thenjaesays

moo.

Posted on by thenjaesays

A friend messaged me today and was basically like “Hey, I don’t like when you talk shit about your former self; that’s my friend you’re talking about…” which was sweet and honest … we had a chat and she made some good points and I hadn’t really considered that anyone might be actually bothered by my self deprecating quips (aside from my long time friend Zeebs who always puts me in my place).

It got me thinking though ….

Some time last year I posted an older photo on my weight loss instagram account of me at one of my favorite places to visit when I am back in Wisconsin; Mars Cheese Castle. In the picture I am standing next to a cow statue, grinning from ear to ear and the caption said something along the lines of ‘not realizing the irony of standing next to a cow statue’ and about there being ‘280 pounds of USDA grade A beef in the black jacket’ … I later added parenthesis and said that I was just being a goof and not mean to myself, that it’s okay to laugh a little ….

But honestly only because someone commented about how terrible and rude it was to compare myself to a farm animal and how I should consider the feelings of others when I post things like that.

Wait. What?

I should consider the feelings of others when I post a photo of ME and make comments about myself?

Why should we have to be positive for other peoples insecurities? If a person is so content or confident in their body; why should it matter how I feel about mine? ‘Hey I love my body and by you making jokes about yours I feel like you want me to hate my body.’ Nah, I don’t, but you bragging all over the place about loving yours doesn’t change my feelings, so why let me disrupt yours?

I responded to her much that way, politely but basically saying that I am not in the business of making other people feel badly about themselves; and I certainly hope that nobody would base their self worth or personal feelings on what I say about myself.

I meant it then and I mean it now. My story is mine, and yours is yours. Similarities aside, they are totally separate things.

I have always admired people who were comfortable in their skin no matter what, but I am not going to apologize for not having been in mine.

The truth is, I hated that body and I’m glad I don’t live in it anymore, no matter how happy I was with my life or anything internal or external. I felt betrayed by it for years despite my best efforts to change it.

But I will say this; I didn’t hate myself.

Ever.

[So, please don’t make that assumption.]

I almost always thought I was the cutest and funniest person I knew.

I don’t bash old me because I think she was stupid or pathetic.

She’s me. What was on the inside at size 22 is on the inside at size 10; maybe sharper, maybe more comfortable, maybe wiser and happier – but still there.

I don’t forget that I had a fat body, I don’t pretend that I didn’t.

Clearly though, it didn’t sit well with me; if it did, there would be no old pictures to cringe at or joke about.

If you hear or see or read that I say something negative or disparaging about my fatter self, it’s not because I think I’m hot shit now and want to shame other people or fat me; my opinions about myself, my jokes, my snarky comments are mine, and to me, they are retrospective.

In the same way someone might look back at pictures of themselves from high school and say “Who dressed me?” or “Who let me have that hair?” … I look at pictures of me and think “Was I really that fat?” or “How come nobody stopped me?” (that last one is totally rhetorical because what could anyone have said or done)

Losing a significant amount of weight, no matter how you do it, is a roller coaster experience. You rise, you fall and even have brief periods where you are stuck in one position waiting for people or things to get on or off.

It’s weird, really.

Nobody can prepare you for the mind fuck that the whole thing is; yea your eating changes, your cravings, or your diet [way of eating, not a fad] but so does almost everything else. You would think I’d be used to it by now; the feelings, the outlook, the attention and ideas, the emotions; but I truly am still learning things about myself every day.

Today I learned that people who love me don’t want me to call myself names.

Hey, I’ll try.

 

jodicow

when i did the thing

Posted on by thenjaesays

If you’re considering bariatric surgery, or if you’re on the other end of the spectrum where maybe you think it’s for losers and slobs who take “the easy way out” you need to know, first and foremost, that they don’t just wheel you into an ER and cut you up and then you get skinny and life is perfect and happy.

I was only three months post op at the time I started to write about it and I couldn’t even believe what I had gone through in the 6 months prior to the big day. I was still learning how to properly eat and drink in a way that didn’t make me sick, or miserable. Still monopolizing the cardio machines at my gym.

I had follow op appointments with almost every branch of the hospital already scheduled for the following 12 months.

Food is the last thing I think about but also the thing that I am forced to think about the most. It’s a full time job, and in all honesty, the “easy way out” would be to stay fat and lounge and eat and waste away.

Before I was even able to meet the surgeon who would potentially preform my procedure I had to have a mental health visit, three visits with a nutritionist and a full day orientation. Not to mention a battery of blood work, EKG and endoscopy. I am not complaining, I signed up for it. (I later learn through instagram and the internet that not everyone’s experience was as thorough)

They tell you in the initial visit, even the initial phone call what you can expect. After you meet with the surgeon, a goal weight is determined for pre-op and then you work on that with more nutritionist visits and food logs and standing on the practically wheel-chair accessible scale every single time you walk into any of the offices.

The last time I threw up was that year, in a hospital gown with no underwear on, sitting on the edge of a bed where yet another woman tells me I’m not going to.

I had just had a test to make sure my new sleeve was doing its job leak free. My reward for passing it is a barely cold carton of skim milk to pour into a packet of no sugar added vanilla flavored instant breakfast, and a cup of orange gelatin. Yay.

Before you get the “prize”, you are laid on a slanted machine that will basically x-ray your stomach and see if the liquid is making its way through properly.

What liquid, you ask? This god awful solution of chalk dissolved in flat lemon-lime soda that no matter how much you can choke down, it seems they still want you to “Take another big sip” I hadn’t had a thing to drink in days and there was nothing refreshing about this. I’m grateful to every god there is that they got what they needed and I didn’t have to take any more sips of Satan’s punch.

It was when I got back to my room that I am telling the nurse I’m going to throw up. “You barely have anything in your system, it will pass” She was right, it passed… right through my lips into the closest thing she could grab; a pressed cardboard bed pan. Black as old oil, it made my whole body convulse, fresh incisions and all. The breakfast reward seemed like a punishment now.

I’m not going to bullshit anyone and say it was great, it was a somewhat gross experience, second only to when my catheter had to be removed because it was so full I basically peed the bed. That being said, in the big picture, I knew it could only go up. And it did.

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.

’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!