My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

View this post on Instagram The benefit of being trapped in a chair for an hour while liquid iron drips slowly into my anemic veins: nothing to do but work on my book! #amrevising #forcedwritingtime #mybodyisanoldjalopy A post shared by Anne H. Putnam (@ahputnam) on Nov 8, 2019 at 11:24am PST Even though I warned her, my new doctor was still startled by my iron levels. “The low end of normal is nearly twice this number,” she insisted, educating me even as I nodded along – I knew this already. “Last time it was a point lower,” I told her, but she (like most people) didn’t seem to care how bad it used to be. She cared about getting me healthy now. “People get blood transfusions around these numbers.” I raised my eyebrows in surprise – not mock, but a bit exaggerated, trying to give her the reaction I felt she was after. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but rather that my anemia had been a concern f...

“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...

The minute I clicked ‘Enter’ I knew I’d done something incredibly stupid.   How could I have been taken in by an Instagram ad, for anything , let alone diet pills ?   I felt disgusted with myself, even as the disgust mingled with an unmistakable tinge of excitement and curiosity – surely after more than twenty-five years of experience with diet culture bullshit, and at least a decade of continuous counter-culture reprogramming, I must know better?   But, well...knowing better didn’t stop me.   I figured five bucks was a cheap price for a very unlikely potential payoff. I went to lie down on our hotel bed with my boyfriend, who was zoned out in front of his own phone, half-listening to an episode of The Simpsons and trying to digest all the rich food we’d been eating on our trip to New Orleans.   I didn’t want to admit what I’d done; I knew he would be disappointed in me, and frustrated with my continued negative body image.   We’ve discussed it a hundr...

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...

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...

My head fills with blood, pumping in a rapid thud, thud in my ears.  My shoulders and wrists ache, my hands are slipping toward the front of my mat, and my hamstrings refuse to budge further as I attempt to 'ground my heels'.  The bead of sweat that slipped down between my breasts during an earlier pose is now creeping back up my sternum, sliding past my throat and up behind my ear into my hair.  All I can think is how much longer, how many more breaths, oh right, breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth, breathe into the pose and try to relax because the next one will probably kill us. "Don't forget to relax your jaw."  The tall, handsome yoga teacher's big paddle feet go past the edge of my visual field.  I try to remain in the moment but I can't help cracking a grin.  He's been telling us to relax our jaws periodically throughout this class and every time I react internally like a 13 year old boy.  Same deal when he has us open our hips...

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...