The Fat and the Furious

I met "Bobby" (so not his real name) in a medieval re-enactment group. Most people called him lascivious and were fairly negative about him, but to tell you the truth he was pretty damned nice. At the time we met, I was married, but the marriage was on the rocks. Someday, I want to talk about that, but I'm just not ready yet (9 years later). Anyway, Bobby taught me how to fight in the group. It was fun, and he never once made me feel specialized or unworthy of his time. As these were the two emotions I had ever felt from men, this was nice. As my marriage crashed and burned, Bobby listened to my woes and hung out with me. And eventually, we kissed and found feelings for one another. I moved away for a while after I left my husband, but eventually, I moved back and in with Bobby. We decided to get married. If this seems fast, it was. I won't give you dates, but looking back, I moved too fast because Bobby was the first person who ever made me feel like I was worth anything. He told me constantly how beautiful I was - something I hadn't heard since before I got married. He told me he liked my body. That I was perfect the way I was.

That was great. It gave me a huge boost of confidence. I needed someone to tell me I was desirable and sexy and all of those things.

The problem is that I was still unhappy with my body. Not because anyone was actively saying that I should be, but because I didn’t meet my personal standards. (I still don’t.)

So, I started eating healthier and going for walks and such. This lasted a while before Bobby started finding ways for me to not do those things. I’d planned to take a walk, he had a movie I’d always wanted to see. I planned a low carb dinner, he’d bring home KFC. 

As I’m sure you know, it’s about a thousand times harder to live a healthy lifestyle when the person you live with is adhering to a different one. It’s even hard when it seems the person is actively working against you.

This went on for a long while (months) where I struggled against him. I was still freshly out of an abusive relationship, and I wasn’t quite at a point where I was comfortable confronting people about shit they pulled on me. To be honest. I’m still not.

But after months of this, I finally said, “Bobby, I feel like you don’t want me to lose weight.”

I don’t know if I caught him off guard or if he was just totally cool with himself, but he says, “Well of course I don’t.”

After a long discussion, he finally admitted that he felt like, if I lost weight, I’d be attractive to other men and he’d lose me to one of them.

It was the dirtiest I’ve ever felt, and we went separate ways soon after. 

See, I have a series of questions I would ask said being:

Can I choose where I lose it?

Will it stay gone?

Can I choose where I lose it?

Can I call you to lose more?

Because what’s the fucking point if it’s just 10 pounds and it comes off my boobs and it will come back on my ass? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then I know the exact series I’d do, how much I’d space it out, how many times I’d have to call him.

The point is, my brain, which tends to obsess over little things that most people have already forgotten, has chosen this particular thought to expend energy. I swear to God, that I could have solved world hunger or something with all the time I spend thinking about this.

But I can’t stop it.

First, even in “plus sized” stores, mannequins are like 6 feet tall and they look like they’re a healthy weight. Remember that “plus size” used to be “big & tall” and somehow, no one’s figured out how to make a mannequin look like a fat girl yet.

So, I see something on a hanger or a mannequin, and half of my brain says, “Oh that’s cute!”

And the other says, “You’re never going to fucking look like that.”

The other side is correct most of the time. 

Nothing ever looks as good as it does on the mannequin, or in the catalogue, or on the hanger, or wadded up in the trash burning.

I digress.

Second, there’s the mentality behind shopping for clothes when you’re trying to lose weight. I always feel like, “Well, this looks okay now, but I just don’t want to spend the money if I’m going to lose weight and not be able to wear it any more.”

Spoiler alert, I could have already worn out all of those clothes and the clothes I bought to replace those and the clothes I bought to replace those. 

But I can’t shake that feeling that, if I pay a lot for an outfit, I’m going to end up throwing it away.

Then there’s the height problem. I’m like 5′0″, and though it’s getting better, those 6 foot tall mannequins are there for a reason. I’m generally too short to wear the clothes. The waistline is too low or the hem drags the ground. And yes, I’m pretty adept at sewing, but I hate buying something that I have to fix.

The initial advice was 8 glasses at 8 ounces each. That’s 64 ounces or half a gallon/1.8 L. For those keeping track, that’s a lot of liquid.

Then there’s Camelbak’s website that says I should drink 1L an hour while active. I’m not sure what it recommends for the non-active individual, but let’s assume I do that. That’s like 12 L (3 gallons) a day!

Then there’s the “water according to weight" measurement. According to that, I should drink 165 ounces of water a day. That’s 4.88 L or 1.3 gallons of water. I’ve also seen turning kilograms of weight into ounces of water. According to that, I should drink 113 ounces a day.

So, regardless of the amount, we’re supposed to drink a lot of water throughout the day. I won’t argue that that makes sense, given that 75% to 80% of our body is supposed to be water. The problem is that I never stop being thirsty.

All of my past nutritionists and trainers have told me that, “When you have enough water, you’ll stop being thirsty.”

Either this is a lie or I am a bottomless pit of water consumption. 

Once, I numbered water bottles and drank 6 - 20 ounce bottles of water every day for 4 straight weeks (I’ll talk about that someday). That’s 120 ounces of water for 28 days. I was constantly thirsty, but I was also constantly peeing.

I had the clearest urine you’ve ever seen. and I swear I peed exactly the amount I drank. I started to jokingly refer to myself as “Brita.” Don’t get the joke? I made a visual aid:

Yeah, I was a water filter. I drank water, I peed it straight out.

I won’t pretend that my skin wasn’t perfect or that my muscles felt like I wasn’t killing them, but I couldn’t be more than 100 paces from a bathroom. It was torture.

In short, I don’t know. I have many things that have worked and I stopped doing. And now I know they could work, but I don’t want to go back to them.

It’s hard to acknowledge that you’re avoiding past successes. Maybe it’s because of my lack of energy. Maybe because I have a skewed memory? Maybe I just want to do something new.

Today is Easter Monday, and I kind of forgot my daughter is home today. Despite the fact that it sets a great example for her to see me exercising, have you ever met a 14-year old?

They’re ridiculously judgemental without realizing how hurtful they can be. By trying to be supportive, there’s a very good chance, she could hurt my feelings worse than I do by myself.

And believe me, that’s really badly.

My daughter and I had gotten separated due to the fact that I was still sticking very closely to the wall. I saw her fall onto the floor, surrounded by skates, with her fingers splayed out. No one was helping her. 

I counted to 30. Hoping she could get up by herself. She couldn’t, and there was still no one there. All I could think was that someone was going to roll over her little hands and break them. 

I skated to her. I cut across the floor to get to her. I know it couldn’t have been more than 45 seconds, but my memory has about 5 minutes of skating to her. I fell.

I fell face first. All I could see was the concrete coming up to meet me. 

I knew I didn’t want to hit my head on the floor, so I twisted to put my shoulder down. 

My leg didn’t twist with me.

I felt it pop and I know I screamed. I heard it.

I broke my fibula and tibia in a spiral fracture. I had surgery the next day and was non-weight bearing for 6 weeks and in a cast for 4 more weeks.

I’m still in pain 9 years later.

Recently, I’ve been speaking with orthopedists trying to discover what happened that the leg won’t heal, and they think that they found an answer. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there’s nothing to do about it.

The current reigning opinion is that, when I broke my bone, I developed a temporary compartment syndrome. The pressure in my tissues impeded the blood flow which caused the nerves and muscles in my leg to become permanently damaged.

This is something that could have been caught and corrected in the days after my injury, but it wasn’t. And now I have a muscle that is severely and permanently knotted and nerves that don’t work correctly.

This causes extreme pain. I can’t walk for more than a few minutes without it feeling like my leg is being hit with a hammer with every step. I can draw a circle around where the pain is. It’s that specific.

The good news is that I’ve been referred to a pain management clinic, so maybe they have something that will make it tolerable and maybe that will help me in the future. 

My whole family [with very few exceptions] looks like me once they get past 19-25. I swear, it’s like we wake up one morning and emerge from our skinny cocoon. 

Oh, boy! Am I a butterfly? Nope, I’m fat.

The worst part is all of us start out as these size 0, hourglass figures, and somewhere along the way, we become fatty fat fatties. The only two exceptions I can think of literally ran track and were P.E. teachers. They’re also identical twins. 

Their kids who are adults are now chubby.

Then why does my daughter being adorable and perfect scare me? Because it fills me with dread that, in the next 15-20 years, she’s going to wake up one morning and discover she’s lost control of her body. And feeling the way I do about my body, I don’t want that for anyone. 

But it’s worse. I can see that I am in serious danger of harassing her about her activity and food choices. I don’t want to, and I’m still fighting the good fight, but I feel myself starting to say, “Maybe you shouldn’t have that brownie” or “Why don’t you go for a run?”

And it’s borne of love, but it’s also borne of fear.