Fugly

Today, I started thinking about my own issues with body image.  Not that they haven't been on my mind already - I have been laying in wait as if these issues are going to jump out at me and insert fat into my thighs or something.  Here's a photo for you:

Me, 1981.  I am on the left.  My kind and long suffering friend, Pam, is on the right modeling my dress made out of dryer sheets.  Don't tell her this is up on the blog.

Do I look like I'm overweight?  A fat girl?  I don't think so, at least not now that I'm looking at the photo through my current eyes.  When I looked at myself then, however, I thought I was huge.  I suppose that is body dysmorphic disease, but at the time I thought that everyone looked at me and thought I was fat and ugly.  

I remember being a thin child until I was about five or six.  In my family, you were stuffed until you burst.  'No' was not an option.  Don't want to eat your food, but want to go outside and play?  That's okay, it will be waiting for you when you come back, warming in the oven, and you'd better eat it then if you're going to be a good girl.  Somewhere down the line, food became a comfort, a panacea for my life with a difficult and violent father, and a mother that did not protect me.  There was love in my home, but not understanding.  There was some safety but also the insecurity that comes with the possibility of violence at any moment.  

At some point in my teen years, my mother put me on diet pills, an event which she denies to this day.  They helped me to finally become a normal weight, and have a better life in school, however I was high all the time and barely slept.  Often during the night, I got up and cried in the bathroom, and no one ever knew, to this day.  Now I know that I was suffering from depression.  At the time, I just felt ugly and unloved.

When I was 17, my sister's best friend and I spent the summer going to Gloria Stevens fitness salon.  By the end of the summer we were in great shape, looking very thin and feeling healthy and fabulous.  However, one thing overshadowed this success - the fact that my parents did not want me to join the health club and fought me so hard about actually having a membership ('It's a scam!' they would shout with absolutely no knowledge of it) that I had to pay by the week and sometimes go on the sly.  The real irony came a couple of years later, when my mother joined the health club herself.  I confess to being a little pissed about that.

I gained the majority of my weight being in a bad marriage wherein I felt misunderstood to my very core.  I was so unhappy all I did was eat and I could no longer recognize myself.  I am now in a very healthy relationship with a very understanding and intelligent man (AF) who loves me no matter what I weigh, and could not think of me as ugly if my face were smashed in with a frying pan.   A good relationship is very healing.  So is therapy, which I was in regularly for many years, and now use as a maintenance tool.

I often say to people what Maria the psychologist at the Weight Loss center says in her meetings - This is NOT about five shakes a day.  It is about so much more.  And recognizing that leads to breaking the patterns, which leads to forgiveness and healing.