275

Me before I began this healing journey.

This journey has had so many ups and downs, it is hard to even quantify them all. But some of the mile markers recently have been the most emotionally vertigo inducing.

We have a Honda Minivan, because an ex was obsessed with not buying an American car. It wasn't a great answer, at the time. It was expensive, and cars made by tiny Asian people tend to completely fail to accommodate differently proportioned Americans, let alone very overweight ones.

For a lot of reasons that mostly involved being exhausted with battling and not really having my needs respected, I eventually just gave in and said it would do. It was one of those dumb things that those of us with autoimmune disease are prone to do. Eventually we're just trying to make everyone else happy, because we can't find a way to meet everyone's needs, and those around us are busy pushing back on all of ours, and we're exhausted.

In retrospect I can see all the stupid parts of that decision. But one of the more frustrating consequences of it was that, the seat belts never worked for me. I eventually gave in and went on a quest for a seat belt extender. It's humiliating enough to be stuck with a foreign car with short seat belts made for 120 pound people, and to need a seat belt extender. But had I known at purchase time that Honda doesn't even make such a thing to meet the needs of their customers and refuses to care about fat people's safety on the subject, I wouldn't have okayed the purchase of the car, even with my tendencies to try to make peace.

That left after market and third party options. There was an extreme lack of them, which just further emphasized the humiliation and helplessness of the problem. Everyone likes to tell themselves they would never get that heavy, that it's a set of choices I was making, that maybe I just needed to get off my butt and pass on the potato chips. They tell themselves it can't happen to them. But I assure you that I could follow all that advice, and it made not a bit of difference. If anything, following that sort of advice became an unhealthy form of self torture based on the constant fear of it continuing to spiral out of control. And the more I yo-yo'd the more extreme the rebound every time. And so I did what all those trusted authorities and our whole culture seems to believe in. Only it wasn't working.

And so that left me with hours of web searching, just to be a little bit safe driving the car, and not having to listen to that infernal behavioral modification system of beeps telling me “You're too fat!” or be in pain from a belt too tight. I did finally find one. But no sooner had I gotten the stupid thing, than it was recalled for safety reasons for not always latching well enough.

The problem was that there were no other choices other than having someone pull apart the car and start from scratch on a belt. So I just kept using it, trying to remember to double check that it was really latched firmly. But it wasn't really safe. It wasn't really okay. It's not okay that this isn't a standard device in this country. It's not okay that the trade agreements and chemical agricultural phenomenon have so screwed up foods that anyone here needs it to be a standard thing in this country. And it's not okay that we're left in that ignorance to just face the shame of trying to find non-existent, after market parts for our cars to cope with the consequences of choices we were not genuinely consciously making, and wouldn't have made, had someone been able to explain what on earth was going on.

It becomes a form of cultural gas lighting. It is so clear that we are not allowed to be fat that we learn not to talk about it and blame ourselves. Every moment is defined by the problem, and constrained by it, and we try desperately in every moment to please all the rest of you by following your rules. But those rules are lies. They are things that work in healthy people who aren't as sensitive to being poisoned by the disaster we call a food system. And so we absorb the shame and turn it on ourselves, believing we must just be too weak. But we're not. I have news for you. We, in our fat bodies that many of you find repulsive, are probably some of the strongest people you will ever meet. Every day that we don't end it in despair is a day that we prove we fought harder than most will ever understand. And we do it every day, one more time, while things spiral further out of control, and while we are genuinely helpless to stop it in that moment in time.

I can say this because I finally have found the understanding. I have finally spent enough years of my life reading medical journals and firing doctors to finally get to a place where I forgot to grab the extender, in a hurry the other day, and discovered that I don't need the horrible recalled reminder of all that victim blaming.

So it is with relief and exhaustion and much heart pain that I finally say goodbye to this little death trap I no longer need. But that process made me realize it had been some weeks since I weighed in.

So I stepped on the scale, and blinked, with tears coming to my eyes. 275. Maybe that still seems like a lot to a lot of you. But what it was for me, was a weight I hadn't seen since I started college. The weight is still coming off. There are interludes of wild fluctuation when I am fighting a virus or otherwise inflamed for some reason. But overall, it's just falling away.

I finally had to give in and go shopping for some winter clothes. I haven't wanted truly winter clothes, other than a jacket, since I was a child. Most of the time I was too warm, if anything. But suddenly I am cold when the weather changes. Suddenly I have some glimpse of what it's like to not be miserably inflamed all the time, for those of you lucky enough to spend at least some of your life that way, or with less extremes of inflammation, so that you can still tell the difference.

It was weird to go shopping for the first time in years, really, for anything other than a bra here and there. Mostly I had to order my clothes online, because the inflammation and weight spiral was so out of control. I actually got to use dressing rooms again, and have a girls day out, and … wait for it … feel pretty in something I picked. I could even shop expensive brands in outlet stores and find things hanging on the rack that fit me.

I am not done yet. There is more to this journey, but 275 was a bit of magic I hadn't even dared hope for when I started this. It was an impossible desert mirage, a lie our culture believed in, but that I couldn't risk more heartache to believe it. It was a cruel number. A hopeless number. A pipe dream, and a curse, and, now...finally...a relief.

So I stood there in tears, wearing a size I haven't worn since high school, weighing what I haven't since college. And it also made me realize that while I still have denser fat to loose, I have lost so much inflammation that I am now a size smaller than I was the last time a scale read anything of the kind.

Me today in a little too much sun.

Me today in a little too much sun.

There are people out there who believe this is a problem of all kinds of things, but the truth is that being overweight, for a lot of us is no more and no less than the inflammation and ignorance trap we can't find our way around. But have hope, my friends. If you can find enough of the pieces of your personal puzzle, like I have, you too may find yourself in tears of relief and rage and hope as you stare at your own personal 275, and turn away to toss your own personal reminders of that trap you feared you'd never escape. And you are absolutely right in your heart of heart that knows and fears that all that advice to eat healthy grains, and work out more, and all the rest, are really dead wrong for you. But you have to decide to stop the cultural abuse and find your path. Good luck. And know that my heart is with you, and that your pain is real, and totally undeserved.