Beyond The Weight Loss

 “Fat Women are Disgusting, they just aren’t attractive to me,” he told me as we talked in my usual bedroom I used while visiting. Conversations started randomly and ended up on different subjects, but this was a little different. He had never expressed this sentiment before and there was a glaring conflict of emotions going on inside me with knowing how we had just discussed my recent weight loss of one-hundred-plus pounds, which had happened since the last time he had seen me, and after he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to mention that I still had a little more to lose in my thighs; one of my biggest insecurities when it comes to my body. Which, in some respect, I’ve since realized he may have planted that seed in my head, even if this new comment almost seemed like a subconscious thought coming to life.

My brain has since grappled with this conversation over the last month since my visit home, feeling something irritate me and make me feel less than, and possibly derail some mental progress I felt like I had been making, as well.

Regardless of his intent, and how he would probably proclaim that’s “not what (he) meant" if you mentioned how this comment directly links somebody’s body to their overall worth as human beings, they go hand in hand. When you say someone is disgusting, most of the time it’s in a criticism of their character as a person; sure someone can have disgusting habits like picking their noses in public or putting their bare feet (or shoe covered ones, I feel) up in your personal space on an airplane. 

Though that comment that I had never heard from him before was only expressed after my own weight loss, and never before. I remember being teased by him for the way my thighs jiggled in the car as we rolled down the highway, wearing shorts on a family outing. My brain internalized it as a personal thing, negating the fact that in all likelihood, depending on how any body part is positioned in a car, the movement of the vehicle will make most body parts shake like Jell-O, simply due to the laws of physics. I also got all the, “your mama is fat” jokes from the nineties directed at me. I deflected and made some right back to make it seem all in good fun, even if they hurt a little. I did ask one day if the jokes would stop if I lost all the weight, and he just said he’d say something along the lines of “You’re so skinny you could hula hoop with a cheerio,”  as some way to justify it wasn’t a personal attack, maybe.

I feel like I’m trying to justify his actions, like they are okay when I know they’re not. Especially when I have had comments about my body and its over-sized form (not just in weight, but height too-- I currently stand more on the 5’10 side of the 5’9 height I tell the world I usually am when asked) from the moment  I entered kindergarten when a boy asked me if I had been held back because I had tits at five years old. Yes, that’s the reason I remember it fondly because he called my boobs, “tits.” 

I remember when I was house sitting a neighbor’s dog during the summer and we had talked about how she felt I reminded her of a younger version of herself, all his friend could say was at “least [I] had something to look forward to” and when I questioned what, thinking it meant having a dog of my own, or house or successful career, he could only state that one day I would lose the weight. Flash forward to them, later that summer, laughing when I got upset that the cashier at a local restaurant asked if ten-year-old me was pregnant because of my over-sized belly. You know, that one thing you really shouldn’t ask a woman, out of common courtesy. 

There was also a point of them having me pull them in a shopping cart with a rope around my waist until that rope snapped, and I have no idea how or why, but still feel the sting of humiliation radiate with that memory in shame; debating if I even want to mention it here at all, since I think you get the picture of how he treated me already, at this point

I know this man, and I do believe this guy has a good soul because I spent my life growing up with him. Does  he have his faults? yes, like all humans do,  and somehow I feel more protective of him because he’s my brother and I’m not excusing these actions, I know they are part of a bigger issue at hand entirely, that has bled into our general  weight-shaming subculture and our identities, and undermines our worth and value as basic humans. 

And yet, I fight with even writing this due to the fact that I have lost the weight, but I know like all trauma in life, if it’s not addressed and expressed it festers like an open wound you continue to pick at till its scabs and scars. My scars, it seems, run deeper than I’ve realized until late, and I still feel like I haven’t experienced enough issues with this as some, like women of color or those who aren’t as able bodied as I am, or those who even feel they were born in the wrong body.

I also feel the need (after weight loss) still festering inside of me to somehow judge myself still for this size or that number, or that body part. I know though, that holds no comparison to a human’s right to be and to exist. I feel that if you think you’re doing something other than shaming someone for something you have no idea about, you need to learn to educate yourself on how to improve first before you can help others. So first I’ve got to, in a sense, air my dirty laundry or my personal shit to find a place of peace within myself to simply be enough, because I still don’t feel that way and I know I’m still, at times, looking for outside fixes for that, when I know damn well that’s not how healing and acceptance  work.

My childhood wasn’t perfect but it was good, at least from what I remember of it, there are a few memories and experiences from my childhood  I want to recreate for my own children one day, but there are also some things I feel I’m still dealing with and never really understood that I was dealing with  till now.  

I remember weight being a topic in our household from early on, from Jenny Craig to Richard Simmons, Weight Watchers... hell, even fitness by Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger; we had books and VHS (yes, those bad boys) tapes all my life, talking about losing weight and being healthy.  This may sound pretty normal for most families growing up in the nineties, and for the most part it was average. Though I don’t remember a moment where there wasn’t a struggle of losing or gaining weight with my mother most of my life, and somehow seeing that cycle may be created my own?

I have no clear moment to pinpoint what really started the weight gain and why, maybe the old adage of “Clean Your Plate,” rule that I still give my mom a hard time about. When I tried to tell her I was full  after being sick and getting better, but I was told to finish my Happy Meal, until it came back all over the back seat of the car, seeping through the flimsy box that had once held my meal and toy and into my lap, not meant for this use of recycling. 

I also know my Dad did the best he could and for someone who’s temper can flash like the last point on the rope of dynamite before the bang at times; he can be the most accommodating person I know for those he calls family. If it was what we wanted and it made us happy when it came to food, that was the easiest choice to make, regardless if it was good for us or not. But what parent hasn’t made that choice more often than they care to admit?

I can’t say there hasn’t been a point in my life where my body wasn’t a discussion topic or a rumor of sorts in my life, or even my own worst enemy at times. I remember the first time I found a man cute when I was way too young for him. It was one of my Dad’s coworkers who was half his age and yet still more than twice  mine I’m sure, but I remember the day we came with my Dad to work and I felt myself become insecure due to the moles and freckles on my arms, thinking “who could like those?” 

Also fighting with my mom about makeup, wanting to play and experiment with it when I was young and  at least in my memory, her explaining  that it was something only girls who were vain and stupid used to, get guys or impress someone else, yet she wore it herself for her own reasons I didn’t know till later. That one stuck with me until probably after high school. Now I wear it for myself and play around with it like crazy. In  some ways I’m grateful for that, since while I fought with the labels of what ‘vanity’ and ‘feminine’  were for a lot of my life, due to this comment (and her making sarcastic jokes about the term “being lady-like”) that I took, at face value, of everyone’s term of that when I did something that didn't fit the stereotype of “girl” that our society likes to label for us and not the joke of what a crock it was the entire time until I got older and she explained it to me. The fact is I know the reasons I wear it over just because society tells me I should. 

I remember being bullied in elementary school, once again, for my weight. For wearing a certain dress that I liked because to a group of girls, I looked pregnant in it. I overheard them talking about me in it with pictures on the music room door from our show we had that year. 

This turned to me asking this said group of girls (awhile later) to help me lose weight and have me run around during recess to fit in with them, and on their terms, wear a sports bra cause that’s what they do. I can honestly say I had a true Mean Girls experience before I was even eleven years old, but it wasn’t all the drama  of that movie and I wasn’t as nearly invest in it when my own self woke up and gave me a guilt trip for letting them treat me this way. To get them to like me or to feel like I belonged somewhere, or someone finally saw me without judgement, because that was never that to begin with, sore muscles kicking my ass back to reality I suppose.

I’ll say I’ve been told I’m very kind and patient, but I can also be a stubborn witch of a person as well, which is especially true if I feel something’s off from that telling feeling in my gut. It won’t let me stick with it for long without making me question everything. Sometimes to the point I think it even made me start questioning my own worth or adequacy as a human when trying to know if I was loved. At least in the ways I knew how to understand that, though  I’m learning that sometimes it’s not about how I feel someone else should love me, but seeing how they do love me in their own warped little ways that they know how to show or give. Based on their own experiences and walls and social structures that they may not be entirely aware of existing in the frameworks of their mind. 

All this came to a head around the time that my brain, one restless night, wanted to remind me somehow, for whatever reason, that I was going to die one day.

 Instead of that being a release from the judgement or need for outside approval, it made me cling harder and feel like a complete failure to see that they weren’t responding to me the way I thought they should  by showing me love, or acceptance, or belonging, without judgement of some sort, which I’m beginning to see the reasons to all that now more so recently than ever, and it took me losing a whole person pretty much in weight to realize that, or at least for it finally stick. But not before I wished and prayed on everything I knew from the stars in the sky, to God, and to a fucking firework on the fourth of July, to be reborn to get a restart at life.

Somewhere in the life of the  eight-year-old to eleven-year-old me,  I felt the need to find this acceptance of our ultimate death wasn’t in letting go of the expectations of others for love or approval and work on finding it in myself, I looked at as a sign of failure because if I wasn’t loved for me and I was going to die, had I really lived the right way? Was I really worth sticking around this planet for the seventy or eighty more years this life hopefully had for me? I knew something was big with that because I remember freaking out when my mom happened to come across a prayer I had written out, asking God to restart my life; to make me new or different or better. 

I knew there was something off with this and yet my mom “reading the paper” was doing it more so as a lesson (I had been caught earlier in the day reading from her journal) and didn’t mention anything about what was written. I’m honestly not sure if she even read it, nor if she would remember this if I asked, but I know if she had been aware she probably would have wanted to talk with me, I at least know than as I know now there was an issue.

 But did I work on it? Nope! I let it fester and chose to find other avenues or ways to cope and numb this pain when well as you guessed it those wishes didn’t come true. 

Still here, still kicking; scars attached and popping up slowly as I’ve learned to try to let go of coping tools and learn how to be truly here, now.

 I don’t want to admit to this, but there were days I would troll around like Templeton after the fair, in the school hallways on bathroom runs in after school care before my Dad would pick me up and pry into lunch pails students had, long forgotten for the day. To using my lunch money that would be enough for the week’s lunch in half the time on the chips and candies at the checkout line till my parents put a no a la carte option on my lunch restrictions to avoid that when it happened once too often.

Food became my crutch when the anxiety became too much, and I know some people may play the game of stereotypes and say “see, the proof is in the pudding  with this fatty,” to which I would say first of all fuck you and can you not realize by now that one person’s story doesn’t speak for the world’s? Have we not realized that yet?

Anyway, it became my mission in a subconscious sense to either deny the truth of my weight to myself, and at times blame the dryer for shrinking my clothes more than it really does. To having eternal battles with myself about needing to lose the weight because how uncomfortable I felt, or the way society treated me. The way men treated me when being plus size was just another notch in the belt to feeling like I wasn’t enough, that I didn’t belong, that I was too different and strange to be accepted or loved. But in the same instant I think it did help me with those who I cared for growing up as much as it made me an over analytical analyzing mess of a person. It also helped me relate to others and see myself in their shoes and know and understand those moments of not feeling like a complete, rational normal human. What is that like, does anyone really know?

I think I spent most of my childhood, teens and early twenties playing a role of sorts, not that we all don’t in some way always play a role in our daily lives. I would watch my parents get mad at my brother’s actions in school or in life and try to gain attention or acknowledgement by being the “good child,” or the less problematic one at the moment sometimes. I had my fair share in that parental disappointment limelight too, but in turn I think I also put a small wedge between my brother and I when they spent most of our lives comparing us to each other;” why can’t you be more like your sister?” I think I heard. I also think I was told that once, maybe twice. That’s never fair of a parent to do to their child, I get the reasoning but without trying to understand their (the child’s) perspective or what they may being through, that’s just adding wood on the fire of a shit storm they may be personally dealing with.

I feel like such a melodramatic bitch going on still about my struggles here, in middle school I got teased too and on multiple occasions went to the guidance counselor’s office for help. I learned to at times either tune out or to turn the comments of a group of girls calling me fat in the hallway just for the hell of it, into something positive like it wasn’t F-A-T was P-H-A-T, or that the number on the scale was just a statement that Earth’s gravity loved me more. The kicker with this group, most of them used to be my friends and one is actually still one of my longest friends and we’ve gone through some shit together since. 

I remember having a falling out with two of what I thought were my closest friends right before high school because of miscommunication and them seeing possibly the cracks in my facade showing up and it freaking them out, because I still didn’t feel completely safe being one hundred percent myself around most people, but the way they ended our friendship did not help much. 

We went for our normal walk around the neighborhood, but they had me walk a little ahead of them whispered talking about me and things I couldn’t quite hear, but I got the sense that things were over, and something wasn’t right. The week prior of hanging out while awkward at first was normal and things felt fine, and they then had me stand at my door after walking me home, and they stood at the end of the walkway from the driveway to that door and told me they couldn’t be friends with me anymore, and when I didn’t say anything they told me that was the problem and I asked okay what should I say, and they said you could ask why, I asked would that change things and they told me no, so I said than why bother. 

If you ever wonder why I’m quiet, there is your reason; about seventy-five percent of the time, another maybe fifteen of it might be I just don’t have anything to say, or the other twenty-five I’m just enjoying the moment and don’t think I need to add anything.

I’ve learned to be afraid of being too much, or not enough and not knowing where to land and then feeling like I’m just too sensitive and I need to get over myself.

Though as you may guess, instead of just being in those feelings and knowing they are probably all in my head, and they’re not real. That they’re just the thoughts and ideas in my head, I over-analyze with them and then I try to numb them. Or do things or eat things to feel like I’m better when I don’t think I've ever been because I’ve never just allowed myself to be. The more I write this and the more I try to be okay with feeling like a little bitch still the more this self-reflection makes sense as much as it hurts, and I know my brain is telling me the truth and I need to remember to be honest with myself and be okay here and now just as fucked up as I am. 

I’m coming to terms with how much anxiety I do have as much as I never thought I did, because I was numbing myself to the reality of it, I think most do, however that I don’t want to judge on something I don’t know.

I’m still trying to piece together my standings in my own body these days when most of the time the body I am use to, was the one that I ended up realizing I needed to change for pure personal reasons of my body just couldn’t deal with the weight I had let it become. After failed yo-yo diets over the years with the wrong intentions or just getting lost in my own issues again, do I have the moments of being lazy or eating shit, yes but those aren’t the reasons that caused the weight gain as they are present now just as they were then.  

I feel like I need to tread lightly here because my reasoning's for losing weight were due to being out of breath going up stairs and my feet getting plantar fascists in them when walking around due to the strain on my muscles with the weight, for my body

I really want to put that last point out there, this was for my own body for my own mental and physical  health, and I’m still trying to understand what that means and also be okay with knowing I might gain a few pounds back as there are parts of me I think are too thin now at times and areas that need the curves I’ve lost, like the butt and the tailbone not sitting right for long anymore.

There is still a need within me, at least I feel so to get to this goal weight number that I’ve had in mind for years, due to it being a number that has stuck in my head since around that same summer when everything escalated for a brief moment before I moved out of state to a new life (or at least chapter) when I started my middle school years still looking to find acceptance in the wrong ways and reasons, like thinking summers  at my Dads were times I could spend losing weight and coming back like a scene from one of those She’s All That movies.

There was an afternoon my Dad, brother and I were in downtown and weighed in on this scale in the building we were in, and I remember being no more than ten or eleven years old and finding it off that I weighed the same as my Dad did, even if I was already five foot seven. I remembered this memory also: I read somewhere that the actor who played Captain America was normally around this weight pre workouts and at that point in my life I was heavier than him at his  Captain America weight he added to his frame, his height being the same as my Dad’s I believe. 

I knew there must be something wrong with me to weigh more than them by that much (at my heaviest), but yet I also thought to weigh more than them period was off, too. That’s how much I allowed the world of social constructs and Hollywood to get to my basic understanding of self-worth. Thank fucking God I was older and maybe a slight bit more over the Hollywood scene and its ideal images when social media took its current place in our culture.

I still find some interest in the beauty/social media world, but I can look at it with a different eye appreciating what it has taught me but also know in ways it can and does need to change and have seen some of that for at least some. Though not where it counts to those who at times are the most invisible but yet I’ve seen time and time again make the most impact out there, who don’t get the credit they deserve. 

There is a big part of me that stays silent on my topic of weight or weight loss because I know my treatment was a “privileged” compared the life’s some of these women have had to live, or not gotten to live on their own terms because of the way society has treated them. I really have no say in this topic but to point their way to show how fabulous they really are. Let them shine, because they deserve to just like they beautiful beings that they are. 

This is only a brief history of my own life and some thoughts on this matter, I feel like I could have made this come across clearer or in a better way like always but I also know that right now this is needed for my own mental state to understand that it’s okay to feel these things ( even when I mess up and make mistakes, and take a step (or ten) back time again, as all us humans do as we learn and grow hopefully for the better) and to not always feel one hundred percent okay, and when I’m having an off moment the best thing to do isn’t to find a “fix” but to see it and embrace it with acknowledgement that I never let myself have in just loving me, even if it’s just one day  (or moment) at a time.