Sporky Pig

If the title has not tipped you off, my greatest shame is that I am fat. Clearly this one is not a secret, because if you have met me, chances are good that you have noticed it. There is not really a way to hide it. At the same time, it is amazing how reluctant I have been to talk about it, or think about it, or even weigh myself. I didn’t want to know.

Sadly, that is a big part of how I got here in the first place. There is a story here, but I think I am going to backtrack a little. I have referred to the therapeutic writing that I did, and the idea for that pretty much came from my own head—I have not had an actual therapist guiding me. However, I did have two emotional processing sessions once, and they have had an influence.

I may not be using the correct terms for it. I used the term emotional processing once while talking to a friend to describe me trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings about some things (see, I do a lot of that). She was surprised at the term because it was used for the type of therapy one of her friends practiced. Basically she would use kinesiology to find ages and emotions that needed to be explored. We covered three, but the big one was from when I was fourteen.

We will cover that incident later, but what was interesting to me was that I had a very clear memory of it, and I had noticed how clear the memory was before, but without assigning it any special importance. I thought it was just a dumb thing that happened that I had a clear memory of. Anyway, after discussing it, and seeing that it was in fact pretty significant, I started going back to some of my other sharp memories.

The memory that applies here comes from when I was six. I was on the playground at school, and I was just sitting on this concrete thing by myself and thinking. I could go into my own little world pretty easily back then. A pack of girls in my class came over, led by Suzy A., who was their leader. She started criticizing how fat I was. I remember looking at her, and seeing that my thigh was twice the size of hers and being mortified, even though externally I was ignoring them.

From then on, I always knew I was fat. I hated it, and I tried not to think about it, but it was always there. There were two problems with this. For one thing, I was never thinking in terms of getting fatter, it was always just staying fat. However, there are different degrees of fat, and it would have been good to have paid attention and stopped at some point.

The other problem is that it simply wasn’t true then. I was bigger than Suzy, but she was really under-grown. Some kids tend to be more spindly, and some are more solid, and I was always getting my growth spurts in ahead of time. I was also always one of the taller kids until junior high, when the rest of the kids caught up. Now when I look at pictures from back then, I seem pretty healthy. I didn’t stay that way though, and I didn’t really even know that anything was happening until it had happened.

I think it is a big part of why I am so passionate about honesty and clear-mindedness now. Perhaps you can’t blame a six-year old for being emotionally vulnerable and easily devastated, but surely I should have been able to figure it out sooner. However my coping strategy was always the suppression route. Don’t talk about it, don’t think about, and don’t let it be real. At thirty-six, I now realize that ignorance and avoidance don’t actually change reality, and are not productive in general. I know, give me a gold star.

So that was how I saw myself, and it hurt, and what hurt more was that I believed that was how everyone saw me, or that it would override anything else that they saw. People can make a lot of assumptions about the obese. It’s like you are wearing a poster board saying gluttonous and lazy. Except, I’m not lazy. I work hard, and at times I have even been exercising regularly, which did give me better energy but never made me small. Gluttonous? Not as often as you might think. It’s always been more complex than that.

I was thinking about that a few months ago. I was at a church meeting and the talk was about reaching out to others with their struggles, and I was thinking about how I am pretty functional, regardless of what I have going on (perhaps that was prideful of me), and then I had this flash, “Sure, and it only took you two hundred extra pounds.”

Ouch, but I am beyond that now, right? I have friends that I talk to and I write out things that bother me, or talk about them, and I am not lugging around the same loads of emotional baggage anymore. I have thirty years worth of bad habits, so I am not expecting anything to be easy, but I should be capable now. I’m at least going to find out.

There will be obstacles. I have been an emotional eater, and so there is the possibility of falling prey to that again if you give me a bad enough day. There are also medical issues that will make things harder. In addition to a genetic predisposition to obesity, forty of my current pounds happened after a bad reaction to some medicine, and since I am on insulin, that encourages weight gain as well. I also have a sedentary job, I live in the suburbs where you go by car everywhere because things aren’t close enough for walking, and the corn lobby ensures that most processed foods contain high-fructose corn syrup. Add in all those things we all know, but still fall prey to, like bigger restaurant portions. So maybe really only eighty pounds is emotional, and forty is corn syrup and forty is family and so on. The causes only matter in that understanding them may help me to beat them.

I don’t really know what my ideal weight would be, or what dress size I would end up. Right now the focus is going to have to be more on trying to be healthier, and trying to take good care of myself, because I do often put my needs last, and that needs to stop.

In the past, in addition to the repression, which is kind of hiding things from your self, I have also tended to conceal most of what is on my mind. I wouldn’t tell people things that I wanted to do, because then if you fail they know, and it makes it worse, and you certainly wouldn’t tell anyone your weight because the horror of that must be contained at all costs.

Well, I am telling you that I want to lose weight, and my current weight is 344.5 pounds. It is in fact horrifying, especially when there men who are a foot taller than you and weigh less, but again, it’s not like concealing the number makes me look thinner.

There will be a lot more to write about this. This will not become a full-time weight loss blog anymore that it has been an all-music blog or an all-writing blog, but every subsequent entry will have a number by the title, and that will be that day’s report from the scale. Now I really need to make it move down.