“Losing weight won’t make you any prettier or more desirable.”
If someone said that to you, would you believe them?
I think I might.
At the moment, my weight has declined a bit, and it feels as though something essential about me is being lost.
I am hanging in there with this temporary disequilibrium of self.
If I continue in this direction, the clothes in my closet, the clothes I’ve had for many years and love, may not fit, and I do not have money for new clothes. I have no desire to buy a new wardrobe. I don’t long for clothes that are a smaller size.
My body looks and feels fleshier to me than it did when it was fuller — I’m feeling like I’m being emptied out, not my full self. I’m a short person, and a few pounds makes a substantial difference on me, to me. The change I’m experiencing might be temporary, it might not.
The idea that as we adapt to differences in our lives — could be a change in seasons, could be a new medication, a change in movement frequency or intensity, other things that can cause our bodies to change — is not hard to understand. And when this happens, when I’ve grown a bit larger or smaller, there’s this gap between acceptance and a longing for what was. To adapt, I’ve needed to alter my diabetes medications, but just a bit — and this has to do more with changes in eating than changes in weight, I think.
When I first started getting smaller, a crazy part of me kicked into gear and I started eating less and less. And the advice I received was this: “Put yourself first. Don’t lose your self.” That helped, and since then, I’ve been eating in a more intuitive way, bringing a big bag of food with me so I had plenty of things with me, all things I like. (It wasn’t that long ago I scoffed at the idea of a food bag.)
The mythology of weight loss holds that in losing weight, a person finds her true self. The slender sylph is uncovered under layers of the former fat self, and the slim butterfly emerges from the chrysalis that was entered by the fat caterpillar.
My true self feels fat. No matter what my size, my self is abundant, generous, expansive, large, whole. I have no desire to take up less space, to require less fabric, to be more pleasing to eyes that see losing weight as emerging from a cocoon. My myth does not need to be that I am only “matching” when my interior and exterior are both the same degree of fat. My self can remain fat. (Although I’m not aiming for anything other than a resolution — perhaps temporarily — of some health issues, and likely will still be quite fat by most people’s estimation.)
Writing this brings to mind Heather MacAllister‘s Keynote Address at nolose in 2006. I wasn’t there, I never met her or saw her peform, but when she was memorialized across the fatosphere upon her death in 2007 (I hadn’t realized that, like me, she was born in 1968), I read her address and learned so much from it. The legacy of fat burlesque and what it means for perceiving myself as sexy, and the ability I have to experience abandon on the dance floor, are directly related to her art. I don’t have any terminal illness I’m aware of (other than the terminal condition of human existence) and I’ve not had the “added blessings” that Heather refers to in her address, but reading and re-reading this text has left substantial marks on my psyche.
Thank you for this. I’ve occasionally felt that losing weight, losing size, has represented the loss of part of myself. I really appreciate how clearly you’ve articulated what I couldn’t.
Thanks for letting me know this resonated with you. I realize that I’ve been through this before — after I had an appendectomy, for example — and I survived it but it wasn’t pleasant at the time.
Oh, and I also “reject the chick-industrial complex” — beautifully put.
“chick-industrial complex”… oh wow… simply brilliant!!!!!