My body is my arch enemy. It's badly constructed, things keep getting broken and it keeps malfunctioning.
First of all I'm short, but no one informed my back about that. So, I ended up with the back of a person who is about 180cm tall. While I in reality only measure in at 154. On a good day. After 8 hours of sleep. As a result my body consist of about 75% upper body. Which surely isn't the right porportions.
My body was also designed with a funky feature called PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. Say that 10 times after half a bottle of whisky, I dare you!) This is a medical condition that, without going into too much detail, messes with my ovaries somewhat. The result is a hormone imbalance which comes with an array of delightful sideeffects. Thin hair, thin skin that scars easily, striae (stretchmarks) and depressions to mention a few. But the real kicker is the overweight. And it's not normal, everyday "oh I'm a bit too pudgy and should lay off the cinnamon buns" kind of overweight. It's the kind that makes me gain a pound by just thinking of pasta, or indeed anything else that might contain carbohydrates. And, in stead of all the adipose tissue being distributed evenly over this poor excuse for a body, it all gathers in the middle. Causing me to look like I am four months pregnant. Or like I really, really, really love beer. Oh,and it gives me a hump. Yup, like The Hunchback. Lovely condition, this PCOS, isn't it?
There isn't much I can do about this. Ironically the only cure for PCOS is to lose weight. And losing weight is three times as hard for someone who has it. The hormone imbalance causes us to have a quite apallingly bad metabolism, and we are nearly "allergic" to sugar and carbohydrates. We just can't handle our glucose, and we handle fluctuations in our bloodsugar levels as bad as a diabetic. But as they go into insulin shock, we just get fat and cranky.
I've been grieving over my body and my weight for many years now. I've always felt fat, but looking at photos from when I was 20-25 kilos lighter Ican't help but think "seriously, what had I smoked?" I looked perfectly fine. Now I weigh an horrific 84 kilos, which is 25-30 too much. I feel, to varying degrees, very uncomfortable in my body, when I am out and about I feel... just wrong. I look at myself in the mirror and sometimes I can't help but think "Who are you? This isn't me. This isn't who I am, no on the inside."
And it's not just my vanity that makes me hate the extra weight. My mother was overweight, and being on cortisone for her asthma most of her life just made it worse. She died of a heart failure at 45. My brother had two (small, but still!) heart attacks at 30. Clearly people in our family aren't constructed with the best of tickers, quality wise, and being overweight isn't going to prolong my heart's life span (or, as a result, my life span). "They" say that the tummy fat is the most dangerous kind, but then again "they" say a lot of things. Discovering that I had a high bloodpressure that needed medicating at 25, and heart arrythmias, didn't exactly soothe my nerves.
And honestly, I'm tired of being heavy. Of feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Sick of sucking my gut in. Sick of having no energy, of hating clothes because nothing ever looks good on me, of hating on skinny girls who can stuff their face with whatever they want. And I'm so. tired. of. obsessing. about. food. I've changed my diet a lot over the last year, eliminating a lot of carbohydrates and dairy out of my diet. Now I eat mostly proteins, meats, eggs, I have a home-made high-protein granola, I make berry or fruit smoothies with rice milk. And I've added things like coconut oil, flax seed oil, lots of cinnamon and spirulina tablets (yay for superfoods!) I feel better for it, I have more energy, my blood sugar is stabilized somewhat, and I am a lot less sick. But I'm not losing weight.
My extra kilos get unfairly blamed for a lot of things, probably. Somehow my overweight is in my mind inevitably linked to me being a miserable, lonely wanker. For some reason I have some notion of life being so much easier, simpler, happier, if I had just been designed a bit differently. Take away 20 kilos and a pregnant beerbelly and I'd be happier, healthier, have more friends, everything would've been perfect. And I would definitely have had a boyfriend.
Which is probably a very unfair way of thinking about boys. And people in general. Because I really want to believe that people aren't that shallow. I should give people more credit. I want to believe that my weight has nothing to do with how many guys talk to me out at the pub, or how many friends I have, or whether or not that person I have so much in common with and love talking to, would fall for me. But evidently people are shallow.
In some ways I have to believe that. Because I can't face the other alternative. If I'm miserable, reclusive, lonely and single because people simply just don't like me, that it really all comes down to my personality and it's completely unrelated to my beergut... I can't deal with it.
I can't be fat and have a horrible personality. Life just can't be that cruel.
