Over the first year, she gained thirty pounds. They came on slowly, and then viciously, a metabolic Trojan horse. It was unclear what to name the primary cause — happy(ish) relationship, intrauterine device (copper, non-hormonal), increased cortisol levels, gluten. Didn’t matter anyway, because the extra weight was loath to come off. Most frustrating was the need to deny, self-deny. A good feminist didn’t care if she gained three thousand pounds. A good feminist loved her body unconditionally. A good feminist agreed to dessert as a matter of international politics. And God, it triggered everyone. No, that wasn’t right. But sometimes it felt like beneath every friend, every potential confidante, was a recovering bulimic. (Allow some hyperbole, please!!) A woman whose grandmother told her to size up or down in the dressing room, who drank prepackaged diet smoothies for breakfast in middle school. It made for a lonely trek.
Just to consider it — the nameless “it” — was feminine in the gross way that pink razors and marrying too young and gender reveals (regardless of gender) were feminine. A femininity that somehow seemed like an insult to real womanhood. It was way cooler to be a cold hard bitch, even (in some circles) a fat bitch, but never a mild pushover trying to lose weight. How embarrassing, the want, the desire. How juvenile. How unprogressive. But she couldn’t guilt her way out of it. Was it so much simpler in her mother’s days of Bridget Jones? They were now living in an Age of Labels, of libtards and sapiosexuals, polycules and trad wives, cottagecore and clean girl aesthetic, and yet. She still didn’t know how to categorize the internal conflict. It made one yearn for the straightforward days of Weight Watchers, almost.
So instead she tip-toed around the matter exclusively with her therapist, who was paid to feel triggered, couching her crisis in euphemisms and metaphors. She felt “uncomfortable” with the “physical changes” that her body was “experiencing.” With horror, she realized that perhaps this was the rest of her life. Slowly deteriorating until worms ate her up. Or maybe she would get cremated, get breathed up into someone young and beautiful, a sort of psychotic stab at reincarnation. In the meantime, she set alarms for 6:30am to get bossed around by some demented woman on YouTube in possession of kinder genetics, doing burpees for immortality.
Her doctor prescribed her a drug meant for the pre-diabetic (not the one you’re thinking of with the tireless PR team … her insurance wouldn’t cover it). But actually she wasn’t pre-diabetic, her ovaries were actually just full of cysts, a common condition in women, actually. Supposedly, this drug helped with insulin resistance, which could cause some people to lose weight. But online, the reviews were mixed. Anonymous Redditors claimed that the drug helped them lose fifty pounds, but over a long period of time, and only by strictly excluding dairy and lifting weights. Or it had no effect, except nausea/diarrhea. Or perhaps — a-ha! — it was the diarrhea that made you lose weight, but no more than six or seven pounds. Water weight. The kind that didn’t count. Her primary care physician told her to eat at a calorie deficit, but didn’t elaborate any further. That bitch.
Funny, her boyfriend suggested the same. Oh no, was she mad at him now? It was just like, objective science. One of them had a medical degree, and the other had whatever the opposite was of that, take a guess at which was which. She dropped the conversation, already exhausted. Hmm, so she was that kind of girlfriend now? She would reevaluate later, but not today. They didn’t speak much that morning. Perhaps for the best.
Back to the worms. Once, she read that the great opera singer Maria Callas, a famed diva and unrepentant cunt, swallowed worms to lose weight. Obviously not the type that crawl on sidewalks. Right? That would be too easy. Every woman would be thin if it were that easy. (No, not every woman wanted to be thin.) How did she flush them out when she was done? Or did they just stay there, rumbling near her diaphragm, as she belted La Traviata? It didn’t sound like a bad life, for a worm. Just food and opera.
Like many, I have a complicated and ever-morphing relationship with my own body. This third-person journal entry is my attempt to capture some of those feelings — of sensing that you might be betraying your own professed values, of holding conflicting personal needs, of confronting the spectrum of internalized fatphobia, of managing meta-emotions and deciphering medical truth versus medical gaslighting. I’m linking a couple of excellent episodes from the podcast Maintenance Phase on calories and BMI, as well as educational social media I’ve personally found helpful on PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), an under-researched condition (medical sexism!) which affects 1 in 10 women/people with ovaries. ♡