Here I am. Still fat after all these years.
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Self Improvement, Life, Self, Health, Weight Loss

A long, long time ago, I was an athlete. A swimmer. A runner. I was comfortable in my body. I struggled with body image, I often felt fat, but I knew that I was strong and capable and healthy.

My brain and body were mostly on the same page.

I’ve spent a long, long time feeling like my brain and my body just aren’t anymore. Like decades.

This is me, in 2013, in New York City. I’d just sold my first book and I was at Book Expo America. (I really, really thought if I showed up, I’d be treated like an author. That’s another story.)

This is me last month, at my daughter’s university graduation.

In the first picture, here’s what’s going on.

I weigh 375 pounds. I’m wearing size 28 jeans. I have arthritic hips, although I won’t be diagnosed until I’m thinner. I have sleep apnea that hasn’t been diagnosed yet, either. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in at least five years. I’ve done a lot of inner work on self-acceptance — but no amount of that can mask the fact that I really don’t feel well.

I’m in so much pain, I can barely stand. I have to tell my daughter that we can’t go to see the Statue of Liberty — because I just can’t. I’m barely alive here. When I get home from this trip, it will take me six months to recover enough to be able to put my own pants on without my husband’s help.

In the second picture, here’s what’s going on.

I weigh 270 pounds. I’m wearing size 16 jeans. I’ve been diagnosed with arthritis in my hips, but losing weight has helped to control the pain. I’ve been diagnosed with sleep apnea, but losing weight has reversed it, so I don’t have to use a CPAP anymore.

I’m not in pain. I walked up two flights of stairs to get to my seat at the Taco Bell Arena at BSU in Boise, without being out of breath. I bought my jeans at a regular Old Navy store — just walked in and bought them off the rack. I can breathe and sleep at the same time. Which means that I don’t wake up so exhausted I just want to cry anymore.

I still weigh enough that I could probably get weight loss surgery, if I hadn’t already had it.

But I’m healthier. I feel better. I feel normal.

I still marvel at how easily I move.

I went to Disneyland last summer and was on my feet for hours and hours and never had to go find somewhere to sit down while everyone else had fun. I fit in every ride. I fit on an airplane, without a seat-belt extender.

I fit in my own car without a seat-belt extender.

But it’s still so weird.

I’m still a fat lady.

I still see photos of myself with people who aren’t fat and I have to take a minute, catch my breath, remember that I’m okay.

I still struggle to keep my brain and body together. I don’t feel like I eat much — because at any one time, I can only eat a little. I’m still afraid of pain, so I struggle to exercise. I feel better, but I sometimes feel dissociated.

So, it starts with food.

The most concrete thing that weight loss surgery taught me is that I really was eating enough food to maintain 375 pounds of body weight. My metabolism wasn’t broken (it was checked.) I really, really wasn’t eating 1500 calories a day.

And, despite having a stomach the size of a banana, I’m still not. It seems impossible. My brain insists that no one who can only eat 1/2 of a sandwich in a sitting — no chips, no soup — can be eating more than 1500 calories a day.

It’s fascinating to me, in a dissociated way, that I’m fixated on 1500 calories. My Base Metabolic Rate says 1900 calories. My Fitness Pal says 1900 calories to lose weight.

Except, Zach and I are starting a thing. One hundred days of using My Fitness Pal. And I tracked my eating today. Day One. Here’s what happened:

That doesn’t include a few olives I ate while I was making lunches. Or the samples at Costco.

Once upon a time, after I came home from that trip to New York, I understood that something had to give. I couldn’t make my husband pull up my pants for me for the rest of my life.

So, I figured out my BMR and I made a commitment to eat that much for 100 days. (And to exercise for 10 minutes a day.) I didn’t lose much weight. But my life changed anyway.

I realized that I was capable of feeling better. All I had to do was get there.

So, I did. It took a while. But I got there.

It’s time to do it again. To support Zach. Because I want to keep feeling good. I’m tracking what I eat for the next 100 days.

Maybe not so much to lose weight, but to be more aware. Of what I’m putting in my body. Of how I feel.

To try to reconnect my body and my brain.