Being fat, formerly fat, and fat again*
(*Disclaimer: This story is about my own relationship to my body and my weight, and not a commentary on any one else’s body, weight, or relationship to food/body image.)
One day back in 2016, when I was in the height of my first lupus flare, I was out for a walk and started to cry. It seemed to come out of nowhere, which was pretty standard those days thanks to the large amount of steroids wreaking havoc on my emotions. But, I’ll have to admit that these tears weren’t totally random.
I was listening to an old episode of This American Life — “Tell Me I’m Fat.” As a “formally fat girl,” I found this episode especially relatable. I listened as Lindy West (author of Shrill) discussed the ways her boss publicly spewed fat bigotry, how she called him out on it, and how she eventually learned to celebrate and love her fat body. I listened as Roxeanne Gay (author of Bad Feminist and Hunger) talked about how difficult it was to navigate the world in a fat body, one that was more that just “Lane Bryant fat.”
But, what really got me was Elna Baker’s story. Elna had lost 110 pounds and, in doing so, almost immediately gained access to the success she craved: in work, in the media, in relationships. Her skinny body unlocked countless doors. She was now noticed, respected, and catered to in a way she never had been when she was fat. Suddenly, she was being given free things all over town. People were smiling at her. Men wanted to sleep with her.
This resonated very strongly with me. For most of my life, I had been overweight. When I went to college back in 2007, I gained the standard freshman fifteen and then some. I was dating this older guy who had lots of opinions about this. There were constant remarks. He withheld affection. Only hung out with me in private. Constantly commented on how attractive other women were. Though he was incredibly fit, he was always concerned about his own body too, constantly working out and taking diet pills. He kept trying to convince me to take them, too. You’ll be amazed at how much energy you’ll have, he said. I refused. Then, one day near the end of spring semester freshman year, he leapt on top of me, pinned me down, and shoved a diet pill in my mouth. I sat up in outrage and he retreated, claiming it was all a joke, telling me to spit it out. I looked him right in the eyes and swallowed hard, took the chalky pill dry and began to cry. Oh my god, he said, don’t be crazy. Calm down. I was just kidding.
After that, I was determined to lose weight, to never let him make me feel that way again. Despite how awful this made me feel, I didn’t leave him. I was just determined to change myself enough that he couldn’t make me feel the deep amount of shame I had just experienced. I moved back home for the summer and I started doing this ridiculous workout regimen called P-90x — a three month guide to your dream body. I started dieting, but not that religiously. After about 60 days of P-90x, I was so over the extreme workouts. My body hurt. It was exhausting. I just wanted to listen to music on the elliptical. But, I was committed to returning to school that fall as a transformed woman. So, I started doing Weight Watchers, determined to stick to the diet enough that I wouldn’t have to tell my boyfriend that I quit the exercise program. If he saw the results he wanted, he wouldn’t need to know that I was a quitter. I counted every point, found every work around, and the weight peeled off. By the end of the summer, I’d lost 60 pounds. Throughout the next year, I lost 20 more.
Let me tell you; losing all that weight that fast is exhilarating. It seemed like I was a completely different person overnight. Here I was, 20 years old, thin, very few responsibilities. All of a sudden, the college parties I’d been avoiding seemed like a great idea. All of the boys wanted to talk to me, buy me drinks, hear what I had to say. Even in school, I was more confident, speaking up more, getting noticed. People were constantly holding the door for me. Boys were asking for my number all the time. I was always flirting with people in my classes and making new friends. I kept things at the level of flirtation with all this newfound interest because, for some reason, I still stayed with my boyfriend for most of college. And he was so proud of me. He said he was finally getting dividends on his investment.
I was able to keep the weight off for all of college, even dipping down an extra ten pounds during the stress of applying for grad school. And, despite all of the time spent sitting and reading, I kept it off in grad school, too (even long after the boyfriend was gone). I always vaguely stuck to the Weight Watchers plan, eating processed foods that were technically low in points. I also added running into my schedule, usually running at least 2 miles a day.
By the time I was diagnosed with lupus, I’d kept the weight off for nine years. But, like Elna Baker talks about in her This American Life piece, you always feel nagged by the constant fear that it will come back. That you’ll have to go back to who you were before. Skinny you is powerful. Skinny you gets noticed. Skinny you is the real you. Because of this fear, you develop unhealthy habits. Elna talks about the fact that all of her friends think she has insomnia but, in reality, she’s on phentermine (ie, speed) in order to keep the weight off. She skips meals and overexercises, terrified of going back to the “old Elna.” While I’ve never taken speed, I would go through short periods of time in which I’d take over-the-counter appetite suppressants. Just enough to shed the holiday weight, I’d tell myself.
It was when Elna talked about the constant fear of the weight returning that I started to cry. It was at that moment that I realized how much that fear I had internalized over the last decade, that fear that the “real you” is temporary, fleeting, under constant threat. But, once you’ve seen this other side, seen how much people “respect” you in your current form, how do you not fight with everything you can to stay there?
It was ironic that I was having this strong reaction at this exact moment in my life. Because, despite the fact that lupus was preventing me from working out and I was not currently on any diet, I was dropping weight like wild. I was actually at the lowest weight I had ever been, and damn if it didn’t feel great. I logically knew that it was only happening because I was so sick and that it wasn’t a true sign of health but that did not keep me from going out, buying new jeans, and showing off my new ass and stomach. I might not have been able to walk very well at that point in time thanks to achy joints, but I tried my damnedest to strut.
Once I started to heal, the weight I’d lost came back almost instantly. This is to be expected, I said. I wasn’t happy about it, but I knew I had to stomach it.
But, much to my frustration, in the five years since then, about twenty-five additional pounds have tacked on, too. Perhaps because I entered my 30s. Perhaps because my immunosuppressants don’t allow my body to burn calories as efficiently as it used to. Perhaps because I can no longer exercise at the same intensity. Perhaps because I had to switch up my birth control.
And this has been hard to accept.
I’m often tempted to fall back into my old ways of coping with weight gain. Taking a quick course of appetite suppressants. Upping the intensity of my workouts. Doing strict, flash diets for a couple of months. But, lupus doesn’t let me do any of this. I can no longer trick myself into going hungry. When I haven’t had enough calories or if I push my body too hard, I now get really light headed. My joints start to ache. Lupus symptoms begin to onset.
When I did Weight Watchers in the past, I ate mostly packaged Weight Watchers meals, low-fat pudding, 100 calorie packs of cookies, pretzels, and string cheese. Now, I cook amazing, nutritious meals with things like vegetables, chicken, olive oil, avocados, and mozzarella. I drink my coffee and tea with half and half. Whenever I try to return to Weight Watchers, I miss all of these amazing, nutrient-rich foods. My body craves bananas (2 WW points for a small one), mushrooms that have been sauteed in EVOO (1 WW point for a teaspoon of oil), lattes (4 WW points for low-fat talls at Starbucks). It’s almost impossible for me to resist these things and commit to a diet. It’s as if, by necessity, my body has learned the types of nutrients it needs to survive and demands them, even if those are different than the ones that made it skinny.
Lupus has thus forced me to keep my destructive tendencies in check and I’m left to take stock of who I am, in this body, for better or worse. Some days, this really wears on me. Makes me feel low, ashamed. It makes me feel like that scared kid, dry swallowing a diet pill with a defiant look in her eyes, determined to never let someone make her feel that way again.
But, as I’m starting to see, losing the weight didn’t fix the way I felt about myself. It just changed my circumstances so that I didn’t have to learn to love the version of myself that I was. While lupus took away some of my “coping” strategies, the destructive things I was doing to keep my body and shame in check, it’s also given me something else. It’s given me the will to live, to allow my body to have what it needs to rest and to thrive.
It’s also given me gratitude for what my body can do. Appreciate it for what it’s been through. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t bend my knees. Couldn’t stand up without passing out. Now, I can head out my door, turn left and, within minutes, I’m deep in the forest, heading up through the Portland hills. Maybe sometimes my joints won’t let me run the staircases all the time and maybe I can usually only do one actual run a week without hurting my hip but, my body is here. It is in the world. It persevered. It might not look the way it used to when I was twenty but it can carry me where I need to go.
The day that the shelter-in-place orders were put into effect across the country was a rough one for me. Work was wild that day. Everyone was rushing to the store to stock up on toilet paper and groceries. A threat was electric in the air: you’re about to go inside, and we don’t know when you’ll be allowed back out. We don’t know if you’ll survive this.
Anxiety coursed through me as my body and mind were immediately taken back to the early days of my diagnosis and the uncertainty it brought. But, rather than let that anxiety overtake me, I laced up my shoes. I ran the five blocks from my house to the park, and then I kept running. Up the fifteen flights of stairs until you reach the top of the park. I got to the top and immediately turned around, heart rate pounding and sweat beads forming. I looked through the trees and into the neighborhood below me and took deep, calming breaths.
With a steadying inhale, I slowly descended back down the stairs one by one, back to my house.
I didn’t know what the future held but, at that moment, it was just me, my body, my breath, and these trees.
A lot of things were uncertain but I was here. And I would survive. And I had my body to thank for that.
