My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

When my ex and I were together, I used to joke (or, honestly, wrap the truth in a joking tone that fooled no one) about how after we had kids I’d probably need “a re-up” on my gastric bypass surgery. I was terrified of regaining the weight I’d lost – I’d already regained about 20 lbs, give or take another 15 on any given day, and I knew from reading about longer-term GB patients that it was common for them to regain all of the weight, even going over their original weight in a sort of pendulum reaction. This is true of diets in general: they screw up your metabolism and cause more gain than loss in the long term. So why any of us should imagine that literally starving ourselves would lead to long-term, maintainable weight loss, I’m not sure. But despite all my jokes, I was in no way prepared to actually face the reality that science told me was coming. But I’m coming up against it now. I haven’t regained all the weight (yet), but I’ve been steadily getting larger – a combin...

Wowwwwww I have owed you all an update on my anemia for a long time, and yet that’s not even what I came here to write about – let’s blame the pandemic/police brutality/election/wildfires/general apocalyptic nature of 2020 for any distraction or slackery on my part.   First, the update: the second round of infusions WORKED and my iron levels are GOOD and I can actually WALK UP A FLIGHT OF STAIRS WITHOUT FEELING DIZZY and if the all-caps don’t express it well enough I’ll just say outright that I AM SO RELIEVED. Of course, it’s not over yet, because we don’t know if/how quickly I’ll drop back into anemia – my levels are already lower by about 2/3 just three months after the initial post-infusion test – but for the moment I’m back to being human, and that is an amazing feeling.   Now, the thing I came here to write about, which is not so good: I’ve been backsliding pretty badly into negative body image, and that’s due in large part to the fact that my body itse...

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...

It’s been on my TeuxDeux list for months now, just rolling over to the next day and the next. Every time I open my laptop or check the app to make sure I’m on top of schoolwork and life admin, it’s staring at me: make appt with bariatric dr. When I can’t take it anymore I move it ahead a few days, manually, telling myself I’ll do it when things are calmer or the apartment is quieter or it stops raining… These excuses are bunk, of course – for one thing, a Pacific-Northwesterner* should never wait to do anything until the rain stops. But I’ve been putting it off, because I’m scared. I’m terrified that I’ll be weighed and measured and found…what’s the opposite of wanting? Overabundant? I’m afraid I’ll succumb to pressure and tacitly agree that the weight is the problem, not my attitude about it (or my hoped-for response, the whole reason I’m going to a bariatric doctor at all: that my post-GB body processes food and exercise differently and there’s some key element I’m missing...

“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...

When I told my brother I was counting calories, a vulnerable admission of defeat, he reacted just as I should have expected: he rolled his eyes, sighed as if he was exhausted by my weight struggles, and told me “don’t be mom!   Just be balanced.”   As if it were that easy.   I made the mistake, at first, of trying to explain that after years of balance and reasonably steady weight, I was no longer stable and I felt the need to do something drastic to try to reign in my body; I gave up pretty quickly, after multiple interruptions and dismissals. It’s not that my brother is insensitive – he’s actually more sensitive than most dudes and most of my family, not that that’s saying much – but he doesn’t have a lot of patience for any kind of struggle to which he doesn’t relate.   Worse are the struggles he thinks he relates to, like weight.   A few years ago he felt he was getting ‘tubby’ and so he cut out junk food and cut back on carbs and started doi...

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...

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...

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'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 had a little breakdown over my body, the kind that's bad enough to make me cry, but not bad enough to completely incapacitate me.  And when I got up, wiped off my face, and set about bustling to take my mind off my thunder thighs, I realized it had been a pretty long time since I'd cried over my size. I don't mean that I've been particularly happy with my body lately – on the contrary, I've been far too inactive, physically, and far too lax about snacking and such, and as a result I've been feeling a bit like a blob.  But I've been too busy to dwell on it, really.  I'm working a lot , and thinking about the book process, and trying to be more social and spend more time with my boyfriend (we had a period of not seeing each other much and it was hard on our relationship), and I just haven't had time to indulge my negative thoughts much.  I mean, I've had them, a lot of them, but then something else has come up and I've had to re-focus....

Last night, after I posted about the BBC Horizons program on obesity, I got an email from a reader who needed help understanding the gastric bypass surgery and what it might be able to do for her.  She had been emotionally overeating for thirteen years, since suffering a devastating loss, and she wanted to know if the GB could really change her desires for junk food, as the BBC program suggested.  In case anyone else wants a more detailed response on this, I've posted my response here: Hi, I've found that the gastric bypass has altered my desire for crap food, but I would say it mostly has to do with behavioral conditioning – every time I eat something very rich or sweet, I get really sick, and after a while I started feeling sick just smelling certain things.  Kind of like when someone gets really drunk on rum and never touches it again.  So it's effective, but not very nice, and I have to admit there are always going to be times when your desire for a fo...

A friend of mine emailed me last night, suggesting I watch the latest episode of BBC 2's 'Horizon', because it dealt with the issue of Gastric Bypass.  But when I started watching it this evening, I realized that really, it deals mostly with obesity – how and why it exists, and what we should do about it – and Gastric Bypass plays a large part in the last third of the program. In all honesty, as I started watching, my immediate reaction was rage and righteous indignation.  Gabriel Weston, the thin, blond, female surgeon who hosts the show announces at the very beginning that for her entire life (including the ten years in which she's been practicing medicine) she has operated under the 'assumption [...] that I am the size I am because of my character'.  Now, not only is that a particularly smug way of putting it, there is a serious problem with the underlying message: that fat people are fat simply because they are lazy and eat too much.  They don't have ...