My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

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...

Weight loss surgery is controversial.  This isn't news.  But what you may not realize is that it's not just controversial among thin or 'normal' people, but in the fat community as well. Whenever I visit any sort of 'fat acceptance' website, I'm always startled by the attitude toward GB and surgeries like it (WLS, in short form).  Today, I came across this interesting article on being a 'Smaller Fat' – the strange limbo that those of us who are BMI-defined as obese but who look 'normal' enough to pass – and I was all set to write a post about the main article.  But then I read the comments. One commenter talked about the strong support system she had at her workplace in the medical profession, where people understand that BMI isn't everything and fat people should be understood instead of tormented.  Lovely, right?  But then, in a parenthetical aside, she mentions that one of her supporters is a doctor who "had to autopsy a bunc...

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...