My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

“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...

“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, ...

As Jennifer Lawrence cried perfect, beautiful tears of rage onscreen, her home in ash and rubble around her, my gaze settled lower down on something inside the theater: my legs.   Tessa and I were sitting in the prime seats in the front row of the back section at the AMC, our feet propped up on the bar in front of us, and for the first time I could remember I had a moment of positive revelation; my legs are normal-sized , I thought, with so much surprise that the moment was instantly notable. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt abnormally large.   For much of my life, reality was at least mostly in line with this self-assessment – I was larger than average, or at least larger than any person I knew.   Later, as I got smaller, I still felt massive.   It took me years to force myself to believe that my idea of my body was out of proportion to how ‘freakish’ I actually was.   And even then, reality was often on the side of my ne...

--> One of the most difficult things about dating in the aftermath of my last relationship is the question of when to oh-so-casually mention THE WORST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME and how to paint it in an authentic but not terrifying light.   It’s complicated stuff: bring it up too early on or emphasize the trauma too much and I give the misleading impression that the betrayal still rules my life, but mention it too offhandedly or gloss over the pain I’m still working through and I give the equally inaccurate impression that I’m completely over it – or worse, that I wasn’t completely devastated because I didn’t invest my entire self into the relationship. It also brings up the complex issue of my self-confidence.   Nearly everyone assumes that my self-worth must have been completely shattered by what my ex did to me, but it wasn’t.   Which is kind of odd, given how fragile (at times almost non-existent) it was before.   Yet somehow, although the b...

For seven years, I’ve been in love with the same man.   It started as an insecure, whirlwind infatuation, then grew into serious affection and concern for his future happiness and well-being, and by this time five years ago I had stopped using every bad argument as an excuse to look up flights from London to San Francisco – convinced by his conviction over so many months, I was finally operating under the assumption that we would share our lives, or at least as much of them as we could bear to share before things got too hard.   A couple of years later I dropped the caveat.   I was all in: my future family became our future family, my dream home our dream home, my career plans inextricably linked with his, less flexible career plans. I did the one thing I’d always said I could never see myself doing: I gave myself over completely to another person.   I was proud of how little my pride had come to matter, after years of extending arguments in its favor; I was...

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 ...

Today is my 28th birthday.  That seems both really old and really familiar, due to my habit of saying I'm older than I am for a couple of months before my birthday makes it so.  Anyway, whether I'm old, young, or a 'spring chicken', as my BF calls me when I lament our age difference every year on his birthday (he just turned 25), I'm definitely exhausted.  The past couple of months have been manic: I started a new position at work, at essentially the exact same time that book publicity began in earnest, which meant interviews and photo shoots* and writing and tweeting and generally being much more involved in the world than usual, and on top of that came personal dramas and Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and the general year-end pressures we all face every year around this time.   Suffice it to say, my body and my heart and especially my brain are all knackered. So all I want for my birthday is a break, and for once in my life I'm doing my bes...

I've been thinking a lot about the gym lately, and not just because my body is falling apart and I know that lethargy is helping it along – the gym has been on my mind in part because of this article , in which Lindy West claims that to be a fat person at the gym takes courage.  Not only do fat gym-goers have to fight their own (possible) sluggishness, they also have to be prepared to defy the judgment of other gym-goers, who (West claims) look at their fat colleagues as motivational at best and disgusting at worst. I have to admit, I feel this way at certain gyms – usually disgusting rather than motivation, though – and it's one of the reasons I don't belong to a gym here in London (the other reason being that I straight-up can't afford it).  It's hard to find gyms where normal people make up the majority; almost every gym near me (Virgin, LA Fitness, etc) is very expensive and caters to a clientele that's image-obsessed, as a rule.  I'm hard-pressed to f...

I just watched an hour and a half long TV show on BBC called ' I Want to Change My Body ', which follows 30 young people who have different things about their bodies that they want to change, from their weight (obviously, since that's usually the #1 complaint), to their boobs or noses or skin or receding hairlines.  It basically validated what I've become more and more sure of in the past ten years: that nearly everyone has issues about something to do with his/her appearance, and a lot of us are tormented enough to take extreme measures (define extreme any way you like: surgery, juice fasts, obsessive makeup use) to try to 'fix' ourselves. The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch.  I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly n...

Ever since the book got picked up, I've found myself having to explain 'what it's about' to people on a regular basis (and yet I still haven't come up with a good one-liner, and inevitably end up mumbling my way through mentions of weight loss, surgery, and mental health / neuroses).  Most women get the point of the book pretty quickly, and often begin telling me their own stories or the stories of people (mostly women) they know who've struggled with weight or body image, but the men often glaze over a bit and kind of nod and smile – if the men in question happen to work in publishing, they might make a comment about marketability, but generally they just nod and let me do the talking.  I very rarely get any sort of instant relating of personal stories. Based on this divide in reactions to my own experience, it would be easy to assume that men don't have body image issues, or at the very least they don't have bad enough issues for it to affect their l...

Okay, I don't really get the obsession with the dancing/skating/dogwalking with the stars franchise, but I do read gossip blogs and they like to talk about these reality/competition shows, so I've sort of been watching things unfold.  So I've been aware of Kirsty Alley's big comeback, and I've been secretly rooting for her– after the rags have been all over her for her weight these past few years, I figure she probably needs a confidence boost (although maybe I'm projecting).  At the same time, though, I've been sort of holding my breath, waiting for Youtube to explode with videos of her falling and her thighs jiggling in slo-mo and all that terrible stuff people love to make viral. But as my favorite snarkblogger, Michael K , has put it, Kirsty is dancing her Thetans off !  She's been shaking it way harder (and way better) than a lot of the skinny bitches out there, and in a weird, detached, uninterested-in-her-up-to-now kind of way, I'm so prou...

Writing all these chapters about my life and my body is kind of intense.  Last week, I wrote about a panic attack I had over my body three years ago, and I could feel my pulse racing as I wrote it; re-living the experience actually made me have another mini-attack.  It's amazing how much I seem to have blocked from memory.  The smell of surgery recovery, the pain, both emotional and physical, that I've continuously put myself through in the fruitless pursuit of bodily normalcy... but I've forgotten good things as well. Today I was writing about my recovery from plastic surgery, specifically abdominoplasty and brachioplasty (arms).  And I was remembering the horrible, excruciating pulling at my stomach, and the fear that if I made one wrong move my belly would split open and all my insides would tumble out.  But I was also surprised to remember how happy I was after those surgeries, and how confident. The accompanying lipo made me retain so much water, I wa...

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...

So as I think I may have mentioned, I have to write a book for my MA in Creative Nonfiction, and I decided to write a memoir about this whole GB experience, including childhood stuff and family dynamics in addition to the process of surgery and the mental and physical results of the change.  I thought it would be so easy.  I mean, I spend 90% of my time thinking about my body anyway, how hard could it be to put those thoughts down in the form of an interesting, structured narrative? NOT, that's how easy.  I haven't written one single word of the book, and I'm having a really hard time starting.  And the longer I put it off, the more afraid I am of failing at my goal to write a funny, frank narrative; I'm terrified it'll end up as a 'poor me' memoir, and I'll have proven my dad right in saying that this project is self-indulgent and useless.  And that's not the only surprise stumbling block... When I tell people what I'm writing about, they al...

This is how I look today: No makeup, moderate VPL, okay hair, sunburned nose. But every time I looked in the mirror this morning I felt pretty good. I’m not saying I saw no flaws; I saw a few, and I even identified them aloud to myself. But then I immediately identified the good stuff, and I made sure I ended on that positive note. And, lo and behold, at least half of the men I passed on the way to the park this afternoon took a second look. A few even smiled at me! So maybe I look better than I give myself credit for, but I have a feeling it has more to do with that little extra swing in my hips, and that easy smile on my lips. Maybe confidence really is key. Or maybe it’s just that Frowny McWorryalot is kind of unattractive. Noted, men of London. Thanks for the smiles today. PS For anyone who actually reads these things, let it be known that I have integrated pilates into my workout routine and decided not to be so hard on myself. Fuck sticktoitiveness, I'd rather just b...