I’m Tired of Caring About My Weight

Am I “winning” because I’m thin?

Trigger warning for anyone with eating disorders.

Do you remember the first time the number on the scale mattered to you?

I do. I was in elementary school. The wee young age of 9.

It was recess and I was playing with Sarah. We were the two petite girls who were always placed in the front row during class pictures because we were both short. Even at that age, I knew we had the same frame.

For reasons I don’t recall, she mentioned her weight. It was fifty pounds. I was fifty-five pounds.

And so began my lifelong journey of hating my body and worrying about my weight.

It’s a no-brainer why this number mattered to me. My mother is obsessed with her weight. I’ve heard her say, “I just need to lose a few more pounds” more often than I heard, “I love you”.

For all her overthinking about weight, she was unsuccessful at losing it. There was no exercise in her lifestyle minus a few years of walking around the block at night. Instead, she ate bland salads consisting of iceberg lettuce (the Kellyanne Conway of greens), tomatoes, red onions, cucumbers, and Kraft Light Italian Dressing. To this day, that bland bowl of sadness is what I imagine when someone says “salad”.

To offset all those salads, my mom was a binge eater. There were boxes upon boxes of frozen treats in the freezer that only she ate. She was constantly snacking on butter-laden bread and is still notorious for “just a taste” of something chock full of calories. My mom tried to hide her McDonald’s milkshake purchases ( no idea why she had to shame eat in private) but her frugality and need to reuse the distinct striped straws gave her away.

She had a miserable marriage and a miserable life. She self-soothed with food.

I remember a drawer full of Ayds weight loss chocolates. Shockingly, my mom never hid them; they were in the bathroom drawer where us kids could easily get them. They were next to her Ex-Lax, which I assume she took to empty herself and make the scale provide a better number.

To sum it up, my mom was (and still is) morbidly obese with the naïve belief that she will ever, ever lose weight.

I should be grateful she never focused on my weight. Then again, she never had to. I stayed lean through high school. I wasn’t athletic but I knew to maintain my weight was a balance of eating less when the scale crept up.

When I was in university, my mother asked me how much I weighed. “I dunno, why?” I asked. I knew why. “Just a matter of interest” she replied.

That’s my mom’s answer when she’s excessively nosey.

“When I was your age, I weighed 125lbs” she sighed. I weighed 120lbs, a new high due to college life of eating nonstop when studying but had no desire to tell her. Nor did I want to be so close in size to a person who would later become morbidly obese. Add yet another ring up the ladder of my fear of weight gain.

Eventually, my weight steadied around 110lbs until I moved out on my own after college. Unused to oversized American food portions, my weight jumped back up to 120lbs. I felt uncomfortable and nothing fit. In the world of skinny San Francisco Asian women at clubs, I felt like Jabba the Hut.

The problem with weight obsession is that it takes away from the moments in life you want to remember. One night when clubbing with some friends, I crashed on the couch at their house. Someone’s brother, in town for the weekend, slept on the floor. Before passing out, he mumbled how everyone in the club was staring at my ass.

Meanwhile, I was miserable because my curves in black pants stuck out compared to the gorgeous, skinny Asian women with short dresses. Not once did I feel attractive in my skin; I only wanted to be someone else.

When I began dating my ex-husband, he made a small comment about my choice to eat cake for dinner instead of a real dinner. It’s a comment he regrets twenty years later. In his defense, it wasn’t anything that someone without a disordered eating time bomb would even remember.

But it flipped a switch in my brain. Suddenly, I became obsessed with losing the weight gained from US food portions. I went into cardio overdrive at the gym. Every calorie was analyzed before consumption and compared against the effort to burn it off. Was a piece of chocolate worth 15 minutes of the elliptical?

That craziness morphed into burning off every calorie. Which further led to just not eating at all. I refused to eat more than 600 calories per day. Then I worked out for an hour.

I dropped from 120lbs to 83lbs in six months.

It wasn’t about the weight.

It was about twenty-three years of a traumatic childhood catching up to me. I thought moving out would solve my problems (my friends used to say I was the oldest person to run away from home). In an era where therapy was still shunned, I was left on my own to work out my emotions.

Eating disorder websites were of no help. Back then, those were reserved for teenagers. There was no information about adult working women and the underlying psychological issues. I guess psychologists figured if the teen girls didn’t die, they’d eventually grow out of that problem.

The shitty company I worked for had a mass layoff. Upon losing my job, I walked into the Engineering department and ate the entire box of doughnuts sitting in their section (why do the Engineers always get the good shit?). I promptly threw it up.

And so began almost a decade of wobbling between anorexia and bulimia.

Eventually, the weight crept up. I was 95lbs on my wedding day. I maintained 110lbs with my top-secret bulimic ways.

Russian spies have nothing on a bulimic. It terrifies me as a parent that one day my children might go down this path because I know it’s almost impossible to catch the behavior. My husband blindly thought it wasn’t an issue; it wasn’t something we discussed more than a handful of times and he assumed I no longer engaged in bulimic activities.

I had it down to a science. If I ate one thousand calories and threw them up, then I had to assume around 20% was digested. Those 200 calories were then added to my allocated daily total. On days where I went all out bingeing, I’d use Ipecac syrup to help expel it all. Thankfully, that shit is discontinued and off shelves.

For a brief moment, I went to therapy for my eating issues. The therapist had a support group that met a few times a week. Do you know what’s the worst thing you can do to someone with an eating disorder? Put them in a room with others like them. It became a mental competition of who was the thinnest in the room. One woman was a hairdresser and she said she struggled to be in front of a mirror all day. I couldn’t even fathom that kind of torture.

One activity the therapist asked us to do was eat a raisin. Something about keeping it in our mouth and savoring the flavor. My brain went berserk. How on earth could I possibly eat five calories? I was someone who only ate vegetable soup but tossed out the potatoes in them. Why soup Because the high sodium content kept me full. Even a raisin was up for debate.

No one discusses the awful side effects of quitting an eating disorder. Every time I’d stop, the swelling was agonizing. My fingers became sausages, cut off of circulation by my wedding rings. Ironically, quitting an eating disorder causes a person to appear like the very thing they’re trying to avoid: puffy and overweight.

My savior came from an unlikely source. When separated from my husband, I dated a former drug addict. (He was still very much an addict but I naively had no idea.) The similarities between bulimia and drug addiction were enough for us to understand each other. Mark told me that in his addiction treatment, they told him that you just have to be okay that occasionally, you’ll slip up.

Fuck that. In my all-or-nothing line of thinking, slipping up with an eating disorder was not okay. It should never be okay because it kickstarts the cycle all over again. My stubbornness to not have a hippie “it’s okay to mess up” mentality fueled (bad pun) me to continue my efforts to quit.

I give Mark credit because no matter how swollen I got during recovery, he still looked at me like I was a goddess. Each morning my body was tender and swollen from edema. There was no way for me to feel pretty when my face looked like I was swelling from a bee sting. Yet Mark still wanted me just as much and made me feel like I wasn’t a hideous beast.

Homeboy turned out to be a complete stalker psychopath. But to his credit, he also saved my life.

Shortly after reconciling with my husband, I got pregnant. It was a relief. I could finally focus on eating healthy without the panic of weight gain. It was a struggle when the weight inched over the highest I had ever been but my focus was on a healthy pregnancy.

Since giving birth over a decade ago, I’ve made myself throw up once. I felt like I was hit with a truck and made a mental note to never, ever feel like that again.

I’d like to say that since then I have had a healthy relationship with food and my body, blah blah. My self-esteem towards my body skyrocketed after I had plastic surgery to repair the hot mess caused by two pregnancies. Worth every penny.

But I still weigh myself every day. I still mentally count calories. I still beat myself up when I don’t work out. I still panic if something doesn’t easily zip up.

Most stories I read about lifetime eating issues stem from someone’s extreme weight gain or tales of being the “fat kid” in school. I’ve always been relatively lean. The catch is that you become the one that others envy or compare themselves against. It’s what compels me to stay slightly underweight. I get a mental hit when someone says, “I wish I was thin as you” or “yeah, I’d wear that dress if I was skinny like Jen”.

Being single, I also obsess over my weight because it’s attractive to men given the unflattering stereotype of women over forty. I’m often told that they’ve never been with someone as small as me. I assume it makes them feel big and manly. Or they feel Herculean in strength because I’m light enough to lift onto the bed. Yet another positive mental hit when they tell me these things.

Not much of a sob story when women say they envy your weight and men love seeing you naked. Wah wah, woe is me. Your eyeroll over my body and eating issues is justified.

I’m so over it.

I’m so overweighing myself every day.

I’m so over-panicking when I don’t exercise.

I’m so over the constant mental tally of food consumed.

I’m so over feeling like I live in a body that is fighting against me. Like bruh, stop getting cellulite. Stop getting wrinkles. Stop getting muffin top. Stop getting grey hairs. Stop getting fat in your thighs.

The worst part of it all is how much mental effort and memories were wasted on this. I can look at photos and remember the food I didn’t eat. There were so many fun nights that I spent internally miserable because I was starving or stressing about my appearance. I still won’t drink mixed alcoholic beverages because of the unnecessary extra calories from sugar and thus I force myself to have wine when drinking with others, despite loathing the taste.

I’m that weirdo who still wore jeans instead of leggings during the pandemic because it allowed me to make sure I didn’t overeat. Feeling the stiff waistband is a reminder not to gorge on junk during the day. I don’t want athleisure’s forgiving, stretchy fabric.

I wasn’t compelled to write about this part of my life on Medium. Home buying, moving out, construction, and unpacking derailed my typical eating/exercise routines. Going up one size in clothes has put my brain on overdrive. Having lost the scale in the divorce, I bought a fancy new one that tells me every day if I’ve gone up or down from the previous weigh-in.

My scale is Aunt Lydia and I serve to please her.

Realistically, this is the best I’m going to be for the next few years. Not starving, purging, or constantly loathing my body is my limit for now. I fantasize that when I retire because that’s when I can stop giving a fuck about my appearance. I’ll wear sequins, bright blue eyeshadow, and eat to my heart’s content. Fettucine alfredo for breakfast, muthafuckas.

Time for me to get out of bed and start my day with the background noise reminding me to never, ever gain weight.