fat, FAT, faaaaat, fat!

six years. six years of my life have gone by since my last post. amazing trips, work triumphs, great new friends, terrible dates, family drama, loneliness–and all of it unrecorded.

except, maybe, on my body.

i think i’ve always had issues with food. i remember as a kid and teen coming home from school every day to an empty house, going into the kitchen and grabbing a whole box of cheez-its or wheat thins. eating half a box or more while lying on my parents’ bed watching tv. sometimes my mom would get home early and i’d hide the box under the bed or in my room because i couldn’t get back to the kitchen in time. yet, at worst, i was only 5-10 pounds overweight.

the summer before college, i crash dieted and binge-exercised and lost any extra weight plus a little more. i still had problems with food, but i ate in private and i was always able to stay thin with weeks here and there of very little food and lots of exercise. i wonder if any of my roommates heard me sneaking into the kitchen after midnight, bent on an epicurean orgy for one.

my last year of college, i got into running. by the time i started law school, i was a size two, but curvy in the best way and the fittest i’d ever been. no exaggeration, i turned heads. on more than one occasion, i recall walking out in a bathing suit and a guy would actually stop mid-sentence and then nervously finish. i’m not boasting, i could barely believe it myself. i was never THAT girl in high school, and i never believed it even when i was hot. i would lie in bed and marvel at the way my stomach was so flat, so concave, even as my stomach sometimes rumbled. it was almost a point of pride. i had control. don’t get me wrong, i never made it to the point of anorexia, but in order to eat pizza or drink at constant parties, i had to find other days to compensate.

but i had time then. i could fit in work-outs, i wasn’t exhausted from working long hours and trying to get enough sleep. that all changed when i started my career. i don’t think it was just work, i’m not naive. obviously, the food monster inside me was just lying in wait. i’d broken up with my boyfriend and my life was all about work. i’d work until all hours of the night, getting home with no energy to prepare a healthy dinner or tamp down on the food monster. my mentality was let me get past this big hearing, write this big response, prep for this trial–THEN, i’d deal with my personal problems. well, there was always another case, and there was always another tomorrow.

food became everything. big win in court? that deserves a celebratory meal. terrible, horrible, awful day? comfort food. nothing big planned for a saturday night? that calls for a feast and a bottle of wine. i would order-in constantly, the embarrassment of the front desk man seeing all my food deliveries still not enough to stop me. i was always waiting for that moment, that glorious moment when i decimated whatever delicious meal i convinced myself i deserved that day.

honestly, there were times where i couldn’t wait to abandon some party just so i could go home and savage the contents of another styrofoam container. sometimes, i would eat with my friends and still go home and order food. at first slowly, and then faster and faster like a boulder rolling downhill, i put on weight. it happened over the course of eight years, and yet somehow it still feels like i was chubby one day and morbidly obese the next. now, at night, my hands map the unnatural bulges, the rolls, the cellulite, the ruin i’ve become.

there are so many good things in my life, but my body is holding me back on some of the most important. no one respects fat people. every day, i am underestimated at work. if i’m fat, i must also be stupid, lazy, unprepared. in some ways, that works to my advantage because they never see me coming. but every day i am also unseen. men forget to hold the door open for me, their eyes slide past me at the bar. i live in fear of seeing people i know from my past life, the one where i was thin and beautiful and wanted. i avoid seeing old friends who are in town for a weekend. family weddings fill me with dread. and certainly, i don’t date. sex feels like it happened to another person in some far off wonderland.

how did i let myself get here? how did i go from this beautiful girl that should have had everything to this thing.

it’s hard to write this. being this honest about how disgustingly gluttonous i’ve been, seeing it in black and white, putting this out into the world for judgment. i think the only reason i can even do it is because i’m fighting for control again. it only took a global pandemic resulting in months long house-arrest! after wasting the first three weeks of quarantine drinking wine every day and over-eating like i was on vacation, i realized that if i did this the entire quarantine, i’d reach the tipping point. that’s that critical threshold where your body is so heavy, it’s hard to move. it hurts to move. and so you just don’t. and soon that weight snowballs and the likelihood of ever losing it is next to nothing. it’s just a slide into diabetes and heart disease and a life alone because how could a man ever want to touch this mountain of fat. so i started a strict, but healthy, diet and exercise regimen mid-april. no food deliveries. no processed food. lunch and dinner only. no snacks. no soft drinks. alcohol only on fridays. one hour of exercise a minimum of five days a week.

as of this post, i have lost 26 pounds.

i need to lose another 70.

some days, i’m certain i can do it. i think it’s impossible to have reached such a level of discipline and fall back into bad habits. but I know that’s not true, and then i feel overwhelmed and discouraged. how can i possibly dig myself out of such a massive hole? losing weight is such a slow, mentally-draining process. every day that this coronavirus rages, i’m stuck home alone in my apartment, the kitchen twenty feet away. every day, it’s a battle not to eat everything. every day i weigh myself and progress is measured in increments of .2 or .3 pounds. these are such minuscule victories that the idea of losing 70 pounds seems ridiculous, impossible.

at this point, i’m trying to concentrate on one day, in one week, at a time. i’m hoping writing all this out gives me the will power to keep myself on track. maybe if i write it, it will happen.

thin, be thin. 

the road of lost innocence

i knew my checking account was dangerously low, but i was hoping i could feed it before it went negative. unfortunately, i woke up this morning to a stern email from my bank, again saving my ass through overdraft protection. and smacking me with a $35 fine. it turns out that my car insurance, macy’s and nordstrom’s off-the-rack bills, and gym membership fees left me with $3 in my account…but then i toppled into the red when my monthly automatic charity donation was deducted. sigh.

besides highlighting my reckless spending, it felt as if this charity was metaphorically slapping me in the face for my recent pity-fest: stop moping around because you don’t have a boyfriend and remember that other women do not even have the fucking PRIVILEGE to search out love!

i learned about this charity two years ago when i came across a book called The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam. this is the kind of memoir that rips at your heart as you try to empathize with a young girl caught in circumstances that should never exist.

an orphan growing up against the backdrop of the bloody khmer rouge regime in cambodia and later invasion by vietnam, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery at the tender age of 12.

when i was 12, i got a puppy.

she says of the brothels,

This was ordinary prostitution. Stinking mouths and bodies, dirty rooms, violence. The blows hurt, but the act itself was much worse. Sometimes there would be only two or three men a day, sometimes many more. If there weren’t enough, Li would tell Aunty Peuve not to feed us, so we’d try harder. If there were too many, you hurt inside and out, until you managed to shut all feeling off. (mam 60).

she speaks of never, ever feeling clean or good. of loathing the smell of semen, and feeling, for the rest of her life, as if she could not scrub the stink of it off herself. if she refused to work or attempted to run, she was punished brutally. it was a life of dead ends. the kind of life that would make most of us crawl into a ball and just never move, never feel, never care again.

somehow, Somaly escaped. she made it all the way to france where she started a new life. and yet, instead of quietly living out her days healing wounds as deep as the grand canyon, she chose to go back to cambodia to fight for the thousands of girls still being abused. since then, Somaly has begun a movement that has given new life to over 400,000 women in circumstances much like hers. sickeningly, her memoir recounts that,

Nowadays the girls are much younger too. This is because men in Cambodia will pay a thousand dollars to rape a virgin for a week—it’s always a week, for a virgin. Sex with a virgin is supposed to give strength, to lengthen a man’s life span and even lighten his skin….Often they are very young girls, just five or six years old. After the week is over, they sew the girl inside—without an anesthetic—and quickly sell her again. A virgin is supposed to scream and bleed, and this way the girl will scream and bleed, again and again. They do it maybe three or four times. (59-60).

i’m not quoting these lurid passages to be sensational. but if there was ever a book that needs to be read, this is one. you will cry, you will get up and pace, you will put it down because it is too much to absorb. i hope at the end, you will be moved, like i was, to visit the Somaly Mam Foundation website. i spend so much money on stupid crap that it was no hard decision to set up a monthly payment plan for this cause. i am currently doing $10 a month.

one last quote, i promise:

It’s still happening, today, tonight. Imagine how many girls have been raped and hit since you started to read this book. My story doesn’t matter, except that it stands for their story too, and their stories are why I don’t sleep at night. They haunt me. (60-61).

ten, fifteen dollars a month is really nothing. think about that monthly $140 you pay toward the monstrously large HDTV in your living room. the four times this month you’ve ordered delivery. the $60 bucks you blew on tequila shots at an overpriced bar celebrating nothing special.

little, precious girls. just think.