Every now and then I go completely off topic from what my blog usually covers. I’m human, right? And there’s a lot going on up in this noggin’ besides what I’m usually obsessed with, and that’s, of course, chronic health. But there’s something that ties in very close with that, that was very much the brainchild of this blog and that also ties in very closely with mental health also and has kind of crept it’s nasty way back into my thoughts recently.
Weight.
I think it’s probably been the subject or obsession of every woman, at some point of their lives and I think most all of us have some degree of an unhealthy relationship with our body and our weight. For me, my body image was always entangled with a number. A number defined how fit I was, how beautiful I was, how healthy I was. That number, in turn, became the object of my obsession and it didn’t take long before I was caught in a very dangerous game of purging and starving in order to be thin. I think at my thinnest I was in the ’90s and that was after two children and feeling like I had the illness beat. I didn’t. The illness simply shifted its centre.
Twenty-something years later, many more health problems than I’d begun with, and I’m about 30lbs heavier than I’d like to be and that’s about 30lbs less than I was at my heaviest. Several major surgeries, not accustomed to being sedentary, eating more than I used to out of depression and I packed on the pounds. The first 30lbs were pretty easy to shed because, well, let me be completely frank here. I am a professional when it came to starving myself, and what I didn’t starve, I purged and 30lbs came off lightning fast. The rest has kind of stuck around for the last few years and I’m pretty desperate to lose them. But my body has changed since I was in my 30’s. I didn’t have my left hip replaced, the lower lumbar spinal fusion and sacroiliac joint fusion and I didn’t have the gut issues, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative disc disease, or psoriatic arthritis or the ankylosing spondylitis. I still had the migraines, but you throw a good migraine into the mix now and I’m just down for the count. I can do some yoga, but the yoga I can do is not designed for weight loss. It’s designed for gentle or deep stretches and helping with the hurt parts. I think of myself as an excellent researcher, given what I do for a living and I can’t find anything on what someone like me can do to lose weight successfully, without exercise, and as someone with a history of body image disorder, it’s torture. But you don’t have to have experience body image disorder to feel the pressure. All you have to have experience with is being a woman and men feel a lot of the pressure as well.
We are bombarded with thousands, if not millions of images of scantily clad, photoshopped models on a daily basis. Smooth flat belly. Beautiful, bountiful breasts. Satiny skin. Tiny waist. Hips not too big. Ass plump but not too big. Thin here. Curvy there. Combinations that are simply not possible with genetics. This onslaught of images, that extends to movie representations, begins from childhood through our teens and whether we realize it or not, we are constantly judging ourselves and comparing one another against these fictitious representations of what women should look like. The outward judgment of one another is brutal, but the inward judgment that we hand down on ourselves might as well be labelled savage, with a side dish of merciless and level of sadomasochism that would make Mr. Grey pale in comparison. Any woman knows this. You know this. And yet every day we go out there and we inflict the pain of judgment on one another and ourselves without even a second thought. Some of us even inflict this pain on another girl/woman, in groups, gang-style. Abusing and harassing viciously, in person and on social media. It’s really not surprising so many women have issues with body image that leave them susceptible to other problems.
But what happens when a girl, like me, finds herself trapped in a body like this, with no way out? Ever toss two cats into a burlap sack? Only one escapes alive. All humour aside, it’s hell. I don’t own a scale. My daughter does, but I don’t and I usually forget it’s here. I get weighed every 4-6 weeks, for a variety of doctor appointments, and while I am aware of the numbers, the numbers don’t rule my life, the way it would if I lived with the scale. Numbers are very bad. They trigger my OCD and I can get very wrapped up in them, which leads me to my other option for weight loss in my current condition: Calorie counting. The #1 way to effectively lose weight in my current condition, might as well be a nuclear bomb. I was perusing some diet plans on Pinterest and just looking pushed my heart rate to 110. How do I know this? I got an alert from my happy little Apple watch. Some days I really love my Apple watch. Other days I just wonder if I was better living in blissful ignorance. My point here being, I feel like there is no option for me and it leaves me feeling helpless and angry and depressed. I am not without the drive and I feel like I have researched quite a bit, but it’s also exhausting being me and it’s a full-time job just researching all these different methods that -abled bodied people can do to transform and lose weight. I get enormously discouraged and on top of all of this have to fight those old tendencies not to starve myself or purge (though with my current GI issues, it’s a lot less tempting) until I’m more or less left with option C, which is just trying to accept me, for me.
You can see where this is going right? The vicious circle of doom? I’m not sure whether or not to call this irony or tragedy or maybe a dark comedy, but what I can say is that it sucks. Before I was too young to understand everything, my brain was being blitzed by images that would alter my perception of myself, leaving me to seek this impossible perfection that would never come to fruition. Now that I understand this, my psyche is already damaged to a point where I may intellectually understand this but I struggle when I look in the mirror and then as an added insult to injury, I am chronically ill to the point that exercise as I once knew it is a dream and so I struggle not only with my illnesses, but my weight and how I see myself and I often feel trapped. That is one hell of a curve ball I never saw coming at 13. But, I’m not the kind of person to just give up. In fact, it just makes me angry, which gives me just enough energy to keep on researching. If I find the answer, I’ll let you know.
As always, thank you for reading and being a part of my world.
