So I finally bought a scale. I normally never (ever ever) weigh myself because I prefer to stay active–with dance, yoga, jogging, and regular fitness classes at the gym–but I figured I should start monitoring my weight since my metabolism is definitely changing as I get older. To be honest, I’ve always had a messed up relationship with food.
Me, posing with the hospital Santa at Christmastime
When I was little, in and out of the hospital with asthma attacks, I never felt like eating. I was so scrawny other family members would ask, “When are you going to fill out?”But even so, I would sit at the table and cry when my parents made me clean my plate; eating seemed like another chore. I remember feeling smaller than my older sisters, a late bloomer in every way, but eating more never seemed like a solution.
Then I turned 14 and thought I new everything, became a pescatarian and gave up meat, which, on top of all the sports I did in high school made me very lean–although I distinctly remember feeling fatter and bigger than the white girls on my soccer and track teams, and trying to starve myself whenever possible. Then there were my mother’s good report card luncheons, to celebrate getting straight-A’s, at which I gorged myself on all-you-can-eat pizza or chicken wings or whatever else was on the menu.
“I don’t know where she puts it,” Mommy would always say, noting that no matter how much I over-ate, on occasion, I never seemed to blow up. It seemed like either I didn’t eat at all or ate too much, largely based on how I was feeling. And so, eventually I decided I was an emotional eater.
My fitness slowed way down as a college pre-med and I gained the freshman 15– adding more pounds every year afterwards, and even moreso after my mom died at the beginning of senior year. I drowned my grief in chocolate chip cookies and Cheez-Its from the vending machine at midnight, hiding the wrappers in my dresser drawer so my roommates wouldn’t see.
In hindsight, gaining weight was something of a cry for help, but because I went to Stanford 3000 miles away from my hometown, nobody knew enough to know I was in trouble. Cut to me after graduation, lugging around at least 25 extra pounds than when I left, and being fairly depressed about it.
I did everything I could to shed the weight in those early post-graduation days with exercise and diets and lemon cleanses that sometimes made me disappear. The stress and poverty of being in film school “helped” a lot, but at some point I had to choose to develop a healthier relationship with food to help heal my mind and body.
Many people who have known me in these adult years since often comment that I stay about the same size–which is mostly true, largely because I work at it and have often been so broke that the inability to buy new clothes alone keeps me trim enough to wear my old ones. But I don’t really stay the same weight, I fluctuate about 5-7 lbs on a good year, 7-10 on a bad one. I’m still an emotional eater, though when I’m anxious I stop eating, rather than binge, which tends to have a more “favorable” visual outcome.
I’m scared that I will get too fat to do things, that I will end up sick like my mother, bedridden, and die young. The fear alone gets me up and at the gym almost every morning. Cue (what I’m calling) the “check yourself, before you wreck yourself” scale.
No matter how much I’ve grown in understanding the type of eater and body I am, I realize that I still see my weight as an adversary, the number on the scale as something to be conquered. And I would like to deal with that.
But I’m more than just a number…right?
Then I remember all the numbers that have mattered: being number 2 in my high school class, then dropping to 3 shortly before graduation, so the principal called me in his office to say I would no longer be giving the salutatorian speech; getting into 7 ivy league schools, then picking Stanford; losing my mom to cancer in 2002; moving to NYC in 2004; turning 25; turning 30; turning 35.
Consciously or not, I realize I’ve spent the better part of my life worrying about the numbers on the scale even when I refused to weigh myself. So having to do so now, out of necessity, makes me want to say, f— that, take a sledgehammer to it and drown my sorrows in a bowl (or tub?) of melted chocolate.
Love them or hate them, our lives are a bunch of meaningless numbers to which we arbitrarily assign meaning. The scale is no different. So I will keep it in my closet and pull it out once in awhile to make sure the numbers don’t get out of control, but I promise not to let it own me.
Because I own me.