My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

It’s been on my TeuxDeux list for months now, just rolling over to the next day and the next. Every time I open my laptop or check the app to make sure I’m on top of schoolwork and life admin, it’s staring at me: make appt with bariatric dr. When I can’t take it anymore I move it ahead a few days, manually, telling myself I’ll do it when things are calmer or the apartment is quieter or it stops raining… These excuses are bunk, of course – for one thing, a Pacific-Northwesterner* should never wait to do anything until the rain stops. But I’ve been putting it off, because I’m scared. I’m terrified that I’ll be weighed and measured and found…what’s the opposite of wanting? Overabundant? I’m afraid I’ll succumb to pressure and tacitly agree that the weight is the problem, not my attitude about it (or my hoped-for response, the whole reason I’m going to a bariatric doctor at all: that my post-GB body processes food and exercise differently and there’s some key element I’m missing...

“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...

It’s been over a year since I’ve written here, and a lot has happened.   I’ve moved to Oakland to live alone, spent the past nine months teaching middle school (which, in this internet age, has made me much more squirrelly about my online presence and what I say here), and continued to work on a book that feels ever more like chopped-up pieces of squirming earthworm in my hands – perhaps they can be fitted back together but every time I try to start I just want to throw up.    Perhaps most relevant is this: last time I wrote, I mentioned a new boyfriend.   Well, he’s still around, and not so new anymore.   We celebrated a year this January and we’re planning to move in together at the end of the summer, which is simultaneously surreal and wonderful and terrifying.   The last time I lived with someone I wound up staying with him for seven years, planning the next thirty, getting engaged, and then having my heart rot from the inside out over the cour...

“If you think I’m hard on my body now, you should have seen me ten years ago.” My new boyfriend looks at me with his eyebrows raised, uncharacteristically disbelieving. Then he says, with a slight edge to his tone, “but I didn’t know you then. I only know you now.” I pause for a second to try to figure out why this irritates me so much, when he brushes off my explanations of my past as if it has no bearing on the person I am now. It’s always surprising to me when he does this, partly because to me it seems obvious that my past is a huge part of my current self, and partly because he’s usually so thoughtful and understanding, and this kind of invalidating reaction is unusual for him. I take a deep breath and try to articulate my frustration. “You have to understand that where I was then is important…it informs where I am now. And for you to say that the person you know, the particular body image issues of the woman you’re dating here and now, are all that matter…for you to say that...

--> Of all the terrible things I saw as possibilities in my future, being cheated on was never one of them. I always figured I wasn't attractive enough to have to worry about cads who couldn't keep it in their pants – anyone who wanted to be with me would, by necessity, be too good a person to cheat.   He would be with me because he truly loved who I was, and he would never want to (or be able to) do anything to hurt me that badly. Obviously, I was wrong.   Either about the caliber of man who would seriously date me or about how people’s intentions control their actions, or both.   Whichever I was so incorrect about, the facts are now clear: I’m not immune.   And it’s partly the shock of learning this that has made it so hard for me to face what’s happened and move on. I have whole weeks (like last week) where I’m mostly okay.   I go on dates, act whole and human, then come home and text with my ex and get sad, but then I go to bed and I’m st...

It’s been a month.   A whole 31 days since I found out my fiancé had been having an affair and my world fell apart.   I really thought I’d feel better by this point, but I woke up yesterday with the same sharp pain in my chest that I had the night I found out – I spent the morning hours doubled over with the same kind of sobs I cried then, too. In some ways, things are getting easier: I’m no longer in London so I’m somewhat less reminded of our relationship every single second (it doesn’t help that we spent a lot of time in SF, where I’m currently living); I’ve finished all the packing and shipping and logistics of getting out of the flat where we lived together for four of our seven years; I’ve gotten rid of some of the wedding decorations that were haunting my closet.   In other ways, though, the pain is endless: I’ve hurriedly left behind the city and friends who made up the majority of my life for the past five years; my wedding dre...

“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 ...

I just had a little breakdown over my body, the kind that's bad enough to make me cry, but not bad enough to completely incapacitate me.  And when I got up, wiped off my face, and set about bustling to take my mind off my thunder thighs, I realized it had been a pretty long time since I'd cried over my size. I don't mean that I've been particularly happy with my body lately – on the contrary, I've been far too inactive, physically, and far too lax about snacking and such, and as a result I've been feeling a bit like a blob.  But I've been too busy to dwell on it, really.  I'm working a lot , and thinking about the book process, and trying to be more social and spend more time with my boyfriend (we had a period of not seeing each other much and it was hard on our relationship), and I just haven't had time to indulge my negative thoughts much.  I mean, I've had them, a lot of them, but then something else has come up and I've had to re-focus....

I had a total meltdown last night.  Some of it was triggered by the usual stress (I just got back from a wonderful trip to SF, and I'm homesick and worried about catching up with work, and I had a massively important writing deadline yesterday), but mostly it was about the doctor's appointment I have tomorrow.  And the weigh-in that awaits me there. I know I've ranted about doctors before.  And I've told you about this one , specifically.  The short story is that if my BMI goes up one more point I'll be cut off from using Nuvaring, which is the only form of hormonal birth control I've ever tried that hasn't made me feel crazy and disinterested in sex.  So I booked this appointment last month, making sure to make it for a day when I was unlikely to be PMSing and likely to be writing at home instead of in the office.  But I didn't factor in the vacation beforehand; suffice it to say, my weight is not low enough that I feel totally confident strutting i...

There's been a lot of chatter in the media lately about the trials and tribulations of traveling under the influence of a couple (hundred?) extra pounds.  And somewhere between Kevin Smith being kicked off Southwest Airlines and the constant barrage of fat-fear and obesity epidemic outcry, a few pieces have emerged that put a chubbily human face on the matter (without too much whining or crying).  I think I'm going to start linking to such pieces (if only to keep the blog alive for a while as every remotely interesting original thought goes straight into the 'book' file).  First up, Traveling While Fat , from last weekend's NY Times.  It's a pretty good start down the 'fat is human' road, although I have to wonder whether a woman could write something so matter of fact, with so little apology for her size. Lord knows I couldn't.  Hence, the GB, and now, the memoir in which I constantly express a need to apologize for my still-unacceptable size. ...

The lovely bf took me to Mexico a couple of months ago, and I started a blog post there.  Obviously, I never finished it, because I was distracted by the beautiful pool and our personal pastry class and the delectable food everywhere we turned, but I looked at it again today and realized that the subject I wanted to touch on is still worth discussing.  Basically, I started the post with a photo of the amazing resort where we were staying.  And I mean AMAZING.  I’ve never before in my life stayed at a hotel so beautiful and comfortable and just plain stunning that I didn’t want to leave the compound walls.  I’m all about real Mexico– the people, the culture, the food– but I had absolutely no desire to leave ever.  I could seriously live in this amazing place.  This is important for you to know, not so I can brag, but so you can understand how pissed off I was to still feel like such a fat cow.  I mean, here I was, with my own private villa w...

Happy July everybody! I can’t believe the time has gone by so fast. I feel like I just got back from London, when in reality we’re coming up on a year since I left. Yeesh. And if all goes well I should be heading back that way in just under three weeks; fingers crossed that the British government gives me a visa… But you don’t read this blog to learn about my personal and locational life! That’s what this blog is for. This blog is for all my many ugly and my few pleasant thoughts about my body, so here goes. As you may know, July 1st marks the 12th week of my ‘new’ calorie-counting, gym-going regimen. As you also may know, this regimen, although it follows all logical and mathematical guidelines (I have a resting metabolic rate of around 2700 calories a day, so I eat about 1700 calories a day and work out at least 3 times a week), did me no good at first. In fact, I gained three pounds the first week and spent the next 6 trying desperately to get back to breaking even. And now...

In a little over a month I’ll be heading to Miami for a weekend reunion with my college girlies. Sun, drinks with umbrellas, lounging on the beach… sounds great, right? Well, yes. And also no. While I’m psyched to be seeing my girls, I’m less than thrilled about the location. At first I thought this was due to my heart already having been set on meeting in saint louie, because who wouldn’t want to visit Miami? But recently I’ve realized that although I do want to visit Miami at some point, I’m worried about how it’ll affect me right now. Lemme ‘splain. As you all know, I’ve been pretty rough on my body recently. Surprisingly, I’m not always so down on myself, but ever since I came back from London I’ve had a tough time liking myself. Anyway, I joined a gym in January and I’ve been pretty good about going three times a week, and I have started to see some tightening up and such (although I’ve actually gained a couple pounds), but I still feel really vulnerable to attacks of the...