The Road to Self Acceptance is Closed Due to Inclement Weather

So let's talk about weight gain.

I am lucky.
It is very difficult to say that, because I do not feel lucky very often. Admitting that there is a genetic advantage contained within my fleshy coda is so outside the realm of my sarcastic, cynical, body dysmorphic self perception is LIKE REAL HARD.

But I am.
I hit puberty with a bang and blossomed fairly completely over the course of about a year or two. I was fourteen, one hundred and forty pounds, five foot eight, menstruating, and wearing a 34 B in the eighth grade.
For the most part, my weight leveled out there.
I got wicked sick at the end of the school year, and sick again as a freshman in high school and lost some weight, about ten pounds, but it came back by senior year, and I was fairly comfortable in that I knew what my body looked like in a mirror. I had a little belly. My legs were pretty long, and kind of naturally muscular. My arms were flab, my skin was pale and freckled. My shoulders and posture were straight and good.

When I went off to college I yo-yoed a bit.
I lost weight at first. I went out dancing a bunch, ate weird food that had never been in my house growing up, went on adventures with friends, and didn't pay too close attention to my body's looks.
Then I gained a bit of weight unexpectedly.
I cut off my hair, I kept dancing, but I just ate more. I don't recall eating anything in particular.
I do, however, recall going home for christmas break at the age of 19, and weighing in on the ancient, black, plastic scale my parents' owned at 152 pounds.

I was appalled.
I didn't recognize this number. It lashed across my mental battlefield like it had been written in fire. Suddenly, my body felt unacceptable: my tummy protuberant over the waist of my jeans, my legs rubbing together when I walked, clothes from high school I had meant to bring back with me to school were too tight across the bosom. I remember feeling like I had failed. Next stop: Whale City. I would turn into one of those women who rode rascal scooters in wal-mart on her way to buy powder pink sweatpants so large that one of my sisters could fit in each leg. I pictured rolls of fat over my jeans when i sat down turning into the dreaded fupa. I poked and prodded and pinched at my body with new, judgmental eyes. Where had I gone wrong?

I realize ten pounds is hardly something to stroke out over.
In the real world people gain twenty five pounds when they go to college. Some people gain seventy. Some people work hard to lose a hundred pounds in a year and then gain fifty back and are happier that way.

I had so little experience with the needle deviating more than five pounds above or below the 140 mark, that I could not stop thinking about it when I got back to school. I must be out of control and not know it, I concluded. I needed to tighten up ranks, get back in line, sort myself out.

The process, as you now know, lead me to develop anorexia the following year.
I remember coming home that next Christmas at the age of 20, getting on the scale and seeing my lowest weight, the lowest I had ever (and will ever) been. 115.
I had lost almost 40 pounds in one year.
I had also lost my period, two hours of sleep every morning to sit ups, leg lifts, and crunches, the ability to generate my own warmth, and any normal perception of food. It is twelve years later, and I have yet to regain the positive and healthy attitude toward food I possessed before my disorder.

Yesterday, I got on the glass scale my husband purchased a couple of years ago when he decided he wanted to lose weight. I was 154.

The last time I weighed myself, before Christmas I was 147.
I've been eating all over the place.
I know my relationship to food right now is not healthy. I get obsessed with the things in my cupboards. I get obsessed with the pastries I am surrounded by at the bakery. I do not trust myself around any of it, and so I eat uncontrollably, and miserably. I do not recall the last time I took in a mouthful of food without the thoughts,
"You don't deserve this. If you were stronger, you'd put this fork down. Don't you know how many people in the world are hungrier than you, needier than you, more worthy of this food than you, and they don't get it, but you do. You stuff yourself with this shit because you're weak. You're pathetic. You deserve to look like a fat, pale whale. You don't deserve love. You are disgusting."
I am in full fledged panic mode.

Food fills me with fear right now.

I hate feeling hungry, and I feel hungry all the time.
It is a very uncontrollable feeling, and it makes me feel unsafe. The thoughts are not confined just to food anymore. Anytime I am near food, feel full or un-full. When I am dreading a meal or an outing where food will be offered to me. I am constantly worried about it.

And I thought I was doing so well.

I know there is a part of me that is deeply unhappy with my job right now. In my work I rarely get to stand up for myself, and so I am almost always overlooked, taken for granted, and compromised. I know that these are the reasons I hate doing what I do, and I recognize that I need to move away from this job because the longer I am there the worse it will get.

Those trapped, immobilized feelings have amplified with the recent deposit of over three feet of snow on my town in the course of eight days.
They are further exacerbated by the trips everyone close to me have taken in the past two weeks.
My employers went to costa rica.
My youngest sister and father went to england. My sister stayed.
My second youngest sister went to the bahamas.
My best friend went to florida.

I mean COME ON!

Is it any wonder I feel like I might be fossilizing within my own flesh?

I find cold comfort in hideous synchronicities.
My husband has gained about twelve pounds since his miraculous weight loss of thirty five this summer.
Both our dog and cat are ravenous constantly fighting each other to get to their food bowls and throwing fits if we don't feed them at exactly the same times each day.

Perhaps this is the season?

Deep down I want to believe that.
I want to think that I will leave my job, move away from these harsh new england winters, and suddenly be awash with self control and self love. I will shed those twelve extra pounds like magic, without running forty miles a week (Like I did last summer), or starving myself (like in college).

But if all else fails and this is just the next phase of my body. What I look like now at thirty two is 154 pounds and that is that?
What then?