One Last Kiss

I’m in a holding pattern right now.

I made the decision to change my life via a radical diet plan almost two weeks ago, but due to scheduling conflicts with getting my initial physical exam at the clinic I cannot actually begin the program until this Thursday.

On the upside, I had an EKG done yesterday morning (which is sort of like getting attacked by a large medical cephalopod) and discovered that I have a very healthy heart with a strong sinus rhythm, which of course made me immediately think about my nose.

Having made up my mind to do this, the waiting is really difficult.  There’s a certain amount of anxiety for me regarding giving up solid foods, even though they assure me that I will not be hungry on the program I fear feeling empty, depressed and out of control.  The best way I can think of to combat this is to tackle it head on and get started, get day one over with… but I have to wait.

Much like Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting.  It’s also dangerous because I have been plagued with a near constant impulse to, “EAT NOW – WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!”

I’ve been bracing myself for negative feedback from the people around me, and though there has been some it’s mostly taken the form of natural human concern over the idea of giving up food.  We are supposed to eat food – so deciding to walk away from all solids makes people understandably uncomfortable.

By and large though I’ve been blessed by abundant promises of encouragement and support from the people around me, even the ones who are slightly scared that I may be walking into doing myself medical harm.  The love I’ve felt over the last couple of days is both beautiful and overwhelming.

The other day I was complaining (okay… whining) about this interminable waiting period to my friend Kristina, who has been a beacon of positive energy and encouragement to me since the day I shyly told her what I planned to do.  She told me something about the waiting period that stopped me in my whiney tracks.  She told me that there’s a good reason for this waiting.  This time gives me an opportunity to concentrate on completely feeling and enjoying the last step before it’s time for a new beginning.  She told me to go ahead and enjoy food, because when I’m not actively behaving like an addict anymore although it will be nice, it won’t be the same.  She told me that it’s critical that I walk into this change from a place of positivity and love, not from hate or dislike.   She said it’s my time to truly love myself and who I have been all these years, and then it’s time for me to finally say goodbye.

And when I think about that, really think about saying goodbye to the fat girl I have always been – it’s harder to do than I ever thought it could be.  Not just because she was comfortable and because sitting on the sofa with a bag of chips was a satisfying thing to do, but because of how I’ve treated her all these years.  When I think of what I should say to that girl, the words that keep coming to mind are, “I’m so sorry.”

I’m sorry I never loved you the way you are.

I’m sorry I never let you be as fabulous as you could be.

I’m sorry I looked at parts of you with such vitriol that I fantasized about cutting into them with a knife.

I’m sorry I hated you when you were strong and capable and always took me wherever I wanted to go.

So I told her how sorry I was for all these things.

And then I knew it was time to give her that one last kiss goodnight.

Rock Bottom

I guess it looks kind of different for everyone.

I met a woman a few weeks ago who was asked to step off of an amusement park ride because she was preventing the shoulder harnesses from lowering properly for the rest of the riders.  Not a gigantic woman, just an ordinarily obese one.  In fact, she was about the same size as me.  Her children crying and berating her for being the “fat” mom who ruined the ride for them was her rock bottom moment.

My horror over the way she was treated by her own children aside, this was what rock bottom looked like for her.  I had a similar experience where I was crushed and bruised by the lap bar of an amusement park ride a couple of years back, but for whatever reason that wasn’t rock bottom for me.

Mine involved Ted.

After ten years of telling me every single day that I am the most beautiful and sexy woman on the entire planet, he finally realized that I am never going to believe him.  I am never going to believe him because he spends every night with me building me up, and then every single day I step outside our front door (or just turn on the TV or browse the internet) and the entire rest of the world attacks and breaks me back down.  The pain in his eyes when he realized this was too much for me to bear any longer.

I wish I had the strength to tell the world to sod off, and that I’m beautiful the way I am and that’s all there is to it.  For a couple of years now I’ve been trying to focus on eating healthfully, exercising regularly, and loving my body the way it seems meant to be – but it has become abundantly obvious that I am not strong enough to maintain a healthy self-esteem in a world that resents my very existence.

I want cute clothes.  I want to be a nerd who engages in Cosplay.  I want to see myself in the mirror and pictures and like what I see.

Beyond that, I have a family history of arthritis and joint problems.  My right ankle is already so damaged by repeated ankle sprains that it is never the same size as my left ankle.  I cannot wear shoes with a heel because of this damage and weakness.  I want to wear cute shoes.

All of these are enough of a reason, so I’m waving the white flag and I’m taking a pretty drastic step.

I am not having surgery, but I am seeking the assistance of a Doctor and following a course of action that involves both drastic calorie reduction for my body and treatment of food addiction for my mind.  I am going to be off of solid food for the foreseeable future beginning on Thursday the 29^th, and I will be monitored to make sure I’m not developing malnutrition or other complications.

In my head, I’m thinking of this as detox.  It’s the only way I could find for a food addict to go cold turkey off of their drug of choice.  Eventually, I will re-learn how to eat, hopefully with a healthier and more stable relationship with food and a viewpoint of it as fuel, not as pleasure or a substitution for other needs.

It has now been almost four years since I started this blog with the intention of using it to help myself lose weight, and I am fast approaching what will be (once again) day one.

This is Hurting Me

I am lightly covered in freckles.  I have a delicate constellation of reddish-brown spots that mostly spreads over my arms, chest and face (the parts of me that most often see the sun).  In truth, I love them – I think freckles are adorable.  But imagine if I didn’t like them.  Imagine that I believed that freckles were the ugliest trait I could possibly have.

Now imagine me standing next to one of those naturally red-headed types who is completely, densely covered in freckles from head to toe as part of their natural skin pigmentation.

Now imagine me saying to that freckly person, “Ugh!  I hate these freckles!  They make me look like a leper!  They are so ugly!  I need to work harder at bleaching my skin to get rid of them!” with the obvious connotation that once I have less of these bothersome freckles, I will be attractive.

Does that seem hurtful for me to have done?

That is exactly what is going on when someone thinner tells a fatter person that they believe themselves to be ugly, or a “porker” or “cow”, and that they desperately need to lose weight so that they can be more attractive.  They are attributing extremely negative things to a physical trait that the person standing next to them has in sometimes much greater proportion.  And it’s so deeply ingrained within our culture to despise our bodies that the hurtful implications of this action do not even occur to people.

In truth, it’s only recently that I’ve managed to summon the courage to even talk about this – because I don’t want to upset anyone or make them feel bad.  But the thing is, I don’t deserve to feel bad either.  I know that when people thinner than me demean their bodies they aren’t thinking about me at all, their fighting their own personal battle against completely unattainable beauty ideals that have been shoved down all our throats since we were very small children.

The difference now is, in this small way, I am summoning the courage to ask that people do think of me.  Not just me, but anyone around them who might be struggling even harder than they are.

I made a commitment awhile back to be kinder to myself, not to speak nasty, demeaning things about my body.  That’s a commitment that’s really hard to keep in these situations.

To clarify, I am not asking that anyone not share with me their health and/or weight loss objectives, frustrations, triumphs or even failures.  Talking about these things and discussing our goals and what may or may not have worked for us isn’t hurtful to anyone, it’s just supporting one another by sharing strength and what we’ve learned.  I’m talking about people specifically demeaning and insulting themselves in front of me for having a trait that I have much more of than they do.

Since I’m one of the biggest people I know, over the years my response has always been to assure the thinner person that no, they are not fat – and then to point out that, “hey, at least you don’t look like me.”  Sacrificing feeling good about myself so that someone smaller can feel better has never actually done anyone any good anyway since the person doing it isn’t comparing themselves to me – they’re comparing themselves to an airbrushed image that doesn’t even exist, so my killing part of my self-esteem to help them is a completely wasted effort.

If anyone out there reading this feels like you owe me any kind of apology – allow me to assure you that you absolutely do not.  Commiserating over self-hatred is part of our culture, we do it reflexively at this point, like breathing.  We are all owed a gigantic apology for that, for being made to believe that our bodies in any shape, size or form are ugly or inadequate, or not okay.  My heart hurts for every single one of us that suffers and I don’t blame anyone for what has collectively been done to us.

Also, I have never once in my life made this sort of request before or publicly indicated that it was a problem and I do not expect anyone to read my mind.

Moving forward, if this continues to happen I am going to politely ask that whoever is doing it please stop – because it hurts me.  That’s a really uncomfortable and awkward statement to make, but I’m starting to think I’ve spent a little too much of my energy in life attempting to make everyone else comfortable, and I want some comfort now for myself.

There might also be people reading this who think I’m oversensitive, I’m internalizing and getting hurt by comments which have nothing to do with me, or even that I deserve to feel bad because I’m fat and that does really make me a lesser person.  That’s okay too – people are allowed to have their own opinions.  It’s just that those opinions aren’t going to stop me any longer from attempting to recover what I can of my shredded self-esteem.

Whether I am beautiful or not by cultural standards, I deserve this.  I deserve better.

So do you.