In which I have made a decision.

In order for me to really explain what I decided yesterday I need to talk about my history a little bit. I will try not to be too wordy, I promise, but there is ground to cover. (Starting up the Gilmore Girls playlist on the spotify web player for this...)

Things you need to know about me:

I am a chubby woman. Since about the age of 12, I have never been not-chubby, unless you count all the years when I was really heavy. Here's the thing, though: I didn't want to be. I remember watching a lot of TV as a kid but also going swimming, riding my bike a lot, taking long walks around our town. We could walk to either the library in one direction or the mall in the other, both about a mile away. Somehow my mom was like, "Yeah, go!" and didn't seem too worried about it. So I would. I was even on a sports team in high school. I mean, fencing. But still! There was a lot of working out involved in those practices. But I couldn't lose weight no matter what I did. I went to the gym in college, I counted fat and calories and even joined Weight Watchers the year after I graduated. My mom died the September after I graduated college and I put on about 30 more pounds. Well, I don't know how many, really, but there was for sure some Kummerspeck. (That's German for "grief bacon," literally, meaning the weight you gain when you're sad because you're eating your feelings. I love languages so much.) I also had my first real job and was making some money, so I could afford to do things like join a gym, get a trainer, and go to Weight Watchers. Nothing really worked, despite my best efforts. I didn't want to be 22 and fat. Basically my 20s were an endless loop of hearing that I had to "eat less and move more."

But honestly, there came a point where I couldn't have been eating less OR moving more. I would go to the gym before work for 30 minutes of cardio (which is no small thing when you have to be at work for 7:15 and you have a 30-minute commute) and then go back later for more after work. I would go for long hikes in the woods on the weekends. I would stick to 1200 calories and try to hit all the food groups. I started Googling like a crazy person. I'm still eating too much. I'm not eating enough. I'm only doing cardio and I don't have any weight training. I shouldn't do weight training because I'll get bulky. I should do it, but only high reps at low weights. I was hoping to find just the right balance of everything so finally I could drop a few pounds and maybe wear a size 14 instead of an 18 someday.

After a while I realized one day: It shouldn't be rocket science. There are a lot of stupid thin people out there.

I was listening once to a podcast by Jillian Michaels. Someone called in and told her she couldn't lose weight no matter what she did and I was thinking, "YES! I am not the only one!" Jillian told her to go to an endocrinologist. I had no idea what that was or what they did, but I didn't care. I had great health insurance so I found some endocrinologists in my area and I went to one. She drew my blood and told me she would try to get to the bottom of this. She said, "I really do believe you." When I went back for my results two weeks later, I was so hopeful. This lady was going to give me my Answer.

But what she said was, "Your bloodwork is beautiful. Seriously, you can't fake this. Everything is perfect. This is the bloodwork of a very healthy person." I said, "But...?" She said, "But that's just it. It doesn't show anything that would cause problems for you losing weight, and I'm sorry. I believe you when you say you eat healthy foods and don't smoke and exercise. You can't fake stats like this. If you had unhealthy habits I would see them." She gave me two phone numbers. One was a surgeon who did gastric bypass surgery, and the other was someone who had a "nutrition program." OK, so by then I'd had it with nutrition programs. They clearly didn't work for me. But I wanted to try one last thing before surgery. At the time I was doing all this, my father's cousin was in a coma in the hospital in critical condition from complications from her gastric bypass surgery. I would have signed up for it anyway, in a second, but I thought one last "nutrition program" couldn't hurt, right?

So I went to see this guy. I expected the same crap I would get from every doctor since my pediatrician. "You just need to eat less and move more." But this guy zeroed in on one number in my bloodwork that the endocrinologist had skipped over. He pointed to my blood sugar, which was normal, but on the higher side of normal. He said, "You have insulin resistance syndrome." This was a brand-new term for me and I'd been Googling everything that made people fat. He looked into my face and said, "Christine, this was never your fault." I have never had a doctor say that to me. I literally once had a GP fat-shame me when I went to her for allergy meds. ("I'm so tired all the time, I'm falling asleep at 4 pm, my eyes are stingy, I'm queasy..."  "Well, it's because you're lazy. You don't take care of yourself. I mean, look at you. You clearly don't take care of your health at all. No wonder you have no energy." This woman fucking said that to me. If I ever see her again, I will flatten her. Her face will meet my fist, hard.)

But this man said to me, "This was never your fault. You should never have had to go through this. You didn't do this." Years crap from family members and people around me about how I needed to work harder, I'd never find a boyfriend, the implication that other girls had so much be proud of because they were so thin... I mean, would you ever tell a child who was born with a lazy eye or a birthmark on her face about how gorgeous this other girl is and imply that it's because she has such beautiful eyes or such lovely skin while looking at the kid who did nothing wrong but wasn't blessed so disapprovingly? Can you tell I still have issues? Fuck all of you sometimes...

Anyway. That was when I was about 32. This doctor put me on his nutrition plan, which was basically less than 1000 calories a day of shakes, bars, and a little solid food, plus a lot of vitamins. I left his office that night with bottles of vitamins, boxes of bars, and protein powder. I went through the McDonald's drive-thru and got a Big Mac meal, then drove to the beach and ate it on a bench. It was the end of October. I sat there thinking about how it would take me a year, but it's OK. I never ate breakfast anyway, so now I'd have a shake. I didn't love cooking anyway, so now I only had to worry about one meal a day instead of two. I loved to snack, so now I'd have some protein bars at certain times. And I had to drink a lot of water but I already did that. It would only be one Thanksgiving, one birthday, one Christmas.

So I did it and I loved it. The first 50 pounds just fell right off. The next 25 were a struggle. Then circumstances happened. My doctor closed his practice. I didn't know what to do. But I had gotten down to a size 6 in jeans. Every trip to Old Navy to try on smaller jeans was like a rite of passage. It was amazing. Unfortunately, in the years in between, I've put about half the weight back on.

I reached out to my old doctor. His daughter had a Linked In account and I asked if she could get him a message for me. I said I didn't know what HIPPA or anything else said but that I really wanted to come back to him, if he was still practicing anywhere at all. He was not, but he told me about a colleague of his that was, and encouraged me to go see him.

So now I'm working with a team in an office that's over an hour from me on a similar meal plan to the one I used to have. On Monday nights I've been going up there to get weighed and I see the therapist in that practice, who I really like. However, I've been really struggling to lose weight. This past summer, I had a lot of free time and we'd moved, so I had a brand-new town to explore. My boyfriend put me on his gym membership so I would spend a couple of hours unpacking from the move, then take a 5-mile walk around town and go to my spinning class. I lost about 12 pounds one month. (Side note: I also have such dysmorphia. I have no idea what I really look like. I know I'm not huge, I know I'm not thin. The jeans I wear regularly are either a 10 or 12 depending on the brand. I do have a pair of 8s that I wore once in the house for about an hour to see how that would go. The problem is that I get dressed in the dark in the mornings and I accidentally wore them to work one day. I didn't realize until mid-morning that I had on the wrong pants and that I would have to wear them until like 1 am because that was the day we were leaving after school to take the kids on a field trip into New York City. Around about 11 pm I was getting REALLY uncomfortable.)

Lately, though, I can't hold it together. When I stick to it, the scale shows progress and I'm grateful. My boyfriend is such a supportive person and he knows everything about exercise. He made me a lifting routine and on Thursday nights we have a date to go lift together. I still hike every weekend when the weather allows (New England...). But I can't starve myself, and that's what I need to do if I want to lose fat. I hate my body for this.

I realized the other day when I was driving home that all I wanted was to pull over at a McDonald's and get an ice cream. I wasn't hungry. I was just jittery and I felt like I needed something. This is a pattern. I don't binge. I don't want a whole pizza or a whole pint of ice cream. But something about grazing really calms me down when I'm jittery. I resisted the ice cream but when I got home I kept taking handfuls of Goldfish crackers. I wasn't even really tasting them. That action of nibbling seems to help me.

Yesterday I went back to my doctor. I didn't get on the scale. I just told him all of this. I cried and told him that I can't stop nibbling. I said that I have great things that I'm using to motivate myself but the urge to calm myself down by munching on stuff is just too much, and when your body sucks like mine and every calorie counts as much as a normal person's three... I told him how sometimes I just get overcome with stress on the weekend and I'll get some pizza after a hike instead of something healthy. How when I was fixing up my condo to rent it out this past summer, whenever I had to go to Lowe's for supplies I'd think, "Oh, and they have Kit Kats there too..." It just helped me to take on this huge task of fixing up the condo by myself to have snacks before taking on painting or spackle or installing new baseboard heater covers. (Yes, I used a drill and screwed sheet metal to the wall. But not before I had a Kit Kat.) My mid-year review is coming up at work and I'm already freaking out about it. I mean, logically, it should be OK, but things like that are just triggering. I told him I was sorry for wasting his time and not sticking to the plan and being a general failure.

He said, "Who is treating your anxiety?" I've never really been diagnosed with that, but I didn't argue with him. I said that I go see the therapist at the practice regularly. I said, "I've been reading a lot. We bought some chamomile tea and I'm found some yoga channels on YouTube and I downloaded a meditation app to my phone!" He said, "Those are great things...."

And then I said, "It's a line I swore I'd never cross. I don't want to take any medication for this. I can handle this. But it's gotten worse and I don't think I can. I mean, I can handle my life, but I can't also stick to the diet. So I'm just kind of in this cycle..." And my kindly, gentle doctor looked me in the eye and said, "In my life I've also had lines I said I would never cross. But sometimes you learn that you have to cross them. It doesn't have to be forever. You can always look at this as a short-term solution, and after a while we can revisit whether you want to try to go off it again. It can just be something that gets you through a rocky patch." He sent the prescription off through the computer and... The way my insurance is, it's going to have to come in the mail. So in a few days, I guess, I'll have my first bottle of Lexapro. He swore that this one doesn't seem to have a weight-gain side effect, even though some people cite one. I told the therapist about this decision in our session and she said the same things he did. I told her that it's just been happening to me lately. She said, "I think you've had anxiety most of your life. It's just getting stronger now for some reason."

I need to stop the shaking feeling in my hands even when they're still. I need to stop feeling so jumpy at work all the time. (In case anyone from work ever finds this... I love my job. It's not the job. It's my favorite job I've ever had.) My boyfriend says sometimes that I seem so sad all the time. I don't feel sad all the time but I guess I do feel tense a lot, and maybe that's what he's picking up on. I need to stop feeling the urge to eat things to reset my uneasiness. I don't have panic attacks, I don't feel afraid to leave the house, I don't get afraid of meeting new people. But I do just feel this constant shaking feeling... I don't know how to explain it. It's not the right word. I just want to still my mind and nerves. So we're going to try this, I guess.

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