"Bad" Thoughts

As "the fat girl" growing up in the 70's, my life was one in which I could not wear the fashionable clothes of my peers. At that time, "plus size" clothes only came in a few flavors and for pants, it was mainly polyester stretch pants. While other girls wore jeans, corduroy, and velveteen, I was clad in the trappings of old ladies. What was worse, I was at the mercy of my mother's fashion sense. I would prefer a parade of dark brown and black to mask my fat thighs, hanging belly flap, and voluminous ass, but she would sometimes buy hot pink, light blue, and lime green (most likely because these were unpopular colors and cheaper - she did not buy similar colors for herself).

At some point in junior high school, I found myself capable of squeezing into a pair of the biggest jeans I could locate. I was so happy to have a chance to wear something other than stretch pants and feel like I marginally fit in with everyone else. On that day, those too tight pants split across the seam in the back and I had to walk around for the rest of the day with a sweater tied around my waist to cover up the huge rip.

One of my classmates, Julie, who was a cheerleader took no end of joy in this incident. She carried on and laughed through several classes about what had happened. Her mirth at my embarrassment was something she could not contain and when we got to Spanish class she was bubbling over in giggles. The teacher asked her what was so funny and she asked the teacher how to say "rip" in Spanish and she constructed a sentence which said, "Shari's pants ripped", and she burst into new gales of laughter at the renewal of my humiliation. I just put my head down and endured it because there was little else I could do. Needless to say, I never wore jeans again in school.

By graduation, Julie was starting to show signs of pudginess herself, though she edged away from becoming genuinely fat. In addition to her making fun of my ripped pants, she enjoyed criticizing my lack of athletic aptitude due to my weight and overall lack of grace and coordination. When she struck out while playing softball and one of her friends called her some derogatory word for doing so, she looked my way and said that being caught out on base because you were too slow to run to them made you this unkind term (which I cannot recall), not striking out. Her failure was okay, but mine was not because I failed due to my fat.

Recently on Facebook, I have been reunited with a lot of people who both were and were not my friends in school. This is a situation which taxes my ability to be mature and kind to the hilt since these are people who dealt me a great deal of damaging cruelty and contributed to the psychological burdens that I continue to carry with me to this day. I have to admit that part of me is very ugly in response to how their lives have turned out and that I am more than a little happy to see that many of them are aging far worse than I am, and that includes the formerly skinny and pretty girls who are fatter than me at my current weight.

Julie was persuaded by one of the people I am friended with to get onto Facebook, but she hasn't uploaded a picture and hasn't interacted with anyone. I'm unhappy to admit that I have a strong hope that she amply fulfilled her propensity for chubbiness through the years and that she got very fat. This is a truly awful thing for me to wish on anyone as I know extremely well how difficult and painful obesity is. The part of me that longs for karma to be real and desperately wants empathy to be bred in my former tormenters can't be denied though.

I realize that these sorts of feelings are "justifiable" in one way. I was hurt and it's not uncommon to want those who hurt me to learn a lesson in the pain I lived in by living in it themselves, but this type of thinking is poison for the soul and the psyche. I need to focus on positive motivation and my own successes and growth, not wish misfortune on others who once hurt me. As I have said before, I also realize that the people my classmates were at that age are not who they are today and I need to learn to forgive them. This sense of wanting them to be worse off than me is not conducive to that sort of mentality and something I need to work on.

Hungry Young Me

When I was about 14 years old, I became infatuated with the guy who sat in the seat behind me. He always sat behind me because teachers arranged us alphabetically and our names were locked together in an unbreakable fashion due to the inflexible nature of the roman alphabet. On those rare occasions when a teacher didn't force us to follow this convention, he sat with other people. This gave me more than a small clue about the fact that perhaps he wasn't fond of talking to "the fat girl" at the start of every class.

Since I'm 45 years old, I grew up in a time when "the fat kid" really was only one in the class. In our small rural grade which totaled around 85 people, I was "the fat girl" and there was also "the fat guy". Everyone else was thin or not more than vaguely chubby due to the vagaries of puberty.

My lingering crush on this fellow lasted well over a decade. It waxed and waned. He was my friend during parts of it, and out of touch during other parts. It was quite literally a spell over me that I could not shake or break until I fell in love with my husband and I hated being controlled by my feelings for this person. There were days when I would have done anything to not feel for this guy the way I did. I did not want the burden it placed on me. Falling for my future husband finally shattered this sense that my affection was painfully tethered to a person who would never feel for me the way I felt for him. In my mind, this was the case because I was always "the fat girl" to him. Since he grew up watching me go from chubby to ballooning up to "big" and then close to what I thought was "huge", he'd never see me as sexually attractive.

Even when I lost weight in college, I was still too fat for "normal" guys and getting down to about 180 lbs. didn't change the object of my long-standing love's feelings for me. When I finally got the courage to admit to him that I was in love with him, something that I'm sure he had known for a long time, he told me he just didn't see me that way, and gave me a pity kiss on the mouth. I was around 21 when that happened, and it was the first time anyone had ever kissed me.

Fast forward to the future, where I have the benefits of 20/20 hindsight and over 20 years of blissful union with my husband who I adore and adores me back. I'm immensely grateful that my unrequited love never returned my affections because I can't imagine how that may have affected my potential future relationship with the man who is my perfect match. Either it would have "worked" enough to dissuade me from pursuing my future husband, or it would have failed and possibly left me too jaded or wary to give a relationship with my future husband a chance.

At the very least, I wouldn't be the open, fresh, and, yes, even naive, person who entered a relationship with a man she met and developed a distance relationship with. Frankly, I believe that a lot of people who have bad relationships are worse for it when they enter future ones. They are scarred by the things that went wrong and may be unreasonably wary of seeing the same things happen in the next relationship. My husband had the benefit of not competing with the memory of anyone from my past, either in terms of positives or negatives. He deserved this "fresh" and undamaged "relationship me" (the only part of me that probably wasn't damaged), and I'm grateful to have been spurned by the person who I focused my affection on throughout my youth.

I have been in touch off an on with my old friend throughout the years, and am currently in contact with him through FaceBook. He married a woman he met at a job he held a long time ago (about two or three years after I married). My husband and I met briefly with him and her about two decades ago and she seemed nice enough. My friend confessed that they were marrying at that time because his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, but quickly added that they were going to marry anyway. The pregnancy just hastened the time-line.

In the past several months, my friend had gone rather quiet on FaceBook, and what I suspected might be the cause turned out to be true. His marriage was ending. He and his wife have two children and the oldest recently finished high school and the younger one is a young teen. He told me that he had been unhappy for quite some time and felt that he couldn't "be himself" in their home. I concluded that perhaps the oldest child entering adulthood and the youngest definitively being out of childhood may have given him the courage to walk away from a situation he was dissatisfied with.

For many years, when I have been occasionally in touch with my friend, I have had a deep sense that his marriage would not last. This was not some petty notion that he would have been happier with me and that I wanted to see his marriage end to validate that. As I said, I'm grateful that we never ended up together. The reason I thought his marriage might fail was based in some information he confided in me a very long time ago when he was engaged to a woman from our small hometown. He cheated on her with not one, but two other women and eventually ended the engagement. I should mention that my friend is a lovely person. He is very kind, intelligent, artistic, talented, and very charming. He is not "good-looking", but has a very appealing personality. Many people are drawn to him because he has a particular energy. His actions with his long-ago fiancee should not indicate anything about who he is at his core.

Let me say that I don't believe my friend is some sort of Lothario or a "cheating dog" that can't be taught new tricks. The case in my opinion has been that he is deeply insecure on some level (a feeling I can truly identify with) and that it would be hard for any one woman to meet his needs adequately, and such a woman would have to be both immensely self-aware and other-directed. Also, he is moody and passionate, and that is a hard combination to live with on a daily basis. Frankly, though I am both incredibly self-aware and other-directed, I've realized in retrospect what a horrible combination his personality and mine would have been and that it would have been me who he would have been divorcing had we ended up together.

All of that being said, and here I finally reach the point of this post. There is a small nagging voice in me that wants to hear him say something to the effect of, "I wish I had married you instead". I am incredibly disappointed in myself for this tiny, little voice that whispers from a small corner of the immense cavern of my insecurity. It's my ancient need for validation of my value aside from my physical presence tapping at my psyche and asking to finally be fulfilled. The fat girl I was always wanted to be loved and accepted by this person because she was intelligent, witty, funny, kind, and loving. That girl was never accepted by any boy or young man because her body was a deal breaker.

Even though I am an adult now and am utterly validated as a desirable character by my husband's bountiful unconditional love and frequent professions of admiration for all of the qualities no one else appreciated, that tiny voice still whispers at me. Some part of me still needs validation from this friend of mine who I held affection for for so very long and I am ashamed of this need.

That shame is not because of the need itself because I think that anyone who has been so battle-scarred in life because of her weight may need a lot of pointless validation to help heal some of those old wounds. I'm ashamed of it because I want someone to profess some sort of wish to have had me in his life (but not to want me in it at present) when I have absolutely zero desire for him now and haven't had any since falling in love with my husband. This desire is incredibly selfish and self-serving. It is merely a need for a quick, pat stamp of approval that I never got when I was younger. I don't care about what the stamp means or brings, but I want to have it nonetheless, as if it completes a collection with a missing space that I just want filled for no good reason.

Recognizing that I have this need is not new to me nor unique. I'm sure that many people want the people they pined for to want them later even though they no longer want the object of their former affection. For me though, it's a little different as I'm not looking for spite or revenge at being rejected. I have some deep need for this friend to have "liked" me, but have been afraid to have acted on his feelings because it was too embarrassing to have a fat girlfriend. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that any such feelings ever existed. I don't believe he ever was attracted to me in any way other than as a friend just like his male friends.

It's this rather sad and pathetic need to feel that my character transcended my physicality and to have that verified with an assertion from him. At its core, it's me wanting someone to say, "prove to me that I was a good person who was worthy of loving, even when my body didn't allow me to be loved." That's the hungry part of me that has been pulled to the surface from this experience, and I'm going to have to work to reconcile the unfulfilled feelings of that very young me with the more mature me who is truly blessed to have it all when it comes to love and validation from a person she worships and adores in the here and now.

Another Woman's Life

Jane grew up the as the fifth child of six. Two of them were boys and the other four were girls. The youngest child, a sister, was her mother's favorite. Jane's father was quite a bit older than her mother, and his second wife. There was a half-brother from her father's previous marriage, but he was so much older than her that he was more of an "uncle" figure. She got along better with him than her other siblings, but he had his own home and family and they saw little of one another.

With such a large family, she grew up feeling lost and unloved and felt rejected by her mother in particular. Her mother was status-conscious, demanding, and very hard to please. She insisted that Jane scrub floors until they shined, and she grew up to loath housework as a result. She looked outside of her family to fill the emptiness and set her sights on a boyfriend from a young age. Her mother disapproved of Jane's boyfriend, a young man who Jane first encountered at a roller skating rink around the age of 12. Even at such a tender age, he was smoking and drinking beer.

Wanting nothing more than to escape her family situation, Jane asked to marry her boyfriend, Ed, a few years before the legal age (which was 21 at that time). She had just finished high school with a "C" average and a year book picture she didn't consent to that had a nickname she hated under it, "Skunk." She hadn't been popular in school nor academically gifted. The way she could move on with her life was to get married to a person who loved her and get away from a mother who she never pleased and who made her do things she hated around the house.

Ed had quit school in the 9th grade and grew up without a father or a mother for the most part. His mother left him with his grandmother while she ran around living her life as she pleased, including frequenting bars. His parents had separated and his father was uninvolved in his life. His grandmother beat him and favored his sole sibling, a sister. His "pedigree" didn't come up to snuff for Jane's mother and she would not agree to allow them to marry. The consent she required for an early marriage was granted by her father. Her mother never approved of her marriage to this man, and constantly judged Jane's lifestyle from the start of their union. She never visited Jane and Ed's home, but did expect her daughter to come to her for regular visits.

Jane entered marriage with the expectation of a white picket fence existence. Ed would work and earn money and she would be a housewife and have children. She had two children, and some time in their early primary school education, her husband suffered a series of accidents on the job which left him intermittently paralyzed on his left side. Ed was told that he had a blood clot in his brain which would eventually float to the wrong place, block the wrong blood vessel and he would die. He was given 6 months to live and turned to alcohol to hide from the terror he felt at his impending young death.

This situation crushed Jane's dream of a traditional family life. Her husband's disability payments were just enough to live on. They had a house with a mortgage and two children and she had a yearning to live up to the lifestyle of her now adult younger sister. The youngest sister, Judy, still lived with her mother and had an impressive rotation of new lifestyle upgrades like new furniture, electronics, and cars on a regular basis. For a family on a disability payment income, this was an impossible standard to reach.

Jane tried hard to keep up with her sister by buying things "on time". She'd have a new furniture set just as her sister did, but would have to spend a year making payments. Eventually, she had to turn to a sequence of dead-end, low-paying jobs to help support the family. She worked one job after another, often getting fired or laid off at the first opportunity in order to collect unemployment because she hated being told what to do and often complained behind the boss's back to people who later told the boss. This inability to do what she was told was courtesy of the way her mother pushed her so hard to do more housework than she was comfortable doing in her younger days. She simply did not like to be bossed around by anyone.

While Jane worked, Ed did nothing around the house to help look after their children, and spent most of his days watching T.V., smoking, and going to bars. Some nights, she'd bundle her kids up and load them into the car and visit every bar in the adjacent neighborhoods to track him down and drag him home. There were many arguments and threats about divorce, but neither of them were capable of living on their own so they remained unhappily together.

Debt started to pile up as Jane tried to have a lifestyle that was beyond her means. She felt she deserved nice things, and would often buy things on payment plans or take out loans to consolidate all existing debt so that she could minimize overall payments and start a bunch of new ones. She bought things for people to impress them and gave them gifts to show them that she liked them or cared about them. Her children, despite being poor, were never without a lavish Christmas with huge piles of gifts under the tree.

Often, it would take months to pay the debt for all of those presents, but she used material possessions to not only show love, but to justify her need to buy things. She wanted to shop anyway, and saying it was "for the kids" made her feel like she was being altruistic when she overspent massively. The gaps in her increasingly difficult and dissatisfying life were something she tried to fill with stuff.

One of the things which Jane didn't understand about herself, but was certainly the case, was that she was a very sensitive person. Loud noises startled her. She complained loudly about bad smells that came her way. Her feelings were easily hurt. She turned to food in addition to shopping to drown the pain, and gained a lot of weight. She often weighed between 200-250 lbs., sometimes a bit more or less depending on whether she was making an effort to diet.

She also felt starved for attention and friendship. As a result of being physically abused as a child, Ed was closed off and rarely expressed affection or feelings. He didn't tend to empathize with her when she was in pain, either physical or mental. Part of that was his closed off nature, and part was the constant fear he lived with of his own death. The doctors were wrong when they predicted his young and early death, but he still suffered crippling headaches that could only be muted by extremely potent prescription pain killers and occasionally went suddenly blind in his left eye or became paralyzed on the left side of his body. There were recurrent and terrifying reminders of the results of his accident and the possibility that he could die at any moment. He tended only to say anything loving when drunk, and even then rarely.

What was more, Ed completely abdicated all responsibility as an adult. He wouldn't go into banks, pay bills, grocery shop, file tax forms, or look after his children. This was because he felt insecure and lacked confidence in most "public" interactions. He didn't want to look foolish, so he was unwilling to go into any situation in which he wasn't fully comfortable. The burden to do everything fell to Jane, with her sensitive disposition and easy sense of feeling overwhelmed. There were times when she would say she couldn't take it anymore and would cry or put her head in her hands. Ed would ignore her or sometimes berate her for this. Her children would feel scared and insecure. Sometimes she'd talk about losing the house or not being able to pay the electric bill. She juggled the financial balls so that she could keep shopping because it was all she had to mute her misery and fill the emptiness left by her shattered dreams of white picket fences and housewife bliss. Sometimes, the balls would all fall at once.

Many people didn't like Jane very much once they got to know her because she talked too much, often lied to represent herself as more knowledgeable or to keep conversations going, and she often gossiped. Eventually, the friends who she told things to compared stories and they knew she was talking badly about them behind their backs. Most of her female friends were the wives of Ed's drinking buddies and even poorer than her. She enjoyed putting them down, because it helped her elevate herself. Much as her mother used her as the black sheep to elevate herself, Jane used her friend's lives to make her feel like she was "better" than others. This was behavior her mother role modeled all too well, and her daughter naturally picked up on this way of boosting her esteem at the expense of others.

Eventually, she had only one friend left, and alienated her when she snapped and reached out and slapped a noisy child who was at her friend's house. She apologized and admitted for the first time in her life that she was pulled to the brink and reacted badly, but the friend wouldn't accept her apology and hung up on her. The truth was that she was constantly lashing out at people because she was in pain or distress due to being overstimulated and overwhelmed by all of the responsibility that she bore alone, but she usually did so verbally and only toward immediate family, and she never, ever apologized to them. She couldn't bring herself to admit she was responsible for her behavior, because her low self-regard required that she be "right" all of the time. This caused her children to withdraw from her, so she had a distant husband, and kids who put a wall between themselves and her to protect themselves. This made her even more profoundly lonely.

As the years went by, Jane developed a wide variety of problems and had some accidents. She had her first major health scare when she was around 22 or 23 years old. She developed a gangrenous infection in her uterus after her second child and nearly died. She was also told that she couldn't have more children after the damage done to her by that infection. In later years, while performing a particularly degrading job for horrible wages, delivering pizzas, she crashed into a stone wall with the only brand new car she and her husband had ever built. She came back concussed, bruised, and with cracked bones. She also lost all of her beautiful teeth around age 26 to periodontal disease. It wasn't that she didn't take care of them, but rather a bad role of the genetic dice. In her early 30's, she was told she had the genetic disorder, retinitis pigmentosa. This was another bad roll as it affects women far less often than men. She was going to slowly go blind.

At one point, she was having intense headaches that wouldn't go away for a prolonged period of time and was taking pain killers. She became so confused that she accidentally overdosed and "died", but was revived. When asked why she kept taking pills, she said that she "just wanted the pain to go away." She was nearly committed to a mental health ward for being suicidal, but she begged her daughter not to allow her to be put in there and she intervened with a doctor who warned that she would try to kill herself again. She didn't. She never meant to in the first place. It was just another bad roll of the dice.

As the years went by, she tried to find ways to fulfill herself. She opened a video arcade that failed. She went back to college in her mid-50's to get a degree, but couldn't find work related to her field with her failing sight. She opened a candy store which was reasonably successful, but had to be closed when her blindness allowed too much shoplifting to go unnoticed. As the years went by, she developed crippling arthritis and a disorder where she couldn't get enough oxygen to nourish her blood for a brief trip across a room. Now, she has to carry around an oxygen tank and undergo repeated tests to find the cause of her malady. Her only pleasures are going to a senior center and attending its outings, food, listening to books on tape, and shopping with assistance. Since she suffers so much pain on a daily basis, she is demanding, temperamental, and unsympathetic to those around her when they experience difficulties. She feels no one suffers or has suffered as she has.

Jane's life didn't turn out in any way as she expected. Her mother was judgmental and showed overt disapproval of all of her choices. Her mother's love was entirely conditional and she never felt truly loved when she was growing up. She married a man who she adored and expected to fulfill her need to be loved and accepted, and he was an alcoholic who couldn't express love due to his abusive upbringing and absent parents. She wanted to live the life of a housewife and mother, but was forced to take a series of dead-end, low-paying, low-status jobs to augment her husband's disability payments and support her family. She wanted to live a comfortable lifestyle and have nice things, but she was too poor and fiscally irresponsible to ever have the type of life she wanted. She wanted to have friends, but her self-esteem was too low to be herself and she alienated them with lies and gossip. Instead of living a relatively healthy life, she suffered one health set-back after another, and inherited a terrifying genetic disease. Most painful of all, she wanted to be loved and to have meaningful companionship, but everyone put distance between themselves and her.

Of course, I am one of the people who put distance between her and myself, and you may have guessed that Jane is my mother. I tell this story because I often speak of the behaviors my mother has carried out that have damaged me and created a lot of my weight and food issues, as well as my neuroses and psychological problems. However, I want it to be clear, that I love my mother and I understand that she never, ever meant any harm to me or anyone else. I know she loved me, and never acted out of anything other than her own pain and strife. She was dealt an incredibly bad hand in life, and is a very fragile person. Like many emotionally frail people, the best of her, including her warmth, her loving nature, her strength, and her giving of herself both materially and emotionally, has been crushed under the oppressive weight of life's responsibilities and problems.

I recognize that, like me, my mother was cursed with high sensitivity. And, like me, she had no choice in the matter. It is just the way her nervous system is built. Unlike me though, she wasn't given certain gifts in life. She didn't have my intellect growing up. She didn't have a mother who told her she should work hard to be independent, educated, and try to make her own way in life because you don't want to be dependent on a man. She didn't have my self-awareness, and most importantly, she didn't have a life partner who is as close to psychological perfection in terms of character strength and self-esteem as a human can possibly be. My parents are both damaged people who did more damage to each other with their respective weaknesses. They are not, however, bad people. Both of them do not willfully hurt people, and I think even my emotionally distant father loves his daughters and wife, but cannot act on those feelings due to his inhibitions.

My mother did a lot of things which ended up hurting me, but she was acting on chains of behavior that were carried from her mother to herself, and responding as best she could to the incredible hardship of her life. I offer her the same compassion and understanding that I offer others when I speak about eating disorders. Like them and me, she was controlled in the present by all of the things she couldn't control in the past. Unlike me, she was never given the support or reprieve from life's problems in order to get out from under those negative influences and stressors. I can't be angry with her for what she did to me because it was never what she wanted to do to me. She wanted to be a good person and to be a loving wife and mother, and a lot of the time, she was.

Though I still suffer because of her influence to this day, I want to at least take one post to give her credit for the things she did which make me stronger. She did love me then and still does. She sacrificed her time and energy to care for her family financially and was the only adult in a family where there should have been two of them. She emphasized my sister's and my capabilities and encouraged us to better ourselves. She was proud of my sister's and my achievements and praised our grades and academic excellence. She did anything she could to give us the things we wanted despite our poverty. She would march into record stores and ask if she could have their promotional posters or materials for my favorite rock band because I was too shy to do so and so delighted to have those types of special items that no one else, regardless of the money they had, could have. She made sure I had a car at an early age, and taught me how to drive. She played card games with me and taught me to play well. My mother, before she reached her current broken state due to her health problems, blindness and relative social isolation, could be a charismatic force and often showed incredible kindness. She loves people and wants to be around them. She needs it, and has suffered for the lack of this sort of contact.

I forgave my mother for all of the damage she did to me a very long time ago. I still talk about it here because it is part of my therapeutic process. Sometimes, I even remark on it with irony or sarcasm, but there's no anger there. Mostly, I feel sorry that her life has been so incredibly hard and I have infinite compassion and empathy for what she has gone through. I just wanted her to be human and represent her in the proper context to people who follow my blog. She deserves that much, and more.

Note: I don't put a picture of my parents on this post because I have no regard for their privacy. The truth is that no one who would recognize them at that age is still alive, or at the very least, not trolling the Internet. There are only a few people who would recognize the picture of them in their late teens at all. One is my sister and the other are my mother's surviving siblings who are all computer illiterate. The truth is that using the picture puts my identity at risk as much as hers since I would be known as her daughter by anyone who recognized the picture.

I put the picture there because I want to show that my mother was once this young, fresh, happy person who had just married the man of her dreams and clearly had high hopes for her future. Her smile shows who she was and who she had the potential to be had life not completely dealt her one of the worst possible hands. There was no way the woman in that picture knew what was to come, and it makes me (literally) cry to think of all the dreams and quite reasonable needs she deserved to have fulfilled that were dashed by fate.

The Sky Isn't Really Falling (Part 2)

(this is a continuation of a post started here)

The thing I know is that the fear that kept me at that job despite the way in which it was crushing my soul was the fear my mother gave me. The idea that I couldn't let this opportunity go because there would never be another one like it was the driving force behind my clinging to that job. It not only kept me there, but it kept me powerless to demand anything that I was reasonably due. I couldn't stand up for myself when credit was stolen from me. I couldn't ask for raises. I couldn't refuse to do things which were outside of my job description. I couldn't do anything because it might threaten my job security and the job must be kept at all costs, even at the cost of my mental and physical health.

In the end, I couldn't endure the depression anymore. I took a vacation and was more miserable when it was over than before I had left. The fact that nothing could make me happy anymore was too much to bear. With my husband's encouragement, I finally was able to take my utterly defeated self and say I'd quit. I gave notice about 6 weeks before leaving, and I cried every day for a month at the prospect of leaving. It wasn't that I loved the job so much, but that I feared the change.

Prying myself away from something I'd clung to like a lifeline for so long was like ripping the very flesh from my body. It was painful on so many levels because I'd assigned disproportionate and ill-deserved value to the company and the work in order to validate my remaining there. The truth was though that it was my mother's fears that she had so deeply inculcated into me that played the biggest role. If I left, the sky was going to fall.

Obviously, the sky did not fall. Everything was okay. I got other work. My husband and I make enough money with our combined jobs, and I finally began the process of recovering my mental health. It took nearly a year away from that job before the depression started to lift. I spent much of that year holed up in our apartment talking to my sister, playing MMORPGs, and going out as little as possible. I cocooned myself from as much external pain as possible and one day, about 7-8 months later, I realized that I could enjoy things again, though I still didn't feel anywhere near "whole" for a good deal longer.

Three years away from that job, and I had the courage to make a decision that set off my weight loss efforts. That decision is to move to a very different place where new opportunities will present themselves. The truth is that we have remained where we are, in part, due to inertia, but also perhaps due to my fear. Things are going pretty well here, so I'm afraid to leave, but the truth is that our situation keeps us both in a state of intellectual and career stagnation. I'm afraid the sky will fall if I walk away from a life of relative comfort, so I chose to stay in a place in which I am not really happy and in which I have no bright future.

My fear at letting go of the stability we have had here has been a big part of why we have remained. My husband is okay to remain out of inertia, but he probably would have left a long time ago if I had wanted to. Everyday that I think about leaving, I face my fear that the sky will fall when I move on. It's a deep terror that I realize has one foot in reality and one foot in conjured fear.

Anyone can step off the curb to cross a street and be hit by a car, though the chances of that are rather low. Chances are you'll cross that street just fine. Chances are that I'll cross that street just fine when I move on and life will be different but no worse than it has been here on the whole. My mother would have had me believe that I would certainly be killed for taking the chance and stepping off the curb. She would have had me decide to stand on that same corner forever no matter how miserable it made me for fear of that that one in a million chance of getting hit by a previously unseen car would be the result. I have decided that I just can't keep standing there anymore based on a fear that the sky might fall if I take a step.

The Sky Really Isn't Falling (Part 1)

Among the many enduring "gifts", or should I say more accurately, "boobie prizes", that my mother gave me were a number of attitudes about life. She never told me these thoughts overtly, but I learned them clearly and loudly over the years through her actions and advice. The main theme would be that the sky was always falling, though breaking it down a bit is rather more enlightening.

One of the primary messages she gave me was that life was incredibly insecure so I had to take whatever chances I was offered immediately, whether they suited me or not. If I turned down an opportunity, there may never be one again, so it was important never to turn one down even if it made me unhappy to pursue a particular path. This is a lesson that I have carried with me pretty much my entire life. It's one that had me accepting unsuitable jobs because any hesitation on my part not only made me believe I'd be unemployed forever, but brought about a rain of complaining from my mother.

The worst of these choices resulted in a crappy job as a camp arts and crafts counselor for 2 months followed by a two-week stint as a waitress in a mall snack bar just after college. My mother was apoplectic at the idea that I would wait and apply for jobs that were more suitable for someone who had a Bachelor's degree in Psychology. She'd rather I worked for sub-minimum wage than allow me in peace to search for jobs in my field. Since I lived at home throughout and just after college, as I was too poor to do otherwise, there was no escaping her haranguing. Also, quite frankly, I'd lived my whole life with her fears and had thoroughly integrated them into my mindset.

The sense that I could not walk away from anything because it made me miserable also contributed to my remaining in a job I held for over a decade even though my substantial and unique contributions were seen as valueless by the company's president. I was the only one capable of doing much of the work I did, and replacing me would have required hiring at least two people at higher wages. My immediate boss also spent a few years stealing credit for my work and quashed any attempts on my part to assist other employees (including himself) with an angry snappish comment because he was worried that I'd look more valuable than he and the president might replace him with me. This isn't speculation on my part. He told me this perfectly clearly. He only stopped covering up the extent of the work I did when the president considered firing me and replacing me with someone else. Essentially, his efforts to cover up my value had worked so well that I appeared to be someone who could be replaced on a whim for a younger, cheaper newcomer. Only then did my boss start advertising my abilities because his work would have been nearly impossible without someone of my talents and skill level.

My misery at this job was compounded by the fact that I was rarely given any but the tiniest and most insignificant raises. In fact after a year in which I did particularly excellent work, I was hoping for a bit of a juicier raise than usual. This hope was utterly dashed when my expectations were answered with the aforementioned near firing.

I spent over a year in a state close to clinical depression at that job because I was so fearful that I'd never find another job again. My husband did everything short of begging me to quit, but my sense that the sky would fall if I left kept me in place. I got up day after day finding no joy in anything that once made me happy and miserable at the prospect of going to my office. I sat in my cubicle feeling like I'd rather scream than remain another minute there.

I used to offer to do other projects or help others with their work when mine was done, and I stopped that. I used to use my down time to expand my skills (and indeed became an expert user of Adobe professional products through self-training), but during the last year or so at that company, I'd just do my work as rapidly as possible, keep my head down, and clandestinely play video games that I didn't even enjoy when I had nothing else to do. If anyone asked me to do something, I'd do it, but I was done growing my abilities or volunteering to assist others. That sort of thing gave me no satisfaction anymore.

Eventually, I did leave that job. Incidentally, when I quit, they did hire two people to replace me. It was during that job that I gained much of the weight since my marriage. I probably put on 50 lbs. due to strife with my in-laws and early difficulties with the situation after I married, but I probably put on 150 during that job. The job ate at me and I ate back in response.

People talk a lot about "eating your pain", but it really is a misnomer. The pain was right there in the open. I complained. I talked about it. My pain wasn't being suppressed nor was my sense of how crushing it could be to be so skilled and so undervalued. My boss knew it. My husband knew it. Some of my other coworkers knew it. I wasn't swallowing any of my anger, frustration or pain.

The eating part was about exhaustion, negative overstimulation, and finding some source of easily accessible pleasure in my miserable life. I liked the work, but the workplace and the general environment I lived in was oppressive and punitive. A bit of chocolate, a large amount of white carbs, and a pint of ice cream was a balm that I could lose myself in as needed, and I needed it a lot. Since the job itself was desk work and didn't require movement, and I was in too much back pain to exercise much anyway, the weight accumulated.

It sounds incredible to say I gained 150 lbs., but less astonishing to consider that that was over more than ten years. How hard is it to gain 10-15 lbs. per year? It's really not all that hard, especially when you are under a lot of stress, in physical pain, and have little comfort in your life.

(continued in part 2)

Why I Insist on Complexity

It likely would surprise no one who has been reading my blog to know that I studied psychology. While it may be logical (and certainly would be understandable) to believe that this was a choice made by a fat girl raised by very messed up parents (alcoholic father, mood disordered-mother) to explore why she was such a mess as well, that actually was not the case. When I entered college, I didn't know for certain what I wanted to study. In fact, psychology wasn't even on the list at first.

Initially, I was torn between choosing math, biology, chemistry, or art as a major. Because I wasn't certain which path to pursue, I spent my first year and a half at college taking a variety of courses to see what felt right. Oddly enough, I wasn't a fan of psychology until I took my second course and read a few books on my own. In the end, it was not my desire to fix anyone, particularly not myself, that made me choose that major. It was the multitude of theories that abounded to explain the complex puzzle of human behavior. Though I was interested in hard sciences and was not the least bit intimidated by them (as many women supposedly are), I liked the fact that psychology was part science and part philosophy and that the answers were more elusive.

Unlike hard sciences, psychology is not dependent upon the accuracy and technology of the instruments being used in its practices to find answers. For example, in biological experiments, our understanding is only as good as the accuracy of our instruments when measuring cell activity. Expansion of knowledge is more dependent upon better instrumentality rather than on theory, observation, or intuition. Psychology relies much more on individuals, and the debate and depth of understanding required to really understand human behavior is more challenging.

Ironically, though I was drawn to psychology based on the potential for ambiguity and inability to measure precisely, I found myself more attracted to the theories that were most easily proven. I embraced Behaviorism, which is a philosophy that is based on the idea that behaviors are learned or conditioned. It's a tidy philosophy which is easy to create experiments for and to measure. We'd do things like put rats in Skinner boxes and teach them to press a bar for a food pellet and generalized that humans in the same way would act for rewards or not act because of punishment.

My "hard science" approach to psychology in school further included intense study of the biology of behavior and the chemistry of the brain in particular. The way we studied it, it all seemed so cut and dry. We read that schizophrenia was caused by increased levels of Dopamine in the brain, so something which inhibited the uptake of that particular neurotransmitter was the "cure". While I was in college, the entire process seemed so tidy and neat. Behaviors were conditioned (learned) in or out of existence. Chemical imbalances were corrected with medication.

After graduating from college, I got a job in a mental health-related non-profit agency. I worked with people who were seriously mentally ill. In fact, I dealt with people who had had psychotic breaks and had been placed in a psychiatric ward or a mental institution, but had gotten well enough to leave those facilities. My entire worldview based on my studies in college radically altered. All of that tidy explaining and curing meant nothing in the real world. People are so much more complex than Behaviorism with its rats and controlled learning situations could explain. Human brains are so much more delicate than the books made us believe. You couldn't just pour medication into people and balance their brains like some lab experiment. Every chemical interaction caused some sort of negative reaction. People couldn't be tuned like machines. Even when the right chemical cocktail was applied to a psychotic mind and worked for some time, something would change and that very same cocktail would cease to keep their hallucinations at bay eventually.

Learning also is not as tidy as many behavioral theories would lead you to believe. My poor hungry little rat in his box did learn to press the bar for a food pellet, but he also picked up a superstitious behavior. The first time he made the mental connection between the bar and food, he happened to turn around in a circle in the box. Because of this, he circled around every time before he pressed the bar even though it had nothing to do with getting the reward. Like my rat, we similarly make connections between things that aren't related when we learn things. For some who grew up with abusive parents, that might be a connection between abuse and love which causes them to seek out partners who are cruel because they think love and pain are as interconnected as my rat's turning around and pressing the bar in his box (note: I do not speak of myself - I was not abused physically).

These connections aren't formed cleanly, simply, or obviously, so we need to scrutinize carefully to develop an understanding and untangle the destructive from the constructive and be mindful of the fact that there is comfort in following even destructive or useless actions. My rat would almost certainly have experienced anxiety if not allowed to perform his little turn around before hitting the bar because he would have felt that the reward may not have been forthcoming. It would have taken many successful attempts to lose the stress associated with abandoning the superstitious behavior. Similarly, people who find comfort in some destructive behavior (such as eating up food they don't want rather than throwing it away) are going to find it hard to simply abandon that behavior for "rational" reasons.

How does all of my back story apply to this blog, which is about losing weight? Well, I offer this information for two reasons. First of all, I want it to be understood that all of my talk about psychology in this blog isn't idle speculation or mere navel gazing. I do know what I'm talking about to some extent (at least). I have a professional interest and education and experience in behavioral science.

The other reason is that I want to provide some insight into why I am so adamant about seeing weight problems or issues in a manner which embraces complexity rather than simplicity. Human behavior is not simple. Interactions with our environment whether it be food, other people, the stuffed toys which we form odd attachments to, or that favorite tree outside our window, are never something which are simple to change. Just as giving a pill to a psychotic person to stop the way their brain caused them to hear voices caused other aspects to change in unfavorable ways, changing your lifestyle to lose weight will cause other changes as well.

Behaviors all happen for a reason, whether it is emotional or physical, and changing one area will create a shortcoming or change in another. You can't simply choose to alter your course from unhealthy habits and fly the path of health and virtuous living without some sort of fall-out, and you didn't follow your original course capriciously or because of character flaws. You were either inclined to do so biologically or conditioned to do so psychologically (or both). So, I insist on complexity, because everything in my life that I have learned and experienced to date have shown me that that is the reality of our existence.

A Slow Crash

When I was a kid, I loved to spend time at my paternal grandmother's house. She was poor, lived in a small trailer with no running water (you had to pee in a bucket or go into the woods near the edge of her property), and had a big belly and one eye in which she was blind that didn't move. My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was trim, middle class, lived in a big house with lots of magazines, gossip papers, games, and not one but two bathrooms. My maternal grandmother was judgmental and distant though and my paternal grandmother, who I'll call "Grandma D", was warm and loving.

Grandma D used to take her grandchildren with her to play bingo as well as on various cash-paying jobs that she could do to augment her meager SSI income. She did a lot of manual labor work like cleaning up a wealthy woman's lawn from sticks and leaves, picking strawberries, and doing seasonal tree handling at a nursery. We'd do these jobs with her sometimes, and part of being with Grandma D was steeped in the pleasure of her company and the uniqueness of the activities she took part in, and part was in the food that she treated us to. When we went to bingo with her, she'd buy us French fries or potato chips. When we stayed in her little trailer, there were pizzas or hoagies. She also let us stay up late and watch "Chiller Theater" on her small black and white T.V. It was through my association with her that I developed an affection for old, old horror movies with the likes of Boris Karloff. Even as a kid, they never scared me, but hooked me with the underlying sense of humanity that was in the "monsters".

Don't get me wrong, she didn't ply us with junk by any stretch of the imagination, but spending time with her was very special in part because special food was sometimes involved. I remember specifically walking in the dark from her trailer to the local pizza joint to pick up a small cheese pizza. She was a "townie" and it took about 7 minutes to walk to town from her place and we lived deep in the rural backwoods so it seemed so different being so close to the heart of even a tiny town. The idea that one could walk to a store or restaurant was novel. I'm sure that a kid, even at age 10 or 12 in a safe, sleepy rural area, would not be allowed to walk alone after 10:00 pm as I did at that time.

I've been thinking about Grandma D a lot as of late. She passed away some time ago. After college, I used to drive through the area she lived in when I was doing my first job (and had lost a great deal of weight) and I'd stop by and talk to her (usually to complain about my mother) for long periods of time. I'm glad for those times with her because they had nothing to do with special food, bingo, yard-sale-hunting, or any of the other activities I engaged in with her as a child. It was just the two of us, talking, though I'm sure that being young and self-centered, it was all about me. She never criticized me though and listened, empathized, and commented.

When I think of Grandma D, and her common-law husband, Grandpa B, I miss them both, but I also feel bad. He died when I was in my early teens and she died when I was living very far away from her and out of touch for quite a few years. I never felt I got a chance to let either of them know how much their love meant to me and how they were such wonderful grandparents because the time they spent with us was enriching on so many levels. I want the chance to tell them how good and meaningful my relationships with them were now that I have my adult perspective on life, but I can't, and I grieve for the loss of that opportunity because I was too young and self-involved to tell them when they were alive. I don't believe that any reassurance that "they knew" is helpful. Maybe (only "maybe") "they knew" without my telling them, but it is in no way as good as having told them while looking with love in my eyes and arms ready to offer a hug.

Given my rocky relationship with my emotionally unstable mother, being with these grandparents was a relief. They weren't perfect people, and Grandpa B once made the well-known comment about my "living to eat rather than eating to live" after I started to gain weight as a kid, but they generally did not judge me and engaged me as person. I think that spending time with my grandmother was a necessary relief from my mother's way of belittling me and sending mixed messages about my value as a person which may have granted me some scrap of self-esteem on occasion.

I never thought about my grandmother's big belly. It simply was not a factor in the way I viewed her. I never thought of her as "fat", particularly not compared to my mother who was always big all over while Grandma D had pretty average-sized limbs but a large belly. I'm guessing Grandma D gained her weight later in life and spent much more of her early adulthood rather thin. At any rate, I never thought about her weight until she developed what must have been Type 2 diabetes at some point in her late 50's or early 60's. I don't recall it too clearly except that at one point she talked about the doctor putting her on a diet and "getting her 1600 calories" for the day. It still wasn't something I dwelt upon, but just a random comment that went along with changes in spending time with her. By the time this happened, I wasn't so interested in the food side of spending time with her anyway, but it did signal an end to pizzas, hoagies, and chips at her place.

This experience came to mind recently because I think that 1600 calories is a common slow but steady loss benchmark for people who need to lose weight. I don't think the doctor put my granny on any sort of extreme diet, but chose a number which she could manage without getting too terribly starved and that would result in about a one pound average loss per week. She probably needed to lose about 50 lbs., so it'd take awhile, but she'd get there. It may or may not be a coincidence that my target number is 1600. Perhaps something stuck with me from that time, or perhaps it just seems sensible.

I'm talking about that number not only because Grandma D has been on my mind a lot, but also because recently I read a blog post by a fat acceptance advocate who said she spent several years on a 1600 calorie diet and worked out often and only lost 35 lbs. over a long period of time. Some of the comments were critical of her and called what she did "crash dieting" and accused her of being "lazy" and seeking the easy way out!

I was flabbergasted at the idea that 1600 calories, when the recommendation for most average adults is a diet of between 2000-2500 calories depending on height and gender, could be called a "crash diet". The poster I'm talking about is only 5' 3" and female, so 1600 calories per day would be a very slow motion "crash" indeed. If it was safe and moderate enough for my granny, it certainly is safe and moderate enough for a woman who looks to be in her middle adult years at most. Reading the comments showed just how judgmental people can be if you don't lose weight. It's not enough to exercise. It's not enough to eat less than a day's calories as you're instructed to by doctors. It's never enough if you aren't thin. They will always find a failing on your part, even if it means defining something with is moderate and reasonable as extreme and unrealistic.

"Warning: Fat Ahead"

My husband had two girlfriends before he found me. In fact, I was well-acquainted with the first one ("GF1" from henceforth), and fairly decently acquainted with the second one ("GF2"). GF2 had ended her relationship with my future husband because she realized that there were some core incompatibilities in regards to needs for attention, time spent together, etc. that were never going to work out. Also, she found another guy closer to home who she was more attracted to and didn't want to string one man along while courting another.

I always had the impression that GF2 may have wanted to fob her ex-boyfriend off on someone else because the break-up was so painful for him and he needed a lot of interaction with her in order to recover. He needed to talk and understand what went wrong and she just wanted it all over with. This was one of their core incompatibilities. Whatever the case, she was relieved when he got involved with me (at least initially).

For those who may not have read or recall my earlier posts, I'll state that I got involved with my husband after losing a tremendous amount of weight. I probably weighed around 180 lbs. when we became acquainted and was on a fairly strict healthy lifestyle kick. Since I had known GF1 for quite awhile, she had known me during the time when I was greatly heavier and had seen pictures of me as a fat child and young teenager. She knew I had lifelong issues with weight.

While GF2 was happy for my future husband and I, GF1 was outwardly supportive, but inwardly unhappy at the notion. This may have had something to do with the fact that he ended their relationship after finding out she had lied about many things that had happened between the two of them to GF2. I should mention that GF1 was also friends with GF2. We were all one little group of friends passing around the same guy at that point.

GF1 put on a big show of saying how happy she was for us that we seemed to be hitting it off so well. She maintained this for awhile, but when my husband and I were traveling abroad together, she sent him correspondence beforehand saying, "You know (my name) used to weigh a lot more; I thought you should know."

There it was... a warning that he was dating a (well-proportioned) chubby girl who was a former very fat girl who might get fatter again. She was using my past to try and drive a wedge between us because she couldn't stand that we were succeeding where she and he had failed. All of her proclamations that she was happy for us rang false, and the way in which people can be malicious and evil with a smile and a sense of doing something morally "right" (he needed to know I used to be fatter, it was only right) was clearly demonstrated.

Her efforts to break us up probably would have worked better had I not exhaustively informed my future husband not only of every single character fault that I believed I held (and yes, I did this - I gave a laundry list with explanations of all of my flaws), but also of my past in glorious Kodak-worthy color pictures. He knew I used to be fatter, and had seen just how fat I used to be. He knew how long ago I'd lost weight and by what method. He also knew that I believed I was temperamental, neurotic, and prone to many unappealing behaviors. And he still loved me, wanted me, married me, and has been with me happily for over two decades.

My husband has told me on many occasions that what he loves about me is that I have a "spark" that you don't always encounter in other people. Fortunately, that spark can't be drowned out by layers of body fat so he has loved me unconditionally and without reservation through weight ups (mostly ups) and downs.

GF1, who was shallow, vain, and a compulsive liar, couldn't begin to conceptualize why he loved me if it wasn't related to my physical beauty, and thought that she could use my (then former) fat as a weapon against me. It's something which reflected badly on her, and for which she never apologized. I confronted her about it, and she defended her actions by asserting that she felt it was the right thing. He "needed" and "deserved" to know the truth as hitching his wagon to a former fat girl carried implications she felt he needed to be aware of, as if I had some infectious social disease that he deserved to know about before he got too seriously involved with me.

In perhaps a karmic backlash, years later GF1, who had always eaten abysmally (hot dogs and sugary Coke) and remained thin, went through a bad patch in her life and put on a lot of weight. She eventually lost it and went back to her trim self, but I hope she learned a few things about being fat and looks back with regret on her devious behavior. I don't know if she did though since my friendship with her, unsurprisingly, had long ago ended.

My Marriage and My Weight

Sometimes I think about my relationship with my husband and how it has affected my weight. Before I get into this, I want to state unequivocally that this has nothing to do with "blame" or assigning responsibility to my husband. This post has to do with my responses to my relationship and the things that have happened which may have affected my weight. Just as I don't blame the existence of ice cream for my being overweight, I don't blame the existence of my relationship with my husband for my weight. Both may be factors in my problem because of how I acted on them (eating the ice cream, for instance), but that doesn't mean they are responsible. I'm merely looking at pieces of the puzzle in order to grasp the big picture, not playing some pointless blame game.

When I first got to know my husband, I was just out of college and on a very healthy living kick. I exercised 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I didn't eat sugar, white bread, pork, beef, butter, or fried foods. I was about two and a half years into some pretty serious weight loss and at my lowest weight in my adult life. This lifestyle melted away rapidly after I moved in with my husband. I had to change jobs (which didn't allow me to exercise because of a different schedule), lived in a situation which was highly stressful (and where I had little to no control over anything, let alone my eating), and became a part of his lifestyle choices. I also had to deal with the emotional aspects of our new relationship.

During our first year together, my husband and I fought nearly every day. That sounds awful, but we've been together now for 22 years and I can tell you that it's normal to have a lot of conflict early on and to have almost none as the years go by. Part of the process of getting to deeply know one another and learning to live together is conflict. There's a lot to learn, compromise on, and adapt to. Once you go through the process, it's all downhill. The important thing is that you grow to fit one another better and become better people, not that you are all sunshine and lollipops all of the time.

During that first year together, I gained at least 50 lbs., possibly more. My husband being the wonderful, loving person that he is never said a word, and he married me anyway. He also knew about my past weight and childhood obesity. He didn't care. He loved me anyway and always has. My husband has never been anything but accepting of my weight, even when he was frightened deep inside that I was digging my way to an early grave through a food-filled tunnel. His main concern, and he has very rarely voiced it because he knew that I would deal with my problem when and if I could, was that I would die young and he wouldn't be able to spend more of his life with me.

I view my husband as an extraordinary man because he is absolutely devoid of any shallowness and unconditionally loving. Some people may aspire to be as he is, but battle niggling voices that tell them to be preoccupied with the superficial. In this way, I am absolutely fortunate, but I wonder at times if this has played a role in my gaining more weight than I otherwise might have. Sometimes I wonder if my husband's absolute acceptance took away my motivation to keep my weight under control while the stresses associated with our relationship early one compelled me to lose control. If I had felt a risk that I would lose him if I got too fat, would I have then not become so fat? It's a terrible thought that I may not have gotten this way if my husband had put an emotional gun to my head. The fact that I feel that may have helped reflects more on how messed up I am (I need external validation for my actions or I don't take them).

My husband was the first person who ever accepted me unconditionally, loved me openly, and provided a lot of the validation, attention, and affection that I desperately needed. Because he was the only person who ever made me feel like I was actually human (since I'd been dehumanized by everyone my entire life based on weight), I developed a mindset where only his opinion mattered. This is a view that he encouraged because he wanted me to stop allowing the arbitrary judgment and subsequent devaluation of me based on superficial analysis of strangers to continue to damage me. He knows me. They don't. Therefore, his opinion of me was the only one that mattered.

Though he did not intend me to take this message from his actions, I wonder if I stopped caring about my weight because he seemingly didn't care about it, and though everyone else still did, they did not matter. How could I reject their judgment yet act on their wishes? Beyond that, I believe that, despite my husband's complete acceptance of me, the self-loathing I had (and still have) made me disbelieve it on a certain level. I accept it as a possibility that I may have let my weight go completely on some subconscious level because I wanted to "test" whether or not his love for me was beyond superficial concerns. I can say, without hesitation, that it absolutely is.

Of course, I don't know if any of this is actually true. It is mere speculation, but I believe there is value in pondering it. I do want to know all of the factors that contributed to my getting to a weight close to 400 lbs. so that I can understand how not to get there again.

Existence

In his book The Greedy Bastard Diary, Eric Idle talks about the person that his fans want to meet. He mentions that that person didn't have a paunch, ate meat, and wasn't a Buddhist. He observes that he misses that person, but he doesn't exist anymore. Idle realizes that who we were then is gone. We are who we are now.

When I think about the past 15 years or so that I've spent in a state of being semi-crippled and in sometimes agonizing pain, and know that I could have made the situation largely better (if not entirely so) by losing weight (as I have over the past 7 months), I have a fleeting thought about why I didn't do then what I'm doing now. It's possible to think, "if only I'd gotten my crap together and learned to control my eating back then, I wouldn't have suffered for all of these years."

Well, I take Mr. Idle's words of wisdom to heart. The reason I didn't do it then was that the Screaming Fat Girl who exists now had not yet been born. People often relay this notion by saying, "you weren't ready to lose weight," but this is a misleading phrase as a fat person is always "ready" to lose it. This could be replaced by, "you weren't able to lose weight," but that is also misleading as it implies a lack of absolute biological capacity to shed pounds. As is so often the case, a simple, pat phrase is incapable of conveying a complex situation.

Being able to lose weight requires a great many factors to be in place in order to achieve success. Until and unless they are there, it won't happen, and each person's situation is different so you can't clearly define when it might happen. There's simply no objective measurement for what is required for the alchemy of weight loss success.

To be successful, you not only have to be the person you are when you succeed (who wasn't who you were before that point in time), but you also had to have the circumstances in life that you have during the time you achieve success. In my case, there was a combination of a strong motivating factor (a big life change coming along in a few years) and finally reaching the point where I could fight my addiction to food with my current level of wisdom as well as behavioral changes.

I liken this situation to an educational one or one of a type of emotional maturity. You can't expect the average second grade child to read a college textbook. Yes, the child can read, but the level is both beyond his educational level and his intellectual capacity to digest the material. Experience is required to understand various concepts or to take certain actions. Lacking both the education and experience, you cannot perform the task. Losing weight is no different, but it's much more highly individualized than something as concrete as reading. You can know everything about food and weight loss and seemingly have a life that is perfect for tackling the problem, but you can still fail because your psychological situation isn't where it needs to be.

I rarely think about how I "wasted" all of those years when I could have been doing something about it because I believe that there was nothing I could do about it. If it were possible to deal with it before, I would have done it, but the person who existed then couldn't do it. I don't mind this as I see no point in regretting lost years. The only thing I do mind is the certain knowledge that the person who exists now and is capable of success won't exist 5 or 10 years from now. This is a source of some discomfort, but I'm hoping that that person will not be lost when it comes to food, but even better about it than the person who exists now.

Patience...

"Patience" is something I have to keep telling myself through gritted teeth. I'm so tired of my body that sometimes I just want to scream in frustration. I know I have to be patient, and as I've said before, I am absolutely not itching to reach the end so I can start eating more again. I'm on a plan for life now, but...

The thing I'm losing patience with is not looking better or being a significantly smaller size. I don't want to be stared at, pointed at, or made fun of anymore. I don't want to worry about fitting into chairs with handles or having to buy two seats if I go on an airplane. I'm sick of living my fat girl's fears. I'm tired of regarding my body with disgust and thinking everyone else is as well. I'm patient with being fat, just not this fat.

When I started my efforts, I don't know how much I weighed, but it was probably near 400 lbs. When I started blogging, I guessed I may have weighed 330-350, but I wonder now if it was more like 370-390. I've lost a lot, but I still look freaking huge. If I could bear it, I'd get on the scale, but I just can't handle knowing exactly how far I have yet to go.

Back when I lost weight in my late teens, I think I weighed nearly 300 lbs. At that time, I remember thinking that I would have found the whole endeavor more bearable if I just could have started out at 200 because then the road wouldn't have been so long and daunting. Now, that path seems like nothing compared to the one I've been traveling this time around.

When I stand in the shower, scrubbing my vast expanses of flesh, I find myself wishing I could bargain with my body and convince it to let me live in a nicer one if I promise never to overeat again and to take good care of myself. It's like I want to live in a better house before I've paid for it or finished the remodel, and want it to just give me what I want simply because I earnestly promise that I will do the work, and I will pay for it all. But, it doesn't work that way. there's no way of getting it now and paying for it later. I have to pay as I go, and sometimes the wait just crushes me.

Two-faced Friends

When you're in school, you expect kids to pick on your for being different, especially if you're fat. After finishing high school though, I learned that a lot of the overt mockery slows down. After college, it tends to come at a crawl except from random strangers and children. Adults tend to exhibit more self-control in the interest of showing a modicum of social skill and grace.

That being said, I cannot say that I've been at a loss for being acquainted with adults who have made fun of my weight, or talked about it behind my back. The random strangers who make rude remarks are one thing, but the people who are friendly to your face and then stab you in the back still were able to shock me.

Shortly after starting work at a new job as a temporary employee, I was getting to know my coworkers. One of them, a man who was 28 at the time (I was 26) hit it off particularly well with me. We talked amiably, made jokes, and had a good rapport. I should note that this was all utterly devoid of flirtation or sexual considerations. I know that when men and women get on, some people believe that they only do so when there is some sort of attraction. I was (and still am) deliriously happily married and relate to all men I encounter as potential friends, much as I relate to women. After several weeks of working together, I thought that this fellow was going to be someone who I'd get along well for the duration of my time at the job. I should note that he worked one shift and I worked another shift, but there were times when the schedule overlapped.

One day, he was sitting at a table that we worked at communally with those on our shift with several other coworkers on his shift. I was working in another part of the office in private work spaces that my shift's workers were currently occupying. We swapped off in these spaces according to the types of tasks that needed to be done. The schedule for our work was set for the most part, but my schedule wasn't quite the same as that of the other worker's, so I left my cubicle early to join in on the work at the communal work table.

The cubicles were located about 15 feet behind the table that my coworker's shift was working at, so I was approaching from behind. As I was walking there, I heard him say very clearly, "what it must be like to have sex with (my name)... it must be like lying between two big slabs of beef."

Since my shift ended earlier than that of everyone else on my shift, he didn't expect me to approach and didn't hear me, but I sure heard him. I was humiliated and furious. I didn't confront him directly, but I did say something about people who pretended to be your friend and then stabbed you in the back. He pretended that he didn't have any idea what I was talking about, but this just made me angrier and more aggressive. One of my other coworkers told him to "give it up", meaning that there was no use continuing to pretend that he hadn't said something really ugly about me.

After that, all of my interactions with this particular coworker were cold and officious. In the end, he was fired and I was given his job because he was not the greatest worker. I became a permanent worker and he was headed for the door. This was gratifying because I thought he was a thoroughly despicable person and deserved what he got.

I have blotted out a lot of the immediate pain I felt at that betrayal and the two-faced nature of his actions, but the effect was to make me wonder what every "friend" I've ever had has thought about me and said about me behind my back. To be honest, I still don't trust anyone other than my husband and figure that even people who are nothing but gracious and kind to my face are probably telling their spouses or friends about how disgustingly fat I am. I take it as a given that even people who are nice to me are going to judge me and speak ill of me when I'm not around. Sometimes I wonder if the scars of the cruelty I've lived with most of my life will fade after I lose all the weight I want to or if they're with me forever.

My Mother's Book

My mother had two tricks in her book of half-assed parenting, and my father had no book at all. According to my mother, he never wanted kids (thanks, Mom, for sharing that fact with my sister and I... it really helped us feel unwanted and unloved from a young age), and this explained his lack of parenting. As for my Mom, she alternately claimed to want as many kids as she could push out but was stopped in her tracks by a uterine infection that required a semi-hysterectomy or to have not had sufficient access to "rubbers" when she was younger.

Getting back to her slim volume on parenting though... My mother either was completely slack about monitoring us in vital aspects of our childhood or adamant about adhering so strongly to her principles that she exhibited no flexibility whatsoever. She never pushed us to brush our teeth on a regular basis, for instance. Though she claims to have told us to do so, I can't recall her telling us past the age of 6, nor did she ever buy toothpaste. When I got old enough to care because of my own concerns as I approached adulthood, I'd already lost two molars to cavities, was in need of some fillings (which I never got until my 20's) and had to buy my own toothpaste.

When I asked my mother about why she didn't push us harder to brush our teeth, she shrugged and said, "I tried, but you didn't do it." I guess it was just too much trouble to come upstairs to the bathroom every night and check on us when she could just sit on her ass in front of the T.V. and leave us to fend for ourselves. It could also be that having lost all of her perfect, white teeth to gum disease around age 26, she found it hard to care about our dental health.

In terms of the things that she did care about, there was generally a patchwork quilt of things she'd insist on then drop from consideration. One of those things, of course, was food. My mother is a terrible cook and most of the vegetables that I was offered as a child came from a can. Canned vegetables might be okay if you are putting them in soup or cooking them up creatively with some other ingredients, but slopping them into a pot to reheat them and then dropping them on a plate is a singularly awful experience, particularly for a child.

I recall one situation where my mother served us canned peas when I was around 10. Usually, she didn't care about what we ate, but she insisted that I eat those peas and wasn't going to let me up into I consumed all of the vile things. They were mushy and tasted bad and I loathed them. In the end, I think she gave up before I gave in and I didn't eat them. I love all sorts of vegetables, and eat them everyday, but I still hate peas and have never bought them fresh, frozen or, shudder, canned.

This little anecdote is being offered to illustrate how our eating habits are influenced by people telling us what to eat and not to eat. Despite being very open-minded about sampling new foods, I've formed a seemingly life-long dislike of something because I was forced to eat it when I found the experience repugnant. I think parents often make the mistake of forcing foods on their children in an effort to make them eat more healthily without considering the palates of young children. Kids have a much stronger sense of smell and taste than adults and are naturally still more in touch with what and how much they need to eat than adults. It's only after years of being pushed to "clean your plate" or to "eat your vegetables" that they grow into adults who overeat and eat junk food continuously as an act of rebellion.

In my mother's book of parenting, we were poor and food should not be wasted so if she peeled 10 lbs. of potatoes for mashing and dropped a bucket of them on the table, we were supposed to put away as much as possible. If she opened up a can of some mushy, over-cooked, salty canned vegetables that even most adults would not eat, we were obliged to help her finish it. It wasn't about healthy eating, it was about what she felt should be done in line with her valuing the cost of food over our health. In the end, she obliterated any healthy relationship my sister and I could have had with food, but she absolutely was unaware of what she did.

Cringeworthy

As I've mentioned before, in my last year and a half of college, I lost a lot of weight and became much more attractive. The rest of my family remained greatly overweight and continued to eat the pounds of potatoes, junk food, and fatty foods that they always ate. They also did not exercise.

I distinctly recall judging them for their behavior and thinking that they could change just like I did if they were strong enough or had the will. This memory of my attitude makes me cringe and I am very ashamed of myself for having had it. The arrogance I had at that time was not too dissimilar to that which many thin people display toward me and those like me now.

Years after I'd regained all the weight I'd lost and more, I wondered if there weren't some sort of just desserts for me in my "downfall". Though I never said anything to my family members about how they lived their lives or criticized them for their weight (and I still loved them all), I had the sense that regaining weight was a karmic payback for my lack of compassion and understanding at that time.

The interesting and very useful thing about what happened to me is that I also understand just how easy it is to lose weight easily or to suddenly stop struggling with food and then become judgmental. In a very real way, the fact that it was relatively easy for me the first time blinded me to the true hardship of overweight people and it took falling back into the difficulty of it all for me to really understand and have more compassion. It also helped me see how people who do not suffer a problem (or don't suffer it for long) can't develop empathy for those who do suffer.

I don't feel that being fat and suffering health issues as a result for the last 20 years has really been the best thing, but I do believe that something of value emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually has come of it. I can't be happy with the damage I've done to my body, or the pain I've suffered (and continue to suffer), but at least I can see that I've grown in some ways of value.

"Bio-panic"

Many years ago, my husband had some problems with his throat being too sensitive and sore for a long period of time. His work involves talking a lot every day so he had to expose himself to pain unavoidably on the job. When he came home though, he wanted to reduce the strain on his throat so he asked that we not talk. In fact, he didn’t want to utter a word if he could avoid it and would clap his hands once or twice for yes or no.

Initially, I understood that he wanted to give his throat every chance to heal by resting his voice when he could. However, it didn’t seem to get better as time went on. Time went by, and I was shut out of conversations with him for months. This was very stressful for both of us, but as the more gregarious person, and as someone who had far fewer social interactions at work, this wore on me much harder than him. Eventually, my husband started talking again because the strain on me was too difficult, and it was starting to have an impact on our relationship.

One thing that my husband realized as a result of this was that he was probably making his situation worse by treating his throat with kid gloves, at least past a certain point. By treating it as something that needed to be protected and reducing strain, he was making it weaker, just like a muscle that atrophies. Now, when he has throat problems, he only doesn’t talk for a maximum time of a week then starts talking again to try and “toughen” up his tender throat’s speaking endurance.

I mention this experience because I think many aspects of our biology work in a similar fashion. That is, we have to condition them to tolerate things that are outside of what they are used to. This comes to mind mainly in regards to hunger. When I first started trying to control my eating, the hunger at times nearly drove me mad. It occupied my mind and body and I found it unbearable at times. I think this is because my brain was so unaccustomed to tolerating hunger that it sent very urgent signals to me about this new and strange condition. In essence, I had a sort of “bio-panic” to hunger pangs.

Now, when I get hungry, it’s still very uncomfortable, but it’s probably about 70% as bad as it once was at its worst point, and about 50% of what it was before in general. I think that by tolerating hunger more often and by gradually reducing the amount of food I eat, I’ve trained my brain not to send such panicked and urgent signals to me when I’m hungry. In essence, I'm attempting to condition my body to tolerate hunger just as my husband had to condition his throat to deal with more talking when it was weak.

Don’t get me wrong about this. Being hungry is still a difficult and unpleasant experience for me. It’s supposed to be for everyone because that discomfort drives survival. Those who are sluggish to respond to hunger cues were more likely to die because they didn’t seek nourishment aggressively enough to survive. That being said, I think that people who can maintain a healthy weight have a less urgent biological response to hunger and can resist the urge to eat better than those of us who are quite overweight.

My hope is that my body can be re-trained to send less loud and painful hunger signals. If the hunger signal strength can be turned down to a low enough volume, it will be more bearable and easier to resist eating as time goes by. This is something that I'd hoped for when I started this type of behavioral change, but I had doubts that it'd work. I'm happy to say that it does appear to be working to some extent at this point.

Looking For Protection

There was an article recently in psychology today which said that children who are abused are far more likely to grow up obese than children who are not. The article addressed physical and sexual abuse, neither of which I suffered as a child. I did suffer emotional abuse on an almost daily basis from my mother who may have had a bipolar disorder, and at the very least, suffered from depression.

It's always been my feeling that gaining a lot of weight has been like putting on an exterior "armor" against emotional pain for me. When you're a small child and bigger people are attacking you, you take comfort in food and use it to make yourself feel more protected. It wasn't until I was in my junior year of college and I was given the support of one of my professors (who I worked for as part of a work-study program) that I started to lose weight. In many ways, she was like the mother/emotionally healthy older sister that I never had.

After college, I became very emotionally detached from my parents. Though I lived in the same house as them, I rarely communicated with them and hid a substantial portion of my life from them. When I got a boyfriend, I only shared what was going on with my sister. My parents were kept in the dark until the moment I "ran away" with him to live in another state across the U.S. from them. I think the main reason that I could maintain my weight loss after leaving the supportive environment at college was that I'd built a wall of secrecy between them and myself, and become so emotionally detached.

Fast forward to how I found myself regaining the weight. Picking up and moving to another state doesn't sound like that big of a deal, especially when you're with someone you love. And one thing I can say is that my future husband loved me and I loved him with a passion. In some ways, this directly led to the problems to come as our insistence on being together as quickly as possible led to some problems.

Moving to another place is immensely stressful when you have no support network to speak of in that place. My soon-to-be husband had worked abroad for a year and just gotten home and his family didn't want him to live with them, let alone both him and a complete stranger (to them) who he was in love with. They disapproved of our haste in getting together and wanted him to first get a job and his own place to live before I came to be with him. We had to live with his best friend's family. What was worse was that I had no friends in the area and the job I took was less than satisfying. In my home state, I had a hard, low-paying job, but it was interesting and pushed me to learn new things in my field.

My soon-to-be in-laws rejected me on many levels and I subsequently developed a difficult relationship with them. I never talked to them about it, but I think they didn't believe my husband and I would work out. What is more, they were very self-involved people who never made me feel welcome and had expectations of me that I was unaware of (in particular, I was supposed to show a certain deference to them out of respect rather than treat them as equals). When I visited, they talked amongst themselves and never asked me any questions. They'd answer me if I talked to them, but I often felt the sense that I was invading a private party when we visited them. At one point, I was left in their house with my husband's brother and sister and her husband while my husband went off to a store with his father and when I went to the bathroom, everyone else just left the house and went off without me without saying a word. It was incredibly rude and an indication of how little regard they had for me.

What was worse was the fact that my husband was too immature to realize that I needed support and that forcing me to interact with his family several times a week was emotionally destructive to me. He continually pushed us to be around them by going over on weekends so he could watch football with his father, eating dinner with them at least once a week, and dropping by to pick up our mail which he insisted be delivered to them rather than to the address we were living at. If I had had friends or even family in the area that I could have gone to while he was with his parents, it would have been different, but there was nowhere to go.

What was more, my husband was pushing me to go with him and get along with them. When I tried to have a conversation about all of the forced contact with them being a problem for me because they clearly did not like me, he said that he would resent me if I didn't allow him to have the relationship he needed and wanted with his family. To be fair to him, he had lived with his family up until his early 20's and was away from them during a year abroad. He probably needed to reestablish his bond with them, but it was killing me and I started to eat and gain weight. I was not only seeking comfort, but protection. I'm sure I gained at least 70 pounds in the year we lived in his home state. Fortunately, my husband learned from that experience and no longer puts me in this position.

This time around, I'm trying to keep what happened in mind. When you're emotionally sensitive and predisposed to eat for comfort, any situation where you have no control and a lot of negative stimuli can easily set off your impulse to protect and comfort yourself with food. I've mentioned before that I have a deadline and a big change ahead in my life and I'm braced for the psychological impact this might have on me this time. Having suffered the consequences once, I know what may come.

I've spent about twenty years in a destructive cycle of overeating since my problems were re-initiated by the issues with my in-laws. I've come a long way in terms of maturity and my husband has as well. He very much regrets what he did before and I can say with certainty that it is one of the very few times that he has put his needs in front of mine in a way that was destructive to me. He lacked the insight to know the effect of what he was doing and I lacked the self-esteem to assert my needs. It's also possible that something else would have triggered my overeating again at some point if that had not. It's not as if that inclination didn't exist before for many years.

To this day, I still feel a lot of anger and resentment toward how I was treated by my in-laws. Despite being overweight, I had a good network of friends back in my home area and people liked me. I never failed at anything I tried to do and I was never roundly rejected by anyone who got to know me after high school (as opposed to strangers on the street who mocked me and called out to me). The way in which I was dismissed and rejected out of hand still fills me with hostility even now, and I wish I could simply forgive and forget. It's like a wound that just won't heal. The truth is that my husband's parents reactivated (and continue to activate) all of my fat girl "call to arms" responses that I have developed because strangers abuse me openly. I can feel the desire to put up a barrier to protect myself when I remember what happened, and I think that's something that needs to be dealt with if I want to increase the chances of not regaining weight once I manage to lose it again.

"All Woman"

I’ve mentioned before that my mother used to try and shame my sister and I into losing weight because she wanted daughters who were beautiful enough to boast about, and that she was more critical of our weight issues than of her own. She treated our being overweight as if it was somehow worse than her being overweight despite the fact that she was just as heavy if not heavier than my sister and I during many of our teenage and young adult years.

One of the ways my mother justified her fat as better than our fat was by talking about her body as if the quality of her obesity was superior to ours. She once related a story about going to the doctor and being checked out which was part of the web of lies she wove to convince herself that her flab was not so bad. She said that the doctor, who was a long time family physician (and a smoker), remarked while examining her that he had thought all fat people were soft and mushy, but was surprised that my mother’s body felt relatively solid. Supposedly, he said, “you’re all woman,” to which she replied, “doc!” The idea was supposed to be that firm fat was fit fat.

I don't know if that story was true. My mother was and still is a borderline compulsive liar who will make up whatever she has to to support her worldview or to attempt to validate another lie when challenged. I do know that it is possible to have hard fat and soft fat though and it’s something that I’ve been noticing as of late.

Despite my mother’s intention of promoting her fleshy body as fitter than my sister’s and mine, the truth is that firm fat is worse than soft fat. Firm fat is the result of skin being stretched out more by expanded fat cells. Softer fat comes from the cells being shrunken and the skin being looser. I’ve noticed as I lose weight that certain parts of my body are getting squishier as things are slackening up and the flesh is not as tight. I can tell which areas of my body aren’t losing the weight as fast by how firm the area feels. Right now, those areas are my belly and behind.

At any rate, I welcome the lack of firmness in my flesh for the time being. Unlike my mother, I'm not interested in fooling myself into believing that my fat is fit.