Weight, weight–Don’t tell me!

Behind every thought I have had, almost, for the better part of my life is the background of my weight.

Right now, I am fat. I don’t like being fat, but I have been overweight and sometimes obese for most of my life.

As a child, I started getting plump sometime before kindergarten. Kids were rarely plump when I was, so it was an additional burden. Our family doctor determined when I was five or six that I had hypothyroidism, and for the next ten or so years, I took ever-increasing doses of thyroid medication, then the synthetic thyroid medication when it was invented. I was skinny around age nine and ten, but quickly started gaining weight as a teenager at an alarming rate, no matter what I did. I was bullied, badly, and to this day, I have avoided school reunions because I cannot bear to see many of my former tormentors.

When I was sixteen, my mom took me to an endocrinologist. He told me that not only did I not need thyroid medication, I had likely been over-medicated for years, perhaps even misdiagnosed when I was little. Why I was fat then remained a mystery, but over the course of the next year, the endocrinologist weaned me from the thyroid medication. I suddenly had energy I had never known, and my thoughts themselves seemed even to change. This time, when I tried to lose weight, the pounds came off. It was still a lot of work, but by the time I finished high school, I was transformed, unrecognizable. Throughout my late teens and twenties, I watched what I ate, maybe even sometimes too much, but in reality, I could eat almost anything I wanted. I never became overweight again until I was pregnant.

After pregnancy, I struggled. I asked my doctor for help, and he didn’t have answers. No doctor had answers for me beyond what I was already trying, and I never found a doctor who would help me figure it out. I tried a nutritionist, who asked me to track what I ate, according to the calories-in-calories-out model she had created for me. She accused me of making up my food diary, and I found myself once again frustrated. Another year later, I tried a highly controversial fad diet, and I lost quite a lot of the weight, almost as easily as I had when I stopped taking thyroid medication. I may have hurt my metabolism and health, but it was still worth it for the five or six years that the weight stayed off. I got older. Menopause crept close, and I gained a little, then a lot, and now I am at the heaviest I have ever been. Nothing seems to help, and my joints hurt. I feel ugly, and nothing like the adult self I became in my twenties. It is so discouraging. I have considered the new drugs, so strong is my desire to get back to myself, but they scare me even more than the fad diet I tried before. But maybe I’ll give in when I have insurance that will pay. I have considered hormones for menopause, too, and once again have to hunt for the right doctor. So discouraging. It is not a question of effort or willpower–I can stick to anything, and have shown this time and time again, whether with food, or money, or work. Sacrifice is not so hard, and perhaps in that, I am lucky. But it is not everything.

I have thought at time whether there is a way for me to accept myself as the fat person my body seems to want me to be, but I am not happy this way. I seem to gain weight with stress, and my life has had a lot of it, battling schools and exes, struggling with work and money. It seems to be a cycle, this weight I carry. I wonder sometimes if the stress in my childhood of having an alcoholic father led me into this very visible burden, embodied by the fat on myself. I think this is very possible, and I am trying to look at this hard, deal with it, resolve some of the blame I think I carry for it all.

I still feel loved in many ways, unlike when I was younger. Maybe it is because so many others carry extra weight, and my appearance is not so unusual. Becoming a middle-aged woman is already a disappearing act in so many ways that I already felt somewhat invisible when the weight came back on this time, so that may be part of it, too.

So much of my personality as a younger person was shadowed by the yes, but… or butt. I lived in somewhat of a fantasy world, as I remember, and even developed many of my talents because they seemed like a way out, an escape to a world that was not quite so mean. I was scared for much of my life, and wondered what I had done to be tormented as much as I was. My mom loved me, and some teachers and others were kind to me, even encouraging. But I was that fat girl who was kind of pushed aside by most people, and tortured, sometimes physically, by others. I feared so much watching the scale numbers increase the first time I gained weight, and I fought like hell to go back to who I was, but even when I was thin, the constant objectification bothered me. My appearance… and yet, I was also the one who put so much stock on that alone.

I do not think that my perception of myself is too far off, nor is it so uncommon, particularly for women. It bothers me, and I crave the ease with which I used to walk ten miles and pop on my bike. I miss the beautiful clothes I wore and my long, long neck. It is vanity, I admit, but I miss the beauty I had and might have had now in my older years, if only I were thin.