The fat feeling

It’s a feeling I know well.

It creeps under my skin like an itch and sends volts through my limbs. My leg bounces up and down, up and down, up and down. My stomach is heavy and my mind muddled. I catch myself breathing a bit harder, and then I recognize this state.

Oh, yes, I know this feeling.

It’s my fat feeling. Not as in “Ugh, I feel fat,” but as in “I am absolutely not good enough because my body is not good enough.” It’s the feeling that I am to abandon all of my other life goals and pursue only thinness. It’s the all-consuming, never-ending feeling of associating my entire worth to the shape of my stomach.

For years, I would suppress these emotions until I couldn’t any longer and they exploded out of me in tears and rage. Then, in the last year, for no real reason that I can pinpoint, the feeling stopped showing up as much, and when it did I could usually brush it off and continue on with my day.

Sometimes, though, it lingers a bit more and today it hung on like a light fog — persistent but only in the background. Although there were several contributing factors (stress, social media photos) today’s episode originates from the looming holiday.

There will be stuffing and potatoes and pies. There will be seconds, maybe thirds and definitely leftovers. There will be excess.

I don’t intend to eat dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free Thanksgiving substitutes or even implement rules to avoid overeating, because I know shame will come regardless. It will come and I will want to fix it with exercise and promising to be better. I will walk past a mirror eight times to make sure I haven’t doubled in size and I will check the waist of my pants to reassure myself they still fit.

But I am not alone. Many will complain they ate too much. They will feel uncomfortable and unworthy. They, too, will want to fix it and some may go to extreme measures to do so.

I’ve come to accept that I will likely never go through big holidays without worrying about how fat I look. I know I can’t rid my mind of such thoughts or suddenly slip into a woman who can eat pie without a hint of regret. That’s just not me.

Yet, I’ve come along way from the young girl who threw up meals in alleys or obsessively counted calories in old journals. I mostly eat the foods I want, paying more attention to nutrition than calories, but that feeling still comes and still haunts me. I can’t change that.

But I can learn to sit with it, to not judge it or suppress it. To let the feeling says what it needs to say and then move on. It can be heard, but it doesn’t have to roar.

So, tonight, I let it talk and then come Thursday I enjoy my life as a healthy, thriving woman.