I’m Not Fat, I’m Just Fat Today

The other day, I was cleaning my place and listening to the news in the background when statistics came up about the rise in depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. I paused when they mentioned eating disorders and the increase in hospital admissions.

I wasn't fat yesterday.

Source: @peter_w / FreeImages

It cited the following: “New diagnoses of anorexia nearly doubled during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the rate of hospitalization among those patients was almost threefold higher, versus pre-pandemic years.”

I have struggled with my weight off and on for my entire life. Although I’ve never been clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder, weight and body consciousness have always been a part of my daily experience.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I attended an all-girls high school, where the pressures to be thin were prevalent. I went on to attend college in New York City, where I spent the majority of my 20s. NYC is notorious for wealth, image, and yes, it’s a skinny place.

I have been up and down with my weight throughout my life, and that is a reality that hasn’t changed. Yet, I accept that being weight conscious is part of who I am, and something I have to manage on daily. Whether there have been self-induced or environmental circumstances, changes in lifestyle that inevitably affected my weight have made Covid-19 no exception.

When the stay-at-home recommendation began, I became concerned and thought: Am I going to get fat? My fear of gaining weight was one of the first and scariest thoughts that crossed my mind. I immediately stocked up on healthy food and planned to implement a strict diet in an effort to successfully adjust to this new “normal” lifestyle. There is nothing normal about eating only steamed broccoli with a glass of water for breakfast, but that was the plan. Obviously, that extreme lifestyle was not realistic, or long-lived, and I was forced to adjust.

When reality set in, I started eating more comfort food, binge-watching TV, and having a less active lifestyle. A combination of these factors resulted in weight gain. It was as if one day I woke up fat. I literally didn’t recognize my driver’s license picture. I was so angry that I actually taped my new fat-faced photo to the back of the old photo taken over a decade ago when I was skinny. At one point, I was carded at the grocery store, and the cashier did a double-take as if my photo wasn’t me.

I don’t engage in social media that much and don’t sit around comparing myself to skinny people. I compare myself to my former skinny self. Both are unhelpful situations; you can escape social media by setting limits on what you read or watch or the time you spend online, but you can’t escape yourself or your former self. Despite this, thankfully, I know my tendencies and behaviors.

I know I have a history to be self-destructive especially when I am doing well. If I start to look and feel better, that is when I am most vulnerable, I will steer off my routine. I will skip working out, overeat, or do something that takes me off the rails. At least I know that about myself and my propensities to fail, and I'm prepared for my inclinations to self-destruct.

Although the struggle is a daily occurrence, the only thing I can do is be honest with myself. Yeah, I can eat right, work out, and hope that with time I will return to my normal body weight and maintain a lifestyle that works for me, but that’s the easy part. Being aware of my tendencies, and keeping the bad behavior in check is the hard part. I’m not going to do some crazy eating plan or diet that is not manageable, like tuna fish with lemon and pepper. It might make me skinny, but I’d be miserable. I’m not going to binge-watch TV and eat comfort food if it results in me going to bed being disappointed in myself. I’m not going to change any of my behavior overnight.

What I do know is that I am aware of the person I am now, and the challenges I have ahead of me. I also know it is not my first rodeo.

I gained weight on lithium a decade ago that I had to fight off for an extended period of time. It felt like a similar situation where I gained weight so fast from the medication, it was as if I woke up fat one day. I’ve been through depression that caused me to be stagnant, and at the time packed on a few extra pounds. I know I have been in previous situations, and have been able to successfully dig myself out.

I’m not fat, I’m just fat today. Well, I feel fat. I wake up fat and I don’t know how it happened. It didn’t happen overnight, but somehow it feels like it did, and it has forced me to have a reckoning with myself.

Life has shown me that this too shall pass. Yes, it is going to take some time and real work, but I’ve done it before and history has shown me, I can do it again.