The Champagne of People

At my heaviest I weighed 316 pounds.  I don't think I need to explain what a bummer it can be to be a fat woman in America.  Over the last few years, though, I have lost approximately 100 of those pounds.  That fact is often met with wide-eyed wonder—losing a hundred pounds is no small feat!  And its true, this is an achievement I dreamed of, but of which I never fully believed I was capable:  I wasn't sure I actually had it in me.  Turns out I did have it in me, and it was fucking hard—just not in the ways I had expected. 

 

So, while I still have a ways to go before I reach the pinnacle of health, I want to share a few things that I think are important for anyone at any size.

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1. Weight is really just a number.  Really.

It took me a year to lose the first 90 lbs.  That day I weighed in and something clicked. The next milestone would be one hundred pounds.  I wasn’t ready.  I had made so many plans, had so many expectations for what life would be like when I lost one hundred pounds.  I was faced with the reality that the things I had planned for, the life I had envisioned post-hundo simply would not be.  Not in the way I’d hoped. Not in the amount of time I’d thought.

 

For a long time I had said that when I lost one hundred pounds I would get a tattoo to commemorate the achievement.  Exactly what that tattoo would be changed over time, but the placement did not.  I wanted it on either my rib cage or my bicep—two places that had previously been flabby and unsightly and which I was sure would be taught once I lost one hundred pounds.

 

Not the case.  If anything, those places are more flabby now than when I was at my heaviest. Turns out Cardio is great for weight loss but does not do much in the way of toning.   

 

SO—it took me a year to lose that first 90 lbs?  Great, yes, well done me.  Well, it took me another year and two months to lose the next TEN.  In the grand scheme of things you could probably say that I weighed about the same for a year.  But at the beginning of that year I could not run a 5k and at the end of that year I could. And I was still overweight!  Numerically speaking.

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Learning to value "non-scale victories" (fitting in to something again, being able to run farther, etc) not only helped me continue to lose weight, it made me generally and exponentially more happy.  The more things you can find to be proud of yourself for, the more you will see how many ways you are amazing, the more value you find in yourself beyond your body, the more you will value your body.  Who cares what size pants you wear—you just ran a 5k!!!  And believe me, you don't have to be thin tp run a 5k.  This sort of brings me to my next lesson:

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2. You don’t have to be skinny for people to find you beautiful (or for YOU to find you beautiful)

This seems really obvious to me—now.  There was a time, though, when I truly believed that I would have to get myself within some acceptable size range to be considered a viable romantic interest.  I knew you didn’t have to be super-skinny to be loved, but I was under the impression that for people to find me sexually attractive there was a limit to how curvy I could be. This was before Tess Holliday and the “real women” movement.  

There was safety in that though.  I wasn’t insecure—I was very secure in the knowledge that I simply wasn’t sexually attractive.  I didn't really worry because I believed I had it within my power to change that, and would change...when the time was right. 

 

You will not be surprised to learn that I wouldn't actually have any power to change or control my body until I released myself from the belief that my body is what held my worth.

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3. I am not as strong as I thought

I am also stronger than I thought.  

 

4. I have a lot of guilt about things I cannot control

This extends past weight loss, but I’ll stick to that subject.  Throughout my weight-loss “journey” (I kind of hate that term, but I guess that’s what it is—a journey) people would marvel at my success, congratulating me and telling me how great I looked and how hard I must be working.  I have to say, though, when I think about the last three years of weight loss, “hard work” is not how I would characterize what I was doing. I can’t think of any huge sacrifice I made, I never adopted any sort of grueling exercise regimen, I still eat fast food and my fair share of cake.  

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I don’t even consider my own decision to join Weight Watchers again as the “beginning”  of my weight loss. Roughly three months after I re-joined I got a spinal tap. The spinal tap resulted in a post-lumbar headache which resulted in a week-long best rest during which I ate practically nothing. This completely jump-started my relationship with food and the pounds started falling off. I have real guilt about this. Not everyone gets an involuntary shove into success. Most people have to conjure that shove from out of thin air, by sheer will power.  With my success, a certain amount of authority on the matter has been placed on me by others seeking the same result. They want to know what I did, what my “secret” was. But I didn’t do anything.  Something just happened to me.    

 

That, of course, is boloney.  Something happened to me that may have helped, but from I continued, and continue to work.  Most people can’t just passively (and healthily) lose 100lbs.  You have to work for it. I worked for it.  Oh BOY did I ever.  It just turned out to be much different work than I had expected.  And the hardest work I did, the hardest thing I had to learn, was this:

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5. You can love yourself and still want to change

This is a big one.  After years of trying to lose weight I finally saw that my biggest obstacle was my own self-esteem.  I really liked myself. I have always liked myself. I am smart and funny and talented. I have always been well-liked and successful.  Sitting in Weight Watchers meetings I listened week after week to tips on being kinder to yourself, loving yourself, and realizing your worth.  This was not my problem. Even at my heaviest, when I looked in the mirror I saw someone who was beautiful.

 

I was pretty deep into it when I realized what was happening—I was having an identity crisis.  As I lost more and more weight I became acutely aware of the fact that I was becoming a different person.  Physically at least. But, as it turns out, my physical identity was pretty tightly knit with my emotional identity.  Who knew?? So, as my body changed, a deep internal contradiction arose. Why did I have to change if I was already great?  Who is this new person going to be?

 

Your physical appearance affects so much of how you go through life—how people treated you, what opportunities you are afforded.  I had spent so much time dreaming of what life would be like if I wasn’t fat. Boys would like me, I would get the leads in plays, I could wear the clothes I wanted.  But as I moved closer to a “nonfat” life, I got cold feet. Those were just fantasies. What would it actually be like? Maybe my body was never the reason that I didn’t get dates, maybe I was just unpleasant.  Maybe my body wasn’t the reason I didn’t get the lead, maybe I was a bad singer. What if I looked better fat? I had been using my weight as the reason for everything wrong in my life. With that out of the way I would to face the possibility that I had other flaws???  Yep. And that was really hard.  But, like everything, you just keep going and trust you’ll figure it out.  And I did. The part of me that was self-assured and confident and even narcissistic was able to reconcile with the fact that there was a fundamental part of myself that needed to change.  And that changing that thing did not mean changing any other fundamental part of myself.

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I don't really have a conclusion.  Nothing has been concluded.  This will be something that is part of me for the rest of my life.  I will be gaining and losing (hopefully more losing) and learning to the end of time.  But I have released myself from the belief that however much I gain or lose defines my success in life or love.  The rest is just math really.