December 2011

I was a skinny kid, a thin young adult and didn’t start to wrestle with weight until my mid-30’s when I began restricting food and going to the gym at 5:30 a.m. five days a week. In 2008 I got married later than most: I was going on 42 years old. Like many women I was a slim bride but by my divorce had become straight-up fat. 


In the final seven months of my five-year marriage, I put about 45 pounds on my five foot, two-inch (57 cm) frame. In 2013, two months after my then-husband ended our marriage, I hit 50 pounds up. Yes, I gained 50 pounds (that’s over 22 kg) in nine months, almost like pregnancy pounds.


I thought it was temporary. I saw that weight as a temporary response to specific conditions in my life that I would overcome and move past. I willingly bought size 18 and XXL clothes in 2013, knowing I’d only need them for a year at the most. Never having been fat before, I had no idea how hard it would be to lose weight. Never having been 47 before, I didn’t know how much harder it is to lose weight in middle-age. I’ve been learning.

In 2015, a severe health problem forced me to cut out sugar, grains and dairy. By last fall, I had made it down to size 14 and could feel size 12 right around the corner.


I still don’t know what happened in January 2016. Financial stress? Fear of being attractive to men again? Not being ready to shed my protective layer of fat? Some other subconscious self-sabotage? Whatever it was, I began eating sweets again and my health problem had improved enough that I could now get away with it — unfortunately. I went back into depression and eating sweets and feeling bad about myself and eating more sweets and struggling with depression and feeling out of control. By spring, I was back up to size 16:

June 2016

I am not at all with Lindy West in accepting myself as a fat person. I wish I were. It would be so much better to be at peace with where I am, although I’ve actually been calling myself “fat” all along, wearing my big body like a costume. I have proclaimed my fatness on this blog, in person, in the doctor’s office and everywhere. I’m fat. Of course, I’m fat. No one can deny this. But in my mind I keep adding the word “temporarily” to the phrase. I’ve accepted my fatness, even to the point of posting fat pictures of myself online, because I want there to be a record of how fat I was before I lost all the weight again. And there it is: I’m living in a future where I’m thin again, just like the people Lindy West describes as being in denial.