It’s midnight, and I can’t sleep. My brain, as it often does, is thinking about my weight and shape. For whatever reason, this time, I wonder whether a medication that I started six months ago could be the cause of my recent weight gain.
When we were talking about medications, I told the neurologist that I didn’t want anything that was likely to cause weight gain. I purposefully didn’t look up side effects of this new med, so I didn’t psych myself out, but I decided the other night that it was time. Sure enough, weight gain was a complaint by many.
So many feelings: anger and betrayal, excitement and relief, concern and wariness…
This neurologist perhaps didn’t take my request seriously; didn’t realize what a problem weight gain could be for me. Maybe if I were thinner, he would have understood that my eating disorder is real. I know he had the best intentions for me, but how could he put me on this medication?
Maybe this higher weight that I was trying to accept isn’t me, and this isn’t my natural setpoint. I was just coming to accept that I might be ‘stuck’ in a larger body, but now I have hope again. Is that good? Is that bad?
And what if this hope is ill-founded? Perhaps it wasn’t the medicine at all; perhaps it’s “my fault”. Or maybe the medicine has permanently changed my setpoint. How could I live with that?
With this recent weight gain, I’ve been working to move from kids’ clothes to adult clothes; a very difficult and emotional task for me for a number of reasons. I moved up from a kids’ Large to a men’s Small, and I was dismayed to find that even the Small was tighter than I was comfortable with. I just checked, though—with the brands I have, the men’s Small is smaller than the kids’ Large. That’s why the Small was more form-fitting than I liked; it was literally smaller than the kids’ size. I feel like less of a failure.
But I don’t want to feel like a failure for being bigger; I don’t see others as failures. I want to treat myself as well as I treat others.
Lots of conflict and confusion right now. Luckily, I have Intensive Outpatient (IOP) in a few minutes—that group has been very helpful to me.