Below, I am posting an excerpt from my soon-to-be-released creative non-fiction work entitled Above the Clouds. In this book, one of the topics I address is my almost-twenty-year battle with weight.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I actually looked at myself and felt myself in my body eight years ago, I was ashamed. How could I have let myself go so far? Being almost two hundred pounds, yet standing only five feet tall, was deadly. I know that it was a form of protection but, come on! I was actually killing myself.
I stepped off the scale that day and measured myself, knowing that I see my success in inches before pounds. I was terrified as I draped that measuring tape around my ponderous form. The numbers were astonishing. My arms were half again as big as they had been while I was in high school. One thigh was three inches bigger than my waist had been back then. My chest was twenty-two inches bigger. I began to cry.
Once I hit puberty, I developed what I call my “Baby Pouch” – a small bulge just below my waist. In high school, that pouch was one and a half inches bigger than my waist, measuring in at twenty-six inches. That day, my pouch was double that. I stared at the numbers, not believing what I was seeing.
Tears coursed down my cheeks as I remembered the unending struggle to be thin at sixteen. I remembered beating myself up for having to wear Levi Strauss 501’s in size 26 when all my friends were wearing 24’s. I remembered pressing my hand against my pouch, cursing it, hating it and wishing it away, all the while insulting myself with the words, “I am so fat.”
BACK TO DIRECTORY
No comments:
Post a Comment