A Fat Girl's Manifesto

***TRIGGER WARNING***

There's no way to tell where it all really, truly started.

It could have all started as a playful joke about the cookies and snacks I'd stacked high on my plastic lunch tray to compensate for waking up late and being forced to skip breakfast.

"You're gonna get fat if you eat like that every day," one of my best friends commented, poking at her heavily dressed salad with a complementary spork.

It could have started when, while casually scrolling through shared photos on my favorite social media site, that I noticed an acquaintance had commented 'whale.'

It could have even been when my mother sat me down on the couch, and while the tension clawed it's way up my throat, she told me that I was starting to gain weight. She had noticed. She just thought that I should know that instead of seeing her daughter when she looked at me, she saw that I was gaining weight.

I was 14 years old in my Freshman year, painting an unrecognizable portrait of my friend's youngest sibling. She was peacefully pretending to sleep atop a multi-colored rug in her favorite ballet rehearsal outfit. I think her name might have been Emma or Ella, something short with just as many vowels as consonants. Her face was covered in a tell-tale look of mischief, and in her hands, she tightly grasped a wilting bouquet of two lonely dandelions. My painting, which was given a C+, is the very least important part of this story.

I had balanced one of those cheap buy-in-bulk acrylic pallets on my knee. I was trying to mix up the perfect caramel brown color to mimic the color of this little girl's eyes. Obviously, I was doing too many things at once because I dropped the paintbrush. It splattered light brown paint everywhere on the ground underneath my sitting apparatus. In my least prideful moment of extreme laziness, I fidgeted and squirmed, trying to pick up the brush without having to step down. It was in that split second of awkward bending and twisting that I felt just the smallest portion of belly creep above the line of my mid-rise jeggings. At that moment, I could have been convinced that my heart and my stomach traded places. My teeth started to grind against each other so viciously that white shavings might have been seen seeping out the corners of my mouth. I trembled, fingering every inch of the paintbrush, trying desperately to get a good enough grip. Finally, I whipped upwards and shielded my stomach the second I was hands-free. I casually looked up at the clock and let my eyes canvas the room. Wondering if my fellow classmates were staring at my gigantic belly-roll. It felt like I had a studio audience like everyone was staring. I weighed 135 pounds.

This is where it really started because everything else was merely a stepping stone. However, that feeling, the feeling of wanting to be the smallest and most insignificant thing in the room, never went away. It was the feeling of pulling and stretching perfectly fitting clothes until they looked years older than they were. It was the act of just buying clothes an extra size larger and disguising the reason as comfort or mobility oriented. It was eating my breakfast on the walk to school, and not once I was inside where it would be warm. So, it was years passing without a hot breakfast. It was skipping the day in health that we discussed obesity and eating disorders by faking the flu. It was avoiding my skinny friends. It was asking my older friends to purchase diet pills on my behalf. It was spending hours in trash-bag sweatsuits under my clothes when I jogged for the sixth time that day. It was the scale I found in someone's garbage in trash pick-up and replaced the batteries, then hid under my bed for months. I counted every gram of calories, carbs, sugars, fats, and anything or everything else. And right after I was done counting and calculating, I would consume. It was skipping hang-out sessions to exercise. It was calloused knuckles and yellowing teeth that the dentist scolded me for since I was "very clearly not brushing twice a day." It was staring at any kind of food, healthy or not, before I ate it, with disappointment. It was basketball shorts around the house to hide healing wounds on my thighs and "I must have bumped into something," to the ones that weren't. It was bulimia until it was depression.

There was a line that I had unknowingly crossed where I was longer satiated by the empowerment of being able to lose five pounds at a moment's notice. I began to feel so void and immeasurably empty. Food started to taste vaguely like wet cardboard. My throat burned relentlessly with acid reflux. My fingers were permanently green from tons of cheap rings to cover the scabs. I went from exercising around-the-clock to sleeping as much as humanly possible. Junior year, I'm not sure I turned in a single finished piece of Science homework. I'd wake up ten minutes before I had to be at the bus stop, hardly drag a comb through my hair, and be out the door. I'd get dinner at 5 p.m. and then sleep until I had to pee, and then go back to sleep.

A switch had been flicked where the purging ceased, but the binging didn't. I'm 25 years old. It still hasn't stopped.

I lost 70 pounds my Senior year of high school and gained that back plus 20 or 30 more over the past half a decade.

My struggle with weight loss and gain has been volitale and cyclical, and nothing short of a horror story. I spend hundreds of dollars a month on fast food. I put off paying bills so I can stop at my favorite Mexican place on the way home. I buy clothes for dates with my boyfriend that anticipate bloating from overeating. I carry two types of antacids with me at all times. I look down when I brush my teeth and when I pass mirrors at work. I haven't posted a recent selfie for close to six months. I've bought every quick and easy cookbook there is available. I've lost weight. I've gained it back. I have tried desperately to break the cycle and cure myself of this dependency I have on food. But, it's always just starting over. There's another Monday, another month, another new year, and another convoluted list of how I'm going to get better. I've been doing it for years.

Lose 20 pounds. Lose 30 pounds. Lose 40 pounds. Whatever you do, just lose that pooch you've been tucking in your pants for years.

Take better care of your skin.

Take better care of your hair.

Clean your house more often.

Take out the trash. Sit yourself on the curb while you're at it.

Just list after list of denouncing anything short of absolute completion, so this year, I've opted to do better in a better way.

I am overweight, probably significantly so. I have a boyfriend who loves me dearly, including all the curves and crevices that loving me entails. I'm attending two separate colleges to get two separate degrees, both of which I've earned a 4.0 GPA thus far. My relationship with my mother and sister is better than it's ever been. I have the cutest adoring four pets. I have a good-paying job and a house I bought at only 19. This year my list looks different.

Be the good man in the storm that's still brewing.

Love your family and friends as much and as often as possible.

Buy clothes according to your measurements, not your body image.

Dance with your boyfriend when you're out, just a little bit more.

Don't take yourself, or the lists you write too seriously.