Why is it so difficult?
My whole life I've struggled with my weight. I remember so clearly around age 5 when I hungrily reached across the kitchen table for seconds, and my mom saying "do you want to be fat like your cousin?" It was first time I connected being "fat" with being bad. Looking back at pictures of myself I see a perfectly healthy little girl with no sign of eventual obesity. Age 5 was also the year my parents got divorced and the year I was molested by my neighbor Krista who couldn't have been more than 12 years old at the time. It was the year my life went upside down. Just prior to the divorce, my parents lost their house and we went from living in the suburbs in a 4 bedroom house with a playroom, a beautiful backyard and great schools, to a one-room apartment on one of the busiest streets in the city. I quickly had to learn how to fend for myself and my little sister who is two years younger. Both of my parents struggled to make ends meet and between the fighting and the cops arresting one or the other for domestic violence I found simple pleasure in food. Eating a McDonald's "Happy Meal," usually chicken nuggets and fries allowed me to escape the chaos and for a moment focus on how delicious the smooth sweet and sour sauce was on the crunchy exterior of the all white meat chicken piece. I would eat one fry at a time dipped in just enough ketchup. And then the grand finale! A toy just for me, a token to remember how happy that meal had made me. By the time I was eight, I had boxes of McDonald's happy meal toys. I also started being made fun of for being fat. I remember still, clear as day walking down the hallway to the cafeteria and one of my male classmates starting a chant behind me, "1-800-94-Jenny" which was the catchy slogan of the popular 1995 Jenny Craig commercials.
I think that it is safe to say that I never learned how to eat healthy. And since my life was and continued to be chaotic, eating was the only thing I knew that I could control. Food also became a sure sense of pleasure for me. How good food tastes allows me for a moment to forget all of the crappy things going on in my life. In high school I ballooned to 225 pounds and at 5'4" that meant that I was clinically obese. Eventually I moved in with my aunt and uncle and to a new school. I was fortunate to finally live in a home where we regularly had home-cooked meals, and if I asked I could get a homemade lunch too! Not only that, but I was given a gym membership, and both my aunt and uncle would take me to the gym at least twice a week. In a little over a year I dropped down to 165. It was amazing, I went from a size 18 to a size 10! You would think that I would be thrilled. One thing that they don't tell you about losing weight, is that even when you lose the weight, it's a lot harder for your brain to understand that you've lost the weight. I would look in the mirror and still think that I was the same size. I would get anxious when I'd walk between desks because my fat stomach would maybe slide over someone's desk and gross them out. My mom and aunt weren't all that helpful either, saying things like, "you're almost there, if you lose 20 more pounds then you'd look great." I became so demoralized because even after losing 65 pounds, it still wasn't good enough.
When I went to college, I finally gained control of my whole life. I could drive wherever I wanted, I could stay out late, and even drink and smoke if I wanted to. But adjusting to adult life was full of new problems I had to deal with. I wanted to be a stage actor, but upon seeing the thin, almost frail body type of my female peers I almost instantly changed my mind. At my first audition, I was so terrified that the directors were judging me based on my appearance that I messed up my lines in my monologue and immediately went to my advisor to change my focus to something backstage. Living on campus, I had all of my meals at the dinning hall. I ate, whatever I wanted - anything that would taste good. In a year I gained about 20 pounds. I maintained my weight between a size 12 and 14, mostly because I was constantly busy working 3 jobs and going to school full time. I didn't have time to work out and I certainly didn't have time to make my own meals. I relied on In 'n Out and Del Taco for sustenance.
The entire time I was unhappy with my weight and sincerely believed myself to be disgustingly fat. Especially compared to my perfectly petite roommates. I bought tons of weight loss magazines and books, I signed up with Jenny Craig, I bought exercise books, and learned everything I could online about how to lose weight and keep it off. I believed that I would never get a guy to love me or be attracted to me because of my weight. I kept thinking, if I could just lose weight, then I would be happy.
But the shitty thing about being over weight because you find pleasure in food, is that when you get depressed about your weight, all you want to do is eat something, because for a moment it will make you feel better, and no, a carrot is not the same as a cheeseburger.
So then begins the cycle of abuse that I inflict on myself. I look in the mirror and tell myself, "you're disgusting, look at how your stomach is sticking out and now drooping over your underwear." When my boyfriend doesn't feel like having sex, I tell myself that "he thinks you're fat. Isn't it gross watching a fat person have sex? Exactly, it's what he's thinking too. Why would he want to have sex with a fat, squishy, disgusting body, when he could just jerk off to porn in the other room?" I don't believe that my boyfriend would cheat on me with another woman, but I do believe that he wouldn't tell me these things to my face in order to spare my feelings. If I flatly ask him if he's thinking this, he would of course deny it, so I don't ask because either answer would be devastating.
Nearly 10 years after reaching my heaviest point, I'm there again. I weighed myself recently at 220. I slowly crept up into 190 and then moved closer and closer to 200, jumping from 200 to 220 happened, it seemed overnight. I look at myself in the mirror and am horrified by the stretch marks on my stomach and hips. It looks like I've been pregnant. Now I'm scared to lose weight because I'm afraid that I will still hate myself and my body. When the skin loosens up, then I'll have all of this loose, scarred skin to remind me that I wasn't and will never be beautiful.
Each time I reach this depressed low point, I try to get healthy again. I look online, "how to lose weight" and now it's even more depressing because I already know everything that is out there. I've tried the crash diets, and then learned how terrible they are for you, I know what my BMI is, and how many calories I should eat in a day. I know that I should eat a combination of healthy foods along with maintaining an excise routine in order to lose weight in a healthy way and keep it off. And most importantly, I know that it will take a while. It can take months, even a year to lose the amount of weight that I want to. I would like to lose 80 pounds, which would put me at 140. And I wanted to do this before my college graduation in May. Right now that gives me a little over 6 months which is not a realistic goal since they say one should expect to lose 1-2 pounds per week if they are doing it right. 1-2 pounds per week would put me at 30-40 pounds lost. So around 180 if I worked really hard starting today. I guess, if I put it like that, it sounds pretty good. 180 is about 10 pounds less than what I weighed when I met my boyfriend 3 years ago...
But will losing weight really make me happy? Will I still find something to hate about my body? My uneven skin, my gray hair, my stretch marks, my sagging breasts? Probably, so then is losing weight really worth it?
My whole life I've struggled with my weight. I remember so clearly around age 5 when I hungrily reached across the kitchen table for seconds, and my mom saying "do you want to be fat like your cousin?" It was first time I connected being "fat" with being bad. Looking back at pictures of myself I see a perfectly healthy little girl with no sign of eventual obesity. Age 5 was also the year my parents got divorced and the year I was molested by my neighbor Krista who couldn't have been more than 12 years old at the time. It was the year my life went upside down. Just prior to the divorce, my parents lost their house and we went from living in the suburbs in a 4 bedroom house with a playroom, a beautiful backyard and great schools, to a one-room apartment on one of the busiest streets in the city. I quickly had to learn how to fend for myself and my little sister who is two years younger. Both of my parents struggled to make ends meet and between the fighting and the cops arresting one or the other for domestic violence I found simple pleasure in food. Eating a McDonald's "Happy Meal," usually chicken nuggets and fries allowed me to escape the chaos and for a moment focus on how delicious the smooth sweet and sour sauce was on the crunchy exterior of the all white meat chicken piece. I would eat one fry at a time dipped in just enough ketchup. And then the grand finale! A toy just for me, a token to remember how happy that meal had made me. By the time I was eight, I had boxes of McDonald's happy meal toys. I also started being made fun of for being fat. I remember still, clear as day walking down the hallway to the cafeteria and one of my male classmates starting a chant behind me, "1-800-94-Jenny" which was the catchy slogan of the popular 1995 Jenny Craig commercials.
I think that it is safe to say that I never learned how to eat healthy. And since my life was and continued to be chaotic, eating was the only thing I knew that I could control. Food also became a sure sense of pleasure for me. How good food tastes allows me for a moment to forget all of the crappy things going on in my life. In high school I ballooned to 225 pounds and at 5'4" that meant that I was clinically obese. Eventually I moved in with my aunt and uncle and to a new school. I was fortunate to finally live in a home where we regularly had home-cooked meals, and if I asked I could get a homemade lunch too! Not only that, but I was given a gym membership, and both my aunt and uncle would take me to the gym at least twice a week. In a little over a year I dropped down to 165. It was amazing, I went from a size 18 to a size 10! You would think that I would be thrilled. One thing that they don't tell you about losing weight, is that even when you lose the weight, it's a lot harder for your brain to understand that you've lost the weight. I would look in the mirror and still think that I was the same size. I would get anxious when I'd walk between desks because my fat stomach would maybe slide over someone's desk and gross them out. My mom and aunt weren't all that helpful either, saying things like, "you're almost there, if you lose 20 more pounds then you'd look great." I became so demoralized because even after losing 65 pounds, it still wasn't good enough.
When I went to college, I finally gained control of my whole life. I could drive wherever I wanted, I could stay out late, and even drink and smoke if I wanted to. But adjusting to adult life was full of new problems I had to deal with. I wanted to be a stage actor, but upon seeing the thin, almost frail body type of my female peers I almost instantly changed my mind. At my first audition, I was so terrified that the directors were judging me based on my appearance that I messed up my lines in my monologue and immediately went to my advisor to change my focus to something backstage. Living on campus, I had all of my meals at the dinning hall. I ate, whatever I wanted - anything that would taste good. In a year I gained about 20 pounds. I maintained my weight between a size 12 and 14, mostly because I was constantly busy working 3 jobs and going to school full time. I didn't have time to work out and I certainly didn't have time to make my own meals. I relied on In 'n Out and Del Taco for sustenance.
The entire time I was unhappy with my weight and sincerely believed myself to be disgustingly fat. Especially compared to my perfectly petite roommates. I bought tons of weight loss magazines and books, I signed up with Jenny Craig, I bought exercise books, and learned everything I could online about how to lose weight and keep it off. I believed that I would never get a guy to love me or be attracted to me because of my weight. I kept thinking, if I could just lose weight, then I would be happy.
But the shitty thing about being over weight because you find pleasure in food, is that when you get depressed about your weight, all you want to do is eat something, because for a moment it will make you feel better, and no, a carrot is not the same as a cheeseburger.
So then begins the cycle of abuse that I inflict on myself. I look in the mirror and tell myself, "you're disgusting, look at how your stomach is sticking out and now drooping over your underwear." When my boyfriend doesn't feel like having sex, I tell myself that "he thinks you're fat. Isn't it gross watching a fat person have sex? Exactly, it's what he's thinking too. Why would he want to have sex with a fat, squishy, disgusting body, when he could just jerk off to porn in the other room?" I don't believe that my boyfriend would cheat on me with another woman, but I do believe that he wouldn't tell me these things to my face in order to spare my feelings. If I flatly ask him if he's thinking this, he would of course deny it, so I don't ask because either answer would be devastating.
Nearly 10 years after reaching my heaviest point, I'm there again. I weighed myself recently at 220. I slowly crept up into 190 and then moved closer and closer to 200, jumping from 200 to 220 happened, it seemed overnight. I look at myself in the mirror and am horrified by the stretch marks on my stomach and hips. It looks like I've been pregnant. Now I'm scared to lose weight because I'm afraid that I will still hate myself and my body. When the skin loosens up, then I'll have all of this loose, scarred skin to remind me that I wasn't and will never be beautiful.
Each time I reach this depressed low point, I try to get healthy again. I look online, "how to lose weight" and now it's even more depressing because I already know everything that is out there. I've tried the crash diets, and then learned how terrible they are for you, I know what my BMI is, and how many calories I should eat in a day. I know that I should eat a combination of healthy foods along with maintaining an excise routine in order to lose weight in a healthy way and keep it off. And most importantly, I know that it will take a while. It can take months, even a year to lose the amount of weight that I want to. I would like to lose 80 pounds, which would put me at 140. And I wanted to do this before my college graduation in May. Right now that gives me a little over 6 months which is not a realistic goal since they say one should expect to lose 1-2 pounds per week if they are doing it right. 1-2 pounds per week would put me at 30-40 pounds lost. So around 180 if I worked really hard starting today. I guess, if I put it like that, it sounds pretty good. 180 is about 10 pounds less than what I weighed when I met my boyfriend 3 years ago...
But will losing weight really make me happy? Will I still find something to hate about my body? My uneven skin, my gray hair, my stretch marks, my sagging breasts? Probably, so then is losing weight really worth it?
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