Eating All the Time

The truth is, I have to always be chewing something. I chew gum, I eat ice. I drink diet soda. I drink coffee. I do as much non-caloric eating as I can so I don’t become a 300-pound woman. Sugar-free jello is a great space-filler. But it’s not necessarily about emptiness.
I always thought this urge to always have something in my mouth to be the result of being told to stop eating. “You don’t want that much, do you?” or “Are you really going to eat that?”
This compulsion needs to be fixed before I go further with gastric bypass surgery. What would be the use if I just can’t stop putting things into my mouth?

-Olivia

The Gigi Factor

My best friend in high school (let’s call her Gigi!) was super thin and had all kinds of other wonderful traits about her. She really enjoyed pushing the limits and often wore very little clothes. At fifteen. In the late 80’s. She was pretty punk rock. You can imagine how much attention she garnered in our little town. As awesome as she was in so many ways hardly anyone bothered to know, though, because they were so hung up on her extreme body confidence. The way girls HATED her because of her body and the way she showed it! And then there were the guys (pretty much any and every man and boy) that would fall all over themselves to talk to her. But that was only when she was around. Behind her back men would say the filthiest things about her, which I get, it’s what guys do, but that’s all they’d say. They wouldn’t talk about her witty jokes or great taste in music or any of the other things that made ME want be friends with her – it seemed to always be something filthy or hateful and mean. All the wonderful things about her seemed to be negated in the majority’s eyes by her body and their reactions to how she displayed it. So what got fed into my brain as an impressionable teen from all of this is that being sexy makes you a joke and forces guys to no longer see you as a real person. And what I’ve learned in the years since then hasn’t changed that general impression. What’s been added is the knowledge that, even when a woman IS respected, if she’s even moderately pretty and has a nice body they may be extolling her other virtues, but there are dirty thoughts going on about her in male minds. I’m no prude. I don’t mind being an object of desire and I understand that many women enjoy that attention and find it flattering. It’s totally natural! But I’ve got issues. The thought of ­ inspiring dirty thoughts in random friends and strangers freaks me out. That’s not hyperbole; I am thinking right now of walking down the street and men leering and I can’t stop myself from shuddering and feeling queasy. Does being fat allow me to be more in control of who’s attracted to me? Does my extra layer of fat give me an extra layer of protection from creeps and predators? I’ve concluded that some part of me must think so.

Gigi and I remained best friends through our twenties, but she was pretty toxic. She was always saying shitty things about my flaws, I mean really MEAN things, but it was in joke form so that made it okay. She would literally cluck her tongue and make a little frowny face at my imperfections. How does that not mess with your head when your beautiful best friend acts like she pities you and you know that you’re going to be the butt of some joke at some point any time you get together? I’m kind of disgusted that I didn’t end my friendship with her sooner, but self-respect has never been my strong suit. I did end it, though, and thirteen years later I am still confident I did the right thing. The thought of having a half-dressed best friend hanging around making me feel like shit all the time now that I’m all old and bitter just makes me want to puke. I’d probably have ended up punching her if we’d stayed friends. So, that’s one little peek at one little contributor to my fat psychosis. There’s plenty more where that came from so stay tuned!

-Lily

EDIT: I read this post to my husband, who knows that I’m trying to blog through some feelings about my weight (although not exactly where). His reaction? “I didn’t realize Gigi affected you like that. Don’t let that bitch affect whether or not you’re fit. Don’t let her…” Make me feel like less of a woman? Continue to affect how I feel about myself? Allow how people reacted to her oversexualized dress to make me so cynical? Don’t let her cruelty hurt me any more? No. “Don’t let her ruin it for ME.” Because the tragedy here is not how my self-worth and worldview have been affected, but that The Husband doesn’t have a thin wife. Way to reinforce the ever-present belief that nothing is more important than NOT being fat.

Gastric Bypass

I’ve been considering gastric bypass surgery seriously for about three years. For the past eight months, I’ve been jumping through the necessary hoops.
The necessary hoops include the information meeting, the meet-the-surgeon meeting, the support group meeting. I lost the 12 pounds the surgeon required me to lose. Then I met with the psychiatrist to see whether I was mentally and emotionally stable enough to have the surgery and succeed at the weight loss. I’m ready to go. I just need to schedule a surgery date.
Now, let’s be honest here. Gastric bypass surgery is nothing more than surgically-enforced portion control. It’s the surgical removal of 90% of a perfectly healthy, optimally-operating organ because the patient can’t keep her big mouth shut.
Sure, it works, although the literature they give you is quick to point out that you’ll lose about half of what you want to lose, and then you’ll gain half of that back. Math has never been my strong suit, but this works out (trust me) to a sorta-kinda promise that you will probably lose about 25% of what you fantasized you would lose.
So, utopianly, I’d like to lose 100 pounds. Given the above math, I’ll eventually go from 220 to 170 and then gain back up to 195. That makes no sense whatever. But let’s just say I was able to lose and keep off the 100 pounds. Let’s just say I could live the rest of my life at 120 pounds. Wouldn’t that be the greatest thing in the history of the entire world?
What I wouldn’t give for that!
It gets better: the whole thing is free to me. It’s all covered by our health insurance. I wouldn’t have to pay a nickel.
Even better—I’m so on track with this that I could schedule my surgery before the end of 2012. I could be thin by next summer. Really thin. After all these years—these decades—of hoping and trying and praying and working and depriving myself, I could be thin.
That kind of thin—that 120 pounds thin—is something I have not been since one freakish summer starvation diet in college. I was thin for about six weeks. To get there again, to be thin for real would be amazing. Would be life-affirming. I don’t know if such a thing can be overstated. Thin people won’t understand this, but every fatty does: to be thin is something we would do almost anything to achieve.
And yet, I don’t think I will do it. It seems somehow wrong to cut out a perfectly good organ (and yet I made my husband have a perfectly healthy function disabled a few years ago). It seems like giving up. It seems weak—like I should be able to lose this weight on my own—with my own effort, through my own vigilant self-control.
Or is it that I so identify as a fat person that this “easy fix” would somehow invalidate me?
I’ve jumped through the hoops. I can schedule the surgery. I can be thin by spring. I could go to Hawaii next summer and not be the fat one on the beach. My boys could go to their sports activities and not have kids say, “Why is your mom so fat?” I could go through my day unashamed, not worried that people are disgusted. I could feel pretty.  
It’s entirely my choice. I just have to make the call. I don’t know what to do.

-Olivia

Junior High Angst

I want to be thorough as I discuss my way through my weight issues, and I think we can all agree that junior high looms large in any discussion of body consciousness.
Body/fat issues that stand out to me about this long-ago time (and yet no so long ago, is it? How simple to suddenly be there and feel that humiliation…) are these: my knee-socks keep falling down. My clothes from last year don’t fit. I blamed these phenomena on my being fat. The truth is, I needed new clothes. I needed soft knee-socks that stayed up, not those thin nylon excuses for socks that slid down constantly, that didn’t stay up unless I secured them with rubber bands, and even then, not always. I needed new tops that didn’t pull across my growing breasts. I needed bras. My mother had a rule: no bra until you can hold a pencil under your breast. What a stupid thing to say. At the very latest, a girl needs a bra when she first asks this: “When can I have a bra?” The answer is “now.” Because having a bra is not about being physically mature enough to fill one out—it’s about the fact that everyone else is wearing one…and they know you aren’t.
Junior high is bad for everyone—I know that. And everyone feels awkward and body-conscious at that time because everyone’s body is undergoing massive changes. How nice for those other children who went home to, “Don’t worry.  You’re beautiful. Let’s get you some new socks.” I went home to, “Here’s fat Olivia.”
My mother again: at 12, my mother said, “You weigh 125. You should never be more than 125.”
In eighth grade (at 125), I fasted for the first time. I went forty-eight hours without food. It wasn’t the last time. It wasn’t the worst time.
I fasted because there was a book in the house called Fasting: The Ultimate Diet. If you’re 12 and at the utter limit of what you should weigh (ever!), you definitely want the ultimate diet. The author was a pastor who fasted for spiritual reasons, but mentioned that he lost 20 pounds on a two-week fast. After all, if Jesus could fast for forty days and forty nights, you should be able to do a week or two! Twenty pounds would have put me at 105, almost the holy grail of 99, don’tcha know. I fainted in class. Not awesome.
Note to junior highers: fasting is not a plan. At 12 or any other age. Fasting is for religious purposes, or humanitarian purposes or whatever other purposes. It is not for losing weight. Fasting will make you fat, because the moment—the very moment—you break your fast by eating that apple, you will not be able to stop your body from eating until it is satisfied.
Your body wants to be loved not hated, nurtured not deprived. I’m just now thinking about that.

-Olivia

Hi, I'm Lily Olé

I grew up in a fat family with a (very) fat mom, fat dad, fat aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. Most of us were good, old, American FAT – twenty to fifty pounds heavier than we ought to have been. Although I was always bigger (fatter and taller) than most girls in my class, at puberty, I started to really balloon up. I have had this gut of mine since I was about thirteen and the thick thighs and wide butt, too. Chubby at thirteen can be cute, but the older I got the fatter I got and now I’m forty and there’s nothing cute about it. My fat, disgusting body has been the source of extreme self-loathing almost my entire life. It’s so frustrating to be so hugely impacted in so many areas of your life by an issue that you haven’t been able to overcome in decades and how depressing to know that all it takes is to control your diet and you can’t do that one thing. With all I’ve accomplished in my life and I can’t get a handle on this one thing? How do I spend time every single day feeling shitty about myself, being nearly CONSTANTLY and painfully aware of my fatness in practically everything I do, and not have just FIXED my weight problem by now? It’s maddening! Well, I’m at a point in my life where I there is no going back so I may as well go forward. Becoming vegan six years ago set me on a path where I’ve learned a lot about nutrition. I understand the science of my body enough now to know how I got here and what it’s going to take to finally live healthfully. And I’m starting to understand how the things I’ve done and the things that have happened to me (some of them pretty awful) have all worked to help keep me fat. I’m hoping that sorting it all out here will be the thing to motivate me, but also…release me. Even if I stay fat forever I just want to stop hating myself. I want to look in the mirror and not think terrible things to myself.  I want to forgive myself for all these years of torment and stop living with shame in everything that I do. I’m ready to open up and L E T   I T   G O. I’m ready to love myself.

Introducing Olivia

I’ve been blogging for a while now, but always about something else, like books or movies or politics…never about myself. Never about my struggle—my lifelong struggle—with my weight.
It started when I was eight years old. My mother was excited about a new book she had purchased, The Diet Revolution by Robert Atkins. Having fought against overweight all her life, she must have wanted to save me the struggle—you know, get a handle on it early, before it was a problem. Nip it in the bud.
But what happened was this: at 8, I learned that meat was good and fruits and veggies were bad. I learned—at 8—that my mother thought I was fat and that oranges were a sin. Can you write a better recipe for body-angst?
That was the genesis of my body/weight consciousness. I dieted for the next four decades on-and-off, mostly on. I did what probably everyone reading this has done—been “good” and lost weight, been “bad” and gained it back plus some.
About a year ago, I became a vegan. This happened instantly—as powerfully as a religious conversion—because a friend (my co-blogger here) kept on and on and on about vegan living until I finally heard her. She sent me some books. I read them, and I was on board. In one frantic half-hour, my kitchen was cleansed of all animal products, from the meat in the freezer through the milk and cheese and eggs, and down through the boxed mac-and-cheese in the pantry. I never looked back.
But I was still fat. I am still fat. So, I’ve decided to blog my thoughts, feelings, struggles, and victories here—out loud—to find whether this kind of public catharsis and airing of long-kept secret hurts will be beneficial to my health.
If there is a way to losing weight in a healthy, longterm way, catharsis is certainly part of that. Vulnerability is certainly key. Speaking truth is certainly required.