Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 9: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

One of the benefits of a generally negative and pessimistic perspective is that you're right most of the time.  Hopes and dreams are wonderful things, but being cynical usually just means that you're practical.  Sometimes the world proves you wrong, and amazing things happen, but the day-to-day reality tends to confirm negative assumptions.  It also helps if you ignore all the positive, beautiful things around you, and focus on the things that support the way you already think.

Since this has always been a cornerstone to my modus operandi, I am rather familiar with this world view.  I am not always negative or pessimistic; although I can be jaded at times, I would find it hard to care about teaching or getting married if I felt that neither pursuit was worthy of my time.  Overall I think I'm a fairly positive person, but I planted cynicism in my heart during adolescence and it has blossomed like a wonderful, sad little flower.  A lot of that cynicism and negativity is tied to my self-esteem.

I hate that phrase - self-esteem - given that I grew up in the beginning of Everyone Gets a Trophy fever.  In my fifth grade class, we had something called Project C.H.A.R.L.I.E. (I have no idea what that acronym stands for, but I know it stands for something).  Outside speakers would come in and talk to us in giant group therapy session.  We learned about warm fuzzies (things that make you feel good) and cold pricklies (things that make you feel bad).  In retrospect, it seems to be some strange combination of self-esteem awareness, bullying prevention, and getting abused kids to talk to adults about their fucked up home lives. Since at least middle school, I have felt the same way about the phrase "self-esteem" as I do about "personhole cover" and other ridiculous PC things.  "Self-image" I'm okay with.  "Self-respect" is fine.  But "self-esteem" was hammered so hard into my skull that I will never respect it as a phrase.  I think that should be even worse coming from an English teacher.

Sematics diatribe aside, I know that I have always had a kind of mixed bag of feelings about myself.  In some ways, I'm very egotistical or overly proud.  My presence on Yahoo! Answers, various message boards on weight loss/fitness sites, even this blog...these demonstrate how important and awesome I think my voice is.  I have a lot of shit to say and it is all valuable goddammit.  That being said, I also have plenty of not-so-amazing characteristics, real/imagined/exaggerated.  In the interest of getting out of here before 2013 and not crushing my soul today, I will not attempt to list all the things I dislike about myself; I'm pretty sure that would not be a useful exercise.

I can tell you, however, that one of the biggest things on that list would be the combination of my body image and my ability to control my body (fitness-wise).  I have disliked my weight since about the same time I started getting all pissy about the phrase "self-esteem"...so it's been a long time.  I didn't really try to do anything about it until college, when I was making my own food choices 100% of the time and had a shitload of free time.  It wasn't until later, of course, that I realized I had this much free time because I wasn't doing any of the assigned reading.  But that's another story.

When I tried and failed to lose weight the first couple of times, I inadvertently began a cycle that went something like this:

1. "I'm going to try to lose weight, though I probably can't do it."
2. Eats a little less and goes to the gym a couple of times, but doesn't really try
3. Doesn't lose much, if any, weight
4. "See?!?!?  I told you I couldn't do it.  Well, I'm going to go eat some terrible-tasting pasta at the dining hall and drink 15 glasses of chocolate milk, 'cause they got that shit on tap."

Each time I became more resolved, more educated, more dedicated, but that meant that each failure was more meaningful.  I can write off my lame attempts as simple misfires.  But if I really, really put in effort over the course of many weeks and then ended up failing anyway, that says something about me.  At least, that's how it worked in my head.

Somewhere around starting grad school, I had slowly and without much ado come to the conclusion that I would never be happy and thin, so I might as well be happy and fat.  Stop counting calories or feeling guilty or whatever...just do what I want and just be.  This is known as Sweatpants All The Time Disorder (SATTD).  I had convinced myself so thoroughly that the effort and dedication required to get truly healthy was beyond my ability...or, at the very least, beyond what I was ever going to be willing and able to maintain in the long-term. I finally stopped kidding myself, bought the size 16 jeans, and went on with my life.

...And continued to be unhappy, feel unhealthy, and miss plenty of trains and buses because I refused to run to catch them.  I still had issues with my body and my self-image.  I looked in the mirror and I knew that I was doing this to myself - in the most literal sense, I was in control of my body - but it didn't make me feel any better about where I was at.  Over the course of a couple of years, I went from maintaining in the 170s to maintaining in the 180s and finally maintaining in the 190s.  When I hit 197, I muttered, out loud to no one in particular, "Oh, fuck this."  I didn't have an incredible breakthrough where I just started dieting and exercising like a crazy person, but I did recognize that my "healthy decision" to accept my weight and lifestyle was, as they say, some buuulllllshit.

It has taken me a year to lose half of the weight I plan to lose (look for Episode 10: "Ambuh, you lookin' skinnier erry time I see you!" for charts, graphs, and maybe a progress picture if I'm feeling self-important enough).  It has not been the fastest weight loss, nor has it been a uniformly successful road filled with high-fives and grins.  Basically, some cool stuff happened and some bad stuff happened.  It has been both an excellent adventure and a bogus journey.  Not much distinguishes the past 12 months from all the years prior.

Except that I'm actually, like, proud of myself.  And happy about my progress.  And I like looking in the mirror.  And I'm having to give away all those size 16s that I bought and dig out the "skinny" 14s.  I don't really give a shit that it has taken me this long.  I know that this is how things will have to be from now on, and I'm really at peace with that.  I have dealt with some heavy emotional shit over the course of the year and I am working through a lot of the reasons why I am compelled to do shit like eat when I'm not hungry or glare at twiggy girls on the T whose little chicken legs don't fill out even the skinniest of skinny jeans.  I'm not yet on the other side of it - I still glare, believe me - but I'm also constructing and practicing healthy habits that will only make me happier.

And this is where the cynicism and pessimism come in.  Now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Despite all the positive feelings and great progress I have made (physically and emotionally), I can't shake this feeling like there's something bad waiting for me along this journey.  Pretty soon I'm going to hit a plateau.  I'm going to seriously hurt my knee or my back and the down time will be fatal to my healthy routines.  I'll never actually hit the maintenance period and I'll always be trying to lose that last 5 pounds.  When summer comes and I'm not in the teaching routine, I'm not going to be able to maintain the habits that have gotten me this much success.  In the end, I will lose enough weight in such a way that I will have weird lose skin that only plastic surgery can fix.  I will get to my goal weight and realize that I still don't like the way I look.  My round face will look weird when I lose more weight.  Instead of big, saggy tits I'm going to have little saggy tits, which is WAY worse.  Dan is going to get sick of me working out all the time, or get mad that we don't go out to eat as much anymore, or [the list goes on].

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same kind of shit that went through my head as I was starting this blog series.  I had a hundred doubts and fears that all seemed like great reasons not to bother, at least at the time.  It's taken a lot of work to get to the point where I can recognize patterns like that instead of just feeling shitty and letting it ruin my day.  If I'm going to toot my own horn, and I am, it might as well be about that.  I can see how my own mind tricks me into believing that there are lots of good reasons to quit, none of which are my fault, but all of which make me feel guilty and shitty.  Thanks a lot, me.

For the time being, I'm going to keep on truckin'.  I'm happy with how things are going.  Such a simple statement, but it's not something I say often, especially not about my body and health.  In September, I had my annual physical and my doctor (as usual) advised me to lose weight.  I told her that I had recently starting doing xyz things to make it happen and that I was down several pounds from my heaviest (of course, I was still up a few pounds from my last check-up, so she DGAF).  She was skeptical, but told me that I should aim to get down to 170 or so by next September.  I laughed and assured her that I would be significantly less than that, and sooner than September.  She raised an eyebrow, cautioned me against making huge goals that were not reasonable for me to achieve, but told me that she would be happy if I proved her wrong.  Today I'm at 167.  Suck it, doc.