Skinny is So Inny

I think I’m the only person on the planet who has failed GLP-1 weight loss. All of my friends are walking around with sharp clavicles and pants that hang from their hipbones. Me? I think I have hipbones, but I haven’t seen them in decades. I do, however, have a booty that could double as a serving tray. Serving cocktails from my ample ass—now that might be a good party trick.

I’ve been trying to lose weight since I was sixteen. I didn’t know I needed to lose weight then—I was a 3-sport athlete who spent most of my time in a gym or at the Riley Park basketball courts—but when my high school basketball coach casually said to me, “You’d be so much faster if you just lost twenty pounds,” it changed the way I saw myself forever.

I liked the way I looked until a grown man told me my body wasn’t good enough.

It’s an age-old story: Men commenting on women’s bodies. Men judging women’s looks. Men telling women they’re not “hot” enough if their physique, their hair, their makeup isn’t just so. Men assuring women their worth is determined by the size of their boobs, the color of their hair, and the size on the tag in their jeans. And I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I wanted the male gaze to fall upon me then. It was part of the way I measured my own worth before I knew that my worth came from within.

At seventeen, I began a bingeing and purging cycle that has both haunted and hunted me for over three decades. I stopped purging long ago, but I’ve never really learned how to eat within limits. I eat like I spend money … I don’t stop until everything is gone. And even then, I often don’t stop. I know in my head that what I am doing is slowly killing me, but I have not yet successfully changed it for any sustained amount of time. I perseverate on food. I obsess about food. When I am eating, I think about what I’m going to eat next. The “food noise” I experience is louder than anything else in my head.

And at 56, it has caught up with me in very visible and physical ways. My back, full of osteoporosis, “significant abnormalities,” “extensive degenerative disc disease and facet arthropathy,” and “severe stenosis” (that’s from my latest MRI reading) hurts so much at times that I cannot stand or walk. The extra 75 pounds I’m carrying doesn’t help.

Enter GLP-1s.

I begged my doctor to put me on Zepbound as a possible quick fix for some of my most intense pain. But, of course, my insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I had to find my own way instead. I signed up with an online program and charged the ridiculously high fees to a ridiculously high interest credit card. When the shots arrived in the mail, I was certain they were my ticket to food freedom and pain relief.

Reader, they were not.

On the lowest doses, nothing changed for me. I worked hard to eat high protein meals, I still succumbed to the occasional cookie binge, and the scale never moved. When the dosage increased, I was so sick, I could barely function. When I wasn’t vomiting, I was running to the bathroom and praying I wasn’t going to shit my pants on the way. Riding in the car made me even sicker, and Julie had to pull over multiple times so I could vomit on the side of the road. Let’s also just point out the obvious—when you’re in your mid-50s and you’ve carried four significantly-sized babies in your womb and on your bladder, violent vomiting comes with its own urinary risks.

After a few side-of-the-road vomiting/pants-wetting adventures, I was worried I was going to gain a reputation as the town drunk.

“There she is again, that loaded lesbian vomiting beside her Subaru in broad daylight! And look… did she wet her pants, too? So sad. She should really get some help...”

It was no way to live.

I stopped the shots a couple of weeks ago, and I’m no longer vomiting, but the food noise is back to screaming at me day and night. If I sit for too long (which my job literally requires me to do), I start perseverating on snacks. We’ve had to rid the house of cookies, but I haven’t yet been able to let go of my peanut butter-filled pretzels. I must have a vice; always a vice.

It’s amazing to me, though, how much less I eat now that I’m older. One small meal a day is typically more than enough to keep me satiated, but I know that’s not the best way to eat. Five bites, five times a day: that’s my goal. It’s true, however, that after 50, your body wants to hold onto every calorie you put into your mouth. I cannot seem to lose the weight on my own. Please don’t offer me diet advice here. I appreciate your concern, but I have done IT ALL. I promise. I’ve eaten no carbs, all-protein, low-carb, low-calorie. I’ve fasted. I’ve done the grapefruit diet, Atkins, Weight Watchers, delivered meal services, all of it. I know what I need to do to lose weight; my point is that it’s substantially more challenging to lose it after 50. And because my back limits my activity, here I am. Fat. Sad. Defeated.

Oh, to be sixteen again.

On the flip side of it all, though, if I wasn’t worried about my back pain, I really wouldn’t care about the way my body looks anymore. I don’t want to succumb to the male gaze. I don’t give two fat shits about the male gaze. I don’t care if I’m physically attractive to others, I just want to be kind and loving and giving. I don’t want to be judged and measured by my body (and I don’t necessarily want to be around people who judge and measure me by my body); I want my heart to be what’s examined under the microscope, not my stomach fat.

What I want my body to be is strong and healthy. I want to be able to run again. Hell, I’d settle for a good walk around the block without excruciating pain. I’m doing what I can, bit by bit. I’m starting a heavy lifting regimen to build muscle strength and bone density. I’m focusing on every bite I put into my mouth. I want to return to some semblance of that athletic, kick-ass, sixteen-year-old who didn’t think a thing about the size of her body before a grown man told her she should be thinking more about the size of her body.

And I want every woman out there—young, old, in-between—to stop listening to what the rest of the world says about the way we look. Because it’s never going to stop, the judgment and condemnation.

Last week, one of my favorite podcasters, Haley Popp of The Necessary Conversation—who also runs the hugely successful Hive Bakery in Texas—went viral for having the audacity to speak out about not celebrating the 4th of July due to the deplorable state of our country. (For the record, I agree. There was no celebrating for us this 4th.) She was called a fascist, a “fucking leftist,” and a Communist. There were wishes for her bakery to be burned to the ground or for her to “be deported straight to hell.” (How does that even work?)

But you know which comments bothered me most? The ones that focused on the way she looks. Because how she looks has absolutely zero to do with the topic at hand, and yet, weak, gross, threatened men felt the need to tell her to “stop sampling the merchandise” and to “lay off the cookies.” They commented on the color of her hair, her tattoos, and her septum piercing.

Hey, men—and you women who are carrying water for the patriarchy, too—how about this? Just stop. Stop commenting on women’s bodies and looks. Stop catcalling. Stop giving creepy “compliments.” Stop giving unwanted body advice. Just stop.

Those words and actions reinforce social expectations that can fuck women up for a lifetime. For generations. I know firsthand what it can do, having lived through the 1980s supermodel era. I’m seeing it again in the celebrities who are embracing the “appeal” of the skeletal figure. It makes me so sad to see this kind of history repeating itself again and again.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if we could all just love and nurture our bodies in the best way we know how? That fat and skinny and everything in between was accepted as normal and natural? That perfectly healthy 20- and 30-somethings weren’t begging their physicians for Ozempic? I know my life could have been very different if that one sentence—”You’d be so much faster if you’d just lose twenty pounds”—had never been lodged in my teenage brain.

This isn’t an indictment of GLP-1s. I know many whose health has been greatly improved by them. It’s an indictment of societal norms that make us think we need them when our health is not at risk. It’s an indictment of men continually trying to control women by commenting on their bodies. It’s an indictment of shaming those for living in their precious bodies the best way they know how. It’s an indictment of my own self-loathing, carefully nurtured and fed throughout multiple decades.

I just want the food and body noise to end. Forever. For everyone.