weighing in
i have a food problem, but it's a me problem
I didn’t mean to get fat. No one ever means to get fat. One year I was working out every day, at my goal weight, feeling healthy and fit. And then a series of unfortunate events happened and my depression and anxiety — which I had under control thanks to exercise and meds — roared to life. There was a lot of stress, and a lot of stress eating to go with it. I stopped going to the gym because I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. I felt the weight pile on, slowly at first and then blooming out.
There were diets. Oh, so many diets. I tried going it alone. I tried Weight Watchers. The results were always the same; I’d start off maniacally, throwing myself into weight loss and wellness, carefully measuring and portioning and supplementing that with trips to the gym. I’d lose weight quickly, noticeably. People would comment on it. You look so much better. You look healthier. Instead of feeling complimented, I’d get angry, as if they were insulting my former self, my true self. For this iteration of myself, this one who went to the gym every day and stayed away from carbs and sugars and fit into pants bought three years ago, this was an imposter.
Even though I was very tiny as a child and remained petite until after high school, I was never truly comfortable with myself. I hated when people commented on how skinny I was, when they asked me if I bought my clothes in the children’s department or when they would feign anger at me for being able to eat what I wanted to without gaining weight. I never tried to be skinny, I just was.
That all changed at about 21, when I started to pack some pounds on and instead of just melting off with a few days of dieting and exercise, those pounds stuck around, hovering around my stomach and my thighs. The remarks about my weight stopped. People stopped paying attention to how I looked. And I was happy about that. That weight felt good, it felt like it belonged on me. I was glad to fade into obscurity, to have eyes off of me, to not have to explain myself to anyone.
For years I settled into the role of fat person, not caring about the weight I was carrying, content to just eat and gain and wear loose clothing. It was when age caught up with me, when my knees started to hurt and I was getting out of breath just from moving around, that I realized I was a walking health hazard and decided to try dieting and the gym.
It worked for a while. I worked out every day. I ate well. I ran. Me, I ran. I left my house at 7am and pounded the pavement — knees protesting every step — until I couldn’t run any more. It hurt, but it also felt good. There was a lot going on in my life at that time; my husband had been laid off from his well paying job and we were in financial distress. He was also drinking a lot and that was causing havoc in our marriage. My weight was the only thing I had control over. I wasn’t dieting and working out and running to not be fat, I was just trying to exert some kind of control over my life. But that would fall by the wayside when depression and anxiety got the best of me and I stopped going to the gym, stopped heading out to the streets at 7am and started stress eating. I lost all control, and the more I lost that, the more I kind of threw myself into getting fat again, without being totally conscious of what I was doing.
Even when things got better and life was back to some semblance of normalcy, I stayed fat. I lost the desire to go to the gym. I lost the will to lose weight. I bought new clothes, I bought junk food. I convinced myself that at my age, it was ok to just enjoy yourself, to eat what you wanted to eat, to be at one with your fat. This is who I am, I thought. This is who I’ll be. And then I ate another piece of chocolate cake.
Being content with who you are when who you are is flawed is part laziness. It would take work to fix who I am, and I just don’t have it in me to do the work again. I know my apathy at being fat comes from a place that therapy might fix, but I don’t have the energy to go to therapy, either. I think about it, in much the same way I think about running again. But those demons I carry around with me whisper in my ear: your knees are too weak to run again. It’s so much better to sit on the couch and watch baseball. It’s too hot out. Your back hurts.
I look at myself in the mirror before I take a shower and I think, how did I get here. But I know. I know all the reasons I’m fat again. And I know saying I’m ok with it is just a cop-out, just a way of alleviating myself of the labor I would have to do to fix this. I know people look at me and think, she used to be thinner. I know people notice my thighs are bigger, my ass is wider. I imagine them talking about me, whispering to each other about how I let myself go. I know what everyone thinks about fat people — we’re lazy, we’re weak, we’re worthless. It messes with my esteem, it eats into my depression, and that makes it harder to ever do anything about it.
About a year ago, my doctor told me I had Type 2 Diabetes. I immediately went off of sugar and carbs, afraid that I was slowly killing myself. I lost twelve pounds in two weeks. I felt great. But the minute people started noticing — your face looks so thin, you look so much better, wow, being healthy agrees with you — I felt like eyes were on me, watching me lose weight, watching me get healthy and keeping tabs on that. It made me self-conscious and undermined everything I was trying to do. I didn’t want that attention, I didn’t want that focus on me and my eating habits.
The past year has been hard. My marriage fell apart and I reacted by stress eating. I had been exercising - yoga in the mornings and Peloton at night - and both those things fell by the wayside as soon as that breakup depression hit. The pandemic weight I had gained now had company in heartbreak weight. I replaced my failed relationship with a relationship with food. I looked to food for comfort, for solace, for giving me the feeling of enjoyment that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. I know when I’m eating cake or cookies or two helpings of pasta that I’m sabotaging myself, and I just don’t seem to care anymore except for those bouts of guilt I have after I’m done eating. It’s a vicious cycle of eating, regretting, eating, regretting. I keep promising myself I’ll do better but the comfort of food is hard to pass up; the pull of that hit of dopamine I get when I eat, that absolute pleasure I get from eating keep me from caring about the wrenching guilt and self-loathing I’ll feel after I’m done eating.
I’ve gained the weight back and more. I’m fat again, which has more or less become my default state. I know I should take better care of myself, for me, not for what others think of me. I should lose the weight for my health, for my future self, not so others will stop talking about just so they can start talking about me again.
I just wish weight wasn’t something people judge you by. People treat me different when I’m thinner. I know that, and it makes me sad. I’d just like to be able to me, to be treated the same whether I’m 130 or 200. But that’s not the way this society works. People who aren’t fat think it’s just a matter of stopping eating. That it’s so easy to do just that. They don’t take into account things like depression and anxiety and life circumstances that can lead to one gaining weight and not being able to take it off. Sure, I love food. I love to eat. But that’s not the crux of it. I wish I could do better. I wish I had it in me to be healthy all the time, to take care of myself. But I don’t. At least not right now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe it will stick this time. Maybe by summer I’ll be a healthier weight, or maybe by Thanksgiving I’ll be fatter.
Weight is a battle, and my fight is waning. I think about how I got here, how I, a naturally thin person all those years ago, got to this place. I didn’t mean to get fat. No one ever means to get fat. But I do mean to get healthy, and I’ve got to find that resolve. After lunch.