pass-throughfire:

lol im 93kg

This is a post from August 2nd, 2018.

As I’m slowly learning how to eat like a normal human being I thought I wouldn’t write a big blog post about why and how (but especially why) I did this but then the more I was thinking about it the more I wanted to write this as a reminder, maybe. So I don’t ever do this again cause it sucked and I hated every minute of it.

I’ve always been a very skinny kid and most people in elementary school kept telling me I toootes should be a model because I was tall and skinny and models are tall and skinny so surely, that’s the right career path for me. That of course stroked my ego quite a bit, especially because other than that I’ve never not been bullied in school so being told I could be a beautiful model was like the best compliment ever.

My mum is slightly overweight and I remember my sister always struggling with her weight as well, though I’ve never seen her as even remotely chubby but she’s four years older than me so she was going through the looks are everything phase of her age group’s life when I was only peeking into it. I remember always thinking how lucky I was that I could eat anything and didn’t gain weight.

Then it turned out in 2008 that it was all because my pituary gland sucks at communicating with my thyroids and I burned through my energy intake like a wildfire.

 So after years of hellish medicine treatments and my health getting so bad I had to move home and drop out of school (in reverse order) my thyroids were taken out (turns out you can’t remove someone’s pituary gland so the thyroids had to go :[). A side effect of that was there not being anything to produce a hormone that… does something… I don’t fucking know, it was a long time ago. All I knew is that the lower my TSH was before the surgery the skinnier I was. So once my thyroids were out my TSH skyrocketed.

It used to be .001 before when it should’ve been somewhere between 1 and 4. After the surgery it was 80.

Several more medications and doctor’s appointments later I got set up with an okay-ish dose of hormones that should normalise this TSH but the key word in that is that it was going to be normal. So I would gain weight like healthy people did. And I did. Not a lot, or not terribly noticably but I did. I remember it was either 2016 or 2017 when I first tried dieting. I was 85kg at the time and I ate somewhere around 1500-1600 calories. I lost 4kg in 2 months. I was pretty proud of it but then I got bored and 85kg wasn’t anything to sneeze at so I just… stopped.

I can live with 85kg.

Earlier this year I tried losing weight just by working out but I wasn’t super serious about it. I enjoyed moving even though it hurt like hell and I wasn’t even weighing myself. Just being in shape would’ve been enough. But then I got tired, my spine was refusing to cooperate, and I thought… how heavy can I be? Somewhere around 85kg, right? That’s not too bad.

Cue a few months later when two things happened at once that kickstarted this whole madness. This is going to sound like I’m blaming outside sources for this but I promise you I’m not. If I’m blaming anything it’s beauty standards and society’s infallible methods of hammering twisted values in me.

So late July I decided to go to this thing called MCM Comic Con that was to be held in London late October. For that I was also going to meet up a good friend of mine and then consequentially several friend of their’s. That freaked me out on its own because, well, I’m me. So I thought to myself, oh boy, I can’t be ugly when I meet them, surely, or they’ll hate me! (That’s how people work after all, every single one of them, without exception!) It’s not like I can fix my face but I do wonder how much I weigh. Can’t be much more than 85kg, right?

I weighted 93.3kg.

Unacceptable.

Why? Fucking beats me, my dudes.

It was also late July that I got into this band called Blackpink which then started my downward spiral into kpop hell (jk ilu ♥) and of course my general reaction to pretty girls is “I want to be on you but I also want to be you” and well, seeing all those pretty skinny girls put that 93.3kg into perspective. (It was a shitty perspective but we all know that.)

So obviously, the only solution to my problem was that I had to lose weight so I wouldn’t be fat when I met my friends otherwise they would hate me. Like friends usually do when you’re fat, right? (Please, detect sarcasm.) The most heartbreaking part of this is that I knew that normal people, kind people, the people I know my friends are, wouldn’t hate me just cause I’m fat. (It’s a separate issue that I think they would totally hate me for my shitty personality but there are no diets for that so…) And more than anything I knew that I wouldn’t hate myself any less if I lost weight. I wasn’t going to do it for myself. I was going to do it so others would hate me less. Or like me more. Any of that works. Because my sense of self-worth is so rotten that this is all I have left.

Compliments that I’m looking so skinny now. Pulling up my shirt in front of a mirror and seeing a flat stomach and smiling even though just the thought of a damn biscuit makes me cry because I’m so hungry.

To prevent myself from going crazy (and it’s debatable whether I’ve succeeded) I tried to approach it as more of a challenge. Once I started shedding kilos and I got to like 80kg I didn’t care much for losing even more weight but I had to because it still wasn’t going to be enough. You know… for other people to like me. So it was more about seeing how little calories I could eat, and challenging my willpower more than anything. Once I lost enough weight to be satisfied with myself it was more about numbers than about self-image which is somewhat comforting but it’s still disturbing that despite being proud of myself already I kept going.

Another glimmer of hope is that I kept going into the thinspo tag on tumblr not because I was trying to inspire myself but because I was trying to scare myself. I don’t have an eating disorder and I know very little about them to be able to declare anything about the people in that tag. I also know that there are healthy people in thinspo as well so I’m not trying to generalise here but… the amount of hatred for food, for people who eat more than they should, and above all else, one’s self I’ve seen in that tag is insane.

That’s something I always wanted to consciously avoid because I know I’m prone to it. To see food as the enemy. The very thing that keeps this body alive. To see people who want to feed me as the enemy. To think they want anything other than to help me. To spite overweight people who are so “weak-willed” that they don’t even starve themselves… those are the ideals I was terrified of growing to relate to. Luckily, I didn’t, and I implore everyone to make a conscious effort not to. Because it’s poison.

I wish I’d learnt something from this but the fact is everything I would want myself to take away from this I already knew going into it. I know what the problem is and theoretically I know how to fix it but I just can’t, I can’t bring my garbage brain to do it. But maybe if I repeat it to myself enough times then I’ll get it at one point.

What I would want you to take away from this also sounds kind of hypocritical since… even I don’t believe it despite knowing it to be true. Don’t do it. Just don’t. You don’t deserve to torture yourselves and it’s not worth it. Whatever you think will make people like you is bullshit. You have to like yourself. Friends come and go and if you find people who base their friendship on what you look like, you gotta get out of there. The only friend you’re stuck with for a lifetime is yourself and you deserve kindness from you. And it’s such a tragedy to think anything but.