When I was three, my parents said I was “too big” for something. That’s the first time I remember having a sense of my body, and the first time I remember feeling fat. Messages from adults shouted the importance of being thin, and I was precocious and picked up on things well before people thought I would.
My dad’s job had physical fitness requirements, including weight. I’d see him skip meals and water the day before he had to weigh in, and I noticed. My mom lamented gaining weight from medication, and I learned that gaining weight was bad. Weight was important in our family. I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be loved, and I knew that meant being thin.
As I grew, I was frequently told I was “getting bigger”. Between the normal growth of a kid and the fact that I was at 90th or 95th percentile in height and weight, I got that a lot. I hated it, but I didn’t know what to do about it, and I never told anyone how ashamed it made me. Honestly, I doubt they’d have understood anyway.
I told myself I was unlovable in 3rd grade, when I was weighed by the school nurse. I was convinced my teacher would hate me if she saw the slip of paper with my weight on it, and I was intensely ashamed. I still remember clutching that paper in my hand, holding it so nobody could see it.
The summer when I was eleven, something clicked, or perhaps something snapped. I cut back on eating, without even realizing what I was doing. My shorts got looser. I assumed that was because I was so fat that I was stretching them out. I stopped shopping in the juniors’ section and went back to the kids’ section, but I didn’t see a change at all. I was still fat.
When I went back to school after that summer, my favorite teacher stopped me in the hall. “You’ve lost weight!” she exclaimed. “You look great. What’s your secret?” I knew she was wrong. I knew she was mistaken. But I saw how pleased she was, and I realized that meant that I needed to do something to lose weight.
I read tips in my mom’s magazines and online, and I figured things out. I loved to read novels, but now I read them while standing up, in order to burn a few more calories. I babysat, and after the kids went to sleep, I walked in circles around the house. When I was cold, I’d forego the jacket—after all, I’d burn more calories if I had to keep myself warm. I convinced myself and others that I didn’t like high-calorie foods—maybe I truly didn’t, but I honestly don’t know.
More compliments, more praise. “I wish I had your discipline.” I heard it from other kids and from adults, and I knew I needed to lose more weight in order to please them. Maybe I could lose enough to be happy with myself, to see what they saw myself.
My mom started to worry, and I was taken to specialists. I knew they somehow thought I was anorexic. If they knew the truth, they’d hate me. They’d be ashamed. They’d be disgusted.
I convinced the doctors that I was fine. Of course I knew that I was thin. I ate so little because I wasn’t hungry. Somehow, my growth chart had been lost, so they didn’t know I had started at a normal weight and lost a significant amount of weight as a pre-teen. The doctors labeled my mom as the one with the problem.
I told a classmate my mom thought I was anorexic. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” She responded in disbelief, “They think you are anorexic??” We both knew I wasn’t thin enough for that.
I weighed myself several times a day and watched the numbers slowly creep down. I’d surely be happy if I could get under a certain milestone, but that number came and went. It didn’t help. I never made it to my next goal. A part of me still regrets that. Perhaps that would have been low enough…
I started on an antidepressant, and I began gaining weight despite my best efforts. I wasn’t strong enough to keep the weight off.
I never considered going off the antidepressants, oddly enough. Perhaps because my dad was a doctor, medicine was something I wouldn’t change. My weight was higher than it had been, but I was still hungry and weak.
I made it through weightlifting in college somehow, but when I started karate again, I just had no energy. I had to sit on the bench on the side watching for half the class, which was embarrassing. (It also meant that others were burning calories and I wasn’t.) I started to eat a little more, just to have the energy to train. I hated it, but I gained more weight. A lot of it was muscle, but it wasn’t all muscle.
I talked with good friends, talked with a therapist. I trained more, and I earned my black belt. I had gained so much weight in college… something to be terribly ashamed of, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of how strong I felt now.
Then came graduation, and grad school. I continued with karate, but I wasn’t thrilled with the teacher, so I didn’t have the same incentive. I began to restrict again.
I asked a doctor whether I should lose weight. He said I could lose weight, but that I shouldn’t lose more than eight pounds. The first thing I did was to lose eight pounds, and then eight more “to be on the safe side”. I wound up well under the limit he set, because even though he said that was the lowest I should go, I “heard” him saying that I needed to be no higher than that amount.
I still remember one person who was concerned at that point. Someone noticed my weight loss, and asked if I was sick. I didn’t know what to tell her. Nearly everyone else had glowing remarks about it.
Every compliment told me to do more, even though friends who knew me said I was fine; they told me to eat when I was hungry. I knew I had to have energy to get through grad school, to get through life. I graduated, and I had to have energy to teach my classes, to take care of kids. I ate; I eat. I don’t like it.
I miss being thin. I miss the compliments, the euphoria of conquering hunger. I miss the control that I had when I restricted. It sounds terrible, but I miss the concern from others when I got light-headed, when my vision went dark, when I passed out. I knew they cared. Who would care now? Being thin was something I was good at, something people liked me for. Now what am I?
(March 2018)