An Update and Being the Same Me

The experiment is going pretty well. The first week I gained a pound and a half, the second week I stayed the same, and the third week I lost two pounds. More importantly, I'm entirely angst free. It's really nice not to be even a tiny bit stressed about my food choices. I would bet that I'm eating pretty close to the same stuff in the same amounts as I was when I was tracking. Go figure.

Saturday I'm going to visit friends and family in California. Most of them I haven't seen in over a year, which means they haven't seen me in over a year. As it is commonly spoken and written, most people would be really excited and happy anticipating the unveiling of a body 73 pounds thinner. I hear I am supposed to relish the compliments and attention and be proud of what I've achieved and whatnot. I'm actually pretty anxious about it. I haven't told anyone I'm losing weight. It's not a secret, exactly, but I feel weird about it. I have such conflicted feelings about the concept of dieting and about involving myself in the diet industry, so I don't love talking about that. I also hate how the whole world seems to be having a constant conversation about having lost weight, wanting to lose weight, regretting cookies, wanting donuts, wishing they had time to exercise, hating exercise, being virtuous for eating salad and bad for skipping the gym. I don't want to engage in that conversation and I don't know how to casually tell my father or my childhood friends that I've been losing weight for the last 13 months and that they should expect me to look pretty different. So then when they see me they'll be shocked, which just draws more attention that I don't want. I don't want to talk to everyone I see about how I lost weight or even to accept compliments if they're giving them. Each of them will only have that conversation once, but I'm having it all the time with strangers as well as friends. It makes me tired.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with an old, dear friend who is local, but whom I don't see often. I'm sure she noticed that I've lost weight -- I am aware that I look pretty wildly different, though it makes me uncomfortable -- but she managed to show no sign of it. She treated me exactly as she always has. We ate together, we took a walk, we had a conversation about our gym memberships and she just treated me like me. It was deeply comforting. That's what I want from everyone, really. I don't think my weight loss should be interesting to anyone but me. I care about losing weight. I think about what I'm eating. I want to be thinner, to look better, to buy cuter clothes. All of that is a big deal to me, but I don't want it to be a big deal to anyone else. I just want them to be with me exactly as they've always been. I wish I could send a memo ahead of me explaining that...

What I mean when I say Love

I love my body. No, seriously. I don't mean it's perfect or that I never look at myself and cringe about something -- the size of my belly or a pimple, new wrinkles, hair growing where I don't need hair -- I'm vain enough and I have plenty of room for negative body image -- I don't think anyone escapes that entirely. What I mean is, I love my body like I love my family and my dearest friends and my city and my car. They are all flawed. They all have qualities that drive me crazy and make me hate them momentarily. They are limited, which is frustrating. But the core of the relationship stays strong. Deep down in my heart, I want my body to be happy. I love that it carries me around all day. I am proud of how strong it is. I am amazed at its resiliency, its ability to heal itself. It gives me pleasure. And sometimes I am blown away by its beauty. All that makes me want to treat my body well. It makes me happy to nourish my body well, to allow it to rest, to take it out for runs and yoga classes. I am forgiving when I see an ugly side or am slowed down by its limitations. I forgive it when it causes me pain.

I feel that I was taught for so much of my life to hate my body, to want it to be different, to fight to change it. And that never inspired me to treat it well. Loving my body right now, is what allows me to change it. If I were hating it now, or hating it as it was a year ago, in order to will it to be different at some point in the future, I wouldn't treat it with kindness. I wish that when people talked about losing weight or striving for better health, they spoke more about loving your body, loving your self, and being kind.

Do I really have to talk about this?

I'm afraid I do.

I don't usually get into other pieces of my life here, but it's all twisted up in body stuff, so I will. I'm single and heterosexual. I do the online dating thing. I don't particularly like it, but I don't really have other places to meet men, so it's what I do. One of the horrifying things about online dating is that you can see right there in black and white that many, many men are very specific about what you need to look like to date them. Mostly, they don't want you to be fat. Some of them want to date someone between 5" and 6" but not over 130 pounds. Do they know what 130 pounds would look like on a 6" woman. Well, obviously not, since she'd be dead. Anyway, they're not all like that and while it does hurt my feelings sometimes, I am also aware that (at every size I've been) I am like most people in the world: some people will find me attractive and some people won't. Frankly, I have no interest in dating someone who doesn't find me attractive.

Only this weird things is happening where my body is changing and I look different and I had this online profile with a picture of me (a picture I like -- wind is blowing my hair in my face and I am laughing at something my little sister is telling me and I look like myself) and it no longer represents what I look like. So I changed the picture. I posted the one I mentioned awhile back. It's a nice picture. I am laughing at my nephew. I look like myself. And I suppose I look more accurately like myself now.

A few days ago, someone wrote to me, asked if I wanted to chat, said he'd like to know more about me. I'm usually wary when they don't say anything more specific than that, but I looked at his profile and he actually sounded like someone I'd like -- we had some interests in common, he sounded like a grown-up, he sounded kind -- so I said hello, mentioned that we had the same favorite book and said, "Ask me anything." He responded by asking me out to coffee. Sure. I'm all about a face-to-face meeting. I believe you learn very little by corresponding with someone you haven't met. So we made a plan to meet tomorrow morning and he asked if I'd send him another picture, "...just to be on the safe side." I assumed he wanted to be sure he recognized me. But then I had this dilemma: I don't have another recent picture. I have a handful of pictures I've used before -- the one that shows me laughing at my sister and two or three others -- but in all of them I am somewhere between 25 and 50 pounds heavier than I am now. I look different. And apparently the way in which I look different is a big deal to a lot of men. Ugh. I am at the same time vain, wanting to send a picture of me right now, not just thinner but fitter, happier, more at ease in my skin -- I think all of those things make a difference --and I am resentful that it makes a difference. I like those older pictures. I think I look good in them. Why should I not send a picture in which I look good? In any case, I didn't have the option of another new picture, so I sent an older one. In it, I'm about 25 pounds heavier than I am now, which is about 18 pounds heavier than I was in the picture he's already seen. I refused to mention the change in my size, but I did say that I didn't have another recent picture and that this one was a few years old.

I got an email from him ten minutes later: "I've changed my mind, sorry. Good luck."

I feel so icky about the whole thing. I mean, he's being horribly rude. No one has ever done that to me before in years and years of online dating. And I find it odd that anyone could take a picture so seriously -- I've done this enough to know that people just look different in person. I never know if I'm attracted to someone until I meet him. Part of me, even though I now hate this man and would never want to date him, is still insulted and kind of hurt. I don't like to think of myself as so unattractive that I'm not worth an hour in a coffee shop. I don't like to think that someone would find me attractive now or sometime in the future when I'm thinner than I am now, but would be repelled by a photo of me taken 25 pounds ago. I absorb that. I feel shame. I hate that I can still feel that.

Dangerous Leaps

I realize I'm making up for lost time, here. Blogging is new to me, as are the changes happening to my body, and sometimes I'm not quite up to looking either one in the face.

I've lost a little over 50 pounds, now. I weigh about 200, depending on at what hour I step on the scale. 200 was my goal for the end of October, so getting there a month ahead is a bit startling. It's not just a number -- I seem to have leapt forward all at once. I lost more than 6 pounds in two weeks. All of a sudden, none of my clothes fit. Nothing. I had to buy new bras (and I know I'm not the first to say this, but I did not sign up for losing a cup size!) I had neither time nor money to go clothes shopping, but I had to do it anyway. And people started noticing. I lost 20 and 30 and 40 pounds and pretty much no one said anything -- a couple people thought I was tan or had cut my hair or something. But in the last two weeks, everywhere I go, people are commenting on my weight loss -- my co-workers, who I've seen every day all along (including one person who never speaks to me), friends I hadn't seen in awhile, friends I see all the time. And suddenly, I feel like I'm walking around in a different body. It's not entirely comfortable. It's weird. Maybe a little scary. Weight loss is a loss. Part of me, a big 50 pound chunk of me is gone now (and where did it go? seriously, I'd like to know) and that frightens me in ways I don't entirely understand.

This week, after losing 6 pounds so quickly, I actually tried to eat a little more -- I was never starving myself. I always ate all my daily Weight Watchers points and a few more due to all the working out. I have always indulged here and there in pizza and cupcakes. But this week, I did a little more indulging. I ate heavy dinners Monday and Tuesday nights when I had friends visiting from out of town. I found myself craving heavy food on Wednesday and ate several mini-chocolate bars at work, plus lots of after dinner snacks. I was in a grumpy mood all day Friday and ordered greasy Chinese food for dinner. Now, Monday and Tuesday, I was deliberately relaxing, allowing, even urging myself to eat more because I wasn't comfortable with my rapid weight loss. But the second half of the week the indulging has felt more emotional, a little out of control. Part of me wonders if this is where I will start sabotaging myself.

Once before I lost about this much weight and stopped right here. Here as in October. Here as in 200 pounds. This might be the place I'm afraid to go past. But I do feel different this time. The few people who know I'm trying to lose weight will occasionally say that I'm working so hard. It doesn't feel like it. I hear that and it sounds wrong and I point out that I'm not doing anything I'm not happy with. I love working out. I'm happy, really, entirely happy with my food -- happy with the veggies, happy that I'm able to do pizza and cupcake just often enough, and happy that I'm not hungry. And that feels different. It's hard to sabotage something like that.

The other thing is, I don't feel so alone. I have always felt really alone with my food/body struggles. My friends are thin, and mostly have pretty healthy relationships with food and their bodies (and I'm kind of proud that I've gravitated toward people like this). My sisters are thin, as is my mother. My mother has not been helpful -- I'll write about this some other day. So whether I've been frustrated with my size or working at trying to change it, I've always felt I was in that alone. My body, my issues, nothing anyone else could help with or understand. It felt lonely, and feeling lonely makes me want to eat cookies. It was trying to get away from that loneliness that inspired me both to join Weight Watchers (which as you know I have mixed feeling about) and to hire my trainer. Going to Weight Watchers meetings is helpful. I haven't made friends, have rarely spoken to anyone outside of group discussions, but I feel them there, working on the same stuff, and that helps. And my trainer just rocks. It helps that he's all about getting me in shape, getting me stronger, and not about denying me food or making me thinner. I like focusing on strength. And I like knowing he's there. Yesterday I was at the gym on my own, not paying him for a session, and he snuck up behind me (not hard to do, as I take off my glasses and put on my headphones when I work out) and raised the incline on my treadmill. I growled at him, but kept the incline where it was and kept running. I was thinking about it all day and smiling. I realize the reason it made me so happy was because it felt like someone was watching out for me. It felt safe.

Being a work in progress

I'm finding it very roller coaster-y to be in the middle of losing weight. I've lost almost 35 pounds now, which is enough to feel really different. This is especially true given that I've been working out a lot and doing strength training for the first time ever. My body is different. I feel different. I spend a lot of time lying in bed at night feeling around at my muscles in places where I wasn't able to feel muscles before. It's fascinating and thrilling.

And then sometimes I look in the mirror and remember that I'm still really fat. I'm not self-depricating here. I weigh 219 pounds, which makes me obese according to BMI charts and abnormally huge according to the fashion industry. I still have 80 or so pounds to lose. Mostly I'm not in a rush. This is a good pace -- I'm losing an average of two pounds a week, which is plenty. But it's hard to place myself. It's hard to feel where I am now while I am still and constantly changing (and of course, not changing -- I continue to be Me, which is a comfort and a delight as well as a frustration).

Stats, a mission statement, and a piece of history

When I hear someone else's story about being fat, losing weight, gaining weight, I want stats, so I'll start with stats. I'm 36, 5'4", and currently 224 pounds. At my heaviest, (most recently in March of this year) I was 253 pounds. Once, several years ago, my size 24 jeans were getting too small for me. Right now I usually wear an 18.

After a lifetime of being fat and several years of losing and gaining weight with a lot of ambivalence, I am now losing again, and trying not to get smaller in the process. On this blog, I'll be trying to work out my ambivalence.

A good place to start is the incident that inspired my blog's name. About twelve years ago, I had a brief medical scare (all is and was well, so I'll not go into details) which was traumatic in and of itself, and which led to an appointment with an endocrinologist who, (winning the award for worst doctor ever) poked at me, answered no questions, and then said, "There should be less of you."

Afterward, I managed to not go to any doctor for three or four years and to gain probably fifty pounds. As someone who has always been overweight, I have always felt self-conscious about how much space I take up, but I have never, in my most insecure moments believed there should be less of me. Me is good. Fat, maybe is bad. Maybe there should be less fat. But in one brusque, offhand prescription, this overpaid asshole defined me as my fat and told me not to exist.

When I've lost weight in the past few years, usually stalling at about 200-215 pounds, I have struggled with the fact that by intentionally losing weight, intentionally changing my body, I am somehow admitting that my body (and thus me) is and has always been wrong. That pisses me off to no end. It makes the process of losing weight all about hating myself, which I don't.

So I am here, losing weight again and trying to figure out how to keep going, how to enjoy my body right now, as it is changing, rather than feeling that it's a bad thing I need to fix or get rid of.