Sunday Jan 16, 2022
Weight: 178
This is the first entry of a weight loss blog. I am trying to make my body smaller and stronger. It’s a ridiculous goal, one I’ve failed at many many times. But here I am again.
I’ve been writing these entries in my head for a long time, talking to a pretend audience but I never had the courage to follow through. Since this writing is intended to be anonymous, I still don’t have a lot of courage. But who knows? Maybe I’ll find some down the road.
First off, so you know things about who is writing this: I am a woman in my late forties, an American, white. I am pretty sure I am not at the pointy end of any population bell curve: not rich or poor, not sane or insane, not smart or stupid, not fat or thin. I haven’t invented anything and I am not an influencer on social media. I am not a special or unique snowflake of any kind. I’ve never had an extreme eating disorder or been famous. I probably don’t have much interesting to say, in fact, so unless you are reading this as a way to procrastinate or are struggling with insomnia, you might want to switch to another channel.
While I am by no means a thin person, I am also not extremely fat. Like a lot of women my age I am about 40 pounds from my personal ideal. I’ve never actually *weighed* my ideal so for all I know this is as good as it will ever get for me. No one has ever rejected me because of my weight but I have been called fat-shaming names by strangers. Oddly, it doesn’t get to me much since I am way meaner to myself than any stranger could be. My capacity to torture myself is way more flexible and creative than anyone else’s. I know you know what I mean.
So now you know me: a bland American white woman in her forties who wants to drop 40 – 50 pounds. I am more than a cliché, I am an entire marketing demographic. Noom sales people drool with capitalist greed when they see my online user persona. I’d claim I want to “get healthy” and “age with grace” but I am trying not to lie to myself. I grew up in the early eighties – jazzercise and Jane Fonda and all that crap – and I have chased the word skinny my whole life. If I were super healthy and could run marathons and stayed the same weight, I’d be disappointed. Like I said: it’s a ridiculous goal.
The strangest part is that the goal has no reason behind it. I wouldn’t be beautiful even if I was rail thin. And now I’m too old to be desirable anyway. Even if I were skinny and beautiful and young, attracting lots of attention because of beauty is more of a curse than a gift. Plenty of my gorgeous friends have paid a very, VERY high price for their beauty. They are definitely not happier because of their stunning good looks in any case.
More bluntly, the magical skinny is likely a milestone because I believe myself to be mostly valueless and at some point I drank the kool-aid and associated skinny with high value. I am not alone in this. Plenty of times in my life I’d think “if I were skinner I’d be better at my job” or “if I were skinnier my house would be clean” or “if I were skinnier I am sure that I wouldn’t have paid this bill late.”
I’ve also tried to pretend that I don’t feel this way about the rolls of fat on my hips and belly. That I am fine with…um, whatever, my unique inner beauty or some other bullshit like that. I am not fine with it. When I see myself in a mirror, I cringe away from my own reflection. There isn’t a way to make-believe I don’t. Trying to lose weight or trying to not think about losing weight are about equal.
I know I probably won’t get where I want to go. But I’ve decided that it has value to *notice* myself not getting there. It’s mindfulness of a sort — not the self-love kind where you sit in quiet, joyful meditation and realize the gift of being present with yourself and whole in your magical self-acceptance.
No, this is more the agonized, neurotic brand of mindfulness where I practice meticulous and slightly abusive observation of my own behavior and inner state. I want to know what the fuck is actually happening when I try to eat less and exercise more. I’ve read a hundred articles, tried every diet from keto to vegan to mediterranean to “mindful eating”. The only thing I know for sure is that losing fat is way, WAY more complicated, impossible and painful than the so-called experts generally acknowledge. When I lose fat, it comes back. When I change habits it doesn’t stick. Even when I am successful and think “I HAVE FINALLY DONE IT” I feel weird about myself – becoming food obsessed or ultra vigilant – and eventually end up back with the status quo.
So, instead of measuring my success in inspirational blog form, I’m going to measure my journey to failure in exquisite detail with as objective an eye as I can manage, recording the results here. Beginnings are the first step with a destination in mind but I’ll admit I don’t have any idea what the path looks like to that skinny mountaintop.