Tuesday

It’s funny how weight is such a hot topic for most people, even those who are content with their weight.  It’s a pretty hot topic for me, no matter how I try not to let it be.  I spent 12 years starving myself and throwing up and weighing myself 100 times a day.  I took ipecac to induce vomiting and tried to live on watery soups.  

My lowest weight was 50kg (110lbs) at 5’6".  I hovered around 52kg for years, then it was 55kg when I started to suck at starving myself and instead tried to rely on purging.  I was pretty thin, but still felt massive.  That makes me the saddest – that at such a tiny weight for my frame I still felt like the fattest creature on Earth.

I got sick a while after that, not sure what caused it.  I was very stressed with work, family and my relationship. I "ballooned" to 60kg, then to 70kg (154lbs).  I had diarrhea for months before I went to see a doctor, who prescribed a battery of tests.  Eventually a colonoscopy and endoscopy revealed 12 polyps in my bowel which were removed.  I am actually due to go back again now for another look (I have to have it checked out every 5 years). 

Around that time I dumped my loser boyfriend and got fired from my job.  M and I had been talking for years and I started to lean on his friendship a bit more, now that I was flat broke and living in a house on my own, he was good company as an online friend. 

I found another job, two actually.  I had a friend move in with me (which ended badly) and while I was still purging, things started to even out for me.  I dated Feher briefly, and he dumped me ("I love you as my best friend, but I don’t love you as a partner") and I was crushed.  So was M, actually.  He had been following my diary for a few years at that point and had read my entries about Feher and I and how we had dated for like 2 months right out of school, then broke up.  We had then spent however many years with our respective partners, but having something between us that always made us wonder if things could have been different.  They weren’t different, as it turned out.  We were the best of friends, maybe even better friends than I am with my Heslop.  Not anymore, though.  Still good friends, but nowhere near as close as we were.

So anyway, a few more months passed, and I had a sexy dream about M.  I told him about it, and we started to talk about possibly having feelings for one another.  The possibility of me going to visit for a few weeks was there, and I started to look into it properly.  We looked at visas, and then realised that if we were going to try this, 2 weeks wouldn’t do, we needed to see if this was for real.  What if it was real and we couldn’t bear to be apart again?  America and Australia are not exactly close by.  So I moved home to mother’s house, and started saving money and applying for a 1 year visa.

And I lost weight.  I slipped back down to 63kg and my purging decreased because now my life didn’t seem so challenging.  I had something to look forward to and to feel happy about, and I was LOVED.  I was cherished and cared about and I realised that I was worth something. 

We had an argument and I purged.

We argued about me purging, and I struggled not to do it again. 

I spent the year in the US, and somehow managed to come back to Australia at 62kg, 1 kg lighter than I had been when I left, despite eating everything I could get my hands on.

I started working at my current job and gained weight.  It wasn’t lack of activity, I sit at a desk half the day, but that’s no less activity than I was doing in the US.  I just ate poorly.  I still eat poorly.  But I stacked on weight and bottomed out at 74kg (162lbs) earlier this year. That’s 52lbs between my lowest and my heighest weight.  Isn’t that a bit scary?

Then in May the shit went down with my neighbours and I ate pretty much nothing until the end of June.  That’s why I feel bad about my weight loss, it wasn’t diet and exercise, it was stress and anxiety. 

It seems to be staying off, though.  I am bouncing around between 62kg and 63kg again, which is a good weight for my frame.  57kg would just be amazing, but the problem is that I want to lose that weight from my stomach and thighs, but when I lose weight it goes from my face and waist first.  It won’t solve my body issues. 

I am just taking it as it comes.  Now that we have settled in here, and the Sydney trips are done with, we can eat more home cooked meals.  But that won’t last, M will be gone in 3 weeks.  I do not want to cook with my mother buzzing around.

She makes a big show last night about how she’s not having dinner, then I realise that the bathroom scale has been moved, so she must have been weighing herself.  Then there are potato chip and candy wrappers in the bin.  I know exactly what is going on because I was THERE.  It happened to me too. 

But I don’t say anything because she has always been like this and is in denial.  No point.  

So that’s my little spiel on weight for today.