I’m overweight, fat, obese. But I went from being “morbidly obese” to being “obese” recently by losing 83 lbs. But over the last couple months I have been struggling with my weight and have gained 13 pounds. So now I’m at the point in which I’ve lost 70 pounds and have 70 more pounds to lose. When I was actively losing weight, I would buy clothing a size smaller than my current size and then in a little time I would fit into the new clothing. But when I stopped losing weight, I kept buying clothes one size smaller. I now have so many clothes one size smaller. But one day I realized I was tired of buying clothing one size smaller. Because I do like to look for lots of sales. I felt like I wasn’t accepting myself. After some thinking, journaling, and meditating I realized that I wanted to be kind to myself. And one of the big areas in my life I am unkind to myself about is my weight and my eating, which I am sure many women can understand. I’ve struggled with my weight for most of my life and have gone through the different eating disorders of bulimia and anorexia when I was young, and then started to gain a lot of weight, finally realizing I had Binge Eating Disorder. Over the years I have been telling myself negative messages, in which most are probably unconscious. I have constantly based my worth on my weight, berating myself when I ate too much, and I have always in my head said that life will start when I’ve lost the weight I need to. Right now I am aiming for a healthy weight and when I was a young adult I was sometimes reaching for an underweight goal because it was the time of the waif.
After this thought and processing, a radical thought came into my mind. What if I just accept the size I am at right now. Try to maintain this weight, still exercising for my body and mental health, and eating my veggies because I’m a vegetarian (what else am I gonna have), but at the same time forgive myself, don’t berate myself for the times I binge, because after all I have Binge Eating disorder (the DSM) and I will binge from time to time. I once went to a “Fat Acceptance” workshop in college at a conference. The title had attracted me because being about 20 or 30 pounds overweight at that time, I felt like a huge whale. I had an idea of what the workshop would be about, but I ended up being very wrong. I thought it would be about accepting ourselves as we were at the time, which is my goal now, and I knew I needed to work on that, so that when we lost the weight, we didn’t have so much pressure. The presenters, who were more overweight than I, talked about accepting our bodies no matter what. We were fine the way we were they purported. We didn’t need to lose weight, apparently. At that time that was one of the craziest ideas I had ever heard. As a feminist I was certainly into accepting our bodies, but only too a point. My fat was gross and disgusting. And I judged myself harsher than the other women, but thought they needed to lose the weight at some time too. I stopped paying attention to the leaders of the workshop since I considered them to be spouting complete nonsense.
Now, accepting myself exactly how I am, exactly at this weight is not something that is going to happen overnight. I have been calling myself fat, gross, and less-than for years. But I am trying to be aware when I call myself these names and remind myself to be kind, because after all, I feel much better when others treat me kindly, so of course I do when I am kind to myself as well. I think this willingness to accept myself at between size 16 and 18 at 5’1” (I can’t believe I just said my size online, but I am trying to be daring, and its just a number, and I want to stop obsessing about numbers of my size, and numbers on the scale, and numbers, in weight, I want to be), didn’t just come with my recent journaling and meditating. It was a year and a half ago that I started losing weight, and as it gradually came off, I did something I never had really done. I touched myself (hey get your mind out of the gutter). I touched my parts I was most ashamed of; my arms, my thighs, and my stomach which I used to be afraid of it. I had been so disconnected with my body. I avoided any touching of my body except for washing and tried to not think I had a body because I loathed it and this made my self-esteem terrible. After I touched my body, liking that I was feeling less of a body losing weight, I dared to look at my body. This was much harder. I had to use all the strength I had to not criticize my body. I learned to call myself names a little bit less, calling my fat my pain. I eat because I have severe depression and have suffered trauma, so my fat really is my pain, and my fat is this disease, binge eating disorder, that wasn’t taken seriously before, but I’m glad they are taking it seriously now. Even though working on a healthier thought process towards my weight, by not blaming myself completely, I still pressured myself to lose all my weight.
I’m just sick and tired of hating my body and determining my worth, as society tends to, especially towards women, on my size instead of, let’s say, my quirky intellect or my warm heart or the humor that surprisingly comes out of me at parties sometimes. My body is my shell; is my vessel. I am not; we are not, our bodies. Yes, it feels better to be smaller and more flexible and shop at a regular clothes stores and not have to wear tunics to cover up all the time, but I got stuck in my weight loss, and I may not be able to do all those things, or at least feel comfortable doing so, so I have to respect the place I am. I may end up getting back on track and losing more weight, but I think what is more important is that I did accomplish some weight loss and am healthier, and what I really want to I want focus on is stopping the obsession with weight loss, and to stop calling myself names. I would never treat another person like I treat myself, and I’m just damn tired of treating myself this way and I am so over how negative and depressed it makes me feel.
So, this begins the radical experiment, of accepting my overweight body, and treating myself kindly. Is it too radical? Possibly. But I am up for radical experiments. Here I go…
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