Five Tips to Lose Thanksgiving Weight - Taboo Tuesday #19

I was 17 when my body decided to up and say: “fuck humans, let’s be a manatee  now.”

For my entire life I had been able to eat as many hotdog Lunchables as I wanted while maintaining my sweet thigh gap. 

Moment of silence the fallen homies.

But nope, apparently 2009 was the year my metabolism had better things to do than its fucking job.
       

2009 also happened to be the year that food trucks started showing up outside my high school. Technically they had been banned , so you had to shove your money out of the gaps in the fence while some dude fisted a taco back the other way.

I had already had four solid months of pudge packing when Thanksgiving hit. I distinctly remember seeing pictures of me sitting on a couch that day and thinking: 

"Why is that small couch sitting on a slightly larger couch..*GASP*--"

"--I am the small couch."

On the drive home I was debating on how I was going to cut calories, or run, or whatever the hell those assholes who don’t have thighs that look like bags of potatoes do.

Luckily, a simple answer came to me Saturday morning… when my mother killed herself.

TIP #1

I understand that for lots of people, grieving is like a get skinny quick plan.

                

But like most good things, this is not what I have.

               

By the time that year ended I was the heaviest I had ever been by a long shot.

Now this may shock you, but people were not impressed that I was fatter. In fact, if you can believe it, they judged me for it.

NO SHE'S NOT!

                

LOSE WEIGHT FAST!!!!

I had a friend who would stand above me when I wasn’t looking and take a picture of me. He then made a timelapse of how massive my thighs became over the course of the year.

  

To be fair, sitting down adds like twenty pounds.

It was supposed to be “helpful,” I guess, because he  wanted me to know that I’d gotten bigger so that I could fix it. But it didn’t make me want to fix it. It just made me sad… maybe that’s what he was really trying to do. I don’t know, but if he was, then he did a shit job because I was WAY sadder about my mom dying than about my thighs.

     

Dead mom wins again!!!

This thighcolypse only made me increasingly inclined to hide my disgusting body from penises, ensuring in my mind that I would never find love.

             

Also ensuring at least a year of income for PornHub.

The summer before I went to college at LITERALLY the most penisy school ever.

I moved to a new city; had no friends, but at least twice the thighs. I distinctly remember making a box of Mac 'n Cheese for a snack and my dad saying "don't eat a whole box of Mac 'n Cheese as a snack."

"...Okay."

But I lied. I ate the whole Mac 'n Cheese as a snack in secret in the bathtub to quell the sadness of my orphanhood.

Now, the events to come aren’t fully understood… maybe it was because I happened to make this decision on my mother’s birthday and it was a sign that I was being haunted by her ghost. Maybe it was the result of my pain coming to life as a monster inside me. Or maybe it was because I ate a whole box of Mac 'n Cheese.

Regardless, I instantly had the most diarrhea anyone has ever had.

Proud now, Daddy?

I swear to god – I diarrhead so bad that 230,000 Sumatran people died in the flood. I diarrhead so bad Noah started building a second ark. I diarrhead so bad that I lost seven pounds.

TIP #2

As I laid comatose in my bed – having just had a panic attack because of the immense pain my body went through (or perhaps because I'd just shit out my spleen)– something changed in me.

Aka, I no longer had a spleen.

 From that point on for the rest of the year – conveniently the week before college started – I suffered from extremely severe anxiety that kept me from making friends, learning to drive, and generally being a human being. (Read more about that here.)

Arguably the biggest change, however, was that I could no longer eat. The anxiety clenched hold of my stomach so tightly that if I put food in my mouth I would instantly start dry heaving, threatening to vomit what little I had in me. I couldn’t forget the horrible Day of Diarrhea or the fact that if I ever did eat, my butt returned to being a Nerf Super Soaker Thunderstorm.

But with poop.

Plus my mom’s ghost was still chilling somewhere in my lower intestine.

The result of all this eating was remarkable: I lost a ton of weight.

TIP #3

And all this time I had been trying to cut calories in less obvious ways:

WEIGHT LOSS LIFE HACKS

It's too bad that I was being a dorm hermit because, after the first few pounds, I had returned to my high school weight! People stopped telling me I didn't "have the body for those shorts," or that I didn't "need to eat the whole pie just because it exists."

That must mean that I was beautiful again, right?

Well I have no fucking idea because I wasn't eating in the first place was because I was busy alone in my bathroom, in the fetal position, wondering how a single grain of rice, by some miracle, turned into a half-gallon of Thunderstorm rain.

But with poop.

Weight was the least of my concerns... until I kept losing it.

My waistline was rapidly dwindling and I couldn't stop it. If I ate toast before my morning lecture, I'd never make it because I'd either be gagging in the sink or writhing in the bathroom.

So as I sat in class day after day with little food, I learned the stages of my hunger:

1) First you get the belly growls that embarrass you in front of the cute boy sitting next to you who probably already knows you're a secret man.

Because everyone knows.

2) Second you get the pain. That kind of gut-gnawing pain as your stomach tries to devour itself in an attempt to get any nutrients -- the sting gradually becomes an ache as your stomach then realizes it was a bad idea to try to devour itself.

3) Third you just get really cranky.

4) Finally you reach some odd level of existing where you no longer feel the hunger... or anything really. The pain subsides, the anger disappears, and you're just normal again -- which is the oddest feeling of them all.

Half-way through the year I was perpetually in this fourth step as I descended deeper into my anxiety. I can remember a girl in class giving me a back-handed compliment about the size of my waist.

"OMG your waist is so tiny! What I wouldn't give for that... except my boobs."

Joke's on you, bitch. I didn't have boobs before I was skinny either. HA!

I just sat there, numb, too tired to explain to her that she had no business being envious.

I remember sitting in a busy food court after a movie with my dad. I hadn't eaten anything in the theater-- or anything that day, and I had to eat something. The only thing I thought I could scarf down was the white rice that came on the side of some too-fatty, too-salty Chinese food. I tried to take a bite but immediately heaved it back up. My body wouldn't let me. It was too tired of being in pain -- having my stomach reject everything, the gut-doubling cramps that came with it. Starving had started to feel better than eating. So I just sat at the table and cried, not knowing what to do anymore.

I became really afraid when I was so thin that my period stopped. I told my doctor and his advice was:

TIP #4* 

(to gain weight)*

Which wasn't all that helpful. He hadn't been very helpful anyway. He wanted to treat my depression with exercise. He wanted to treat my anxiety with exercise. Then, when he wanted me to gain weight... he told me to stop exercising.

By the end of the school year, I had lost a quarter of my weight -- keeping on the rest by drinking Coke constantly and swallowing whole pads of butter at night. I was 5'4" and 90 pounds.

I hated how I looked in the mirror -- worse than a scrawny child. I looked sick.

 I'd wear layers of clothes and go to class, sweating my ass off. One day, a girl in a small class drew pictures of all of us and passed them around. Everyone else was a cute, big-eyed cartoon --  I was a skeleton. I just looked up at her, confused. She and the girl next to her gave me a pitying glance then started whispering. After class she came up to me and said:

"So you know you're really thin. You don't have to be that thin."

I just said "thanks." She was trying to help after all, right? She thought I wanted to be this way. She thought someone needed to start my intervention apparently, as though I hadn't already seen bones in the mirror that morning; I didn't need her to draw me as one.

She thought I was scared of being "fat." She didn't know that I had been called "fat" not but a Thanksgiving ago... and I liked it a whole lot better than this. That I wished I could parade down the street, telling people that I could eat a whole box of Mac 'n Cheese as a snack.

In another class, a boy I hardly knew stuck his whole hands around my stomach -- gasping when he could reach all the way around.

"Woah! You're so small! I don't know why girls do this. I liked you better before."

I said "thanks" and left as quickly as I could, panicking that he might have accidentally touched my phantom penis while grabbing me. He was trying to help too. Strangers thought they could diagnose what I had and treat me.

It wasn't until I saw a therapist who finally addressed the underlying issues of my anxiety...

Drum roll please

MY DEAD MOM!

...that I could eat again. By next Thanksgiving, I was back to bleeding out of my vagina and counting calories the other way. The return to normalcy was almost unsettling.

So as I scroll through my newsfeed, past articles recommending weight loss strategies for the holidays, I'm shocked that they aren't mentioning the most obvious one:

Just have your mom die.

Nothing motivates weight change more than your emotional state... and I think that's what a lot of these articles are missing. Sure, everyone knows that consuming more calories than you exert will result in weight gain.

Everyone knows when they're fat -- or when they are too thin. Everyone knows how to change that... if they really want to. There's only one get-skinny-quick scheme that really works.

TIP #5

But that's not what gets me. The thing I was most frustrated about when I was struggling with my weight (on both ends), was how fixated people were on what I looked like.

AKA - Flawless.

I was annoyed that if they had just taken a second to look beyond my ribs, they would have literally seen me doodling all over my paper about how scared and depressed I was. 

But I had forgotten something important -- lots of folks haven't struggled with these things, or when they did it was their own unique brand. They look at me and see someone unhealthy. They don't know that physical health runs a whole lot deeper than whether or not I look good in a bikini.

When I was on the extreme ends of the spectrum it had nothing to do with whether or not I knew I was over or underweight -- my weight was reliant on other factors in my life that were taking precedence.

They didn't know that they couldn't diagnose me by how big my thighs were -- that they were moderately big the Thanksgiving I was 17 because I was so happy about discovering taco trucks that I didn't give a fuck what anyone else thought, that they became tiny planets by Christmas because I was looking for any escape from the reality of my mom's death and had found delicious Cinnabons...

*Cinnabons! Better than having your mom be alive!*

...that they were toothpicks the next Thanksgiving because I was worried about being a man 24/7.

They just didn't know.

This holiday season I'm going to try to remember not to worry so much about how much pie I eat and instead just be thankful that I'm a reasonably healthy person whose mom is still dead so I won't get in trouble for writing about her.

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