My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

“Tell me what that’s like,” my therapist says when I tell her I’ve been experiencing a lot of body image ‘stuff’ lately. “Well, I’ve just – you know, not only did I not lose the weight I put on while teaching last year, but I seem to have actually gained weight?   Even though I’m not doing anything differently, except actually exercising more – it’s infuriating how little control I have, and I just…” and here tears spring unexpectedly to my eyes.   I swallow them back and continue, “Mostly I can’t believe I’m still susceptible to this shit!” She nods, then asks me again to explain what I mean by ‘this shit.’ “Okay, here’s a great example: I was sitting in your waiting room just now and I started a new book, and the opening scene is this woman in a hospital – she’s got some kind of undiagnosable bacterial infection or something, and she’s been on IV fluids for weeks – she can’t keep anything down.   And I thought, there needs to be a place where you can go a...

Have you ever been through something so traumatic that when you look back on it from a healthier space you almost can’t believe you survived it?   That’s how I feel when I re-read the blog posts I wrote during the end of my engagement; I can see how fine that last thread I was hanging from was, and how close I came to it snapping every single day.   I can still remember, on a visceral level, just how painful simply existing was, and I’m genuinely shocked I didn’t self-harm or try to end myself. These days, as I creep up on a date which, in a parallel universe, is my eighth anniversary with the best man I’ve ever known, and which is now just another April day on which I don’t even know who I agreed to marry a year ago – these days I’m mostly better.   I’m currently experiencing a pretty tough downswing in mood, brought on by an ill-advised trip to Mexico with one of the more intimately loved-up couples I know, so it’s not all rainbows and moonb...

--> “The holidays are a difficult time for almost everybody,” my therapist tells me, “let alone someone who’s been through the trauma you’ve experienced.”   I know her job is, in part, to validate my feelings, and she does, but I also seethe at the thought that I’ve become a cliché, moping through the sparkle and cheer of Christmas and New Years, alone and miserable about it. When I was single, in my life before him, I didn’t feel crappy about the holidays.   In fact, I really liked them.   I was still young enough to consider my parents and siblings as my ‘main’ family, and to me Christmas was about spending time with them, getting and giving gifts and eating plenty of deliciously unhealthy food while the colored tree lights bathed the house in a particularly Christmassy glow and Sinatra sang old holiday classics in the background.   Being with or without a boyfriend seemed like a tangential thing: it was a bonus if I had someone to kiss under the mi...

I was supposed to get married yesterday.   I had the dress, the caterers, the guest list – most importantly I had the man, whom I loved with a certainty I’d long thought impossible. But I didn’t.   Get married, or have the man, as it turned out.   I was cut brutally loose, with little warning, and spent the summer floundering and desperately trying to weave together some semblance of a life for myself from the shreds of who I was before things imploded. The good news: I’m getting there.   I’m in therapy, which is helping me strengthen my emotional core; I’m dating new people, which is a constant reminder that I’m not totally worthless to every male member of the human race; I’m actively looking for a full-time job (and the health insurance that comes along with it); and I’m reconnecting with my amazing, wonderful girlfriends, a gang of whom spent the weekend with me at a vacation cabin in Healdsburg, distracting me from my sorrows w...

“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” my mother says when I tell her I can’t eat and I’m losing weight as a result of my most recent heartbreak, “maybe when all this is over you’ll look in the mirror and –” I have just enough strength left in me to stop her before she completely echoes the voice in the back of my head, the one that’s been telling me that not eating for days, while it might fuck up my metabolism in the long run, might also make me more attractive to potential new men in the short term. But I don’t want to be attractive to new men – never mind the nagging fear that it's impossible.   I just want my man to come back and erase everything he’s done to me in the past nine months.   I want to wake up tomorrow and have this all be a bad dream – the cheating, the lies, the images in my mind of him holding that conniving, revolting, vile girl in our bed, the searing pain in my heart that keeps me awake nights – and I want to roll over and ...

This afternoon, while coming home from coffee with a friend, I decided to stop for an ice cream bar.  Now, I rarely eat ice cream unless it's something special, like handmade gelato, because it makes me sick very fast (meaning I get little mileage out of it) and I don't actually like it enough to suffer for it most days, so I haven't had a mass-produced ice cream in probably ten months, maybe a year.  But today was the first really warm sunny day since I've been back in the UK, and I've had an inordinately stressful couple of months (for reasons that, if you can believe it of me, are too personal to explain), and I was wearing a cute sundress and felt like having an ice cream bar.  So I bought a Magnum in the little shop at the end of my road and proceeded to eat it on my way home. Not two bites in, I passed a middle-aged man, fiddling with something homewares-related on his front stoop, his pit bull watching nearby.  He looked up and caught my eye as I went past,...

A friend of mine emailed me last night, suggesting I watch the latest episode of BBC 2's 'Horizon', because it dealt with the issue of Gastric Bypass.  But when I started watching it this evening, I realized that really, it deals mostly with obesity – how and why it exists, and what we should do about it – and Gastric Bypass plays a large part in the last third of the program. In all honesty, as I started watching, my immediate reaction was rage and righteous indignation.  Gabriel Weston, the thin, blond, female surgeon who hosts the show announces at the very beginning that for her entire life (including the ten years in which she's been practicing medicine) she has operated under the 'assumption [...] that I am the size I am because of my character'.  Now, not only is that a particularly smug way of putting it, there is a serious problem with the underlying message: that fat people are fat simply because they are lazy and eat too much.  They don't have ...

So I feel like I should explain that last post. In fact, I thought about deleting it, because on reflection (after a night of sleep and weird non-bodily dreams) I can see how it would really disturb people, but the point of this blog isn't to show you guys what you already see when we're face to face or on the phone. It's to show people the straight, honest truth of how I feel in this mishmash of confidence and depression post-GB. And in the interest of a frank look at my body issues, I'm not holding back. I know that can be scary, especially when I say things about cleavers and such, but the thing you have to try to remember is this: I don't make spontaneous decisions about my life. I don't even make spontaneous travel plans! So you can pretty much rest assured that I will never just hack off a hip, no matter how appealing that option may seem in the moment. I'll always sleep on it, and I think if it got really bad I'd probably call a hotline or s...

I'm so tired of being trapped in this body. How many times in the last few months have I posted about my body making me miserable? Honestly I feel like it's just the story of my life. I'm living out a life sentence in a horrible cell that I can't seem to change at all. And the worst part is that whoever is holding me here lets me out every now and then, liberates me from the prison of fat and self-loathing, and I get to smell the wildflowers and frolic in the meadows and all that great stuff, but then the alarm sounds and the dogs bark and before I know it I'm incarcerated again. And the really fucked up thing is that I'm living two (or more) lives: one of me is constantly trapped in these body issues (and not just the image, but the reality of my weight and my size and all the exercise and dieting in the world not making a dent in the cellulite), and the other lives this great life, with fabulous friends and a hilarious family and a wonderful, supportive boy...

The recap: I had Gastric Bypass seven years ago. I started out at 290, never got down below 185 (size 16 jeans), and have fluctuated somewhere around 200 for the past couple years. I exercise regularly and eat well. I've also had a tummy tuck and arm/thigh lifts. I'm currently around 207, and eating 1770 calories a day in a drastic attempt to drop back below the 200 mark. The current problem: Every now and then I watch a documentary or read an article about someone who has had weight loss surgery, and I feel like they're always so thin. I don't really understand why I never got all that thin in the first place, and why it's such a struggle just to maintain the loss, much less lose more. The conclusion: I guess I'm disappointed. I don't regret the surgery, because it's had a huge impact on my life and my confidence, but I am frustrated that after three surgeries and seven years of struggle, I still feel fat. At what point is a weight-loss surgery c...