Author: thenjaesays

278

Posted on by thenjaesays

I was roughly thirty-five, in my relationship for about five years and just about sick of people asking when we were going to get married, have a baby, and move through the societal checklist.

Not in this body. I mean, I couldn’t say that and I wouldn’t, but I thought it constantly. Pay for a fancy dress and a party and a photographer to document me rolling down an aisle in a size twenty something dress? Nope, not this year. There was no way I was adding the weight of a baby to this body either, never mind the hazard of having a baby when you’re overweight. I try again.

A few months went by; about six of them and I didn’t like not knowing how much I weighed. It was weird, it had been a thing I always knew about myself. I ordered a pricey digital scale to go with my fitness tracker and I was on the phone with a girlfriend who had just gotten the same one. She was telling me how to set it up, when it was ready, I proudly stood on it. It was beautiful, shiny black, sturdy, digital output.

“Do you love it or what?” she said ….

“I, yea, I do …

let me call you back in a minute though?” ….

I stood there looking at the digital output ….

278 …

What in the ever living fuck was that number? How was that real? How did that even happen?

Back to cutting out food groups, adding fiber, monopolizing the treadmill at the gym, skipping dessert, avoiding carbs and eating meats wrapped around cheese for two out of three meals a day.

I hadn’t ever really considered bariatric surgery. I mean I joked about it and maybe in my wildest daydreams I imagined “what if…” but I didn’t ever expect it to be anywhere near a reality. Which in itself is kind of silly, since I’ve been making lists for more than half my life that start out with “lose weight” or “more water” or “join a gym” …. And while I have always done those things in some capacity, they always kept popping up on a list. There must have been a reason, and it was probably that they never really worked, at least not as well as I wanted or needed them to.

So it’s kind of surprising, that when I made an appointment with a new doctor to discuss my anxiety and depression and health and weight concerns and he asked me if I had ever considered bariatric surgery, I sobbed ….

Uncontrollably.

Sobbed my eye makeup right off and said no.

It was like a secret shame, of course I thought about it …. What fat person doesn’t think of that alternative? That’s like asking a partially deaf man if he ever considered cochlear implants or a pregnant woman if she considered natural versus cesarean.

I wanted to jump up and shout like Charlie when he got the golden ticket, “YES! YES! I have thought of it, do I qualify? Can you help? Can I have it? Can you put me under right now? Let’s go, let’s do it!” …..

Instead, just the heaving, choking sobs that were a strange combination of defeat, shame and relief all rolled into one.

This was 2014, on the 7th of June, and the day that this stranger put his hand on my shoulder and comforted me and helped change my entire life.

On my way down the stairs out of the medical building I breathed my way through a panic attack and texted my very first girlfriend, my cousin and light-heartedly shared what just happened. Instant support.

The ride home was less than fifteen minutes but I played everything you could imagine in my head as if it was all about to happen. As if my destination was a hospital in town where they were waiting for me with scalpels and fat vacuums. What would I look like, who would I tell, how does it work?

I really was thinking most about how I would go about telling my live-in boyfriend, who never had to count a calorie a day in his life. I mean surely he knew I wasn’t a size 2 or anything but I was getting that anxious feeling you get when you have to present something to a class full of your peers, but instead of it being a report on the last book I read, or a dissection of my family tree … it was a confession, an apology even that I had apparently been doing something wrong all my life and here I was, too fat to fix without a staple gun and what should I do next?

Well, I’m an asshole because I don’t know how I thought he would react or how a person is even supposed to act when their partner comes home and is like ‘Hey, I really like tacos, so I’m gonna have to reduce the space I have to hold them’ – but he was perfect. He repeated my history to me …. My cutting out of food groups, eliminating ingredients, only drinking meals, fasting, appetite suppressants …. Of all the words he said to me, the ones I remember most, the ones that were the most melodic to me where “If someone is basically offering you the opportunity on a silver platter, if insurance will cover it and you don’t take advantage of that, you’re stupid” …. Oh sweet release!

He didn’t make a face, he didn’t say anything negative or disparaging, he encouraged me, he wanted me to give myself the gift … and if I hadn’t already been in love with him for years, I would have fallen right in that moment.

tipping (& tossing) the scale

Posted on by thenjaesays

I don’t care about the scale.

I mean, I do, because it has these numbers and it means something to you, to your peers, to your family, to society.

I think of it now, and I still weigh myself daily but I know the scale is bullshit. It didn’t ever tell me how smart I was, how much I was loved, how well I took care of those who loved me, if I was funny, or a good cook or a good dancer or a good friend. It said ‘hey, this starts with a two so you’re basically shit, have a great day!’

I woke up one day and stood on it, cold because I was in nothing but my chubby girl granny panties, staring down at what I could see of my wide feet when I saw that number: 255. I was so sick of it I got dressed and went outside and threw it in the trash.

Liberating.

I told a friend about it, I laughed about it. I went back to a low carb diet and I was going to just do the thing. It was working but not the way it had before.

I’m about 33 and eating mostly salads, walking three to five miles a day, no packaged foods, eating organic, no drive thru windows and nothing helped, nothing changed it, nothing moved the scale.

I saw a doctor who was cute and French and told her of my weight woes, to which, at now 258 pounds, she told me that she wouldn’t worry if she were me, that I “have a very pretty face”.

Well, yea.

But that visit told me everything I needed to know about the world around me; it doesn’t matter what’s on paper, what matters is what you look like, what you show the world, what people see. She saw pretty, I saw blob; we were both right.

I didn’t go back to her because in my entire life every doctor I encountered commented on my weight, my predisposition for diabetes, my need to pay attention to my blood pressure, my cholesterol. I didn’t have issues with these things but I could, and if I wasn’t smart about it, I would. I used to joke that even at the eye doctor for an eye exam they’d say “You know, if you lost a few pounds, your vision might be sharper.” That never happened but the amount of medical professionals who made a comment or recommendation was many, so it was a blur of lab coats and poor signatures offering me just enough information to know that something had to be done, but not giving me the answer, or the tools.

When you’re fat – or more specifically, obese, there’s usually some other stuff going on, too. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, threat of diabetes, I mean plus you are super uncomfortable. A host of other things can (and will!) present itself, like anxiety, depression and all sorts of food addictions are possible, too. Not to mention what you miss out on – purely out of fear, lack of confidence or exhaustion from fat. You avoid things that might have a weight limit or size constraint. You start to avoid things before you even know if they’ll be an issue, you start avoiding your life.

Even worse? You may not even realize that it’s happening.

Which is worse than realizing. Instead you’re just tired and forlorn and lazy and sad and more anxious and then things are crazier, harder and just plain frustrating.

You think it’s everything else, and maybe for some people it is. I thought it was for me, but looking back on those times I think it was more me and who and what I was as a result of my weight than anything else.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of overweight people live fulfilling useful lives full of love and success and happiness and I applaud them for their comfort in their own skin. I was just never really comfortable in mine.

1-800-94-Jodi

Posted on by thenjaesays

Part of the problem in grammar school was that I was also taller than half the girls (and boys), so even if I only had twenty pounds on them, I had a few inches and might as well have been a monster considering them as part of my next meal.

Kids are cruel, and the height thing is funny because as I got older, people who cared about me, and loved me would also justify my weight commentary with “Yea, but you’re tall” as if the length somehow justified the width, I mean those are two different measurements.

Years later in high school – my all girls, all races, religions, colors, shapes and sizes high school I remember singing a jingle to a commercial and a classmate saying “You need to be singing 1-800-94-Jenny for some Jenny Craig”. She herself was fat, but in a different way.

Once you get to college nobody cares what you look like. Except a few people – but they don’t CARE they just want you to know they know whatever flaw or weakness you have.

After college I think it was a non-issue. Well, I mean the commentary or insecurity (to a degree) not the being fat. That stayed. Then was less, then was more, then less and there were shakes and pills and fads and supplements and restrictions and juice fasts.

When my mom and I talked about my weight situation a few years ago, she commented about how despite it having been a struggle or an issue for me, it never really affected my quality of life. It didn’t. I always had friends, acquaintances, I was invited to more things than I wanted to participate in, had boyfriends and flings, had jobs and made moderately useful contributions to my community and society.

The only person who truly cared about my weight was me. Oh, and some dicks I met working as a waitress or drunk guys at parties.

I forcibly chased a guy out of a friend’s party once because he called me fat. Looking back, I don’t think he even used the word fat, just the implication that I was and I was mortified in front of a bunch of people whose names I don’t even remember now even though they probably live and work right where I left them.

I pushed him with my voice, out the door, down the hall and down a flight of steps, halfway through it he started complaining that he brought beer or wine coolers and wanted them back if he had to leave; I said something like “No fucking way are you going back in there, here’s your money” and I was tossing fives and ones at him while I visually shoved him down the stairs. He was nobody to me and the majority of the people in that room probably weren’t either, but I was not letting him have the last word on me.

I’d rather be the one people talked about as a bitch or loudmouth than fat. It was as if I had let everyone know I had this one syllable kryptonite that rendered me mean and sad inside the minute it was unleashed.

Ridiculous.

Now, almost out of my thirties I know that words really only have the value we give them, and even as a writer, on a small scale, I know that sticks and stones may break my bones but words ain’t shit.

So yea, I always had a pretty normal quality of life. I didn’t worry that in a middle of the night fire I would burn to death because a fireman couldn’t lift me out of my bed, or that in the event of a plane crashing into water I would drown because the only way out was a miniature window I might be able to stick my arm through. I was never afraid that I would be loveless and grow old alone with a bevy of pets and unwritten love letters. I had never really had anything go on in my life that I attributed positively or negatively to my weight, until I did.

And back to pills and shakes and supplements and counting points, and not eating carbs, and only eating cabbage and drinking my weight in water, cutting out dairy, juicing every fruit and vegetable in my fridge, cutting out meat, not even looking at desserts.

These were rarely ever done at the same time, I didn’t ever have an eating disorder, not in the traditional sense anyhow. But someone who spent that much of their life counting and cutting and avoiding definitely had some eating issues.

hey, you’re kinda fat

Posted on by thenjaesays

When I first realized I was fat, I was about ten.

I vividly remember changing after gym and a (not fat) classmate held up a gym uniform shirt and said “Jodi, is this yours? It looks kind of BIG” I don’t know how I reacted at the time but roughly twenty-seven years later I remember the interaction, so it obviously had some impact.

Sometime after the whole barfing in church fiasco, when the dust had settled, the carpets were replaced and nobody remembered when we returned back to school after two weeks of candy cane comas and snowball fights, my life went on.

That summer or the one after I am sitting in the kitchen with my mom and a good friend of hers, and my best friend at the time. I don’t think anyone used the word diet, I don’t think I was being punished and I don’t think my mom was trying to do anything but be a good parent and help me before I really needed some help.

I remember a pear. A green, hard in some spots, brown and mushy in other spots pear. I whined about it. Could I have a different snack, why did it have to be a pear and why did that pear have to have those gross spots, why couldn’t I pick a different one that maybe didn’t have spots? Forget a speckled banana or carrot sticks, I wasn’t into it.

But the other thing I wasn’t into was being the biggest girl in my class, and I was. Bigger even than some of the boys.

Everyone noticed, and while nobody ever put a dog bone in my sandwich like a girlfriend of mine had experienced because those little shit boys wanted her to know they thought was a “dog” in the looks department … or made fun of my hairy legs because my mom wouldn’t let me shave them and called me things ranging from hairy man to monkey and sent me home crying to my mom – who then showed up and gave us all a lecture about how to treat people in a thick accent that was only ridiculed behind her back later like another classmate experienced – they did call me fat.

Full of blubber.

Big,

Gross,

Lard,

Blob,

Thunder thighs,

Whale,

Fatso,

Fatty.

Grody Jodi.

That last one was a witty creation from the brain of the boy I had the biggest crush on, of course. Years later I will watch that Drew Barrymore movie when the kids at school call her “Josie Grossie” and I will totally get it and be transported back to grammar school days.

The days of wondering if my women’s dress for the dinner dance would be flattering when it was altered, and confiding in a girlfriend that I weighed something like 170 pounds (not sure if that was a lie in my favor in itself) are behind me, but you don’t forget them.

As an adult I can tell you the word fat is subjective and really just used for the purpose of criticism, judgement and making others feel badly about themselves. It’s such a small, stupid word but it can break your heart or ruin years of your life depending on who utters it.

’twas the season

Posted on by thenjaesays

Everyone barfs.

In the fifth grade I barfed for what was probably not the first time, but the first public time and man did I go whole hog with that one. Christmas Eve mass, sitting on the altar as part of the children’s choir and I would be the one who announced the hymns. All dressed up in my green and black sweater dress with the matching cardigan from the Misses department at JC Penny.

Every Christmas Eve afternoon my dad and I would scour stores for last minute extra gifts for my mom, and stocking stuffers at a huge pharmacy that had everything you could dream of in the way of trinkets, treats and actual necessities. I always got a few of the first two, and then we went out to lunch.

When I recount almost any story from my youth, or my life in general my boyfriend playfully teases me about the food memories. “How the hell do you remember what you ate when you were at a friend’s house when you were twelve?” To some of us, food is nourishing in more ways than one.

So here we are at this diner who’s slogan for as long as I can remember has been “Where good friends meet to eat” … over the years I would have gravy fries after prom, middle of the night burgers with friends after one too many drinks, and early morning pancakes with a heartbroken friend who couldn’t sleep. Today, this seemingly average weekend afternoon I am having a pizza burger with my dad. For a few years I remembered what I drank, and if I had to guess now I would say fruit punch because it sounds juvenile and like a bad idea when poured on a pizza burger.

We sit munching on our respective plates and talking about how to wrap the odd shaped manicure kit or heart shaped picture frame. I say we just tie some curling ribbon around the little bag of jelly beans or Brach’s candy by the pound we got for her stocking. I had had at least forty-five jelly beans myself because the sheer variety of flavors was overwhelming you couldn’t have just one, or twenty.

At 5 pm after the running around and the eating, we clean up and dress up and head to church. I’m on the altar with at least three other people; one of which is a boy a grade below me and his mother who is playing the guitar for some of our songs and maybe someone else. We’re sitting in the packed church and despite being December, it’s warm. It’s hot. Or I’m hot. I’m also nauseous from incense or something and I feel slightly dizzy so I tell guitar mom that I think I am going to throw up. “Oh, you don’t want to do that” she said. I remember that exchange so well because even with a pizza burger fighting its way back up my gullet and my fifth grade brain I thought, who the hell says that to a kid? Or to anyone? Of course I don’t want to throw up. Not ever, never mind here on a literal stage in front of my peers and community. I didn’t want to at all, that’s why I’m telling you lady, get me out of here.

I have to stand up to announce the next hymn and I must have moved in just the right way to shake it up. I felt every damn jelly bean coming up in a hamburger filled fruit punch sauce as I started to stand, so I sat back down.

Oh god, it was happening.

I threw up, violently, all over the lap of my sweater dress. On the altar, in the only moment the church was silent the whole hour. I don’t know who can see me and I can’t care, I have to get this pizza flavored betrayal out of my body. A few ushers and maybe parents from the front rows come up to help me, so this doesn’t turn into one of those chain reaction vomit fests you see in the movies. I don’t get up with their prodding because I can’t.

I can’t get up because while I was vomiting my fun afternoon all over my dress I was also crapping in my queen sized tights.

I AM A 150 POUND 5th GRADER WHO CRAPPED MY PANTS WHILE BARFING ON A CHURCH ALTAR ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

I’m in the back room off the side of the altar and some nice man who counts the collection money after mass is trying to help me clean up with a brown paper towel from the ancient dispenser – the kind that says pull with both hands but you always have to turn an awkward dial to really get it going. Another lady is there, maybe some more ushers, and they ask me if I can go back out and find my mom. I’m about 10 but I’m pretty sure my response was the 5th grade catholic school equivalent of “Fuck no. I am covered in my lunch and I have shit dripping down the back of my leg.”

If ever there was a time I needed someone to get my mom for me, this was it.

I don’t remember what part of the mass it was but I know my parents packed up my brothers and we all left, somewhat discreetly out of the side door.

I cried all three miles home about what turned out to be a stomach bug going around. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel better tomorrow. Santa will still come if you’re sick. Why are you crying?” my mother asked from the front seat.

*sob*choke*sniffle*

“Because we’re supposed to go to Bennigan’s and now we can’t …”

I’ve always had a lot of heart, so I’m sure I was upset that I ruined everyone else’s good time; Christmas Eve tradition, my parents dinner out, my brothers missing their chance to drink root beer out of bottles and check the color of the soap in the restrooms and stopping to see our grandparents on the way home.

But when you’re sitting on a blanket in the car covered in your own vomit and poop and crying over not getting to go out to dinner… you have to assume my relationship with food was questionable since before I could even spell relationship.

 

 

 

fancy meeting you here

Posted on by thenjaesays

it seems every few years in my life i have started a blog, forgotten to post in my blog, abandoned my blog and then remembered and started anew. i have the same relationship with twitter no matter how hard i try to remember to throw a quick quip up, it never catches.

maybe i don’t have much to say, you might think, but on the contrary, i do. if something is happening, i either have an opinion on it, or a personal story about it. i have been recording snippets of my own life over the years in journals, word docs and of course, my brain. i recently compiled a few & shared them with someone who asked why i wasn’t at least blogging if not writing a book – i didn’t really have an answer, and was flattered, so here i am.

i have spent the last eight years of my life with the best guy, and in that time i have also moved (over 1000 miles!) away from my family for the first time, made new friends, mourned old friends, had weight loss surgery, quit my job, bought a new car, had excess skin removed from my abdomen, searched my soul, become a mentor, figured out (mostly) who i am, fallen in love with the idea of change, obsessed over growth (mine + others), become my own best friend and finally know what it is i want to be when i grow up.

i’m not going to make any promises about posts – their frequency, content and length will just happen. i’m not going to smooth my edges, or censor myself. i’m going to share it like it is, and like it has been. maybe you’ll see some of yourself in me, maybe you’ll laugh, maybe you’ll cry, maybe you’ll sigh in relief that someone finally “gets” you or maybe you’ll just scroll through my posts on the toilet and that’s fine too. I’m glad you’re here & I hope you’ll stick around!