Dysphoria

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”

― Erin McKean

I've been pretty. I was pretty when I studied chemistry, I was 19. I was pretty when I studied art, I was 22. I was pretty when I studied hairdressing, I was 27. I was pretty when I got pregnant with our second child, I was 32. I was pretty when he stopped breastfeeding, I was 34. I'm going to be 36 on Saturday. I'm not pretty.

Did I say "pretty"? I meant "slim".

The truth is, I don't recognise myself as female, let alone "pretty" unless I am slim. Slim for me means having a BMI around 25. Below that and I tend to look ill. So let's talk about that.

When I was 19 I was put on a crash diet by the doctor. I got down to 69kg and people thought I had cancer or some shit because I was always tired, never at class, looked gaunt. I had depression and mono and couldn't eat anything above 5% fat content. I was miserable.

When I was 22, I dropped a ton of weight as I quit smoking. I picked up fruit instead of cigarettes and didn't eat much else during the day. I was svelte yet curvy and got a lot of attention. I was also depressed and diagnosed with a mood disorder.

When I was 27, I was slim thanks to having a dodgy thyroid. My BMI was 24.9. As soon as they took me off the thyroxine, I started putting weight back on. I was actually pretty stoked at this age. I was recently divorced, actually doing something meaningful with my life, had met a nice guy on a dating website and had a social life. Post-thyroxine and the weight crept up and continued slowly until I hit 90kg.

Got married to nice-guy-from-dating-website. Full term with first child and I was 102kg. We both started dieting after that and I was just about 75kg when we got pregnant with our second.

I hit 102kg at full term with him, too. Breastfeeding for a year and not being silly with food got me back into my size 12 shorts when second child finally weaned onto a bottle. I started some different meds at that point because the mood disorder turned out to be BPD and - you guessed it - the weight came back on in leaps and bounds.

Every time there's been family trauma (first child was critically ill, we lost my husband's father later that same year) the weight jumps up by a few kgs. I tried coming off the meds, but in November last year I started a different medication and since then I've put on 10kgs, so these days I float between 123kg and 125kg. Almost twice the person I was at my adult skinniest. I'm back on thyroxine because I have sub-clinical hypothyroidism, but it can't even help stabilise my weight. I'm up or down by up to 2kg each week. My weight chart looks like a silhouette of a mountain range.

I have emotionally dissociated myself from my ever-expanding body, so I no longer feel depressed because of my size. Trouble is, I no longer feel anything about it. I don't feel feminine, I don't feel female even. I don't feel sexy. I don't feel sexual at all. My body is merely a means to an end. It allows my brain to learn and process information and it allows me to connect with my family through hugs and kisses.

That can't be healthy, but reconnecting will mean emotional pain, pain that stems from not being recognised as female by virtue of the fact that I am not the size and shape society deems acceptable for a female to operate within. A lot of that is self-stigmatising behaviour, but it's difficult to break. I'm in absolutely no rush to even try until I'm back down to a regular kinda size/shape. I can't accept myself for the size I am, why should anyone else?

What am I doing to lose weight then, I hear my grandmother in particular cry. Well, I am doing what we did the last time and calorie counting. Breakfast and lunch are no more than 400 calories, dinner is usually around 600 (rarely up to 800 and often sub-500). I'm wary of the calories I drink and am weaning myself off of the 400+ calorie milkshakes I casually gulped to relieve heartburn and back onto a more measured coffee with sweetener and skimmed milk. I lost weight 3 weeks in a row but this last week it all came back on in one go.

Losing weight at a consistent rate of 1-2kg per week requires a level of sacrifice I'm not strong enough to make just yet. I'm in the gloomy shadow of residual depression and I simply cannot face preparing, cooking and eating food that I don't like for the sake of everybody else's comfort.

I've been pretty. I'm sure I can be pretty again. It just won't happen any time soon.