Preoccupied with "beauty"

As anyone who has been following this blog knows, I didn't lose weight to attain beauty. I'm 47 years old, soon to be 48, and I know that the best I could hope for physically was to escape the stigmatizing and physical pain that come along with being nearly 400 pounds. Nonetheless, the idea of "beauty" has been on my mind a lot lately, and I want to explore why.

One of the things that makes me think about beauty in this way is the manner in which some of my friends talk about how men interact with them. These women are contemporaries of mine, a few years older than me. One of them lost 40 lbs., but is still a little chubby and decidedly looks like your average middle-age lady from a physical characteristics point of view. Even at her lightest weight ever, she has had a flabby neck and double chin (much to her chagrin).

There's nothing wrong at all with her appearance, but she's also not some hot mama who you could see strange men walking up to and hitting on her. She has been married, happily from all external appearances, for a very long time. She mentioned on Facebook that a guy hit on her in the supermarket while she was buying a deli salad.

Another one of my friends is very, very short (4' 11", I think) and somewhat apple shaped with disproportionately large breasts and possesses a classic middle-aged Italian lady look (if you're thinking Sophia Loren, think again). Again, there's nothing wrong with her appearance, but she's no Roman beauty. She's just an average woman in her early 50's. She has mentioned that a friend of her ex-boyfriend has always wanted her and started hitting on her after her former relationship ended. I believe that, from time to time, she has talked about other men wanting her, but her having no interest in them. She is unmarried (never has been) and is actually one my my husband's former girlfriends (though he chose her, like he chose me, for personality, not appearances).

After losing so much weight, I feel as if something must be very "wrong" with my appearance when I hear about contemporaries getting hit on despite the fact that they don't appear to possess any special beauty. I realize that this is unproductive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm pretty sure I'd be creeped out if a man tried to pick me up and I am utterly devoted to my  husband. However, a part of me wants this sort of validation, and I'm not happy about it.

I've been pondering why I want this because my husband is the only person whose opinion matters, or at least it should be the only one that does. He adores me and tells me he feels I'm beautiful. I adore him and think he is the sexiest creature on the planet. I have never wanted another man after committing to a life with him, and the truth is that, if something horrible were to happen and I lost him, I don't think I'd ever want another man in my life again.

I should also note that I don't like being touched by people other than my husband, but I absolutely love to be touched by him (as much as possible). We are incredibly physically affectionate, sometimes to an extent which makes other people a little uncomfortable. We always hold hands when we walk together, kiss or hug intermittently when walking around, put our arms around each other, and sit in contact with each other if it is at all possible and not socially inappropriate. I am not one of those people who just doesn't want to be "pawed". I love it, as long as it is coming from him.

Despite my high level of comfort with being physical with him, it's sometimes an effort for me to engage in social hugging because I really don't want to have such contact with others. This probably stems from a certain amount of distrust of others as well as deeply ingrained fear that they secretly are repulsed by touching me, a remnant of being so overweight for most of my life and knowing people were repulsed by touching a morbidly obese person. I mention all of this because I want it to be clear that I'm not sitting around desiring other men in any way.

Though I've been picking at this psychological knot for awhile, I haven't quite untangled it. I think that there are a variety of insecurities at play in this. One is that, when I was much younger and lost weight, no men expressed any interest in me. I look back on pictures of myself from that time (age 21-22, around 170 lbs.), a time when I thought I looked pretty good "for my weight" and wonder what was wrong with me. At that time, I believed it was because I was still fat and any fatness at all was a huge turn-off to men. There was a man who was far fatter than me (about 75 lbs. overweight) who I was interested in who did not return that interest. There was a man who I had a crush on for over a decade who was not particularly attractive who turned me down even after I'd lost weight. In both of the cases I'm citing here, it's important to note that I knew both of them well, socialized with them a lot, and made my interest clear. I didn't hint, I directly asked, and was nicely told I wasn't seen that way by them.

I never got any validation that I was physically appealing even when I was younger and had a greater potential to be seen as such. Since my picture is not on this blog, you'll have to trust me when I say that I do not have any unappealing facial features. I don't think anyone would look at me and say I was "ugly". In Asia, where I was considered "exotic", I was often told I was "beautiful" by the natives. Their standards are different and some of them were almost certainly just flattering me, but I think that if I was actually strongly physically unappealing, they wouldn't have said that.

Looking back at some women who had boyfriends at the same age as me (in my early 20's), frankly, I think they were not very visually appealing at all and many of them were as dull as dishwater to boot. In retrospect, this continues to baffle me. Not only did young women get more attention than me then, but middle-aged women I know get more than I do now.

So, I wonder, what was/is wrong with me? Well, the answer is that I still am seeking external validation for my worth based on my appearance. This is not a good thing for two reasons. First of all, even if I got it, it would never be enough. In fact, getting it would very likely make me want to seek more of it and start to hang more of my esteem on a continuation of such validation. Second, it's more of placing control of my sense of worth outside of myself.

I think what I'm experiencing here is a re-occurrence of a life-long pattern. People have always invalidated me based on appearance and I have accepted that that is their right. Now, I want them to validate me based on appearance because I think that is also their right. I'm so accustomed to my appearance being a critical factor in how my value is determined that I continue to look for cues that I am valuable (or value-less) in this area. Clearly, this is a point which I have to work on.

My Inner Masochist

The past five days or so have been difficult for me. From a mental point of view, it has felt like a real backslide. I've found myself hungry all of the time, watching the clock to see when I can eat again, and daydreaming about food while I'm working. Part of this, I believe, is biological as it could be PMS. Part of it, however, may be psychological.

Though I can say that I have done a pretty good job of beating back my impulses, the fact that these thought patterns have re-emerged after their having gone blissfully dormant for awhile has disturbed me. I had felt that I'd turned a corner and was living much closer to a "normal" (i.e., non-food-obsessed) existence for once in my life. With all of these mental struggles circling back around, I've been beating myself up for falling back into old patterns.

I have come to wonder if part of the resurgence of these patterns is related to some sort of unconscious need to find a reason to degrade myself. After all, my inner dialog for most of my life has matched the outer responses to my appearance. People let me know I disgusted them, so I told myself I was disgusting. People let me know that I was weak-willed and self-indulgent for wanting to eat too much, so I told myself I was a horrible pig.

Playing these negative inner mantras for myself day-in and day-out for much of my life is probably one of those routines that is hard to break. It is similar to the problems I discussed in my post on redefinition of ones identity. They need to be purposefully replaced with new thought patterns in order to vanquish them. If I do not make a concerted effort, then the vacuum will be filled with the old inner dialog, and that dialog cannot be motivated unless I'm either eating the way I used to or at the very least desiring to eat the way I used to.

What I realized today was that I have been castigating myself over the past few days for a backslide, but not one in which I have been eating too much or off of my desired plan. I've been berating myself for thinking about wanting to eat too often. In the absence of actual behavior to form a self-hating inner monolog, I have found a way to tear myself down for the equivalent of a "thought crime."

All I can conclude at this point in time is that my inner masochist was caught off-guard by the positive normality of my existence for the last several weeks. Since my ability to hold myself in check in terms of outward behavior thwarted some twisted need to hate on myself, I found a way to gratify that need by just thinking about such things.

The truth is that I think I'm not yet ready to love myself, and that deep down I still feel unworthy of anyone's love. The lack of worthiness is not merely rooted in my body (though it has found a way to brilliantly motivate and manifest itself thanks to my body for decades), but in my spirit. I've had so many incredible years of unconditional and oft-professed love from my husband, but that hasn't actually undone the damage to me that was inflicted in my childhood by my parents and those who I grew up around. On some level, I believe I'm duping him or that he loves me because of his greatness as a human being rather than mine. Some part of me still wants to think poorly of myself, and that part is asserting itself rather strongly at this point in time.

Among the many inner dialogs that I must battle to change, this one has been added to the list. If I really want to succeed in mastering my relationship with food, I have to deal with this need to self-hate, or I will find that I'll create reasons to do so. The easiest way to go back to a state of self-loathing is to do what I have always done, and that is something I absolutely do not want to allow to happen.

Redefinition

There is a woman, who I’ll call “Emily”. Every day, Emily gets up, prepares for work and goes to her car. As she approaches her car, her neighbor calls out to her and says, “good morning, Emily… how are you?” Emily says, “I’m fine.” The neighbor says, “you look tired, take care.” When Emily gets to work, her coworkers say, “hello Emily, you look tired.” Every day, Emily finds that this experience repeats itself. This happens not for a week or a month or a year, but for years. Every day, she is “Emily” and she is tired. Eventually, Emily no longer responds to “how are you?” queries with “fine,” but with “I’m tired.”

After several years of this type of exchange, people suddenly stop greeting Emily at all. When she approaches her car, her neighbor doesn’t say, “hello Emily,” but doesn’t seem to recognize her at all. Her coworkers don’t greet her either. Emily feels uncomfortable because of this because she is so accustomed to people acknowledging her and even saying that she looks tired. No one speaks her name anymore. She sometimes finds herself walking up to coworkers and saying, "do I look tired today?" She has grown so used to this definition that she now seeks affirmation of this reality.

I think we can all relate to the idea that someone who is greeted everyday would feel disconcerted if suddenly people stopped acknowledging them. This is easy to understand. Imagine that instead of being greeted as “Emily” and being told she looks tired, we consider someone who is greeted as “worthless fat person” and is told, “you’re too fat”. Day-in and day-out, you are treated as “worthless fat person” and told overtly or covertly that your weight is too much for society to tolerate without censure. It may seem that this is the sort of attention that one would not want, but years and years of being acknowledged in this fashion by multitudes of people isn’t mere abuse, it is externally imposed “definition”.

I have been pondering the feelings I have been having as I have been losing weight, and how it is not easier despite my weight loss success. When I say that, I am not referring to the mechanics of the process because that actually has gotten easier (but not easy). I’m talking about the mental aspects. The reason that it is harder is that the more weight I lose, the more of myself that I lose.

While it may seem logical or rational that I would be happy to abandon a negative definition of self that has been imposed upon me by others for most of my life, it doesn’t really work that way. Just as “Emily” has always been defined as “Emily”, suddenly having no definition or recognition of who you are is going to be uncomfortable. When you start to lose weight to an appreciable extent, you don’t find that you have simply lost a painful and hurtful definition of who and what you are, but you have lost a profound and deep definition of self. The emptiness created by this loss is beyond disconcerting. It is gutting.

I have come to realize that, as a lifelong fat person, I have developed a powerful sense that I am defined by others. I have a very weak internal definition of self and tend to determine my self-worth and identity through my husband, my friends, my family, and random strangers who react to me. This is really the inevitable outcome of being the center of unwanted attention and judgment. It is rather similar to being famous, or should I say “infamous.” Strangers feel they know something about you and have the right to invade your privacy by speaking with you or interacting with you about something intimate to your life (your weight, your eating habits, your lifestyle).

We all know about the self-destructive behavior of people who were once child stars who outgrow their fame. They are also suffering from the same sort of external definition of self that a lifelong fat person is. Most of them never had the chance to build an internal definition of who and what they are just as I did not. They were defined by fame and some character they portrayed. I have been defined by my fat.

I think one of the reasons that people regain weight is that this emptiness is terrifying. You go from being the center of negative attention to being essentially a nobody. People used to pay attention to you all of the time, and now they don’t even notice you. Going outside of your home and being fat enough to draw attention defined you, and whether it was a happy definition or not isn’t the issue. Many people may think that they have other strong components to their identity, but most of them are internally imposed and not as strong. I may tell myself that I am a creative being, a writer, a wife, a counselor, etc., but I am so accustomed to the idea that others control my definition of self that I have not strongly internalized these at as deep a level as I have the idea that I am “worthless fat person.” No amount of effort to convince myself otherwise is going to change that fact. Asserting that I am a strong, capable person who is worthwhile and intelligent comes as a mere effort to fill my emptiness with platitudes. The psyche cannot be fooled with mere affirmations.

A lot of us expect that the end of the weight loss path will bring about a new and better definition of self, but I think that it creates a hole in our identity. We don’t fill that hole with food, but we may decide to refill ourselves with food in order to regain that old sense of self that was externally affirmed and recognized. Just as child stars may commit crimes to get the attention they once had as famous actors, bad attention is better than none at all when you’re so accustomed to having attention and being externally defined.

Many of the people who experience long-term weight loss success tend to be people who focus excessively on being “good” or who become relative fitness freaks. These are people who have taken on a new identity through their weight loss efforts. They are, ironically, still as defined by their bodies and food as ever before. They simply have a different definition that is dependent on new habits which don't contribute to being overweight.

This sort of redefining of self as being rigidly good in my life habits or exercising like a fiend is simply not for me. It is too high energy and too strict, and I'm too old and fragile to become a female Jack Lalanne. I want to slowly build better internal definition based on my unique qualities as a person. I won’t pretend that I know exactly how to go about this process, but I know how to start, and that’s by recognizing everything that I have just said as part of my life and being aware of the potential to fall back into old habits or to seek overzealous new ones.