Weighty Matters

I dropped by to visit with some friends a little while ago.  They’re leaving the Keys soon and I don’t know when I’ll next see them.  They, like all of my friends, have been so supportive of me in these last few months.  They have another friend elsewhere who is morbidly obese and struggling.  The guy said to me something that resonated.   “I’ll love you no matter where you are with your weight, but I’m awfully glad that you’re working so hard to get healthier so you’ll be around that much longer.”

I know that the root of most people’s concern for me has always been my health.  My family and friends have loved me no matter where up or down the scale I sat.  That has always meant so much to me, and continues to touch my heart and soul.  I wish the rest of the world was always so supportive.

Early wounds inflicted by unkind, even cruel, people stay with us a lonnngggg time.  Unless I get dementia when I’m older, I will never forget the jerk in high school who would yell, “Thar she blows” loudly across the school campus whenever he caught sight of me.    I won’t say that he singled me out because he really was a jerk and came up with equally rotten things to say about other classmates who didn’t fit his ideal.

He’s just one example.  Those kinds of abusive, mean-spirited statements made an impact and added shape to my character in good and bad ways.  I learned to echo ridicule in my head when I thought about my own body.  It got to the point where I could be as derogatory to myself as anybody else, if not more so.   I’m still unraveling the damage and will need to continue to do so every step of the way.  I sincerely hope that I will be able to accept myself and truly see my body in the way that it is, rather than cart around the old pictures even when I’m far thinner.

The other way the unkindness impacted me is that I don’t ever want to be that cruel to another person.  Whether I meet someone who’s obese, or incredibly thin, someone who’s missing a limb or has a facial deformity — whatever the case, I am determined that my reactions and interaction with them will not be affected by their body shape and outside appearance.  I want to offer them unconditional acceptance.  Truthfully, that is exactly what they deserve.  What every person deserves.

Even me.  🙂  I’m committed to extending unconditional acceptance to myself.  My body’s experiencing changes all of the time.  It’s getting better day by day.    I’m going to love myself unconditionally today and tomorrow, and then every day after.  Even when the excess skin left by the weight loss begins to hang in drapes around my body.  (Oh yeah.  I fully intend to have plastic surgery to remove the problem when the time comes.)  No matter what I will show myself this respect and be a better, healthier person because of it.

I’ve been reading up on Body Dysmorphic Disorder.  I’d not heard the term before, but then ran across it in a magazine and it caught my interest.  I’ve spoken before about how I have “fat eyes”.  I always see myself as obese — okay, I have always been obese — but more to the point, I see myself heavier than I am, even when I lose weight.  I’ve lost over 55 pounds recently and everyone I work with tells me that they see the difference.  I still don’t.  Whether I look in the mirror or look at a picture, I still only see an obese, misshapen body.

Even with the caveat that I am still greatly overweight, I should be able to see some degree of difference with a 55 pound weight loss.  I can feel it — in my ability to move and walk, in my clothes, in the fact that I no longer struggle to put on my car seat belt.  I just don’t see it.

So, I wanted to research if this is just part of having always been overweight or if I actually have a disorder that requires treatment.   I started investigating the issue online.  I found a site that described and defined BDD.  It seemed to focus on people who focus on one aspect of their appearance that they perceive as horribly flawed or ugly and it completely wrecks their social interactions, drives them to seek out excessive plastic surgery, burdens them with shame, etc.  That site also separated BDD from people who have eating disorders and are overweight.  It didn’t seem to consider an image of perpetually heaviness as a qualification of BDD.

“Okay,” I thought.  “I do not have BDD.”

However, I do have a continuing negative self-image.  I can’t remember a time when I had a good body image.  Over Christmas, I was looking through my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding album.  I was darned slender for me!  My face, body, legs.  I even had a waistline!  I was surprised.  I clearly did not remember being that shape almost 30 years ago.

So, I started researching body image.  I took a self test and scored very high, which prompted this explanation:

You are suffering from a condition called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) which is translated as body hatred. This is not a reflection of how you actually look or how other people see you, because there are very many people who have physical handicap, or, who look different from the norm. But they do not feel this badly about themselves. Similarly there are people who look very normal in reality but they experience this sense of deep hostility toward the way they look. BDD and a damaged sense of self-esteem go hand in hand.                           

People with BDD are at high risk of developing a variety of serious emotional problems such as social phobias, depression and eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia for example, are examples of BDD, but BDD shows itself in many ways, some people develop an obsession with weighing themselves, seeking cosmetic surgery or engaging in punishing exercise regimes.     

So, I have this site telling me that I do have BDD and by reading this, I could start to believe that maybe the BDD lead to the eating disorder eons ago.

You know what?  I’m not convinced — not when there are conflicting opinions.   Maybe it’s a chicken and the egg kind of thing.  I’ve had an eating disorder, so I’ve always been obese and most obese people don’t like their bodies and that’s why I have this negative body image.  Or, maybe because I was chubby as a kid, I developed lousy body image and self-esteem and that’s caused me to always eat about it, descend into an eating disorder and just fuel the problem physically and emotionally.  Damned if I know.  I suppose the smart thing would be to consult a therapist about it and sift through the opinions to get to the real decision.

In the meantime, I’m trying to change my attitude.  I have seen the weight loss in my hands, of all places.  I can feel it in my clothes, like I said before.  I said I was going to take an updated picture and do a side-by-side comparison.  I didn’t because I hated still seeing myself in a way I considered to be obese and gross.  Looks like I need to bite the bullet and do it for real.

My intention is to improve my negative self-image and embrace my new self as I’m emerging.  Where I am today is still not great, but it’s surely better than I was two months ago.  Two months from now, it will be better still.

Hating my body and berating myself over it are not positive attitudes.  They do not belong in my every changing, ever-improving life!