My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

--> “The holidays are a difficult time for almost everybody,” my therapist tells me, “let alone someone who’s been through the trauma you’ve experienced.”   I know her job is, in part, to validate my feelings, and she does, but I also seethe at the thought that I’ve become a cliché, moping through the sparkle and cheer of Christmas and New Years, alone and miserable about it. When I was single, in my life before him, I didn’t feel crappy about the holidays.   In fact, I really liked them.   I was still young enough to consider my parents and siblings as my ‘main’ family, and to me Christmas was about spending time with them, getting and giving gifts and eating plenty of deliciously unhealthy food while the colored tree lights bathed the house in a particularly Christmassy glow and Sinatra sang old holiday classics in the background.   Being with or without a boyfriend seemed like a tangential thing: it was a bonus if I had someone to kiss under the mi...

“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 ...

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...

... but the dude over at Egotastic has finally posted photos of someone above a size 2.*  Not only that, he defends her hotness against those people who would say she's too fat to be attractive in a bikini!  AND since the blog doesn't have a comments section, I can just pretend that's the end of it.  No trolls!  Hooray huzzah and yippeeee! That is all.** * Yes, I'm aware she's probably still only a size 6 or something, but just let me have my moment anyway. **Okay, yes, I am aware that I haven't posted in forever .  There's a post-in-waiting about my recent trip to Mexico (and bikinis), but this was more pressing, and less work, so you'll just have to wait for the mexico post.

A couple of hours ago, I was lying in bed with my boyfriend, making out etc, and he whispered in my ear "your body drives me crazy."  Not only did I not respond by arching my back and grinning at him, the way I should have, but the way I did respond is just SO classic.  I sort of faux-smiled (cha grinned , as I like to call it), and said "that makes two of us." God, what a mood killer, eh?!  If it weren't for my boyfriend's persistance I would have just given up.  And to be honest, sometimes I do.  I don't write about sex much on this blog, I guess because it's one of very few subjects I'm not quite comfortable throwing out there into the internet, but I'm beginning to think I ought to change that.  After all, the bedroom (or the living room, or the kitchen, or the airplane bathroom, etc) is the one place where (in most cases) we can't hide our bodies behind clothes or under water. It's also one of the few places where sarcasm...

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...