Taking Care of Myself

I need to lose a significant amount of weight for health reasons and quality of life reasons. I would feel better and I could do more things if I were smaller. A few years ago, I was doing much better. Most days I ate fewer than 1,700 calories, and I walked up to 20 miles a week, and I did yard work. I wasn’t exactly strong, and I wasn’t up to doing anything strenuous, but for me–someone who has had to battle chronic severe depression, someone who survived a brain tumor, someone who has hernias–I was doing good. I was at the top of my form. But still, I was a bit chubby. When you’re 5’4” and over 40, it’s hard to keep the weight off, but I’ve been at least a little chunky since the age of 9 or 10. Probably because of genetics in part, I imagine. But I was allowed my fill of junk food when I was a kid, too. My parents were raised during a time when scarcity of food was common, so they thought fat was healthy. And I had been in poor health when I was a little kid, and I had been underweight. So they didn’t try to restrict my diet in any way when I started gaining weight. My mother was my primary caregiver, and she was simply too out of it to pay much attention to what I was eating. If I wanted chocolate bars and potato chips, she let me have them.

Slowly, I started to pick up on the fact that some thought I was fat, and eventually I heard the comments and the put downs regularly. It made me feel ashamed of myself, and it all got mixed in with the homophobia, too. I could not acknowledge my feelings, and not one of the boys I found attractive showed the slightest bit of interest in me. Of course, nearly all of them were straight, and even if they weren’t, they couldn’t say anything for the same reasons I couldn’t say anything. It was too dangerous. But I began to feel like no one wanted me because I was undesirable. I felt ugly and worthless.

I did slim down a little in high school, and when I moved to Morgantown to attend WVU and discovered the small, secret LGBT community there, I was noticed and I got picked up. It was thrilling. But several of the guys I slept with told me after that I’d be “really hot” if I lost twenty pounds. Well, I can’t say that I disagreed with them because I wanted to loose that twenty pounds, too. I was attracted to thin guys, so I wanted to be one myself. But the thing is, I was at about the right weight for me. In order to be smaller, I would have had to starve myself or run five miles a day or both. It just wasn’t worth it. So for a long time, I gave up completely, and gained an enormous amount of weight. I later realized that you don’t have to look like what you’re attracted to. And those guys who were rude enough to tell me that I was too fat after I had blown them, they probably would have found some other reason to complain if I had been the prototypical twink boy. They were jerks. What do you say when someone goes down on their knees in front of you and gives you pleasure? Answer: Thank you!

These days, I’m trying to learn to take care of myself–which takes a serious dose of self-love–and I’m trying to accept the way I look. I know that 99.9% of the guys I find attractive aren’t going to be interested in me, and that’s fine. They can like whoever they like, and they don’t owe me a damn thing. I’m simply going to own my feelings and celebrate my sense of beauty without expecting anything in return.