I often wonder if anyone will be able to see past my fatness because at this point, that doesn’t seem likely. Hell, I can barely see my own humanity under my double chin and thunder thighs. To the world, I’m often nothing more than a mistake that needs to be fixed, an uncomfortable reminder of someone else’s failures.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my past attempts to lose weight and how one included several months of an almost eating disorder. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to lose weight – most of my attempts have been futile but in one relatively try, I was successful and lost a ton of weight. But in that success came a dangerous obsession; I was obsessed with losing weight and crossed a boundary into achieving it. During that time, I was praised for losing weight the healthy way: I was exercising, counting calories, and eating better. But after awhile, I was more and more obsessed with shedding pounds.
It was all I could think about – I had to go to the gym 6 or 7 times a week, often for at least an hour and a half. And that was after spending many of my days walking dogs. I could not stop thinking about how many calories were in each part of a meal and eventually I started to secretly throw up if I thought I was eating too much each day. And I started to do it more and more.
I never really told anyone in my life about that time and how the weight loss was actually starting to do more harm than good. It was just one of the few times that I really felt loved by my parents. After several months of everything though, I just kind of broke and stopped it all. The following months were the textbook definition of my own depression – I slept all the time, I lost interest in everything; I didn’t want to be around others, I was happy to be away from others. And it was during that time, I ended up gaining back all of the weight I lost.
My story is my own and one that I still struggle with each time I go back to the gym or eat. But my journey of losing weight only to gain it back isn’t singular – The Biggest Loser has seen many people lose a ton of weight but many have actually gained it back since leaving the show. Ali Vincent was the winner of one season several years ago and recently wrote about how she’s actually gained a lot of that weight back.
I’m at this point in my life where I just want to be happy and for some reason that seems like an impossible goal. I feel awful that I don’t want to be in that same spot again – the one where I’m obsessing and have little control. And I wonder if I was to truly lose weight, would that be what my life is like? Never letting my guard down, spending at least two or three hours every single day (and probably more) exercising, never really enjoying the life I have.
I often wonder if it’s okay that I don’t want to go back to that same routine because at least then I was losing weight and right now I’m fatter than I’ve ever been. Am I allowed to be happy and fat? Would I be happy at a lower weight that was still considered fat? Am I ever not going to hate myself? These are the things that I think about regularly.