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.
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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.”
