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...

Between cheap dinners out with the new boo , a very stressful and time-consuming new job (and the thousands of Goldfish consumed weekly to keep me on my feet), and all the yoga-defying illnesses my little petri dishes have passed me on their homework assignments in the past nine months, I’ve noticed that my clothes have been getting tighter.   Like, a lot tighter.   As in, I find myself wincing as I take off particularly unforgiving dresses at the end of the day – dresses which, nine months ago, fit just fine, or were even a bit baggy at the waist.   And now I’m faced with a dilemma I haven’t faced in years: how to lose bulk, if not necessarily weight.   If you’ve been reading this blog (or known me personally) for the few years, you know that I am majorly anti-dieting.   And if you’ve known me for the past decade, you might recall that the last time I succumbed to societal pressure and tried to lose weight, through a strict-but-real...

“If you throw that in a hot wash and then tumble dry it, I bet it’ll tighten up a bit and fit you better.”   I try to contain my glee at the sight of one of my favorite skirts from college, a blue cotton floral number with a wide band that used to be snug on my hips, not-quite-falling-off T’s narrower frame.   Not only is it a pleasure to think that my friends might get some use out of some of the fifty or so items of clothing I’ve brought to the swap – most of them much-loved pieces that I wore over and over again until they were put away in storage by my mother and my style slowly outgrew them – but it is a surprise and an untold joy to see how many of my old clothes actually fit these girls. My whole life, I’ve been significantly larger than all of my friends.   Even when I lost the weight, I remained a good two to four sizes above my largest girlfriend.   The first time I went to a clothing swap, years ago with my friend Courtney, ...

So I've been engaged for what feels like five minutes (I know, it's actually been a month, but I still refuse to believe I need to finish planning this budget-friendly wedding in the extremely budget-unfriendly Napa Valley in the next couple of months), and it will come as no surprise at all to most of you that my anxiety levels are riding high.  Not only am I in full-on panic mode about my guy's visa, and trying to keep a level head about planning this wedding spectacle from 5000 miles away, but tomorrow is my first dress trying-on day and I'm kind of freaking out. From what I understand ( from too many Say Yes to the Dress marathons ), wedding sizing is different from 'normal' clothing sizing – specifically, in a move that can only be motivated to make already-stressed brides-to-be feel even more anxious, wedding gowns are apparently made two sizes smaller than normal dresses.  So if you're a size 12 at Nordstrom, you'd be a 16 at Kleinfeld.  What. ...

The news has been so full of body-image- and obesity- and weight-related articles lately, to the point that I just haven't been able to keep up!  So in the spirit of the new year, and because the media interest in bodies/weight/health doesn't seem to be waning (so I'm sure I'll have plenty more material in the future), I'm cleaning house: here are all the articles I saved up in my email account in 2012 to write individual posts on, which I'm going to share instead through one big link-filled post.  I hope you find these links as interesting as I did (and still do)! This astoundingly brave young woman is doing a similar thing with a photo series to what I'm trying to achieve with the book – I can only hope I've produced something half as affecting and powerful as what she has created. Months ago I stumbled across this website with images of real women's bodies, sometimes accompanied by a paragraph or two about how these women feel about their ...

I'm wearing jeans today, for the first time since... I can't even remember. Spring, maybe? You guys know how big of a deal this is for me. I didn't want to do it, but it's 28 degrees in London right now and I can't even begin to describe how sick I am of tights and leggings. So I bit the bullet. The last time I tried on my jeans, I could barely button the 'normal' pair. The fat jeans I bought a little over a year ago, though, felt great. Only one problem: they're way too long! Which I don't remember being a problem when I first bought them... But it must have been, unless I've got the horrible shrinks. Anyway, that day I gave up and went for the leggings/dress combo again. But today, after I got my shit together and got the flat ready for our housekeeper, I only had 10 minutes to throw something on. So I held my breath, closed my eyes, and pulled on the 'normals'. And, amazingly, they fit! Ok, so they're ...

These days, curves are infinitely preferable to straight up-and-down body types.  Or so we're told.  But we're also told that said curves have to be wee and firm, taut and high, perfectly rounded and impeccably proportioned.  So all those curvy chicks out there, flaunting their J-Lo asses and Christina Hendricks breasts (DROOOL), and ostensibly shattering the myth of Twiggy, serve less to comfort me than as an even higher standard of sex appeal which I'll never reach. As a result, I often feel disappointed when I buy a dress I think looks great on me, only to see it on the model (or mannequin), with her (its) perfect, bounce-a-quarter-off-that-ass curves and realize that the dress only looks great on me in comparison to other items in my closet.  From a more objective, overall, survey-the-world sort of view, it looks just ok, mostly due to my many lumps and bumps, and my massive hips. BUT.  This past weekend, I was in New York with the bf, and he insisted on...

For a couple of years now, I’ve been a big fan of the TV show What Not To Wear.  I find Clinton adorable and Stacy just mean enough, and I almost always agree with their style choices (I seriously spend half the show trying to figure out where Stacy gets her dresses and shoes!).  And I was hooked for life when I realized that they’re not at all sizeist; they don’t even take sizes into account, almost like they’re wearing blinders to the number on the tag (fabric and fit take precedence). I think the moment I realized that my affection for Stacy and Clinton wasn’t just about the dresses (but OH the dresses!) was during an old episode with a woman named Kandis, who was more than usually obsessed with her size.  Within the first few hours of their tutorial, Stacy lost her patience with Kandis’s self-deprecation, and she said something that I thought was so interesting, I actually wrote it down verbatim (really, thank god for Tivo): “You know what worries me? You are only...

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...

Well, I promised you an update, but don’t come crying to me if it bores you. I have this dress. It’s adorable. I love it to pieces, not least because it has huge pockets and cost 8 pounds (Primark). But there’s a problem with the dress. Well, not with the dress; it’s with me. This dress, like so many of my favorite/hated dresses, is strapless. Now, putting aside for the moment the difficulty of finding a good, comfortable strapless bra, the issue is this: I have wings. Not just wings, but striped wings. Did anybody watch The Real World, Hollywood? If so, did you notice Joey’s fatty stretch marks? That’s what happens when you work out too much or you allow a tiny parasite to invade your uterus: you get silvery lines of ‘oh god WHY’ messages from your skin. Incidentally, it’s also what happens when you gain a ton of weight. And when you lose it, you keep the lines, as a sort of ‘fuck you’ lack of forgiveness from the body’s largest organ. Me, I have these things all over. Actu...