So I went to my internalist appointment today and without even inspecting me at all I was told that there is nothing wrong with me, I am overweight because I eat too much (an I was told to stop drinking too, and when informed that I don’t drink the doctor replied “Uh huh. Well Alcohol has calories too, you know.”) He told me to cut all dairy out of my diet, to eat 1500 calories a day if I want to maintain my weight and eat less to lose weight. He also said, among other things, that he wants to see me again in 6 months and I’m to be 30 lbs lighter.
It’s not going to happen. And by that I don’t mean the weight loss, I mean I am not going to deal with a person who thinks I’m lying about how much I eat. I keep track you know, I am quite aware of how much I eat and part of my damn damn problem is that when I start to feel frustrated, overwhelmed and pressured I start to play the “how little can I eat” math game. Part of my problem is that I’m look for a way to be healthy, and I know that in the past that 30 pound weight loss he wants from me was not enough so I started starving myself. I do not want to go down that path because the more weight I lost the worse I felt, not just because I was getting sick, but because I was incredibly hard on myself, pushing myself to lose more and more, and it was never enough. I was a frenzied cone of self hate, and skinnier or not, how the blue fuck is that healthy?
Side note, my grandmother also never cut dairy from her diet and still has bone loss problems. So how the hell is cutting dairy completely out of my diet healthy?
Anyway, this is just a perfect example of the battle I find waging inside me. I know this path leads to me being an unsatisfiable cunt to myself. I hated myself more at 200lbs by far than I do now, fifty pounds later. But there’s a complete disconnect between I feel good and feel happy about myself and my body and I weigh less. They are not lining up like logic says they should. My assumption then is that I must not be doing something good enough, so I push myself into that bad bad territory that I definitely want to never step in again.
I do not want to live a life where eating is the same as shitting, a perfunctory bodily function to be performed and ignored as quickly as possible. And especially so since the doctor said “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your blood work is excellent your blood pressure is perfect.” Then why do I have to risk fucking that up by losing weight?
Well that answer is easy, because we are raised, trained, to want to be skinny rather than healthy. Because skinny=pretty and somehow it means we’re honest and worthy too, but fat people, well they are just lazy liars that are racking up the health care bills for the rest of the populace.
I live with fear and self hate because I should be allowed to enjoy life, because I’m fat and clearly not worthy. Talking to the behavioralist the other day she asked “Well what’s the worst that would happen if you stopped counting the calories and stopped watching everything you ate and just enjoyed your life?”
And I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. My clothes would fit worse. Okay, buy new ones. None of my friends or loved ones would give a damn, because out relationships aren’t based on my waist size. Would my readers, editors, publishers care? Well how does being fat=not a good writer?
But emotion seized up in my chest, because clearly I am not doing a good enough job if I am still overweight. Clearly I am failing if I’m not skinny. But I’m not unhealthy, and I’m not at risk of anything right now. I’m not suffering from my choices, I’m thriving from them. So where is this obscene pressure coming from and how the hell did it get inside of me?
Because I am a healthy person. I have two years of bloodwork to prove it. And I’m happy too unless I’m sitting here thinking about how I can lose weight. So how do we develop a good sense of worth and self health bombarded not just by media, entertainment and multi billion dollar nutrition industries that guilt us into hating ourselves when we have no reason to, how do we combat medial professionals who we are supposed to be able to trust, who are supposed to trust us, when they do nothing but imply we must be lying, either to them or ourselves, and despite being perfectly healthy we’re still inferior because we’re the weight they want us to be.
How do you combat people who are supposed to help you and who are supposed to know better who look at you and say healthy isn’t enough, now get skinny any way you can?
