Lessons in self-delusion
I’ve gained and lost most of my excess body weight enough times to know a problem when I see one. And this was a problem.
It was December, just before Christmas and its crush and glut. I stood in a cute pair of high-waisted dinosaur-print underwear and a Clash T-shirt, all racoon-eyes in my day-old eyeliner, my black hair a huge bedhead explosion on top of my head. Living my rock star poet-novelist-public-intellectual fantasy, as one does.
My scale was telling me a number which I was struggling to process — because I had not yet had any coffee or the amphetamines which paradoxically chill me out,1 and also because it was very high.
I looked into my bathroom mirror. Okay, yeah, I thought. Definite belly moment happening. But it’s moderate in its extravagance, if anything. I stood up straight. And look at how much better my posture is getting.
I actually felt good about my body. This was still new enough to feel exquisite — my eating disorder so thoroughly in remission I didn’t break down about all the stuff I used to. Being looked at by strangers. Sex. Eating in public. Hell, even getting rid of clothes that didn’t fit me felt like a perfectly neutral behaviour, now. Nothing seemed to bother me. Not even impossibly high-seeming numbers on the scale.
And this number seemed impossibly high.
Look at those toned legs, dog. I’ve been doing, like, dance classes and shit. I stepped off the scale, and checked it for debris or damage that could be causing a malfunction. To my dismay, it was clean and unencumbered. I reset it. I took a teal velvet scrunchie out of my hair, as if that would seriously remove pounds from my overall total. The number remained the same. Third time’s a charm? No. Same number.
In this situation, I had a set of things I would tell myself. Affirmations, if you will.
Weight is only one measure of wellbeing, and it isn’t even a particularly good one.
Okay, yes — so this puts you in the danger zone, technically. But what’s BMI, anyway?
You are, very literally, the full and complete embodiment of everything the little version of you ever wanted to be when she grew up. Every few months you have to cobble together some new dream, because you’ve already achieved every one you set for yourself. You didn’t wait to love yourself to do that, because it was doing that that got you to loving yourself. Your body has never gotten in the way of a single thing you wanted. Your body was your chariot in your every pursuit. She has never given up on you. She has never done you wrong. Not even once.
Plus, you haven’t even shit yet.
That last one always strikes me as very funny. The morning dump — a dieter’s Hail Mary. As if the double-digit weight gain I’d experienced in the five months since I’d gone vegan (ironically, in an attempt to lose weight) could be shed by way of a few extra glasses of water. A few wind-relieving yoga poses, maybe. Then, boom — twenty pounds gone. Since my eating disorder went into remission — really packed her bags up and left one day, and sent no postcards, and was never heard from again — there has been another platitude on my set of reactions:
My weight is not a measure of my worth. But it is my responsibility. And it’s important.
And it’s like, super high.
I was in a weight classification I hadn’t been anywhere close to for over a decade. The scary one. Severe obesity — the disease formerly known as morbid obesity.
Morbid
A Body Mass Index, for the uninitiated, is a somewhat blunt instrument to assess how closely a person’s weight matches the recommended ranges for their height and age. Basically, you do some math, and then you get a number. A Body Mass Index, or BMI, between 18.5 and 24.9 is “healthy.” Any number under or over is usually medically relevant. The “overweight” range is 25 to 30. 30 and up is obesity. There are variations on this — people of different ethnic backgrounds have different risk levels for various diseases at different weights, and nothing I say here is medical advice, talk to a doctor please God — but for like, 90% of the planet it’s basically accurate. Sorry to say.
35 and over is “class II” obesity. Class III obesity (which is the new, more politically correct, less-snappy-and-dramatic term for what used to be called morbid obesity) doesn’t technically start until 40. Just before Christmas, I was just underneath that — in “class II” obesity, where strictly BMI was concerned. Obesity can be considered severe if the sufferer also has obesity-related health problems — like mental health issues, or chronic physical pain. Both of which I’ve had almost my whole life. I’ve been fat almost my whole life. These things are, most likely, connected. To make matters worse, my blood pressure had passed out of the “ideal” range for the first time in my life, and I was actively sick with skin cancer and waiting for a surgery.
My weight is not a measure of my worth. But it is my responsibility. And it’s important. And it’s like, super high.
Here are some of my favourite self-delusions:
Thin people have all these problems, too.
My blood sugar and cholesterol are still good, and always have been.
I find these ideas comforting. They are not entirely untrue. I’m still very young — 30 until this coming spring, and still in relatively good health (skin cancer, which is not an obesity-related cancer, notwithstanding).2 In 2013, the American Medical Association started to recognize obesity as a disease, as opposed to a behavioural abnormality. The Canadian Medical Association, World Health Organization, and UK Royal College of Physicians, are wont to agree. This classification, like many medical classifications, remains highly controversial.3 Why it's controversial is complicated, but it essentially boils down to one of the things that makes being fat so frustrating: my body works properly.4 As a very young, mostly healthy fat person, I am essentially experiencing the beginning of something which has an extremely high correlation with serious complicatons and death, but medically it's still a few skips and jumps to get there. I'm essentially getting into a car to drive a mountainous road where people have accidents and drive off cliffs a lot. In a thunderstorm. In a shitty car. Yes, I should know better. And I do! But when I die, will it technically be fair to say it's because I got inside a car? Or because I was in a car wreck?
My husband has loved me for over a decade. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with me. I describe him as a “classically-trained nerd boy” — he still eats like it’s D&D night a little too frequently, like he’ll have his young-man metabolism forever, like he isn’t pushing forty. He sees me eat the way I do — whole foods, vegetables, protein at every meal — and to him, I’m doing so well, there could not possibly be a problem. He loves my body. He doesn’t just think it’s fine, or good — he thinks it’s a revelation. I love that he thinks this, but also, I argue with him. I feel like he doesn’t get it.
“I have a problem,” I say. “I am like an addict. What feels like eating normally to me is gong to kill me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to just relax and eat like a normal person. I’m morbidly obese.”
He scoffs. “What do you mean? No, you’re not. You look fine. I think you’re beautiful.”
This makes me angry.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I snarl. “I know I’m beautiful. It’s not an aesthetic judgement. It’s not a matter of fucking opinion. It’s a medical fact. I’m not being hard on myself. I’m trying to be loving to myself.”
A history of my beef body
I was a normal-looking baby, at least. I find this comforting. Is that weird? With the exception of always being very tall and big for my age — and not fat, just kind of a magnified, one-and-a-half-times version of the other children — I looked basically normal until I was six. I see pictures of myself from this time, and I sigh with relief. I don’t remember being anything other than fat, but there I am. A skinny legend, I think.
My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was seven. It was terminal when they found it. I found out this year, twenty-one years after she died, that it was a slow-growing, hormonal tumour. She’d probably been sick for years. It was in her breast, mostly. But also everywhere.
My mom was one of those 90s hippies who would like, go to a reiki healer instead of the doctor. I had to get myself vaccinated in my early twenties. She was this tight ball of resentment, a lot of the time. She resented the medical establishment, so she avoided it, even though it was free, and right there, and her end of the exchange was coping with her resentment for long enough to get help. Then she died. Mostly of cancer, but also of resentment. I’m not trying to rag on her. She was mostly an exceptionally good parent and I love her very much. It’s just that nobody’s perfect — and “nobody’s perfect” usually means that people’s imperfections are like, kind of profound.
Blaming her for her own death feels mean. No one is at fault for being sick. I don’t think it’s fair to hold people responsible like that. I think she was in a lot of pain and discomfort — physical and psychological — and she got used to it, and she didn’t notice. I think sometimes our resentments get so big we don’t notice they’re killing us. That makes me feel softer. It’s hard for women, especially. It’s hard not to lose once we make the choice to be female. It was her birthday twelve days ago. I miss her, is what I mean. I just wish she was here.
Considering how emotional my eating is, I wonder if her getting sick had something to do with it. Maybe it was a mother surrogate, standing in for her slow disease-retreat, losing her into that pre-diagnostic confusion. I’m trying not to have the writing here slip too far into the sentimental, or the poetic — at least not yet. So I’ll just say that losing my mother was profoundly and foundationally devastating. Obesity is never just about food, like addiction is never just about drugs or alcohol. Taking comprehensive personal responsibility is, of course, an absolutely essential and necessary condition for recovery, but that’s not all there is. If it was, everyone would be healthy and athletic. No one would be addicted to anything.
I like the term “morbid obesity.” It doesn’t feel stigmatizing, to me. It feels honest. The conditions that lead to obesity are not just unjust, on a political level. They’re not just unfair, in this biblical, Joblike, curse-the-heavens way. They are horrifying. Like a horror movie. They are morbid.
Loser
While my mother was sick, I got really big.
I got big at a terrifying rate. I got big like a bad kid in a magical candy factory. Puberty helped. It turned my body into a war zone, a mess of feelings I did not understand, which compounded and morphed my primary horror, which was my body. Puberty was a flat ontological field, for me. There was no silver lining. No experimentation. No wide variety of new body-experiences into which I could blossom as a newly-minted woman. There was just the primordial horror of me, and my shrinking from it. Mom died when I was nine. I kept getting bigger. I got bigger until my early teens.
When my family intervened, I was thirteen. I was as tall as I am now, and even heavier. I had none of the muscle I currently have. My BMI was in the “morbid obesity” category — not just underneath, but squarely there.
Under duress, I agreed to a low-carbohydrate diet. In two months, lost fifteen percent of my original body weight.
After another round, I lost another 15% — slightly slower, but not much. Teenager metabolism, you know. I cannot possibly overstate the effect this had on my life. I would get out of bed and fall over — launching myself upright with my previously-required amount of strength, and then toppling over from the lack of counterweight. I went from a size 20 to a size 10. People barely recognized me. I felt like a kind of Benjamina Button who fell asleep one night a middle-aged woman whose last hope died years ago, and woke up the plucky heroine in an indie teen drama film.
On a social level, I’d never been rewarded like that. I’d never been celebrated like that — not for being smart, or kind, or sensitive, or brave. The girl I was before was all of those things. But she was also a girl.
The conditions that build an eating disorder are not just emotional, or nutritional. They are cultural, and gendered. They are terrifying. They are very sad.
Notes on consequentialism
I listened to an episode of a podcast recently where a man who was serving a sentence in prison stated that prison was bad, and he did not like to be there, but he was grateful for the fact that somebody intervened before he had the opportunity to do worse things than the violent crime for which he was serving a sentence. The declaration was chilling. I also related to it, in this fucked-up, entitled, very inappropriate way.
Please have mercy on me: I have been psychologically dependent on food to cope. I have been forced by circumstances beyond my control to go on a very restrictive diet. Both had their huge ups and their huge downs. Children have no agency. They shouldn’t, honestly. Children make stupid choices! So do their parents, but we don’t have a better system. Basically, it sucks to be a kid, and we have no solutions.
Being as obese as I was was extremely bad for me, and my family had an obligation to intervene. I could nit-pick about how my family eats if I want, but I don’t know if there would be a point — my mother, father, and stepmother were all good cooks who understand nutrition. They made nutritious food for us. Putting aside the fact that I’m part of a blended family, there is massive body diversity even in the members of my immediate family to whom I am genetically related. This seems to indicate our body composition has more to do with individual habits and behaviours than it does with genetics, or even our environment. An example of my bad food habits: I’m just learning the somatic differences between eating to the point of being overstuffed and eating until I’ve had enough. I just really like the feeling of being so full I’m kind of uncomfortable. I have assumed this was satiety my whole life. My parents tried to explain this difference to me, every meal time, my whole childhood. I simply did not believe them. It took developing the emotional maturity to really pay sense attention to my hunger cues, satiety levels, and compulsions around eating, which just happened to me a few weeks ago. I am thirty.
I’m sure if we look closely at things, we could find ways that my family could have worked harder to make it so I never got fat in the first place, but I think that would be splitting hairs. They did their best. They intervened. I lost the weight.
I had extremely difficult and complicated feelings about the intervention. I often screamed and cried about not being able to eat pasta or ice cream or whatever — sometimes it felt like hunger, but mostly I just wanted to be placated the way food placated me. You know, like an addict. I liked the social benefits of the weight loss. I profoundly struggled with the process that lead to it.
My parents overrid my free will to intervene. This is generally something that is against my principles, but I do think it’s required with children. In this case, it was holistically moral, I think. It was profoundly upsetting to me on a personal level, the following reasons I now understand:
Normal result of dead mom trauma
Being separated from primary coping strategy
Reasonable experience of frustration at having my freedom overriden
Immaturity — I was, after all, a child. I didn’t understand how serious the situation was. Or, I would — in fits and starts. Then, I would get hungry.
How to disappear completely
My physical health improved. My mental health deteriorated. This was the time of web 1.0, pro-ana forums, size 00 pants, and tabloid journalism about celebrity bodies. In a healthy weight range, I’d left one life-threatening disease. Then, when I was fourteen, and working to maintain my weight loss, my older brother died of a drug overdose. As food and food behaviours were my coping strategies, I guess it only makes sense that my loss correlated with my beginning another one. I became extremely bulimic — a problem that persisted for over a decade of my life.
Bulimia was, for me, always a kind of failed anorexia. It isn’t a very politically correct thing to say, but I idolized anorexics. I thought they were very impressive.
I figured I would always need to be in some kind of state of self-denial in order to experience anything like a normal weight. I thought constantly about food. When I got a single morsel of anything that wasn’t part of the eating plan I’d set for myself — low-carb, low-calorie, whole foods, mostly — I’d start acting like a vampire in a trauma ward. Ravenous and out of control. This meant I started to see pretty much all food as a problem. Which meant that being fed was also a problem. Which, or course, meant other people were a problem. So leaving my house was, basically. I’m sure you can see how this could get out of hand.
Hunger rendered me immobile. I would scroll thinspo boards on my phone. I would calculate and re-calculate calorie counts on some app. I got boring and cranky and very, very still. Eating was far worse. Eating lead to THE VOID. Eating lead to some field, out past ideas of right and wrong — the great, ravenous release. Eating lead to me kneeling at the closest thing I had to a church that whole time — which was a toilet, which is disgusting. It felt disgusting. Not as disgusting as eating, or letting what I ate stay inside me. I have not purged in five years, but for a decade I knelt and prayed at the church of disgust. I did this two, three, five times a day. I was a believer. I was very devout.
In a lot of ways, I have left this devotion to what is dark and twisted and painful behind me. In a lot of other ways — precious ones, that I have looked at long enough to conclude they are, in fact, good — I have not.
Puke is a four-letter word
In the gravel behind the fried fish joint, I knew I had to get sober or just commit to dying.
I was in my uniform — black shirt, black jeans, and the stupid logo-printed baseball cap. I hate baseball caps. I was smoking a cigarette. I was sitting on the ground, resting my arms on my knees, staring at my knees, and my loose black jeans, and the blurry space behind them. The ground was filthy. Rocks were digging into my ass, and I was in pain, but not from that. I’m pretty sure I was still wearing my apron, which made this whole self-indulgent meltdown an enormous health code violation, but I was too hungover to care.
I hated myself, but not as much as I hated everything and everyone else. I was living on a loop and I was so bored I was past bored, past wanting to die — into being so near-catatonic in my lack of feeling anything I would have loved to want to die. I didn’t want anything. I didn’t feel anything. I lived in a closed loop. I had graduated university the year before I’d spent every moment from then until sitting down on the ground behind the fried fish restaurant crushed by uncertainty and helplessness. I felt sure everyone else was playing some other game than I was. I had no idea what I was doing. Just that I was bad at it.
The only relief I ever felt was when I drank or ate. So I drank like a desperate fish and I ate like an unsupervised eight year-old at a birthday party. I smoked — when did that start? My drinking was getting worse, as I got older — desperate, directionless. Dark. I didn’t want to die like my brother. Even after the worsening hangovers wore off, I felt horrible all the time. The kind of horrible where you might not notice some worse horrible moving in. I didn’t want to lose the things I loved about my life in the pre-diagnostic confusion that came before a death. I didn’t want to die like my mother.
I signed up for therapy on my phone, on that smoke break. I got a call a few weeks later — this woman was subsidized and fairly affordable, even on my minimum-wage frycook salary.
I started ranting, and she interrupted me. No one I knew interrupted me. I was surprised to find it refreshing. “No,” she said — her voice stern, but warm. “Again, but with less self-judgement.”
We worked on the self-judgement first. I stopped taking on responsibility for so many things which had nothing to do with me. I purged for the last time less than a year later. Sobriety came in fits and starts — a month here, then six months, two weeks, four months — over the next three years. Then it stuck. That was almost three years ago.
I knew I had to get sober or just commit to dying.
Where this leaves me
So where does this leave me? Why am I here? I’m here because I’m really fat and I don’t want to be. I want to be like, fast and athletic and shit. I want to be graceful and confident on my feet. I want to eat like it’s not some kind of insane death match with Satan. I am a veteran dieter: I have been on South Beach, paleo, keto, and Atkins. I have taken shakes and I have been a vegan. I’ve subsisted on juice for weeks at a time. I have gone without anything but water for three, four, five straight days. I have eaten enough for an olympic weightlifter in a single sitting. I spent five years as a treeplanter in the Canadian bush — burning the caloric equivalent of two back-to-back marathons, every day, for months on end. I have been morbidly obese and I have been thin — or, rather, the middle of average. Which is like, really quite petite. For me.
I’m also here because I literally hate pretty much all fitness content online. I’m a serious intellectual, man. I don’t know anything about sports I couldn’t learn in a movie with a hot guy in it. The cardio I got as a child was turning the pages in the books I was reading. I am an award-losing poet and memoirist, a full-time practitioner of writing — the world’s only completely inertia-based art form. I’ve spent years fully immersed in neoliberal identitarian youth culture — home of some of the most unhinged and sad discourse on fatness and health imaginable. I’m a fervent feminist, an old-guard Marxist, a recovered 2010s Tumblr girl, a mall goth from Toronto, a bohemian layabout, and a tortured melodramatic punkass piece of shit. I’m Indigenous, but please don’t be weird about it. I feel alienated from pretty much all weight loss spaces. I’m either too advanced in my nutritional knowledge for what the space is offering, my ego is too damaged by the fact that I’m assumed to be a big dumb fatty who can’t pronounce “nutritional label,” I’m literally too much of a bitch for the girlboss gatekeep grindset, or I keep trying to get all the anorexic bitches into somatic therapy.
So I need some other space — a space that is darkness-positive, because I feel like obesity is actually kind of dark and twisted, and I am deeply turned off and unmotivated by constant positivity. I need a place that is rooted in my inviolable worth, and the progress I’ve made in my recovery. I need a place that is funny, and smart, and absurd. I know people feel the same way.
There’s so little writing out there that exists at the space between what’s dark and what’s hopeful, in the complicated space between differing viewpoints, especially about things as serious and charged and emotional as our bodies. I want writing about the fully-realized artistic powerhouse possibilities that await people in a life after an eating disorder. I want writing on health and wellness for ironic art cunts. I want writing about the truly morbid nature of obesity — that is the writing I need.
And it doesn’t exist, so you know. I have to write it.
So now what
Here’s what you can expect:
one article (like this one!) a month, on a specific topic, which will be accessible to paid and free subscribers, and hosted for free on the website for two months after publication.
shorter, weekly blog posts about the nitty-gritty, personal, more salacious and/or embarrassing details of my weight loss which are paid subscribers-only.
paid subscribers also get full archive access, commenting privileges, and full community access
I have ADHD! I’m not a tweaker. No hate to tweakers, though. Addiction’s a bitch. I hope I’m not a tweaker. You’d tell me if I was giving tweaker vibes, right? I probably wouldn’t listen. I don’t think I’m a tweaker, anyway. Largely because my understanding is that tweakers are skinny.
To make matters more complicated, getting my weight down is one of the better things I can do to prevent a recurrence, and getting one kind of cancer makes me higher risk for other kinds, so who knows.
Please tell me you don’t expect full, like, Chicago-style citations. Here’s the link. Rosen, Howard, MD. Web, or whatever: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179496/
Medical perspective here: https://www.nature.com/articles/508S57a