Advice from a shrinking fat man pt 3: The start
Last one, if they don't pick it up, but I thought I'd share. Enjoy!
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Advice: One size does not fit all. This is true of all things.
One year ago I weighed 532 pounds.
That number’s hard to write, which is strange to me. It’s not like it was a secret. I couldn’t throw on one of my large print Hawaiian shirts (the “man muumuu," if you will) and blend the fat in with the floral wallpaper. You might be able to hide a little muffin top, but when you’re hauling around the entire bakery people tend to notice. Hell, people tend to scream and dive out of the way. To complete the picture, I’m 6 feet 4 inches tall and built large on top of it all. It should become clear, at this point, that I’m not a person built for stealth. My physical talents lie more in line with the sumo wrestler rather than the ninja.
Since that time, I’ve made a lot of changes in my life. First I worked on losing the weight in conventional ways – diet, exercise and constant complaining. Later in the year, I took a bigger step – gastric bypass surgery. All in all, over the past year I’ve lost 117 pounds as I write this page and am working hard to get down to the mystical land over the rainbow called “Ideal Weight". I hear they have unicorns there. Or weapons of mass destruction, I forget which.
Over the next few articles I hope to explain to the normal person what it’s like to be large, what it’s like to work your way towards “normal" and how it feels when you get there. Mind you, it’s always possible I’ll be writing about what it’s like to be large, work your tail off, and stay large. But I’m hoping for the first.
I don’t see how one can write anything about a journey and not talk about where one begins. How, most people will ask, did you ever let yourself get to be 532 pounds? Well, everyone’s trip to the big side is a little different, so my story may not be the universal one.
Let me start with this: most scales only go up to 350 pounds, even in doctor’s offices. I passed that mark in high school, but was still active, very physically capable and so I didn’t think about it much. Once you go past that point, you’re on your own, guessing at what your weight might be but never being quite sure. Keep in mind what this means: you have no numbers telling you about little gains. A smaller person can hop onto a scale and realize “oh god, I just gained 3 pounds! Time to worry!" As a fat person, gaining 3 pounds is a drop in the ocean. Without a scale to tell you what just happened, you’re likely to feel the same way you did 3 pounds ago, your clothes will likely still fit the same, and people don’t look at you any differently. This works the opposite way, as well – I lost 50 pounds before people really started noticing that I was losing some poundage. With that in mind, you’ll just have to take my word that you could gain 10 or 15 pounds a year and just not notice. This helps you to ignore the change as it gradually takes over your life.
In response to the day to day stress of everyday life, I fell back on the one thing that always gave me comfort: food. Yeah, I’ll pause for a moment while you all take in that shocker. When people ask why you don’t just eat less, it’s interesting that they think they’re being helpful. It’s not a matter of just pushing away the plate – it’s a matter of pushing away the plate 3 times a day, every day, always. When food is your reward for success, your compensation for failure and your comfort in grief, this isn’t easy.
As someone who lives between West Hollywood and Silverlake, I’m stuck between one of the most body conscious places in the world and a place that pretends not to be. As a fat man I found that neither place really wanted me all that much, that there was no place in either community where I quite fit in. Since I couldn’t identify with my gay community, I didn’t really build a gay identity and instead built a fat identity. That was easy – I had plenty of reminders. Some gay men can hide their identity in a “drag persona", but for me building the “fat persona" was the perfect escape. I imagine a drag persona and a fat persona are similar in a lot of way: wearing a different personality, bigger, sassier, and wittier than the real me, able to deal with the disgusted looks, the stares and the constant rudeness without any of the slings and arrows piercing the real me.
Unlike drag, though, you’re fat 24/7, and you find yourself living the persona more often than you live as yourself. Somewhere along the way, the real me got lost in my persona. I wonder if that happens to drag queens? They just wake up one morning and bald, sensitive Bill has disappeared, replaced by a leggy redhead named Luwanda.
So weight loss, in the end, isn’t about the body. I wear the only body I’ve ever known, size 3XL and extra wide. In losing weight, I’m gambling the life I’ve known for the life I’ve heard of, giving up many of the loves and relationships I’ve had for ones I’m imagining. And that’s the final trap for any of us trying to change – the difficulty in imagining something different, to believe that my life can be other than what it is. The fear that it’s all an illusion, an impossible mirage that will never quite be real.
Weight loss, ultimately, is about reclaiming the person you want to be. And maybe, just maybe, in the end we might discover that the bald, sensitive man named Bill was worthy of more respect than we gave him and that Luwanda wasn’t all she was cracked up to be.
7-09
