giving up, giving in

on being fat and coming to terms with this is how i'll always be

I am overweight. Nah, let’s call it what it is: I’m fat. I try to hide my weight with shapely leggings and long swing shirts or flowy dresses, but it’s apparent I am fat. I’ve spent most of my adult life - after being a too skinny teen - struggling on and off with my weight. I’ve been thin, I’ve been healthy, I’ve been over 200, and I am where I am now, keeping it under 200 but still fat.

I’m not going to go into my history of dieting and running and going to the gym. I’m not going to talk about losing fifty pounds and gaining it all back less than a year later, but I will talk about how I felt when I was working out every day, because the real issue here is how I never really felt great about it. It was always a struggle to stay within my weight goals and caused me undue stress to maintain that weight. I wasn’t enjoying life when I was obsessing about my body constantly. I’m at an age where it’s really hard to lose weight, and I don’t need to make my life and my mental state any harder.

Which is why I have decided to give up. There’s something really freeing about letting go of goals you can’t achieve, or no longer have the desire to achieve. By learning to accept who and what I am, I have given myself permission to breathe, to relax, to stop yearning for something impossible. This doesn’t mean I’m going to go crazy and eat whatever I want or stop taking walks. It just means that I am no longer actively trying to starve myself, deprive myself, torture myself.

This is not so much about the physicality of being fat; it’s about the mental anguish of it all, it’s about what agonizing over my weight does to my brain. For so long, being overweight has made me feel self-conscious. It has made me feel like a failure. It has made me think less of myself and assume that everyone else thinks less of me for not maintaining a healthy weight. I have been sitting here grappling with my self loathing and realized that most of that comes from not being an optimal weight.

I don’t want to live like that anymore. Sure, I could join a gym or go on another fad diet or ask my doctor for Ozempic, but I don’t want to do any of that. I am soon to be 61 years old. My body is no longer complying with my wishes. Me weight stays the same no matter what I do. And honestly, at this age, and with everything I’ve been through healthwise in the past year, I just want to live my life. I want to live that life without struggling, without the damage that obsessing about my body causes. I have decided at this point that my mental health is more important than losing fifty or so pounds.

There’s a certain strain that comes when I try to lose weight. If I missed a day working out or running, if I ate something “bad” for me, I would go into a spiral. I’d get mad at myself, I’d feel hatred for my body and for my lack of self control and discipline. I was mad at myself constantly. I didn’t run far enough. I didn’t stay at the gym long enough. I ate the damn mashed potatoes. I’d go to bed and feel the weight shift around me and feel like I was failing even though I was putting the effort in. I chastised myself constantly. I never felt great about dieting and working out and losing weight because the negatives would just pile up in my head. Nothing I did was good enough for my psyche. I hated the lifestyle I had when I was attempting to get in shape.

I want none of that now. I want peace. I want to make amends with myself. I want to eat the mashed potatoes and sit on the couch and watch a movie without my brain telling me that to do so is failure. I am old and want to enjoy my life and months of abusing my self esteem to get down to a weight I will probably not maintain does not seem like a good choice right now.

Society loves a skinny/fit person. Society does not love fat people. And that’s ok. I’m not asking you to love me. I am just looking to love myself and I refuse to put myself in a position to harm my mental health again just so I can look acceptable to strangers.

Giving up is underrated. I feel like I have let go of something that was destroying me. I’m ok with being overweight now, because I’ve come to realize this is me, this is who I am. Trying to change my entire lifestyle at 61 is a stupid thing for me to take on when I am already dealing with trying to keep my depression and anxiety under control. I am free now, I am unencumbered by diets and gyms that only serve to undermine my sense of self. I will still go for my neighborhood walks or ride my bike around the block a couple of times because I truly enjoy doing those things. But the elliptical? Keto diet? Stepping on the scale every day? Nah. Not for me. What is for me is peace of mind. That’s something I strive for at this part of my life. I just want to live out the rest of my years trying to enjoy what life has to offer me without constantly thinking about this body I exist in. I should concentrate on my mental health without introducing new ways to loathe myself.

I am done torturing myself. I am done thinking that I can have the body I used to have as a young adult. I am done comparing myself to prettier, skinnier people. I am no longer thinking “why can’t I have that” and I am instead thinking “I am ok with what I have.” It’s freeing to accept who you are, and for me, it’s about time I did.