially profiling Muslims at the airport. At one point she defended her stance with some kind of dog/tiger metaphor, which didn't make much sense. "Hey I know that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in this world are kind, decent folk who only want to work hard, worship peacefully and raise happy, healthy families. Everybody knows that. But look at it this way: you're walking down the street and you see a tiger on one side and a dog on the other. OK, it can be Mickey Rourke's Chihuahua for the sake of illustration. Which side do you want to walk on? I'll give you a hint: It ain't the tiger's."Yes, I would certainly rather pass a dog on the street than a tiger. But what the hell do tigers have to do with Muslims? She further explains her enlightened stance thusly: "But what of the trampling of individual rights, you ask? Hey, like Gandhi or somebody said, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And if those eggs happen to be stamped U.S. CONSTITUTION, well, that was written way before air travel so it's not all that relevant."In general, I just didn't find her jokes to be funny. She calls her husband 'Duh-Hubby' and her daughter "The Princess." She thinks a t-shirt that says: "Ask Me About My Explosive Diarrhea" is super hilarious. There were a ton of pop culture references and a lot of her trying to use slang that just felt kind of gross considering she's, well, not a teenager. I'm a fan of snarky commentary but this went well beyond the point of being snarky and was just mean, plus not funny - which is a really bad combination.Overall, I was extremely disappointed in this book and would not recommend it to anyone.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Celia Rivenbark cracks me up! Having previously read her book "Bless Your Heart, Tramp," and getting a taste for Rivenbark's comedy, I found "You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl" to be even funnier. I was surprised that this book doesn't have a higher rating on Goodreads! But maybe she's not for everyone. I think you have to understand that her comedy can be very southern. If there was a female version of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, her material would fit right in. She's a balance of southern sassy and snarkiness, which I enjoy.

    In "Fat Girl" Rivenbark uses short comedic essays to cover a wide range of topics. Everything from, of course, weight loss, to Twitter, to Snuggie, to Barbie turning 50th, to funny misadventures with her husband and daughter. The book is, overall, a laugh-out-loud, southern slice-of-life from a nontypical NC wife and mother.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I won an Advance Readers' Edition of You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark through the GoodReads First Reads program. This is the first book that I have read by Celia Rivenbark and honestly it will probably be my last. The book is made up of a collection of essays in which she tells the reader her thoughts on different topics while trying to include some snarky humor.Being someone who dishes out her fair share of snark and sarcastic comments, I found little of that within this book. Sure there were some parts that brought a smile to my face but nothing to "split my yoga pants" which yes, I am currently wearing. Some of the essays where so scattered on topics that it was difficult to finish reading.If you don't mind reading books with `slang' terms like `duh-hubby', `bidness', `dawg' and `sistah' that are not part of conversation/dialogue, then you may enjoy reading it. Just because I wouldn't read this book again, doesn't mean others won't find some meaning within its pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The essays in You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl leave no stone unturned as they poke fun at everything and everyone from snuggies to crazed science fair parents to all the "Loonies on the Learning Channel" to society's weird obsession with cuteness that threatens to put Rivenbark's trademark snark out of business while everyone tunes into the latest YouTube viral video. In just a few pages each, Rivenbark's essays can have readers laughing out loud at a variety of topics as we try to keep up with Rivenbark's stream-of-consciousness rantings that swing rapidly from Oprah to the art of writing discipline with the sort of lengthy attention span that only a gnat could envy. Rivenbark never lingers too long on harpooning any one subject, which is refreshing. You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl is the perfect antidote for too much deep, dark reading. Rivenbark's writing is compulsively readable, entertaining, and, at times, downright laugh out loud funny. If you've got a bitter sarcastic streak, a cynical eye for some (most?) of the clowns on TV these days, or you just need a breather from books that take themselves too seriously, definitely pick up a copy of You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't know if it is because I am not a "skinny Minnie" or if I have lived in the south for about 5 years, but throughout the book I caught myself nodding my head and saying "Amen, sister." Rivenbark really has the understanding of what is being thought, whether it is teenagers getting together/breaking up numerous times at a group movie date, or being neighborly to the new people in town (i.e. Bernie Madoff and wife). The humor is great with just the right about of snarkiness to make you feel that she's just chatting with you over a glass of iced tea on the front porch.There are 28 "observations" which makes it an enjoyable read. I am glad that I won this as a GoodReads First Read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love Celia Rivenbark's writing even though I don't live in the South, it is fun to travel there through her books. She covers such topics as Twitter and her take on menopause is worth the price of the book alone. My favorite term of hers is for her husband, who she lovingly calls "duh-hubby" -- you can infer what you like from that reference. I admit I troll the internet looking for her essays while I wait for another one of her books to be released. I think my favorite one is where she pretends to be a trailer trash version of Midge who writes a Happy Birthday letter to Barbie on her 50th! There is almost a snark overload with this one. If you enjoy Dave Barry, you will more than likely enjoy this as well!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was laugh out loud funny! I really enjoyed the various chapters outlined by the author and her wicked sense of humor. Some of stories I found to be the funniest in the book include: Twitter Woes: I've Got Plenty of Characters, Just No character Bitter! Party of Me Happy 50th Birtday Barbie! Midge Has Your Back (Stabbed) Menopause Spurs Thoughts of Death and Turkey Clearly Celia Rivenbark has a wonderful sense of humor and is able to articulate some of those things that many of us have been thinking (but maybe haven't said out loud!) This is a fun, light read that is great for the side of the pool. I enjoyed it and want to read more by this author! Reviewer received a complimentary copy from Good Reads First Reads via St. Martin's Griffin publisher.

Book preview

You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl - Celia Rivenbark

1

Taking the Class Out of Yoga

Happy, happy, joy, joy! There is staggeringly good news on the health-and-fitness front at last.

Are you sitting down? I mean, if you’re like me, you’re almost always sitting down, which isn’t such a bad thing, as you’re about to learn.

Turns out, a twelve-year-long study in Denmark has concluded that women who have skinny thighs have twice the risk for heart disease as us normal women.

Can I get a "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah," my fluffy sisteren?

In your face, you supermodels with your spaghetti stems. Somebody please pass the pork fat and let me get on with the very serious business of avoiding a heart attack. I am all about being heart-healthy.

The study followed twenty-eight hundred Denmarkese (yeah, I know, but the real name makes me hawngry) and discovered that the portion of the population with thighs smaller than 23.6 inches in circumference had twice the risk of heart disease.

OK, to be honest, I thought that 23.6 inches sounded like a lot of inches when I first read that. I mean, that’s like almost two feet of inches if my math memory is correct. So I got out the old tape measure and y’all guess what?

My thighs, which are actually kind of thighnormous, are exactly 23.5 inches. Too much information? Suckit, I’m fit by Denmarkanian standards!

The study doesn’t explain why thicker thighs make a healthier heart but who the hell cares and, yes, I want fries with that Communion wafer.

There’s some speculation that it’s because thinner people (hereinafter referred to as the damned) have less muscle mass to initiate the metabolic breakdown of lipids and glucose. I mean that’s the first thing I thought when I read about it. Sorta. If you remove the part about metabolic breakdown of lipids and glucose.

This news came with caveats, of course. Caveat is a Latin word which means dead person or funny neckerchief, I forget which. Anyway, the big caveat is that people who have thighs quite a bit bigger than the delightful and healthful 23.6 inches in circumference (in other words, anyone who has ever eaten a turkey leg at Disney World and wondered why they have to be so damn small) aren’t healthier by nature. They have gone and gotten themselves a bad case of an overhealthy heart I guess.

Scientifically speaking, the study finds that a woman who is barely over five feet tall and weighs 135 pounds is half as likely to have heart disease as, say, Heidi Klum.

Now before all you supermodels get your Versaces in a wad and accuse me of wanting you to have heart problems, let me hasten to say that nothing could be further from the truth.

Scurvy maybe, pellagra possibly, but not heart trouble. It also should be noted that Denmark is frequently the winner in the annual poll of the World’s Happiest Countries. Small wonder. I’d be happy, too, if I lived in a country where big thighs were considered healthy and desirable.

This breaking news from Denmark came out just about the same time as a Time magazine cover story on The Myth of Exercise in which a very learned scholar wrote that, while it’s good for you, exercise won’t make you lose weight. In fact—and this part cracks me up—exercise can actually lead to weight gain because of the notion that you’re entitled to wolf down a platter of nachos the size of a hubcap at On the Border after a half hour workout on the Spawn of Satan, I mean, elliptical machine.

Your chickens have come home to roost, you diet-obsessed hand-wringers. And I want mine fried with a side of tater salad, extra mayo for my heart, natch.

Ever since I read about the study of the proud Denmarki people, and the Time exercise story, I’ve been thinking about cutting out my weekly yoga at the art museum, but I like it too much. Except for the parts where the middle-school classes taking tours past the Mary Cassatts and so forth point and laugh at us when our asses are in the air for Downward-Facing Hag or whatever you should call a roomful of mostly middle-aged but undeniably enlightened womenfolk in loose clothes.

What if all this yoga makes my thighs get smaller? Still, I’d hate to give it up because yoga really does give me a certain peace and clarity of spirit.

OK, I made that up. It just feels good to be somewhere for a whole hour without anybody being able to find me and ask me to do some shit for them.

I’m fairly certain that’s why it was invented many decades ago by Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player who was excellent at avoiding real work.

I never saw myself as a yoga-type person but then I read Eat, Pray, Love, whose author, the glowy, flowy Elizabeth Gilbert, described how her deep and intense voyage of self-discovery, which included dumping her perfectly nice husband and visiting several different continents, led her to realize that she could eat nine pizzas at one sitting in Italy and still feel good about it if she was headed to India to do some yoga.

I think there was a little more to the book than that, but that was my favorite part.

Yoga just sounds so cool. Our teacher, a young woman fairly bursting with good health, meets us where we are, so to speak.

You can rest when you need to, she said on the first day of class, seeming to look at me for a long time—perhaps because I was the only one who had never had so much as a smidgen of yoga before. She knew this because I announced it, repeatedly, so she’d set the bar pretty low.

I was delighted that she understood, and so I did rest. For an hour. Just lay there on the purple yoga mat my friend Christy Kramer got on a yard sale for fitty cent and loaned me when I told her I didn’t want to invest a whole lot of money into this yoga stuff until I was sure I’d like it.

Sure, some of the other women looked puzzled when I lay down and stayed down, but what can I tell you? It was the first time in for-freakin’-ever that I’d had some me-time, phone off, panties granny, and it felt wonderful.

Laying there while the others practiced some serious deep breathing and challenging poses like Old Pussy in the Sky or some such, I understood why everybody loves yoga. I went to sleep.

And was awakened an hour later by the instructor gently kneading my thigh. My perfect, enormous thigh.

Uhhh, trying to sleep here, I mumbled, but she just smiled one of those real peaceful yoga-induced smiles. We want to keep the muscles as relaxed as possible.

Was she high? If I was any more relaxed, I’d be in an urn on somebody’s mantle. I was deliciously relaxed and now understood why people who take naps in the middle of the day always feel so refreshed. At this rate, I’d be one of those irritating people who has a license plate holder that reads: MY OTHER CAR IS A YOGA MAT! OK, maybe not.

After that, she announced that we would take some deep breaths and thank our sun gods or something like that. It involved putting your hands in front of you and making a praying gesture for about two seconds, which, let me tell you, my muscles paid for the next day! I practically couldn’t get outta bed!

Yoga is going to be a much better fit for me than, say, Pilates, which, because I was raised Southern Baptist, I mispronounced for a really long time until my unchurched, heathen friend told me it had nothing to do with Pontius Pilate.

"It’s pronounced puh-lot-eez," she said with clear irritation. She is one of those snooty types who talks a lot about how all the hypocrites are in church and she believes that God is everywhere around her.

Not meaning to be cruel, I hope for His sake this wasn’t true the day she seriously cut one in yoga class.

That’s the dirty little secret about yoga. All the pooting that goes on. Sure, you can try to sneak it out in low gear, so to speak, but everybody still knows. So while you’re in your Loving Warrior Stance when you should be breathing deeply and feeling the life force gum up your chakras or whatever, you’re just worried to death that the whole class is going to hear you fart out loud.

I’m not sure how Elizabeth Gilbert dealt with that because there’s no way you could eat nine pizzas for lunch and then go to yoga, even if it was a few days later. You’d still be floating up in the air like that idiot balloon boy.

I think I’ll keep doing yoga for a while, staying away from the new yogilates class I’ve heard about which combines yoga and Pilates with a foamy cappuccino concoction from the sound of it. After all, even though I’m not making real progress in the meditative closing moments when I’m supposed to be open to the universe and, instead, routinely make my grocery list in my head and worry about how unfair it is for me to need gum grafts at the same exact time that my kid needs orthodontia and where the hell is all that money going to come from.…

The instructor says that all of this openness to the will of the universe takes time. One doesn’t just leap into meditation. It can takes years of practice, even Elizabeth Gilbert said that. But, in the meantime, while I’m waiting for that to kick in, I’ll continue to eat pizza.

Just for the sake of my heart, you know.

2

When Underwear Jokes Bomb, the Terrorists Win

Does it mean I have to turn in my liberal card if I admit that I actually like the notion of profiling terrorists at the airport?

Here’s the thing. I want to be against profiling, really I do, but I just can’t get past the fact that as much as I want to be fair and logical and open-minded, all that high-minded crap is overshadowed by my fervent desire for my ass not to be blown out of the sky.

So, after much soul searching (OK, actually not that much; I’ve taken longer to toast a Pop Tart if we’re being frank here), I have decided that the TSA should go for it.

TSA, for those of you who don’t follow the news like I do (while cooking dinner, drinking box wine, and screaming at my kid every ten seconds to finish her damn science project), stands for the Transportation Something Administration. These are the folks who are charged with keeping us safe in the sky and stuff.

Bottom line: I’ve decided the TSA should profile suspicious characters. Hell, even nonsuspicious ones. If someone acts just a little odd (furtive glances, shifty eyes, annoying under-breath chanting of death to American pig scum, etc.), then the TSA should profile the hell out of them. I don’t care if they just have a hairstyle you don’t like, go for it, TSA!

Ever since that creep flew into Detroit with junk in his trunk, planning to blow everyone to bits on Christmas day, I’ve changed my whole way of thinking about profiling.

TSA, if you see somebody suspicious, I don’t care if you strip search ’em and force ’em to sit for hours in a detention room the size of a Triscuit. I repeat: I don’t want my ass blown out of the sky. Or yours, either. I’m bighearted that way.

But what of the trampling of individual rights, you ask? Hey, like Gandhi or somebody said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And if those eggs happen to be stamped U.S. CONSTITUTION, well, that was written way before air travel so it’s not terribly relevant.

Face it: The founding fathers might have even embraced some profiling but those were simpler times. When teeth were made out of oak trees and everybody kept poop in a pot beneath their bed. Frankly, it was all a little weird.

The TSA needs to step it up, though, and I’ll tell you why. If you’ll recall, the terrorist dude paid cash, bought a one-way ticket, and didn’t have any luggage.

These are things that most security officials and, well, people who breathe in and out many times in the course of a day, would aptly call red flags. Wouldn’t it have been positively Smurfy if someone had noticed the terrorist bought a one-way ticket, paid for it with cash, and didn’t have any luggage? Wheel, meet asleep person.

The TSA needs an overhaul, and this should worry all of us. While crazy people with no luggage and exploding underwear board with abandon, my eighty-nine-year-old friend—think classic Rockwellian grandpa wearing a cute ball cap covered in collectible battleship pins—was frisked like a whore in church (OK, wrong metaphor but you get the idea) while trying to get to ’Bama for his grandson’s wedding. What up with that?

I was flying on bidness a few months ago and standing right behind a female soldier wearing full-camouflage uniform as we waited to go through the metal detector. As she stepped through, the alarm went off and a TSA worker had to wand her. It happened four or five more times until I finally pointed out that she was wearing a banana clip in her hair that was probably causing the ruckus. She removed it, the alarm stopped beeping, and no fewer than three TSA workers grinned happily at me and said, "Hey,

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