Lies The World Has Told Me: One Woman’s Journey Through Weight Loss Surgery
PART 1: “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”
“There’s always bariatric surgery.”
Words of wisdom from my mother as we ran errands together. I was in my early twenties at the time, struggling with a major weight gain associated with side effects from medication I was taking for anxiety and depression. Needless to say, that side effect was glossed over.
But I digress.
We’ll stay with mom for now.
I remember the way my body completely tensed up and my stomach dropped when I heard her say those words. My face flushed as I choked back tears of shame laced with anger.
“Mom, I don’t even qualify for that right now. I’m not fat enough.”
My mother, a nurse, had traveled her own road of body image struggles, shame, and disordered eating that teetered from heavy restriction to major bingeing, replete with huge swings in her weight. Our house was full of every diet item on the market. Packaged meals, diet pills, books and books of fad diets, forgotten exercise equipment hung with cast off clothing, and workout tapes stuffed in the back of the TV cabinet.
At the time, foods with fat were the socially identified enemy, so I religiously consumed cupboards full of fat-free snacks and a fridge full of fat-free dressings and yogurts despite my intense dislike of chewing on cardboard cookies or ingesting the weird viscosity of plasticky condiments.
Mind you, this was years after being subjected to the Pritikin Diet (a precursor to Atkins where fat was all the rage), the Stoplight Diet – red means don’t eat it, yellow: be cautious and only eat a bit, green: go wild!
As if heaps of lettuce and rubbery grilled chicken would in some way satisfy the shame of living in a larger body.
Remember those charts at the pediatrician’s office that would track your height and weight? Do they still do that?
I remember the dread, even at a very young age, of seeing where I fell at that year’s check-up. Unlike school, where the 98th percentile was a place I sought to stay in and never leave, a high ranking here meant shame, shame, shame.
I recall the old, white male pediatrician looking down on me over his reading glasses as he once more lectured my mother and me on the importance of limiting my intake and increasing my activity.
I was five and headed off to kindergarten, and already believed that I was fat and at fault.
The doctor never took a step back to look at my genetic origins. A father from Scottish ancestors who defended Mary Queen of Scots and were known for their brute strength, and German ancestors whose pictures told the story of generations of women born into larger bodies.
I remember the shame I felt when my paternal great aunts would carry on about how much I looked like their mother, my great-grandmother, who died before I was born.
To be fair, such things weren’t as important or apparent back then. But the fact that I came to the doctor with my mother, herself six feet tall with broad shoulders and the evidence of carrying five children, three of whom lived to be born beyond their due dates…was that not at least a clue that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t about the food intake or activity level, but simply how we were built?
I soon learned that such thinking was merely an excuse for being lazy.
Being fat was no one’s fault but my own.
School brought a tidal wave of comparisons to my classmates. I wished I could look as good as they did in our uniforms as I sucked in my stomach in my formative years of learning to shrink.
I struggled to make friends, fearful that I wasn’t good enough to be chosen by those who were much thinner and prettier than I was. As the years passed, things only got worse. I suffered the shame of shopping for specially sized “Pretty Plus” clothes at Sears with my mother when all I wanted was to dress like my classmates. Somehow wearing uniforms was a better gig than the freedom of public school habiliment.
Report cards full of +++++ (if I couldn’t be thin, I could sure as hell be smart!), marred by those two check minuses – one for gym, and one for “appearance.” Apparently my fifth-grade male teacher was an expert in grading me on this?!
Bullying followed, the push and pull of wanting to be accepted and liked while pushing away potential true friends because they, too, found themselves teetering on the edge of social pariah-hood. How pleasant and accommodating I could be to the popular girls while simultaneously playing the mean girl to others who suffered a fate I was desperate to escape. How does anyone survive those years?
Even as my body changed with puberty, the beauty of emerging womanhood adorned with curves and breasts and height was negated by a series of size nothings I sought to become instead. Size 12 was a horrendous place to live.
My relationship with food also suffered. I’d wake up in the morning and skip breakfast, go through an entire school day without a lunch break (I had to get in that extra class!), and finally allow myself to eat something around 3:30 pm. Some days it was later.
Inevitably a binge would follow such long periods of starvation.
Socially, I patterned my eating after those friends who ordered their salads with grilled chicken and fat-free dressing on the side, daintily dipping our tasteless morsels into it, trying to convince our palates and stomachs that we were satisfied and full. If only I knew then what I know now.
Shame, self-loathing, and anger roiled beneath the façade of smart and nice and unassuming. It broke through, hurting those who meant the most to me, pushing them further away in my endless search for acceptance by shallow standards of high school in-crowds and 90’s heroin chic.
Shame and blame led to restriction and bingeing, significant weight gains, and further distress.
Depression and anxiety plagued me, and panic attacks became daily occurrences. Terrible stomach pains led to hospitalization and a diagnosis of “stress-induced intestinal spasms.” Family therapy followed briefly without much impact.
Trusted teachers offered support and encouragement. I focused on achievement, graduated in the top ten of my class, won awards for nearly every high school subject and activity area in which I was engaged, yet instead of getting better, things got worse.
I hated myself, and my body was the target of my blame.
This self-hatred permeated my college years, impacting friendships, dating and sex, and my overall self-confidence. I struggled to find direction and choose a major, burning myself out at the ripe old age of 20. Close friends didn’t come easily. And even academics and leadership couldn’t save me from my self-loathing. Why couldn’t I get my sh*t together? Why is getting up and going to class such a challenge?
In the end, I graduated, but without much pomp and circumstance. Following the only path I knew, I continued with graduate school, had my heart broken by another failed relationship, and went on leave from school.
That was about the time my mother suggested surgery.
After a 9-month break the burnout and depression subsided a bit, and I returned to school. Achievement became my obsession once again, an escape from experiencing living in a body I now hated even more since my weight gain. I graduated with high honors and awards once again and entered the working world of higher education, an environment that demanded long work hours with low pay. But helping others somehow helped me to matter, and being on-call 24/7 filled the personal void.
I repeated this pattern for years, completing more degrees, working longer hours, putting others’ needs above my own, and continuing to question why I couldn’t be happy.
Therapy helped me to understand better why I was here, but I still struggled to believe that I could be worthy in a body that didn’t fit societal standards for beauty and fitness. As others I knew celebrated their newly thin bodies in the wake of weight loss surgery, I began to wonder if I had finally found the panacea that would bring me peace…
Stay tuned for the next post in this series:
LIES THE WORLD HAS TOLD ME: One woman’s journey through weight loss surgery.
PART 2: “Bariatric surgery is the answer to your weight loss struggles.”
Hi, I’m Laura Gordon!
I’m an eating disorder and Trauma Therapist in Pennsylvania.
In this blog series I’m sharing pieces of my body story and my experience with weight loss surgery. My hope is that this supports you as you look into the risks and cost of bariatric surgery. Stay tuned for my next blog post, diving into more details about my experience with bariatric surgery.
Until then!
🧡,
Reclaim Therapy is a team of trauma therapists and eating disorder therapist in Pennsylvania.
We provide specialized eating disorder treatment in Pennsylvania and trauma therapy in Pennsylvania. We often work with people who have had weight loss surgery and bariatric surgery and are struggling with an eating disorder. We want you to know that you are not alone, and that you deserve support, and never shame. Our team of compassionate trauma therapists would be honored to support you in your recovery.