I have always struggled with my weight. Even as a child I was overweight. My weight has fluctuated throughout my life where I’ve lost and re-gained large amounts. At my highest weight I underwent bariatric surgery. I dropped 150 pounds within 7 months post-op, but then I got pregnant and the weight loss stopped. I ended up having 2 miscarriages in a row; this is a topic I may visit in a later post.

I grew up watching my grandmother binge and purge, watching her weight fluctuate several times from overweight to thin, and watching my mother exercise 2-3 hours per day and starve herself. My mother’s weight fluctuated from thin, to rail thin, with bones jutting out. I remember being a young child, running my fingers down her spine, feeling each bone, admiring how visible they were. I saw her ribs and hoped I would be thin enough someday to be able to see mine. I would often lay on my bed, partially hanging off, and feel my ribs. I admired her prominent collar bone and the sharp angles of her cheek bones and jawline. Despite all of that, she always thought she was fat and needed to lose more weight. At her thinnest, she wore a 26 inch chain around her waist, and it sat loosely at her hips. She wanted to be able to wear a 20 inch chain around her waist. I remember, staring at her concave stomach and protruding ribs, her sobbing at having to wear such a long chain. She lamented her “thunder thighs” that were a genetic curse from her mother’s side of the family.

Meanwhile my stepfather made comments about women he’d see and their weight. I was one of his favorite targets. My mother sometimes talked about my biological father, and that she didn’t find him attractive, but got into a relationship with him because he was strong and smart, so that made her feel safe. According to my mother, my father was a body builder but had to stop after he injured his back in a motorcycle accident, so he gained a bunch of weight. She’d tell me everyone on my father’s side of the family was fat, and I looked just like my father. She wasn’t wrong. I did look like my father; he had black curly hair, olive toned skin, and light brown eyes, like the color of amber. I have never forgotten his eyes. My mother on the other hand, had blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. I have dark brown, almost black hair, green eyes, and pale, olive toned skin. Most importantly, I was fat, with my chubby cheeks, rotund stomach, thick legs, heavy bones.

I began starving myself when I was 10 years old. I didn’t eat breakfast because my mother was never awake early enough in the morning to make anything and I never woke up in time to eat, and I either gave my lunch away or threw it out. Dinner was always stressful, because that’s when my stepfather would go on his various tirades that were either directed at me, my mother, or both of us. One of his favorite things to yell at me about was how I was lazy, fat, and no one would ever love me because of those things.

As I grew older, I fluctuated between starving myself and purging after I ate. I’ve always thought I was unattractive, no matter what others told me, how much make-up I put on, what I did with my hair, or what clothing I wore. When I purged, I wished I had the willpower to just starve and exercise, but I didn’t, so I never achieved the size 2 I always wanted to be. I was forever doomed to be “plus sized.”

One of the more memorable times in my life was when I was 26 years old and recently divorced from my first husband. My eating disorder reared its ugly head with force. I was eating 400 calories a day, and threw up anything I ate beyond that, no matter what it was: a piece of bread, crackers, a bowl of soup. Some days I’d purge 5-6 times. I knew how many calories were in most things. I’d divide food up to last all day; a serving of Hershey’s kisses would be 5 kisses throughout the day. I weighed myself several times a day, and if I gained any weight at one of those weigh-ins, I restricted my calorie intake even more. I lost nearly 200 pounds in a short amount of time, and people noticed. I received many compliments on how great I looked, and each compliment fueled my disorder.

When I was 28, I got remarried and our wedding/honeymoon in Hawaii completely halted my eating disorder. I had re-gained 20 pounds a few months before the wedding because I wasn’t restricting as much, as my co-workers noticed when I didn’t eat lunch. I still had another 50-60 pounds to lose, but at the time I still thought I was just as fat as ever, even though my collar bones were visible, and my face was fairly thin. Looking back at pictures from that time, I recognize I looked decent, and I wish now I looked like I did back then.

As fucked up as it seems, I don’t know how to eat properly in practice. Mentally, I know what eating right and exercising means, but once it comes to doing it, I immediately slide into the disordered eating and thinking. I don’t know how to fight the compulsion to weigh myself 2 or 3 times a day, or count every calorie so I can fit a tight restriction, or purge after I’ve eaten something “bad” or too much of something. I hate exercise. It bores me to tears. If I could swim away my lard in my own private pool, where no one could look at me, I would. But I don’t have that kind of money. And so the battle goes on.

But I haven’t given up yet.