Apologies to my fiercest protector
My mom and I sometimes refer to a study she read about once where they asked men and women what scared them most about the opposite sex. And men said they were afraid women would laugh at them. And women were afraid men would murder them.
I bring this up because I am afraid of men. No, I am not afraid of all men all the time. But I generally fear men as a group. (Duh.) And when I think about my body, I know that much (no, not all, but a lot) of my fatness when I was younger was a fortress to keep me safe from men. Because, in general, men don’t want to be associated with fat women.
I have written about my “fortress of fat” before. And how, when I got thin and conventionally beautiful, I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for dealing with unwanted attention, so I built a “fortress of bitch” to keep myself feeling safe.
I have been losing a lot of weight very quickly in the past 6 months. In April I was a U.S. size 14 and now I am a U.S. size 8. There are a few relatively obvious reasons for this. I started a new cardio workout on a mini stepper, as opposed to jogging. Plus I got put on a maintenance inhaler for asthma and can breathe all the time now, including while I exercise.
Plus, I initially started to gain weight 11+ years ago when I quit smoking. So perhaps it has been long enough that my body/hormones have done some healing.
But something else occurred to me this week. Yes I gained weight when I quit smoking. But I gained more when I started working in construction. Now I have not worked in construction for 2 years. And I know that I never want to work in construction again.
And the weight is just melting off?
I am not eating less to lose this weight. I am eating heavier and fattier to keep myself from getting hungry. I am not working out more than I was. I was jogging 30 minutes and now I am stepping 30 minutes.
But I don’t have to navigate men right now. I don’t have to be productive and professional but also feminine and friendly enough make them comfortable. I don’t have to have my work judged against the ego of a man. I don’t have to worry about my attractiveness (either way) to men who have a say in how much money I make or how I am treated or how I am referred to, either in company or when I leave the room.
My weight has always fluctuated, even after quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating. And even once I took my drug foods out of the equation, I have never been able to “eat lighter” into a particular sized body. I was no longer fat once I got my eating under control. But I wasn’t necessarily skinny either. Even when I ate “light,” eliminating things like bacon and pork rinds and eating more raw veggies and less starchy vegetables cooked in fat, I couldn’t make myself lose weight. So I stopped trying.
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my body chose to protect me from that kind of attention and association in my daily work life. Whether or not it was “necessary,” it clearly was necessary. For my own sake.
And it reminds me that I owe my body the living amends of giving it good food and loving care, for the ways I treated it like it was my shameful problem, and not my fiercest protector.
onceafatgirl 