By the time I look up and realize I’ve gained 100 pounds, it hurts to move. And because it hurts, I do it less than I should. And because I avoid it, it hurts. Another loop in this life of mine. While my physical body has always felt aged beyond my years, extra weight has exacerbated chronic pain. At 30, I am something ancient and rusted over, with joints that feel like they haven’t been oiled. I now live in a body that creaks and drags and moves at a pace that may make one think it’s not the sort of thing that’s supposed to move fast.
I attribute the weight gain to the fact that my brain is wired to be excessive, obsessive and comfort seeking. This, being that I am also a consumer of the Standard American Diet, has only naturally led to a case of obesity. While many used the pandemic as a time to get acquainted with Youtube workouts and long walks outside, and I did some of this, I mostly got really comfortable on the couch. It was a rock bottom that had been beckoning to me for my entire life, with bipolar depression foreshadowing a years-long slumber in my future; a deep, deep sleep that could only be rivaled by death itself. After I reported The Affair, lost my job, and alienated my family, the siren call of the couch rose to that fateful octave, a height for which it was always destined. It was undeniable. And along with years lost to the couch, there was food. Ready to make me whole where I was empty.
Under the cloak of my new body, I have become invisible. Ironically, the larger I get, the smaller I feel. The less I matter in a society that has decided thin equals beautiful. And that beautiful equals worthy. I come from a sensitive, supportive tribe of women who would never shame me for my body. But the invisibility descends upon me, still. It happens in moments when the Uber driver mistakes me for the mother of the group. When strangers see middle age in the breadth of my hips and the expanse of my belly. This is my disappearing act. I have, I think, begun to accept this reality that is not only visible, but internal, with aching joints adding years to this body of mine. I find myself making remarks like “I’m an old lady” to co-workers who I fear wonder why I walk so slowly through the hallways. Or “I’ve got arthritis” (I don’t) to would-be lovers who shouldn’t dare expect that I perform impressively.
But I am young. At least, I used to be.
I mourn the body that I lived in when I starved myself under the umbrella term of “intermittent fasting,” going anywhere from 8 hours to four days without food — a physique that was celebrated by all who surrounded me. My weight loss was their gain; they got the chance to marvel at my beauty and feel a part of it. Since gaining back the 40 pounds I lost from fasting - plus 60 more - I often reminisce about being the center of attention. Nearly five years out from that brief period in my life, I can laugh at the absurdity of this grief. Still, it speaks volumes about our society. Over the years, I’ve often vented to loved ones about nostalgic times from The Before, when cashiers and strangers sharing the park trail would smile at me and strike up conversation. It was not uncommon for them to ask me if I modeled, and treat me with a familiarity that I knew I hadn’t earned. Conventional beauty is the kind of spell-binding, tentacled thing that draws others in, allowing them to feel that their proximity to it is a reflection of who they are, too. All of the people who celebrated me were not thin or conventionally attractive, but they could revel in my beauty – they could remember the days where they possessed the same magnetism, or, even better, fantasize about days to come when they may feel inspired enough to claim beauty for themselves. To sweat and pray and starve as I had. Conventional beauty is something to aspire to, to obsess over.
And the celebration wasn’t just limited to my social interactions. It was communicated subliminally, too. After a lifetime of dressing room meltdowns, at 24, the shopping mall finally met me with a warm embrace. I could walk into nearly any store and fit into the clothes on the rack. This offered me a sense of unbound freedom to explore my love for fashion, lifting the lid on my potential and exposing me to the expanse of open sky. I could be the girl I had always wanted to be. The thin, beautiful, desirable version of myself that I had longed to reach since I was a young girl.
For as long as I can remember, I have been waiting for the day when I would be thin. In hindsight, I can see how my identity has revolved around it. And I had help developing this identity. There were the little girl bullies who, receiving the same messaging as I had, would tell me that I was one cheeseburger away from being fat. Only 12 at the time, I still remember her exact words. They told me that I would have the perfect body, if only I lost my stomach. I feel the need to emphasize the fact that I was not a fat child. Not because it gives my story more credibility, but because it shines a light on the insidious nature of narrow beauty standards – impossible to reach and yet close enough to cast shadows, our own personal rainclouds.
Even though fatness evaded me as a child, the 100 pound weight gain had been a long time coming.
I have always been an over-eater. But when I was safe within the confines of my childhood home, my greatest triggers, boredom and depression, were at least somewhat managed. The feeling of emptiness that lives inside me, begging to be filled by sex or love or food or thrill was, in my childhood, satisfied by intimate family connections and routine. My grades were still lower than my best, and my attitude was defiant and hateful, but, in hindsight, I was much happier than I would be in my college years. Years I spent my entire childhood longing for, only for them to be defined by sadness and isolation. The collegiate reality, I childishly thought, of not having to sneak around the back of the house to smoke my bowl, or climb through a window to meet my “friends,” excited me. Then I’ll be happy, I thought. Then I’ll be free.
But the indiscriminate independence offered by undergrad was a noose with which I would hang myself – a slow death, that would see me saved again and again, until the consequences of my eating would finally catch up to me at 29. I’ve never seen numbers like this, my doctor would say into the phone, shocked by my insulin levels and cholesterol and blood pressure and the story that they told about me.
Back in my early 20s, on late nights alone, I would order large pizzas from Papa Johns and eat them all alone in my dorm. Many nights I didn’t have leftovers. There were no parents around to stop it. No parents around to protect me. There were no parents around to fill this emptiness that was my default – my defect – so I ate.
The depression eventually became too crippling and I decided to leave campus at the end of freshman year. But not before sleeping through my final exams, binging on Grey’s Anatomy reruns, an assortment of chocolate candies, and other junk foods I stocked up on from the dining hall food mart, so I didn’t have to leave my door room to eat. For the entire Spring semester of my freshman year, I sat in my room and I ate. At the time, my metabolism could keep up with the onslaught, keeping me at a taut 175 pounds, only slightly up from the 157 that I stressed and sacrificed and strove for before going away to school, terrified that if I didn’t hit the 150s, I wouldn’t have any “wiggle room” for the freshman 15.
Of course, at 175, I thought I was fat, as I always had. I remember looking at a picture I took with my boyfriend at the time, Steve, and complaining about my weight. Instead of reassuring me that I wasn’t fat, offering those magic words that every body dysmorphic girl and woman wants to hear as often as she can, he shrugged and offered me something more. “So what?” Back in 2015, Steve’s perspective was wise beyond our years. I, along with every other girl of the Kardashian age – and all the ages before them – thought fat was the worst thing a girl could be. And instead of validating that belief with reassurance that I wasn’t, he encouraged me to think beyond these prisms of fat and skinny, in order to see the beauty that I was. His was one of the only tender loves that I’ve known. And his vantage point was one that I would come to adopt much later, when intermittent fasting would fail me and I would end up 100 pounds heavier than my lowest weight. Indeed, these words came back to me when I mourned the woman who fit into the clothes on the rack and commanded the acceptance of strangers: the girl who finally had the confidence to carve out her own place in the world. I may have been in a relationship with a married man, but at least I wasn’t afraid to love. In fact, I was arrogant and naive enough to think myself entitled to it. In the Before Times, I wouldn’t dare make myself so small, as if to be easily missed in a room full of people. Indeed, after I gained the weight I would learn to hate myself. To subconsciously assume that others hated me, too. And maybe they did. And maybe I always had. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy to stay stuck, lodged under the weight of my depression and chronic pain, neither mind nor body offering sanctuary.
Fat was something I had been running from since I was a young girl. Fat was something to hate. And though I wasn’t fat as a child, I wasn’t thin. With hips and ass and thighs from the time I was 12, I was a girl with the body of a woman. In hindsight, I’m sure that is what made me fat in my head, along with messaging from the dominant society. I would spend my entire childhood trying to lose weight. The image I saw reflected back to me distorted as a fun house mirror, offering only fractured depictions of me. All of that worrying, only to look back in mourning for the girl who lived as if she was fat before her time would come. Before my body would become sweaty and chafing and impossible to move, with pockets of fat sprouting where they never lived before. As I write this, I am 243 pounds. A number that I must repeat and repeat and repeat for fear that if I hide it from myself any longer I will never get my life back.
We all hide things from ourselves, locking them away behind the steel doors of a compartmentalized mind. Just as I hid how much I was eating from others, I hid it from myself. Scarfing food down quickly, as to avoid having to acknowledge my filling stomach, or immediately disposing of fast food containers – into the trash, deep in the closet, beneath the bed – rather than having to survey the results of my binge. Or avoiding the mirror. Deciding that the dryer had shrunk my clothes. I hid.
My life has been on hold since I gained the weight, or at least it feels that way. I’ve worked and written and joined different social clubs and abandoned them. But I haven’t been confident or well dressed – I haven’t been happy. I say this with a matter of factness that harkens back to a time when I was well dressed. It was an elated mania that I had never known – having my way in online stores and shopping malls – and that I have not known since. But it was also something more. It was permission to be the girl that lived in my head – to be my full self. I remember the woman who, at 24, fell in love with a married man in the mania of that new body confidence. And in some moments, I miss her. She was alive. Today, there is life blood in my veins, but that morbid lullaby in my heart – seducing me to sleep as many waking hours as I can.
But the truth is, I am choosing this life of hibernation. There are countless fat, fabulous women who live thriving lives. Who don’t shrink in a room full of people, or deny themselves romance and fashion and lives well lived. Indeed, the truth is that I lack their bravery. I am still the 12 year old girl who longs to be desirable. The 24 year old woman who turns heads on the park trail. The 30 year old recluse who mourns them both.