Tag Archives: weight loss

You Can’t Outrun It

January 1, 2021 By in health, leisure Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

You probably won’t believe it, but even when I weighed nearly 100 pounds more than I do now, I liked to go running. There’s a perception that all you need to do to lose weight is diet and exercise, but as I’ve said before, it’s just not that simple. Even as I ran almost every day, I was still gaining weight. After a while, the running slowed to walking, although I was still walking miles and miles a day. But after a while, even that became difficult. I had orthotics for my chronic plantar fasciitis, but they did nothing for either my knee pain or my hip bursitis.

Right after surgery, I was counseled to walk. It’s well known that people heal better on their feet than on their backs, and since I like walking, it wasn’t difficult. As with most people right after surgery, the pounds flew off with very little effort. But, as with most people, the honeymoon phase is coming to an end. The pounds aren’t just falling away anymore. That’s fine. My BMI is within the “normal” range, I feel physically good, and I’m satisfied with how I look. Then again, I was always satisfied with how I looked.

Still, I was afraid to get back to running. Hip bursitis and plantar fasciitis are persistent, and while I have an entire regimen of stretches and exercises to relieve the hip bursitis, I was afraid of aggravating it again. I still use the orthotics for my feet.

So last week, I took the plunge. I’d been walking a three-mile loop around my neighborhood, and decided to see what happened if I tried running it.

Running on a treadmill the way I used to is very different than running on the earth, and my loop has a lot of uphills and downhills. The uphills are harder on my thighs, the downhills harder on my knees. I didn’t run the entire three miles, but I did a fair amount of it. My normal routine is to run as long as I can, and then count to ten. Only then can I slow to a walk. I start running again after 100 walking steps.

After three runs this week, I can tell you how I feel. Way, way better than I thought I would. Better attitude, better sleep, better energy. The biggest problem is the fact that it’s getting hard to sit still and work on anything, and with the covid lockdown, that’s difficult. My house is clean, my stuff organized, my yard immaculate. The only thing I have left to do is…go for a run.

Surgery: A Year On

November 13, 2020 By in health Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

If you scroll back just a tiny bit, you’ll see that I had weight loss surgery a year ago.

What I was told before and directly after surgery was that there would be a “honeymoon period” of twelve to eighteen months. During that time, the weight would come off kind of no matter what I did. And, for that most part, that’s been true. But a lot of things have changed.

  1. Nothing spicy
    My stomach is tiny. I can still eat only less than 8 ounces of food at a time. Spicy food has a tendency to irritate my stomach, making it even smaller than usual, making me instantly nauseated. It’s sad, because I used to put Tabasco on everything, eat pickled jalapeños with my eggs and beans, love a good vindaloo. Nowadays, if it’s spicier than green Tabasco, it’s out.
  2. Nothing bubbly
    For a while, I tried little sips of lightly carbonated beverages. I swished them around in my mouth for a while, then swallowed. It was fine. Then I tried with regular soda. Again, fine. Then I tried just drinking something carbonated. Tiny sips. I had maybe two, and then felt the most alarming sensation I’ve felt since surgery. One of my biggest problems is not being able to burp. It sounds hilarious, but the feeling that I’m going to burst from the inside out isn’t funny. The gas bubble makes it up to about my throat and no further. It feels as though I could I could truly injure myself.
  3. Nothing starchy
    As odd as it sounds, three bites of bread, pasta, rice, or potato fills up my stomach quicker than three bites of meat. Maybe it’s because starches have more air incorporated in them, and when I get air in my stomach, well, see above. I’m not saying I don’t eat starches. I’m just saying I can’t eat a lot of them at a time.
  4. But not too much protein either
    Back in January, I had an attack of gout. I’d never had it before, and it was kind of alarming, but I went to my doctor, got some meds, and it was fine. He asked me if I knew what caused gout, and I told him I had heard it was from eating a rich diet and drinking too much. It’s why it’s called “the disease of kings.”
    “Rich in what?” my doctor asked. I hate when people ask questions that they have the answers to and you don’t. It’s rude and wastes time.
    It turns out that the answer is “protein.” Which put me between a rock and a hard place because the additional protein was called for after surgery. I’ve cut down on protein, and I’m fine.
  5. Watch the sugar
    Thanksgiving. Christmas. Easter. Birthday. Halloween. What do they all have in common? Tons of sweets everywhere. And the problem isn’t so much the calories I shouldn’t have as the fact that the sugar hits my system like a ton of bricks. My heart races, I lose focus, I start sweating. It’s not a pleasant feeling at all.
  6. Alcohol is out
    The last time I had gin (my favorite) was in February, when I poured myself a nice gin and tonic to enjoy during a Zoom meeting (yeah! in February!). After a single sip, my face felt flushed. After a second sip, it felt sunburned and went tight. I excused myself and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror – my face was beet red and the kind of swollen where my smile lines were white creases. So…that’s out.

Before surgery, I would have looked at that list and thought “that’s not living,” but there are a few things that make it okay.

Before surgery, restricting my intake meant dealing with intense cravings. The kind of addict thinking where, even when I knew the thing I wanted was killing me, I rationalized why I needed to have it anyway. Every pound was a struggle, and I consistently lost. After surgery, I don’t miss the food. It’s alarmingly easy to forget to eat for long periods of time. The strangest thing to me is that things I used to love no longer appeal to me. Almost nothing is as tasty as I remember it being.

The result is that as of today, I weigh less than I have at any other time in my adult life. My BMI is within the normal range (not that I care, but my doctor seems to feel it’s important). I feel amazing – healthy and energetic and as happy as anyone can be in 2020 (although things are looking up).

I’d say it was worth it.

Putting the “Morph” Into “Dysmorphia”

April 13, 2020 By in health Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I have never been able to look at myself in a mirror, then look at a crowd of people and point to one who looked like me.

For years, I would point to someone and ask whoever I was with “Is that what I look like?” It must have felt to them like I was fishing for compliments, because that’s usually what I got in return. What I really wanted to know was how I appear to other people, because I can’t tell.

What I did know was how much space I took up. I knew how far back the seat of the car should be. I knew looking at a chair whether or not it would be comfortable. Whether there would be enough room for me on a bench with other people sitting on it. Whether a particular pair of pants or shirt would fit me. Whether, if I parked my car in a certain place, I would be able to open my door wide enough to get out.

But things have changed.

I recently bought some new jeans, because the old ones were uncomfortably large. What arrived was a size smaller than I thought I had ordered, and I held them up and thought “I couldn’t fit one leg into these things.” And yet, not only do they fit, they fit loosely. I can park in smaller spaces and still get out of my car. I can sit in an armchair and cross my legs up on the seat and still fit.

You would think that would be a good thing, but what it means is that my dysmorphia is now complete. I have lost the one thing about my body I thought I knew – how much space I took up. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see that my body has changed, because although my face looks thinner, my proportions are still the same. When I look in the mirror, I have nothing else to compare myself too, so I can’t see that my body has actually gotten smaller.

It doesn’t help that I am still wearing a lot of the clothes I wore at my heaviest. My leggings, for example, wrinkle even at my widest points and no longer compress me at the waist, but they don’t fall off. I have a drawer full of t-shirts that have gone from painted-on to a bit loose, but they still fit. Almost 75 pounds down, I am still wearing the same underpants, although I am less prone to wedgies.

Part of me wants to believe that I will come to recognize this new body. Not just how much space it takes up, but its shape and texture. But when I do, will I love that body as well?

 

Physical Therapy

March 13, 2020 By in health Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Our daughter moved into her own place, and my husband and I have been making her room over into a guest room. The bed wasn’t as cushy as I’d like, so I put one of those memory foam mattress toppers onto it. This thing was a Costco special – fully three inches thick and, for a queen-sized bed, weighing about 20 pounds. As I wrestled it from its packaging and turned and twisted to distribute it over the mattress, I pulled something in my back and ended up in bed lying on a bag of ice for a couple of days.

About 17 years ago, I had a similar incident. I was sitting on the couch, sneezed, felt my back pop, and was immediately in agony. Back then, I went to my regular doctor. He prodded my butt, announced that I hadn’t done any permanent damage, told me it was probably due to my weight, and gave me nasal spray for my allergies.

I couldn’t stand for long. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t lie down. In order to bend over, I had to keep my right leg straight and extend it behind me. The only time I wasn’t in agony was when I was walking slowly, but I had an office job and two small children and so couldn’t do that all day. So I gritted my teeth, ate ibuprofen like candy, and bore with the pain.

I went to another doctor, and she said the same thing – “You’re too fat.” No offers to give me anything to alleviate my pain, no recommendations for ice or heat or stretching or goat sacrifices. Just an opinion about a tangential fact.

The frustrating thing wasn’t that I went to at least one more doctor who also told me it was weight-related. By that time, I had become resigned to living a life in pain and being unable to get medical help. The frustrating thing was that, as an office worker, I had a limited amount of sick time, and, since I was new at this particular job, no vacation time. Taking half a day off to see a doctor who didn’t even try to help, and having to cough up a $20 copay for the privilege, was a classic example of adding insult to injury.

This time around, I went straight to a chiropractor*. We talked extensively about my medical history. He asked me to stand and looked at me from many angles. He had me lie on my back, front, each side. He poked, pressed, probed and asked “How is that?” Finally, he did some adjustments and some deep tissue work, and I walked out of there feeling much, much better.

The entire time I was there, I fully expected him to say something like “I can work on you, but I’m not sure how effective it’s going to be, considering your weight.” Or “We can try to fix your back, but your best bet would be to lose weight.” When I went into the exam room and looked at the table, I thought There’s no way I’m fitting on that table without my hips hanging off the sides. When he took me into another room with a table specifically for lower-back stretching, I had a flash of fear that I would be too heavy for the table to work.

None of that happened.

This guy was polite, professional, competent, helpful. When I sat or lay on the tables, they didn’t even squeak, let alone groan with strain. I walked out of there feeling like I had been thoroughly listened to by a person invested in my well-being, and it felt a little surreal. Is this how it is for thin people all the time? And if it is, do you understand what a gift it is?

So now I’m angry on behalf of past me, who endured two years of unspeakable pain because the medical establishment couldn’t be bothered to look past an appearance they found displeasing to do their jobs, and I’m angry on behalf of everyone who is still suffering because of the judgement of medical professionals.

*The first time this happened, it was a chiropractor who finally figured out what happened. I blew a disc in my spine, and in the two years I couldn’t get treatment, the vertebrae on either side of it had fused, very slowly killing the nerve between them. Which is less pleasant than it sounds.

Thanks For Your Concern

January 31, 2020 By in health, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

“I just want you to be healthy.”

“You look so uncomfortable.”

“You’d feel so much better.”

I’ve heard it, usually coupled with some kind of advice that I’ve heard a thousand billion times before. Advice like “get more exercise,” “eat more vegetables,” and “drink more water.” I’ve done those things, and was probably still doing them. And I’ve lost weight. And then gained it back. And then lost it again.

And people say those things as though I might not have thought these things myself – as though I hate myself with such intensity that I’m committing suicide by cheese (although if I were going to off myself, that would be my choice).

But they’re not saying it because they’re actually concerned. They’re saying it to signal disapproval without sounding actually mean. “I just want you to be healthy” is code for “I feel disgust watching you eat.” “You look so uncomfortable” is code for “I feel uncomfortable when I look at you.” “You’d feel so much better” is code for “I’d feel so much better.”

But none of these barbs disguised as concern or advice help, because that’s not how it works. If it were as easy as “eat less move more,” everyone in a wheelchair or hospital bed would be obese, and everyone who ate vegetables and exercised would be skinny. But I’ve been obese my entire adult life (with occasional flashes of thin), and I know as well as you do that it’s so much more complicated than that.

Environment is a factor. Hormones are a factor. Psychology is a factor. Genetics play a part. If your family is heavy, you’ll be heavy. My mother’s family is from Scotland, and that side of my family is typically short and sturdily built. We totally look like the kind of people who can throw telephone poles and carry a sheep under each arm. My father’s side of the family are Mexican, and are generally taller and thinner. I started out with a 50/50 shot. Guess which I got (cue sad trumpet).

Long before I even considered surgery, I ate a healthy diet and got plenty of exercise, and seethed whenever someone expressed “concern” about my size. So I just stopped listening. I cordially invited those people who felt the need to comment to shut the fuck up.

If you were really concerned about me, you would tell me you love my dress. You’d tell me you read that story I got published. You’d tell me you think I’m smart. If you really cared about me, you wouldn’t want me to feel like crap about myself by not-even-subtly telling me that you feel bad looking at me. That’s your problem, not mine.

 

 

Clothing a Lava Lamp

December 30, 2019 By in health Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Two months after my surgery, I have lost 40 pounds, and I’ve started The Pile – all the clothes I can’t wear because they’re now too big.

At my heaviest, I had three kinds of clothes – those that were slightly too tight, but I could still fasten, breathe in, and move around in; those that were big and loose and baggy (and therefore comfortable); and the Goldilocks clothes that fit just right. By far, this was the smallest group, and now, it’s even smaller.

Clothing you buy off the rack was designed to fit one specific shape of person, and odds are excellent it’s not you. It doesn’t help that for women, clothes sizing has come unmoored from anything as objective as measurements. The dresses I fit into have all come from the same brand, and range in size from 16 to 22. Apart from that brand, I’ve got 14s that fit. Most women I know would give up vanity sizing just to be able to go into any store and know that every garment of a given size will have consistent measurements.

But even if you know that you’re, say 5′ 7″ and weigh about 200 pounds and know your measurements, you’re not going to be able to breeze into a store and find a garment that fits and flatters. Everyone carries their weight a little differently. What’s worse is that as the weight comes off, it’s not like it comes off evenly all around. My face got thinner immediately. My calves and thighs got thinner because I exercise by running. My belly? Not so much. I worry that I’m going to end up like some kind of bug – a gigantic body being held up by tiny stick limbs. What kind of clothes fit Gregor Samsa?

What’s even more frustrating is trying on all the clothes in my closet that used to wear before I gained weight. Many of them don’t fit, even though I weigh less than I did when I wore them, because I’ve changed shape. I had some clothes I really loved, and now I’m worried that I won’t ever be able to wear them, because by the time things fit around my hips, they’re too big in the waist, or by the time I can button a shirt over my boobs, it’s huge and boxy around the middle.

The biggest challenge, though, is the changing size/dysmorphia/specific taste trifecta. I know the look I’m going for, but I have no idea whether, when I hit my goal weight, it’ll look good. I guess I’ll have to do what I’ve always done: I just assume I’m the most amazing looking person in the room.

 

The Hard Part Isn’t What You Think

November 25, 2019 By in health Tags: , , , Leave a comment

It’s been five weeks since my surgery. At this point, the pain from the surgical sites is gone (although that’s only been in the last week), and as of tomorrow, I’ll be able to eat regular food. I’ve lost just a hair under 30 pounds.

When I was first contemplating surgery, I understood that my eating habits would be changed forever, but I don’t think I really understood the mechanisms behind it. I knew that the surgery itself wasn’t going to be what took the weight off. It would be the diet and exercise that happened afterward. While that’s strictly true, none of it is happening the way I thought it would.

Won’t or Can’t

In the 34 hours I was in the hospital, they tried feeding me 3 times. Each time, I was able to take a few sips of water and about as much food as would fill half a baby spoon. That was it.

Over the next two weeks, I had nothing but liquids – protein drinks and shakes, three times a day for the first week, supposedly going up to five times a day the second. Except that I couldn’t. It would take me half an hour or more to drink the entire 8 ounces of liquid, and by the time I was due to have my next protein drink, I was still full from the last one. And being too full meant risking vomiting. My one goal through this whole process has been to never vomit.

Week 3, I graduated to “blenderized” food. “Blenderized” meant baby food consistency. Which meant a lot of actual baby food. If you add salt and spices, it tastes like food. I put a chicken breast in the blender with an equal amount of chicken stock, giving me about 32 ounces of chicken baby food. Here’s another issue: since I could only eat ~2 ounces of chicken at a time, I had enough for 16 meals. Even eating 4 meals a day, that’s 4 solid days’ worth of food, and who wants to eat the same thing every meal? If I put 2 ounces of chicken and an ounce of veggies in my dish, I was often still too full for my next meal. Sometimes, nausea from pain made eating hard.

Week 5, I progressed to “soft” food. By now, I can eat 4 ounces at a meal – four and a half, sometimes. Any more than that, and I can’t do it, and I’m too full for my next meal.

All this is to say, it’s not that I won’t eat, or that I don’t want to as in I have no desire for food (although that’s certainly true, for the most part). It’s that often, I can’t eat.

What does “rapid” mean?

All the literature I was given said “You will lose 10-20 pounds in the first two weeks, 30% of your goal in 3-4 months, half in 6. You will plateau in 12-18 months.” It seems pretty fast. I did lose 20 pounds in the first 3 weeks. And I hit my 30% goal about a week later. I credited the rapid loss to the fact that I was eating almost nothing but protein and vitamins.

I log everything I eat so I can ensure I’m getting enough protein – too little and you can lose muscle and your hair will fall out. I eat somewhere between 350 and 550 calories in a day (meaning I have never had fewer than 350, or more than 550). So I know exactly how much I’m taking in versus how much I’m putting out. Every day, I’m on the treadmill for between 30 and 60 minutes, although yesterday, I took my first hike since my surgery.

I stopped weighing myself every day after the first day I gained a pound relative to the day before. How can a person eat almost nothing and not only still function, but put on weight? Beats the fuck out of me. Years ago, I read an article dating back to WWII that detailed Queen Elizabeth’s very frugal diet (I presume to prove to people that the monarch wasn’t living opulently whilst her people were doing without) that said that the Queen’s diet amounted to about 750 calories per day. At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone could function for a long time on that little. Right about now, I don’t think it’s even possible for me to take in 750 calories in a single day, and I’m functioning just fine.

I weigh in on Mondays, and take my measurements so I can see not just how many pounds I’m losing, but how many inches. This past week, I lost a single pound, and gained 2.5 inches in my hips.

Half the game is 90% mental

Here’s the hardest part of the whole thing: Not losing weight, occasionally even gaining, is phenomenally discouraging. Downright depressing. And yet, I can’t angrily binge eat a pizza or down three Snickers in my car where no one will see me. If I eat the sugar, I’ll get violently sick. And at this point, the pizza would likely make me sick as well. Doing anything except taking care of myself will literally make me sick. And the only thing worse than being depressed is being depressed and sick.

Which means that the only thing I can do when I get depressed is to look at the horizon. I can’t afford to think short term anymore. Being discouraged now is just an emotional state. It doesn’t have anything to do with how I eat, exercise, take my meds.

It’s still early days for me, and yet, I don’t feel like the same person I was five weeks ago. We’ll see where that goes.

 

Part 4: All the Numbers

November 7, 2019 By in health Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

On October 22, 2019, I had a sleeve gastrectomy. I went into this process knowing that this would forever change my relationship to food and my body. This is part of a series of posts covering my history with food, weight loss, and my body. All opinions expressed in these posts are my own, and reflect my own lived experience. Nothing said here should be generalized, or taken as a suggestion for others. If you’re considering weight loss surgery, your first step is to reach out to your doctor.

Prurient Curiosity

There’s a class of questions everyone secretly wants to know, but is afraid to ask because weight and size are such fraught topics in our society. Those questions are all about numbers – how much did you weigh? How much did you lose? How much do you expect to lose? How long will it take?

Let’s start at the beginning.

When I first went to the doctor for a consultation, I weighed in at 243.8. For years, I had gone to every doctor’s visit and refused to be weighed. For most things, that datum isn’t relevant. I wasn’t surprised by the number, but certainly I was disappointed by it, although in a way, hopeful. My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t qualify for surgery. According to my doctor, the criteria was either a BMI of 40 or more, or a BMI of 35 or more and one or more co-morbidities – obstructive sleep apnea, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol (yes, no, no, no).  My BMI was 39.6. I was so relieved that I qualified, I nearly cried.

At that appointment, I was given a pre-surgery consultation appointment about 2 weeks later where I would receive my surgery date, get all my pre-surgery instructions, and get a list of the resources that would help me both before and after the process.

At the pre-surgery appointment, I was told that I needed to lose 5-10 pounds before surgery in order to shrink my liver (the stomach is under the liver, so shrinking it makes surgery easier and safer). And in the 2 weeks since my initial consultation, my weight had gone up to 245.4.

Ten days before my surgery, I started a liquid diet. Three times a day, I had a protein shake and a liquid protein drink. The shake was big, and could be really thick, so the ten days went by pretty quickly without my feeling very deprived. When I did feel sad, I could just look at the calendar and say “I can do this for another 5 days.” On the day of surgery, my weight was recorded as 238.7.

Where Do You Want to Be?

When I first considered this surgery,  it was because I had had back issues for years. I couldn’t lay in bed for more than a couple of minutes after waking, because the pain in my lower back (from the blown disc I talked about in Part 3) would become excruciating.  In the last year, I’d also had a problem with my left hip – it hurt when I lay on my side, or when I sat for too long. The doctor diagnosed it as bursitis. (I think if you’re old enough to have bursitis, you automatically have to put “the” in front of things like Google and Facebook.)

As I filled in the paperwork for surgery, I was asked several times what my goal weight would be. It was frustrating because even though the women recording my information were very encouraging and said “It doesn’t matter, we just have to put something down,” they didn’t give me any guidance. They told me what my BMI was, but not what a “healthy” BMI should be, nor what that would translate to in pounds. A “healthy” BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, which would put my “healthy” weight between 115 and 154. That’s a 40-pound spread.

It’s really hard to know what your “ideal” look is, because even women of the same height and weight can have very different body types. With no guidance, I arbitrarily chose 160. I now know that the number you choose is important – it’s what the doctor will use to qualify whether your surgery and long-term outcome are a “success,” which is defined as keeping off at least 50% of your excess weight for 5 or more years. The success rate of gastric sleeve surgery is upward of 80%.

What Happens Next?

Doing a little math, we can see that my goal weight is 85.4 pounds less than my highest starting weight. I lost a few pounds before surgery, and as of right now, I’m down 21.6 pounds from that highest weight. It was easy, because for the first two weeks after surgery I was on a completely liquid diet, drinking clear protein drinks recommended by my doctor. Each packet of powder was to be mixed with ~8 ounces of water, and it was really, really hard to get that much stuff into my body. Surgery hadn’t just cut off a huge portion of my stomach, it had left my insides swollen and uncomfortable. Often in the first couple of days, I would take a sip of water and then struggle not to vomit. Over the next few days, drinking all my protein got a little easier, but that protein stuff is kind of gross.

Now, two weeks in, I am on “blenderized” food – any food that can be sucked up through a straw. At first I joked about putting pizza and burgers into the blender, but I had a huge secret.

I am terrified to eat real food. 

I’m still in that mindset of “my food choices got me into this in the first place.” To top that off, the advice given for life after surgery can be conflicting – I need to get a specific percentage of protein, carbs, and fat, I need to get at least 60-80 grams of protein a day, I have to drink 60 ounces of water, but I can’t drink either 30 minutes before or 30 minutes after a meal, and I have to eat 5-6 times a day, and I should make my meals last 30-60 minutes. I can’t eat cruciferous vegetables for a few months after surgery, I can’t eat red meat until at least 6 months after surgery….I am paralyzed.

Don’t Overthink It

I said this to the doctor on my first follow-up visit, and he gave a small laugh and just said “You’re overthinking this. Just eat food. Nothing processed, wait on anything with too much fiber, no simple carbohydrates.”

The best advice I was given came from the dietitian I had to consult before my surgery. She told me to eat slowly enough that I would be able to tell when I went from “I’m hungry and want more,” to “I’m no longer invested in this.” Not waiting until I was full, but waiting until the food was less important.

To this end, I bought myself a set of coffee spoons and dessert forks. I already own a fairly large selection of sushi plates and sauce dishes, as well as a food scale.

lunch plate

The remains of 2 ounces of cottage cheese and 1 ounce of unsweetened applesauce. 

When I talked to my doctor about using tiny utensils and plates, he sort of laughed at me, as though it were some kind of affectation. What this tells me about my doctor is that, while he sees and deals with the bodies of severely obese patients every day, he doesn’t have much insight into the mental processes of the severely obese. By taking tiny bites, I can tell exactly how I’m feeling as I eat, and can pay attention to the point where continuing to eat is no longer compelling.

It’s a challenge. I’m supposed to eat 5-6 times a day, but I can eat 4 times, tops. Even then, I’ll portion myself out 3 or 4 ounces of food and can’t finish it. I have no idea how much longer that’ll be the case, but I’m really, really hoping that the habits I’m establishing now will have solidified and be the foundation of how I eat going forward.

Next time, I’ll talk about the ins and outs of self image for the fat.

 

 

Part 2: More to Love

November 5, 2019 By in health Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

On October 22, 2019, I had a sleeve gastrectomy. I went into this process knowing that this would forever change my relationship to food and my body. This is part of a series of posts covering my history with food, weight loss, and my body. All opinions expressed in these posts are my own, and reflect my own lived experience. Nothing said here should be generalized, or taken as a suggestion for others. If you’re considering weight loss surgery, your first step is to reach out to your doctor.

What You Love is Beautiful

I’m currently reading a biography of Alma Mahler, a fascinating woman born at the end of the 19th century. Alma’s distinguishing feature (aside from her tragic anti-Semitism) is her passion. Her teen years were spent listening to and composing music, and all her thoughts as recorded in her journals were wild, passionate, and outsized. In her late teens, she met Alexander Zemlinsky, a composer who mentored her in a weird, emotionally manipulative kind of relationship. Alma fell deeply in love with him, and even though she had earlier admitted his glaring physical flaws (short, “practically chinless”), eventually she talked about him as the most beautiful man in the world.

Okay, he’s not hideously deformed, but in an ensemble show, he would definitely be the hunky hero’s comedy sidekick.

If you ask a small child what they think of the people they love, they will tell you that their loved ones are beautiful. And how many truly ugly  babies have you seen whose parents can’t stop cooing about how perfect their little goblins are? Love is a filter that smooths the rough spots in the loved one’s appearance or character. It’s why people who have been in a relationship for decades can put on dangerous amounts of weight, and their partners still see them as beautiful.

This notion that the person you love is automatically beautiful to you explains couples where one person may be much more conventionally attractive than the other (sure, money can also be a factor, but let’s face it, I don’t know anyone with that kind of money, and neither do you).

There’s Someone for Everyone

The flip side of this notion that what you love is beautiful is a truth that I didn’t find out until I was in my 20s: it doesn’t matter what shape you are, what color you are, what parts of your body/mind/heart are missing/broken/different, there is someone who finds you attractive. Media has shown us for years that the physical ideal is young, white, and a shape that is natural to only a tiny fraction of the population. That image of beauty isn’t some platonic ideal that has existed throughout time. That image of beauty is a way of controlling women by making them constantly feel inadequate. But in the real world, all kinds of people are looking at all kinds of other people and liking what they see.

I’m Doing You a Favor

Boys started noticing me in first grade (although I did have a 17-year-old boyfriend when I was 3, but I later found out he was just using me to hook up with high school girls). So it didn’t seem odd to me that they would keep noticing me as I got older. But when viewed through the filter of my family’s unrelenting negative messages, I soon came to feel that I was somehow unworthy of attention. In fact, I was sexually assaulted twice before I was 16, and both times when I tried to tell my family, I was labeled as “dramatic” because the men who assaulted me used the defense “why would I want that?”

A weird thing happened when I kept receiving something good I thought I didn’t deserve – complete dissociation. The person receiving all the attention couldn’t be me, because me was unloveable. People who claimed to be attracted to me weren’t seeing me clearly. For whatever reason – the way I dressed, the way I wore my hair, the way I spoke – they were somehow blind to the fact that I was fat, because if they knew that, if they could see it, they would laugh at me and walk away.

As an adult, the men I dated fell into two categories – the ones that were genuinely interested in me, and the ones who may have been interested in me, but who felt the need to let me know they were doing me some kind of favor by going out with me. When I was in college, I was at a party at a guy’s house, and my friends and I were all laughing and talking about my (even then) hilarious romantic history. Later, when the guy and I were alone, he said “I just don’t get how all that stuff they were saying could be true when-” and he made a vague gesture taking in my body. This question didn’t stop him from wanting a relationship with me, but his presumption that dating was a new world to me and that he was somehow going to improve my life by approving of my body was so off-putting that I dumped him within weeks.

Cinderella, But With Character

Throughout all of this, I had an idea in my mind of the kind of relationship I wanted – someone whom I found physically attractive who was also smart, capable, and fun to be around. As a kid, being convinced that no one would ever love me, I devoted myself to reading, to learning, to mastering things that interested me. As an introvert, making a good life for just myself came really naturally – I didn’t feel like I would die without a partner. On the other hand, who doesn’t want to be loved? Even the most hardcore introvert needs a core person or group of people to bond with.

So, while I was doing the things that interested me, I was still waiting for that perfect person. And I wasn’t shy about kicking the imperfect ones to the curb. When I was a freshman in high school, there was a boy I went out with maybe two or three times – long enough for me to consider him my boyfriend. But then he told me he was dumping me for the girl that he then went on to date for the rest of our time in high school. That was the last time anyone has broken up with me. Since then, it’s always been me who breaks up because the other person isn’t living up to my standards. Which are, admittedly high – but why shouldn’t they be?

Oh, yeah. Because I’m fat.

Building an Adult Life

In 2000, I met my current husband. I found him very attractive the minute I met him, and as we talked, I found out he was hilarious and smart. There were some obstacles to our getting together (notably, my 3rd husband), but even after we got together, we had some real struggles. I was operating on the assumption that I was always going to be hurt, disappointed, betrayed. For years, I continued to have a dream I’d had regularly since I was a teenager: that I would be in some very public place, surrounded by people who knew me (work, school) and my significant other would approach me with another woman by his side. He would say, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I was out and she was in. When I got upset, he would act disappointed, say “I really thought you’d be more adult about this,” and encourage the onlookers to agree with him that I was the one being unreasonable.

It literally took me a decade to relax into the idea that this person that I valued so highly actually did think of me as attractive. That he loved me – not some fantasized, idealistic version of me, but ME. He’s smelled my morning breath. He’s seen my pimples, my stretch marks, every part of my own body that I find embarrassing or repulsive, and he still tells me he thinks I’m beautiful every day.

Will It End?

I’ll be honest – now that I have a relationship where my husband thinks I’m beautiful, what will happen when I’m no longer that shape? What if he’s just one of those guys who only likes bigger women? This is one of those times where I have to force myself to stop letting my fears run away with me. When my husband met me, I was about 50 pounds lighter than I was before I had surgery, and he was really into that person. The person he’s into is smart, and silly, and curious, and adventurous, and that’s not going away.

Next time, I’ll talk about figuring out who I am, what I like, and how I could make peace with my past. 

Part 1: Forty Five Years of Dieting

November 4, 2019 By in health, personal Tags: , , , 1 Comment

On October 22, 2019, I had a sleeve gastrectomy. I went into this process knowing that this would forever change my relationship to food and my body. This is part of a series of posts covering my history with food, weight loss, and my body. All opinions expressed in these posts are my own, and reflect my own lived experience. Nothing said here should be generalized, or taken as a suggestion for others. If you’re considering weight loss surgery, your first step is to reach out to your doctor.

Did I start out fat?

I have a brother and two sisters. All of us, at one time or another, went through a period of weighing more than we should, and when I reach back into my childhood memories, the thing that’s really clear is that weighing more than you should made you a Bad Person.

My mother has always been stocky, and has been on a diet for the entirety of my life. Rather than recount it all, I invite you to read this article I wrote about food and how it has affected my relationship with my mother. My older brother is built more like my mother – on the short side, and stocky. In fact, even though he’s an ultra-marathoner who runs like a million miles a week, he still has kind of a dad bod. My two sisters favored my father more – dad was a string bean as a kid, and as an adult, was the sort of person who, whenever he thought he was putting on weight, he’d skip lunch and it would be gone.

Sadly, both my mother’s constant dieting and my father’s utter disdain for fat had the same effect: to make me hate myself. I’ve seen pictures of myself as a child, and I don’t look particularly fat. I know that in first grade I weighed 40 pounds (the average weight for a first grader is 46 pounds). And I don’t recall being mocked for being fat in school – like, not ever. Whatever I looked like out in the world was just fine with everyone. It was only at home that I was unforgivable.

I was on my first diet at 9 or 10, my second big diet at 13, all through high school I took over the counter diet pills and would exist for weeks at a time on the pickles off my friends’ hamburgers and diet Coke while swimming for hours every day. In college, my father paid for me to go on one of those medically supervised diets where you drink shakes that add up to (and this is no exaggeration) 400 calories a day. After I had my first daughter, I joined OA and for years followed their very restrictive Gray Sheet diet.

When I was dieting, my family would praise me for making “good” choices, even when those choices were horribly unhealthy – the medically supervised diet made my blood pressure so low that I would faint and my vision would black out. But how I felt wasn’t important. When I lost weight, everyone was quick to tell me how attractive I was, but when I was heavier, I wasn’t unattractive. I was invisible.

It’s Not Just the Food

What compounded the issue was the fact that I am an extreme introvert. I love being around people, but I burn out quickly, and once I’m burnt out, being around other people is a nightmare. My father comes from a family of 7 kids, and all of them had a bunch of kids of their own, and all of those kids went on to marry and have more kids. That side of my family numbers in the hundreds at this point. And I would always rather stay home and read a book than go on family outings (which invariably included some kind of athletic activity). For a long time, both of my extrovert parents took my reluctance to leave the house personally. As though I were purposely trying to spoil their good time. And they decided that I wanted to stay home, not because leaving the house felt horrible, but because I was just too lazy to get my shit together to go out.

It meant that the reason I was fat was because I am lazy. To this day, my entire personality is built around proving to the entire world that I am not lazy. It’s the reason why I feel inadequate if I’m not doing as much as all my friends. I don’t mean doing as much as any one of my individual friends – I mean doing as much as all of them put together. Saying it out loud sounds crazy, but in my head, it’s the only logic I hear sometimes.

Both my parents, whether they admit it or not, equate excess weight with personal failure. I would go so far as to speculate that my mother’s weight was a factor in their splitting up when I was a toddler. My mother longingly recounts times in her life when she was thin the way other people might recount being briefly famous or wildly rich. Those were the highlights of her life, and the memories she falls back on when she feels inadequate. My father isn’t shy about making fun of fat people, despite the fact that much of his family is overweight. He thinks it’s hilarious, like we’re performing monkeys. And it doesn’t matter if those performing monkeys have feelings, or lives, or accomplishments of which they are justly proud – nobody cares what the monkey thinks.

What Happens When You’re Only Important If You’re Thin

The fallout of growing up with this kind of self-hatred was the inescapable idea that I’m not worthy. I don’t deserve happiness, or pleasure, or success because I haven’t “earned” it by being attractive. When my siblings were given things I was denied (which happened more than most of my family will admit), I couldn’t complain, because after all, I didn’t really deserve them. When I experienced successes out in the world and looked to my parents for validation, I was more often compared to other people who were more successful, as though my own personal success wasn’t meaningful. Because it really doesn’t matter what you do when you’re fat. It doesn’t count.

Next time, I’ll talk about the impact of being fat on my dating life.