My first experiences with diets came in middle school, probably before I was mature enough to handle this type of thinking. Eating often and in large quantities was so natural to me, mostly because that’s just how I was from the beginning and because those were the habits I subsequently built, trying to make me utilize portion control and carb control was a struggle. My mother never had a major weight problem but she was always a little heavier than she’d like to have been. Therefore we had several dozen diet books in our house with overtook several shelves in a kitchen bookshelf. Whichever one she was interested in that month could usually be found on the kitchen counter with several post it notes poking out of it.
She approached me like one would approach an addict, gently and letting them know you’re there for them but they need to make the decision to get help. I explored the South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers, Atkins, and more. All not exactly designed for people in their early teens and while I didn’t consciously rebel against these diets I did eventually fall off the wagon, generally because they tried to make me eat weird food and because I was rarely satisfied with the measly portions they allowed (with the exception of Atkins which allowed a lot of food, but the lack of carbs gave me headaches). I never lost any significant amount of weight when dieting ever, my hunger would force me to slowly add foods back in and over the course of about two weeks I would be back to enough calories to satisfy me but too many calories to lose weight.
Walking into high school of over 1,500 students and seeing a sea of students that all seeming thin and put together was overwhelming for me. I had always been one to immediately compare myself to others and being in a room with thirty people (after being in a class where my entire grade was half that size) was crazy. The girls were generally clones of each other, they all had perfectly relaxed straight hair while mine was unruly, frizzy, and naturally curly and all wore clothes for a combination of American Eagle, Aeropostale, and Hollister. Most of these stores didn’t carry sizes above a large in their store so I was shit out of luck. As high school went on I had to change from shopping in the Juniors section, where some of the clothes seemed so unreasonably small I don’t think I would have fit them even as a young child, to shopping in Misses and finally Womans and specialty shops like Dress Barn, Torrid, and Lane Bryant. Clothes for “full figured” women all had a generally theme, in some stores they would be all old lady clothes with lovely floral pattern that looked like they belonged on a tasteless bedspread covering a lumpy mattress in an old age home. For the most part they avoided clingy material and went for the loose style. Sometimes I’d go into these stores and get excited thinking “Wow, that looks great on the mannequin. Maybe I won’t live and die in baggy, shapeless clothes anymore!” But then I would go in the dressing room and it would be a disaster. Maybe I was too fast for these fat clothes, but then I realized that that mannequin did not have chubby arms, bad fat, or love handles, it was just a slightly bigger model of a skinny mannequin. It was just like plus sized models have just a little bit of chub spread out equally throughout their body so you could say hey, they’re a little bigger, but not throwing up in your mouth bigger. You never see a 300 pound woman with stretch marks and cellulite showing off that bra and panty collection made just for you and your special plus sized needs.
I did obviously find clothes to wear because the only thing worse than going to high school with ill-fitting clothes was going with none at all. Around this time jeans started to not find well. To those of you who are jeans enthusiasts, you know that jeans are supposed to gently rest right below your belly button. My stomach protruded to the point where the waist of my jeans rested under my stomach, similar to a man with a large beer belly. This caused them to be baggy in the butt, loose in the crotch, and do weird things around the knees. Overall, it was not a good look so I did my best to make myself look presentable but slowly shifted to wearing stretchy pants (usually black) and t-shirts.
This generally didn’t work and whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror I would cringe. My self-image has always confused me. Looking at my weight and how I’ve only been over 200 pounds since the beginning of college but I was over 150 for the entirely of my time in high school – which is large. I remember thinking how big I was the whole time. I recently found some old pictures and seeing how small I was compared to now. Then I felt big, but I do remember not fitting in clothes in the juniors section and feeling auditorium seats feeling tight. The little sensations of being heavy added up over the years. First it was clothes and feeling bigger in general. Then one day I thought about the size of the skinny girl’s XS shirt and my XL, I considered the volume I had that she didn’t. I physically took up a much larger area than she did and that was just odd to me.
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