My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

A lot has happened since my last post, and yet little has changed. My body still feels… alien to me in a way it hasn’t since my mid-twenties; I still haven’t seen a doctor (I actually did try, a lot, but it seems that post-GB follow-up is not something bariatric doctors are willing to do with people they haven’t sliced open personally); and I’m still struggling to find the balance between making healthy choices, like getting more cardio in, and making my peace with the changes in my body. One thing that has changed is my state of unemployment. Since we moved to Washington I’ve been in a kind of limbo where my career is concerned – you can read more about the writing side of that over on the author blog , but besides that I’ve been unsure what to do about a day job. The ultimate goal is teaching at the college level, but while I work on that I’ve been living off savings, and as I’m sure you can imagine that is unsustainable. So I picked up part-time w...

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...

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,...

I just finished a yoga/pilates/ballet workout, and I felt the need to vent. I feel like yoga is supposed to make me more centered, more peaceful and one with my body, etc. And it does, when I can manage to not look at myself while I’m doing it. But when I do succumb to the temptation to look at my body in the poses, as I usually do, I feel the opposite of what I should. Instead of peace and harmony I feel rage and frustration. This is especially true during downward dog, when I can’t help but look at my legs, the contracted thigh muscles lost under a rippling, hanging sea of excess flesh. I know, I know, I shouldn’t do yoga in shorts (or undies and a tee, which is usually my lazy at-home workout outfit). But it seems to me that covering up the problem is only a short-term solution. Of course, staring furiously at the problem and fucking up my chakra (or whatever) doesn’t seem like any sort of solution at all. What I really want is a quick-fix (or a slow, guaranteed fix), but I do...

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...

Tonight, I lost it. I was supposed to go to a friend's house for dinner (and eat some very comforting Jewish food), and half an hour before I was due at the Caltrain station I made the mistake of getting dressed. Now, it's really cold right now in SF, so I had to put on tights. This doesn't usually concern me too much, but when I put on my go-to pink dress (the one I'm wearing in that photo in the earlier post, about how confident I was), it was tight. And not good tight. I looked disgusting. All of a sudden, when I looked in the mirror, all I could see was fat, rolling and spilling like a lidless latte in an SUV. And so I lost it. I went back to a mentality I do my best to avoid; I was furious, disgusted, and, worse, hopeless. I wanted to break the mirror. I actually wanted to scream, or throw things, or punch a wall. Another part of me just wanted to crawl into bed and give up. Mostly I just cried. The worst part was that I had to cancel on my friends. This...