Getting Down to My Comic Weight

Looking at my eating habits through the lens of body positivity

This is the first year in my entire life that my New Year’s resolution was not about losing weight. I didn’t stare at my body in the mirror and bemoan the horror of how I’d look in a bathing suit. I didn’t beat myself up for gaining 9 lbs over the winter festivities. Sorting through my holiday photos, I saw a fat person, and I was okay with her. I did have a few concerns about my eating habits and decided to take a look at my diet to see if it was where I wanted it to be. I felt good about all of this.

But as I planned to cut out carbs and exercise more energetically, I had a niggling worry. Could I talk about my decision to limit my food intake without sounding preachy or judgmental? Would I be perpetuating toxic diet culture? Was I still holding on to internalized fat shaming?

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on my body acceptance in Background Noise, the comic I cocreated with John Hazard. And I can see how my negative thoughts about my body have changed .

I went from thinking. “Of course, everyone would agree that my body is big. Let’s use magic to make it fit into the image I want it to be in my head,” — as seen in “Penciled In.”

…to, “My body is too big. I am ashamed of its bigness.” — like I did in “Beach (Anti)Bodies”

…to dividing myself up in my head. Meet “Fat Lisa,” a self-hating, larger-than-life failure, and her nemesis, the mythical “Skinny Lisa” who I portray as the better, skinnier version of myself.

“3x a Lady” above was also a New Year’s resolution comic. And it did show a little progress. Part of me still focused on losing weight, but the rest of me was fighting to shift the conversation.

“Where The Wild Thoughts Are” is one of the first times I push aside my demonization of my fatness. I’ve moved to thinking, “I’m fat, but maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m ok with how I look.”

Last year, when I wrote “Mirror in the Bathroom” I declared that I would no longer see myself as “Fat Lisa” or “Skinny Lisa.” I was going to be “Healthy Lisa.” And ironically, last year, I lost 30 lbs. I didn’t proclaim my “victory” over my body publicly because I didn’t want to fall into that dysfunctional polemic — fat is terrible, skinny is good.

But there was a victory in that weight loss, and the numbers on the scale had nothing to do with it. In order to understand why, I had to detangle two very different issues that had become intertwined in my psyche. One is my internalized fat-shaming. The other is my messed-up relationship with food.

For me, the answer to my depression or anxiety lives on my plate. I long for the enjoyment of eating. I crave the feeling of being filled up. I want that heady euphoria of sugar that swims in my brain and promises to dull the pain of my problems.

When I’m stressed, I don’t grab a drink or smoke a joint. I look for chocolate or a chicken or a few bags of chips. But the problem is, there’s not enough comfort food in the house or the world to fix my sadness. This blind hunger is how I imagine alcoholics must feel when they go on a bender.

Eating, my life-long struggle

The fact that I have eating issues, including a proclivity to binging, is not news. But it’s always been so intertwined with my “fatness” that I never thought of it as a separate thing.

When I wrote “Working It Out.” I believed I was writing a body positivity comic. In retrospect, it’s more of a baby step where I try to disengage with my normal good/bad polemic about what I put in my mouth.

It’s true. I’ve learned to love the body I live in. I no longer want to be shaped like a Barbie doll. And I can thank all my comic selves for helping me progress on that lumpy road. Now I need to learn to love the version of me that can’t stop eating and never gets full.

Facing my Unruly Appetite In her book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxanne Gay writes about how the world misbehaves as it interacts with her unruly body. Her book helped me a lot. But at this point in my journey, I want to turn my attention away from my physical self and focus on my unruly appetite. I’m inspired to meet my hunger, eye to eye, and hopefully learn to make peace. Whether I’m “fat” or “thin” when this happens is beside the point.

Thanks for reading! John Hazard and I cocreate Background Noise Comics. These articles are inspired by how we make our comics. They offer a behind-the-scenes peek at our craft, our themes, and our creative collaboration. If you’d like more delivered to your inbox, SUBSCRIBE.

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