*Hippo-Curti-Mus*

Greetings from Hippo-Curti-Mus. I’m too fat. I mean, really fat. I’m not quite sure how much weight I have re-gained of the fifty pounds I lost because my scale died and the replacement battery costs more than the entire scale did when I bought it. I have another scale, a really up-scale (see what I did there?) one that keeps track of goal weight, body mass index, and other stuff… much more information than I should really have at the ready. But it was on sale, and, again, for less than the replacement battery for my other scale. It’s much nicer, too, my old one being basic, digital and having just .5 pound increments. The new one has it down to .2 pound readings.

Scales are difficult things for me, things which it has been firmly suggested over and over ad nauseum to me that I should not have around me at all. When I was younger and in the midst of a long, long bout with both anorexia and bulimia, I was scale-obsessed. I weighed myself so many times in a 24-hour period: before and after each little intake of food; on every commercial break; after a beverage; at least three or four times overnight; etc. It was really bad. If I thought I had gained even an ounce or two I would often become dehydrated to the point of illness because I wouldn’t allow even water into my system. And don’t even get me started on how dehydrated one becomes when taking thirty to forty laxatives per day. After my meals (what normal, healthy people would consider a light snack) I would immediately go to the bathroom and get rid of it. I was so far gone into the disease that I wasn’t self-conscious when going out to eat with friends or having a meal at their homes. It was just known that, when finished “eating,” I would immediately (and rudely) excuse myself in order to purge the offending stuff as soon as possible.

I am 5’8″ tall with a medium build. My recorded lowest weight (because I actually got lower but was not weighed at the time) was 102 pounds. Then, and when I was even less, I thought I was looking good and I had convinced myself that I felt really well, better than ever. I was constantly fainting from extremely low blood pressure; my hair was falling out; my skin was flaking off; my lips were constantly not just cracked but split open due to the dehydration; I messed up my heart, screwing up one of the valves; my finger- and toenails were flaked like a good pie crust… you get the idea.

Yet what was so confusing to me was that people would tell me how great I looked. I didn’t realize at the time (and not until years later when a friend confided in me) that they were actually shocked by my appearance but felt they should say something. Being complimented, even when it wasn’t the intent, fueled the obsession. But interestingly enough, so did the criticism I received for being too thin. When someone would express concern or disgust about how skeletal I had become, trying to “get through” to me that what I was doing was deadly and wrong, it was “inspiration” for me to lose even more weight. I guess it was a sort of “fuck you, too” to them. I was in control, or so I thought. On the few occasions when someone would say I was out-of-control, or was being controlled by the disorders and not the other way around, I would react in a ticked off way and cut them out of my life for a while. That’s because I knew they were right but would not allow myself to admit it, even when alone, at night, in the darkness of my room and my disease.

I knew when it all started for me, too. I can tell you the exact moment my weight obsession began: when the dad told me, “You’re starting to look like your momma and daddy!” They were both dealing with being overweight at the time and I had watched them go through it all: grapefruit and salad diet; this or that gimmick; Weight Watchers (in which they both did well but didn’t stick with it); and so on. I’ll admit that I was frustrated with and disgusted by them, especially him, when he would complain that he couldn’t lose weight (sometimes even blaming her for her cooking being the cause), but every day when he got home he would take a huuuuuge serving spoon we had and scoop out a large amount of peanut butter (one gallon size can mixed with one pound of butter to make it even creamier, by the way), scarf it down, and then follow it with one or two more huge bites. It was basically the equivalent of one of the small jars in today’s grocery aisles. After dinner, during which they both managed to stick to their latest fad diet, sometime later in the evening would find them at the freezer dipping out large amounts of “ice milk” (sort of like a really gross version of frozen skim milk with chemical “vanilla” flavor) which was a better alternative to the real stuff, the real ice cream. The problem? For some reason they both began putting handfuls of peanuts in with the ice milk, and sometimes would go back for more of both.

Watching all of this, combined with remembering all of the comments about having to purchase husky-sized jeans, etc., for me, combined with that fateful comment from him, and an anorectic/bulimic was born. Within a year, maybe less, I had lost probably fifty or so pounds. No one noticed because I dressed to hide it, and I guess I did so convincingly. My face, always rounded and annoying (and part of my problem because I wanted it to be really thin but it would never go down in size), would not give me away. Since I had lost a lot of weight I was cold all of the time. So sweaters or sweatshirts became my norm and no one was the wiser. The sudden move from the only place I had ever known and the only friends I had didn’t help matters. In between running away a couple of times to go back to where I felt was my home with my friends, I lost even more weight. Around this time Karen Carpenter died and I was inspired by the pictures I saw of her, emaciated and weak. “I could do that, too, and my life would be so much happier!!” sang my diseased brain. When I was invited back to CA to graduate on stage with my high school class (I had graduated a year early), and because their wish was for me to play the piano at both the baccalaureate service and the actual graduation, I rode with my parents back to my little home town in the middle of nowhere. All the way there I was sick, a few times to the point of them having to pull over and lie me down on a sidewalk in the shade, pouring fluids into me, until I could stop shaking and focus again, etc. If they knew something was wrong they never said anything or acted in any way to get me help. All they told people was that I easily got “travel sick.” The day after arriving in my home town, the seniors were having a swim afternoon at the high school pool. Normally it was only for the seniors but part of my class’s “senior wish” was that the whole school got the afternoon off to swim. (No big deal… there were less than eighty students in my entire public school, with only thirteen in my graduating class!) Always one to swim with a t-shirt on anyway, it was no big deal for anyone when I joined in with one on. I was desperately trying to hide the fact that my ribs showed and one could put a thumb and forefinger around my collarbones to the point that, if their wasn’t skin there, they would totally touch. I could, using a hand on either s

ide of my waist, make my hands go around to the point where my fingers not only touched, but overlapped a bit. I knew I had to hide these things from the kids with whom I had grown up, or, especially with a couple of them, there would be hell to pay. It so happened that one time, when I was climbing up the ladder to get out of the pool, my friend, Barbara, caught a glimpse of the t-shirt plastered against my body before I could pull it away and walk leaning forward a little bit so that it would drape rather than cling. She went ape-shit and got several other of our friends together and sort of cornered me in kind of an “Intervention” way. What they didn’t know was that their attempts to help me, to “talk sense to” me, were backfiring. The longer the lectures and concerned comments, truly caring words trying to benefit my welfare, the more I thought, “You think I’m skinny now? You just wait!” I don’t know why that was my reaction, but it was. I guess it’s just part of the disease.

I continued to “live” that way for many years. I’d say seven or eight years later, after two failed engagements and a relationship with psychopathic James, and three years of being alone after that, I met K. It was June, 1989, and I had gained some weight, getting up to a whopping 114 pounds. My ribs were still like a xylophone and one could easily see my vertebrae all the way up my back. I was still weak and getting very dizzy unless I stood up slowly, then waited for the room to stop spinning. But in love I fell, and, as is my usual m.o., way too quickly. To make it worse, in a way, K liked me skinny like that, or so he said. So, well, of course… let’s lose even more weight and he’ll love me more, right? When I first met him and moved in with him four days later, I told him that our first fight would be about my eating. He didn’t quite get it. Since we were so knew he didn’t have time yet to see patterns, believing me when I’d say I had eaten on the way home from work, or that I wasn’t feeling well, etc. He wasn’t observant enough to notice that during a meal out, as most of ours were then, I just pushed the food around on the plate, taking a small bite now and then. Yeah, I did the whole thing.

Flash forward a few weeks, and we had agreed to house- and dog-sit for friends of ours for a week. I had gone to K’s work to do some stuff for him and when we got to our friends’ house and walked in the front door, I immediately was overcome and fainted. I was out for a couple of minutes, according to K, and when I came “to” he asked me, “When was the last time you ate?” I couldn’t tell him, because I really couldn’t remember. I had no recollection of anything eaten for at least a week or so, except for one morning when I had two chocolate cupcakes on the way to work and got so busy I forgot to purge them. I was living on Diet Pepsi and cigarettes. If someone commented on how skinny I was I would say I had come up with what I called the “Supermodel Diet”: coffee, diet Pepsi and cigarettes, and a Tic Tac if I felt hungry. Most would laugh, but some would bitch me out for joking about my obvious problem. Again: call me on it, and I’ll show you what being truly skinny is, bitch!

Being with K I did end up gaining maybe seven or eight pounds. Four years into being with him, I weighed in at around 125 when I was diagnosed with HIV, which was actually full-blown AIDS. Part of the reason I was given six months or less to live was because, at that time, most people diagnosed with the disease contracted a wasting syndrome that ate away at the patient, often being a big contributor to their death. Also at this time I had the first of what has become a lifetime of lung problems, so I was put on massive steroid doses. Because of those, I actually started gaining weight instead of wasting away. Once the HIV meds became available, my weight would fluctuate some because of trying each new one to see if I could tolerate it (most of which I couldn’t). I’d lose some due to the constant vomiting and diarrhea, or I’d gain some back. But still, in less than seven months I had gained over sixty pounds. As the long years went on and gained a little bit here and there, mainly due to my sedentary lifestyle. Thanks to a few of the HIV meds I was on for a while I contracted a condition called lipodystrophy, which is a gaining and redistributing of body fat a lot of people got at the time. I lost weight in my arms and legs, my faint little ass completely went away, but my belly began to grow and grow, as did what is called a “buffalo hump” across my shoulders, at the base of my neck. In normal lipodystrophy cases, one’s face sinks in and becomes freakishly gaunt. Due to contracting an infection in my parotid glands, though, my face did the opposite and swelled in a huge way, and unevenly. To this day, the left side of my face is noticeably larger than the right, and both are puffy and gross.

While going through a massive, years-long depression the last three or four years I was with K I put on even more weight. I cried when I hit the 200-pound mark. Finally reclaiming my life and moving away from him after nineteen years together, I came back to Santa Fe with the intent of getting my shit together, etc. However, the depression continued, even though I thought I was finally happy again. I became even more sedentary than I had previously been, and gained a huge amount of weight. Due to the high altitude and my grossly increased weight, my old lung condition returned and I found myself having to be on oxygen 24/7. I topped out at 255 pounds, a far cry from the under-102 I preferred to be. My counselor and doctor helped me out by having the clinic take over a bill so that I could afford to pay for Weight Watchers, and I quickly lost over fifty pounds. I no longer had to constantly be on oxygen, although I still used it at home just for comfort’s sake.

And then I got stuck. WW calls it a “plateau,” but I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t lose any more, due to what I’m sure is the permanent effects of lipodystrophy. Sure, the belly and buffalo hump went down some as I lost the weight. But it’s not going to go away completely. I’m going to be misshapen and lopsided for the rest of my life.

And that’s what I’m really having a difficult time with right now. I know I never recovered (if one ever truly does) from being anorectic/bulimic. I’ve never received any kind of treatment to help me through it. I still have that mentality, in a way, but things have changed. I must eat now in order to help with the absorption of my medications. And for some reason I have become, at least in actions, the opposite of anorexic/bulimic: I now binge eat but will not allow myself to vomit it up. When one pukes involuntarily for twenty years, one doesn’t want to do it for pleasure. I’m struggling so much because I really can no longer stand this excess weight and disgusting appearance. I want to be 102 pounds again, to be a size 4 in women’s clothing. I’m not unrealistic, though, and know that that will never happen. But I still want to at least be back in what would be considered a “normal” weight range for my body type and height. My goal weight, really, is to get down to 165, well within what is considered a healthy weight for someone my age, e

tc. As much as I still have that little birdie in my ear telling me to get as skinny as possible, I know that if I’m to continue to survive all of the various illnesses I have, I need to have as healthy a body as possible.

So, now… well… I have to make some huge changes. Firstly I need to deal with this continuous depressive state which has me isolated and inactive. And I need to quit the junk food, which has screwed up the diabetic condition I previously had under such great control. There is so much I want to do to become a better me that it seems overwhelming. So I’ll start with just one thing at a time. One can start only at the beginning, right? I don’t know that I can lose, truly, any more weight. And I know my belly and buffalo hump and fat face aren’t going to completely go away. But there has to be something more I can do to get at least a semblance of myself back. Right? This is going to be one long, long journey. I guess it’s time for me to make the first tentative steps. I wish I had someone’s hand to hold (figuratively, of course — don’t like to be touched, you know), to support me along the way. But, as with my entire life up to this point, I can only rely on myself. I’m all alone in this big, scary world. I want to get back to being Curtis, not Hippo-Curti-Mus. God help me; no one else will.