Never again but always

I will (hopefully) never again be fat. I will, however, always be a chubby girl no matter how not-chubby I get.  I know that the internets are filled with story after story of fat people losing weight, but I think mine is unique (don't we all.) I guess its primary difference is that I wasn't always fat. I gained a lot of weight and then I lost it. So the real trauma was the weight gain rather than the weight loss or process therein.

So, I have never been a skinny girl. I tried to be a ballerina, but that doesn't work so well for girls with boobs and hips. The whole tall thing wasn't working for me so well either. Anyway, I always felt that I was big when in reality I was pretty average sized. The fact that my mom weighs 100 pounds on a heavy day doesn't help with the whole comparison thing.

Anyway, at some point, I became really okay with my body. This had to do with a number of circumstances: I quit ballet, left home, was getting laid with quite a bit of regularity, and was living a much more active lifestyle. Again, I wasn't skinny, but I was slender, and I was fit. Then depression happened.

It happened normally enough -- a bad breakup that I never really got over. First I lost about five pounds. Then my parents insisted that I go see a psychiatrist who put me on this medication that in addition to turning me into a zombie and giving me suicidal compulsions, also caused me to gain about 20 pounds over the course of 3 months. By the end of it, I looked like this:

Now, it's not horrible, but I did not feel good. I did not like myself. I was so angry at my lack of self control and my inability to motivate myself to get active and just get rid of those pounds. Never mind that I was depressed enough that I couldn't motivate myself to get to class much less exercise. Of course, at this point I was also in an inherently sex negative  relationship with a Christian virgin so I wasn't even burning the calories I would typically burn with rampant fucking. Life, in short was hard.

Then I dumped the Christian, started dating someone who would actually fuck me, stopped being depressed, got on some good medications (with a different psychiatrist), and went to Italy where I was walking to and from school every day. I then came back to the states, got depressed again, got dumped by the new boyfriend, and lost more weight through the not-so-healthy technique that I refer to as stress not-eating. All-in-all I lost about 30 pounds and ended up looking more like this:

The thing is, I don't feel thin. I still often feel fat and undesirable. In comparison, when I actually was fat, I often felt incredibly sexy and lovely. I guess the moral is...your weight does not define you or your sexiness. At the same time, your health does. I feel gross when I am unhealthy, when I eat a bunch of junk food, which my uterus is trying to forcibly expel itself from my body. When I feel sexy, I'm usually being healthy, eating well, working out. So be healthy people. Which is my way of saying...BE SEXY.