Honesty

"I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old" - Benjamin Franklin

Disclaimer: This is my journey, from my perspective. Nothing written in this blog is meant as a judgment upon anyone else's lifestyle or eating/exercise habits. I believe there are people who can be happy and content at any size. I applaud those people who have found contentment in their own bodies, no matter what kind of shape they are in. This blog is about me finding the same contentment and what that entails. I may not always make sense, I'm merely going to write what I feel. I'm going to attempt to be as honest as possible about what's going on in my head. My successes and my failures will be documented with painstaking honesty. One of the things I will endeavor to do in this blog is discuss the thought processes and patterns of a fat person. That doesn't mean all fat people think like me or behave like me, but I do think there is quite a bit of commonality in those of us who have chosen food over health. And I do hope that there will be someone out there who reads my words and finds companionship in them. This is my therapy, and I hope on some level, it can be yours, too.

I weigh 248 lbs. I am five feet, four inches, tall. According to most weight charts, I should weigh between 120 and 140 lbs. I am over 100 lbs. overweight, which puts me in the morbidly obese category.

Morbidly obese. Morbidly obese. Those are real words and they apply to me. Morbid is defined as, "Of the nature of or indicative of disease." I would be the first person to admit that I have a disease. Denial has never been an issue. I know I have a problem. Food is my problem. I am addicted to food. I've been in some unhealthy relationships, but none more unhealthy than my relationship with food. But, why? Why has food become so important to me that I have allowed it to take over my life?

My husband doesn't like it when I call myself fat. It's sweet. I think it's his way of letting me know that he doesn't care, and I believe him. We've been together since high school and his attraction to me has never waned. He thought I was beautiful when I was skinny and he thinks I'm beautiful now. I love him for that. Sometimes, I wish it bothered him a little, just to motivate me. I'm sure I wouldn't feel that way if I was one of those women who was married to a man that had issues with their weight gain. If Jim was the type of guy who commented about my weight, I'd probably just want to crawl into a hole and die.

The thing is, though, I already want to crawl into a hole and die. I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I'm not saying that to elicit some sort of sympathy. It's just a fact. I am sad all the time. All. The. Time. I don't talk about it with my friends. Or my family. Who wants to be around that kind of negativity? But the truth is, every year that goes by, I am sadder than I was the year before. My sadness has reached debilitating proportions. I told Jim the other night that I could actually see myself becoming a shut-in. Sitting up at my computer, eating, drinking, watching Netflix in the dark. I don't want to go out. I don't want to be seen. It takes too much energy to figure out what to wear. What can I put on that will hide my fat back rolls? What can I put on that will hide my double belly? Yeah, the double belly. That's a real joy. That happens when you've accumulated so much fat in your stomach that it actually creases in the middle and breaks itself up into two parts. You totally want me now. Admit it.

So, what is stopping me from becoming a shut-in? What's stopping me from giving up? I honestly can't tell you. I feel hopeless. I feel, in a lot of ways, like the battle has already been fought and I've lost. I've tried so many times to fix me, with minor success. I can't put my finger on it, I'm not sure why, but there is something inside telling me that if I don't do it now, I won't ever. I keep gaining weight. I've showed no signs of slowing down. When I got pregnant with my oldest child in December of 1989, I weighed 115 lbs. That's 133 lbs. in twenty-two years. Broken out, that's 6 lbs. a year, which means in ten more years, I could weigh over 300 lbs.

I can't watch videos of myself from gigs I do with the band. What's odd is when I'm up there, performing, I forget that I'm fat. I feel good. But later, when I watch the videos, I'm horrified and humiliated. It doesn't help that videos are shot from below. Trust me, from below is not my best angle. I've got this chin thing, I call it my goiter, and there's nothing like a little from-below video to make my goiter really stand out.

Being on stage is the ONLY time I forget that I'm fat. I think I can speak for most fat people when I say that you never, ever, forget that you're fat. When you're watching t.v., you're reminded that you're fat. When you read a magazine, you're reminded that you're fat. When you go shopping for clothes, you're reminded that you're fat (we'll discuss the hideous clothes made for fat people another time), when you're on a plane or on an amusement park ride or in a movie theater or in a booth at a restaurant, you're reminded that you're fat. When you're sitting in the bathtub trying to shave your legs, you're REALLY reminded that you're fat. I haven't looked at myself naked in the mirror for months. I try to avoid looking at myself in the mirror unless absolutely necessary. When I make plans with friends to go out, the anxiety is overwhelming. Odds are I will be the fattest one in the group. I hate it. And here's the weird thing about being fat, even though you feel completely conspicuous (because you just tried to squeeze between two chairs in a bar and wound up pulling the hair of the woman sitting in one of the chairs because it got caught between your belly and the back of her chair), you also feel invisible. Being fat can make you feel marginalized. You feel as if your status as a human being has been reduced.

I know so far all I've really talked about are things that would fall under the category of vanity, how I look and judging myself based on how I look. Well, to an extent, that's true. We all have eyeballs. We see each other, and whether we want to admit it or not, we are affected by what we see and how we are seen. Does that mean I support us as a society being obsessed with our appearance and basing our value on that? Of course not. Do I want my daughter to value herself based on her brain and her heart? Of course I do and every human being SHOULD be valued in the same way. I base someone's value on who they are, not how they look, and I'm grateful to have people in my life who value me in the same way. In this instance, however, that's not the point. This is about how I feel about myself. This is about me relinquishing control of my body, and ultimately, my mind, to a damaging lifestyle. This is about me attempting to get my body AND my mind healthy. I am so sick of being sad. I am so sick of feeling like a failure. I am so sick of feeling worthless. I've spent the last 22 years taking care of everyone else but me. I don't regret the choice to do that, I love my people, but now, now it's my time. It's time to reclaim myself. If I don't do it now, I fear it will ultimately be the end of that part of me that's somewhere inside still fighting. The me that wants to body surf again. The me that wants to be able to run at a full sprint again. The me that doesn't get out of breath just carrying the laundry up the stairs. The me that wants to go to the skating rink with my kids and not need to stop and take a break every couple of laps. The me that wants to hike trails and climb mountains and ride my bike for miles without having every muscle in my body hand me a Dear John letter afterwards.

I've spent years blaming my sadness on other things: my marriage, my family, money, work, anything and everything. And then I stopped to think, really think, about the times over the last couple of decades where I've felt good about myself, where my head was in a good place. Every single one of those times has involved me taking care of myself. You'd think recognizing that would be enough of a catalyst to get me to change my habits, but that's the other thing about sadness, it holds you down. It's an impossible cycle. You eat because you're sad, you're sad because you eat, you get fatter because you eat, being fatter makes you even sadder, so you eat more. It's an addiction like any other drug or alcohol, but the problem with food is you can't not eat. An alcoholic eliminates alcohol from their life. A drug addict eliminates the drug out of their life. A food addict cannot eliminate food out of their life. The thing that you're addicted to, you can't get away from, you have to keep putting it in your body just to live. I know that's why I fail. No matter how good I feel about myself when I'm eating right and exercising, the addiction pulls me back in. I have to figure out how to break myself of the habit and be addiction free once and for all.

So, what's different this time? When I'm sad, I hide. I pull back from the people that love me the most. I see myself regressing more and more. I know that's not me. I don't want that to be me. In the past, I've done this by myself and failed. It's too hard to do alone. I need to make this journey public in order to pull in a community of people around me. Instead of hiding, I want to put it all out there, in the hope that there will be a level of accountability. I adore my family, but they don't hold me accountable. In fact, if you polled each one of them, not one would say they believe I'll actually do this. They've seen me try and fail too many times. I get it. I don't believe in me either, but I want to. I really want to.

I go to my Crossfit demo session Sunday morning and then will be signing up on an 18 month contract. From what I've seen and heard, Crossfit is the type of workout program I need in my life. I'm going to get my butt handed to me. I'm excited and terrified all at the same time. I'm going to go find a good sports bra tomorrow. It will be humiliating enough without my boobs making a scene.

I'll let you know how it goes.