On Having Lost Some Weight After Recovery

It’s like when I don’t have it, I’m not good enough—but when I do, it’s all I have

Most people reading this probably know at least a little bit about my eating-disorder-to-recovery timeline. I made sure you did: Losing weight, figuring out something was wrong, and eventually recovering enough to regain a lot of what I lost became my whole personality as a writer for a while. And for good reason. Each step in the process was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. 

The jawline’s been hitting different these days

Then, late last year, after holding steady at one size for my entire five-year-long recovery up to that point, I noticed I’d lost some weight. I won’t belabor the why too much—as the kids say, IYKYK—but my clothes were suddenly roomier and my jawline more distinct, and I hadn’t done much to pursue those changes. Mostly, I’d been sad—sad enough to have no appetite, which is a tier beyond that more common level of sadness that makes one want to eat more. This dynamic is pretty accessible to me in a way that’s directly attributable to my history of anorexia—whenever anything in my life starts going even slightly off the rails, there’s a mischievous and comforting little voice that says, at least you can stop eating. While the changes I saw late last year started out organically, I soon began to lean in. I went to bed hungry, stopped trying the interesting-looking pastries that caught my eye at coffee shops on occasion. I didn’t go anywhere near as far as I have in the past; I kept my hair and my period. But still. I was restricting. (And if you’re reading this, My Therapist, yes, I’m sorry: I lied to you.)

My already-in-place restrictive habits were then given an official hall pass: I was scheduled for an ayahuasca retreat (I know, I’ve mentioned this here before—the first rule of doing ayahuasca is you only talk about ayahuasca), which involves a fairly extensive pre-retreat set of dietary limitations known as la dieta. For more than a month before the trip, I eschewed alcohol and pork; two weeks prior, I gave up beef, peanuts, soy products, and anything with high levels of sugar, salt, or grease. A week before, the salt and refined sugar restrictions doubled down—not less, but none—along with dairy, “overripe foods,” caffeine, and iced drinks. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

Body image was part of what I hoped to confront on the retreat in the first place—mine, like so many women’s, has always been so fucked up—and although ayahuasca has shown promise in the world of eating disorder treatment, I’d wondered from the start how la dieta would play into the dynamic. Indeed, there was a kind of jolt there; I did revel in having an excuse to turn down lunch invites, to have two Lärabars and call it dinner, to pass up the cake making the rounds at a good friend’s wedding. There is a kind of pride, a kind of smug self-righteousness in it. And, yes: It was helping me grow smaller.

The ayahuasca ceremonies themselves are… too much to describe here. (I am writing about them, and I’m certain they will show up in some descriptive depth at some point in this newsletter.) But of course body image did come up, and of course the message I received was the same one I’ve already received in so many other contexts, psychedelic and otherwise: Your physical appearance just doesn’t matter that much, silly. After my second ceremony, I made a note in my journal for a future pitch idea: Ayahuasca told me my boobs are fine. 

But still. Even the headiest revelations are hard to hold onto after thirty-plus years of enculturation in the opposite direction.

At the time of this writing, the retreat is two weeks in the rearview, and—almost without noticing it happen—I’ve seemed to settle at a new, smaller size. It’s a not-insignificant amount of weight I lost: enough that I’ve had to replace all of the leggings I wear almost daily; enough that I sized down my jeans once, then again. Enough that I have, yes, noticed a shift—another—in the way I’m perceived as I walk through the world: more turning heads, more smiles. 

It is disheartening and intoxicating, this realization. It is also the subject of the memoir I have, for the last two years, largely abandoned. When I lost 80 pounds in my early 20s, it became glaringly obvious that—despite all our hopes to the contrary, despite all the Amy-Schumer’s-I-Feel-Pretty-esque messaging that it’s all about confidence, actually—indeed, the shape of my body had (and has) a direct and massive impact on the way I, the person inside it, was perceived. After extreme weight loss, men I already knew introduced themselves to me as if I’d fallen from the sky, anew. They hadn’t even noticed me before, and now they wanted to date me.

While the attention from men was the most obvious (and exciting) effect, it was far from the only one. Doctors, who’d long knit their eyebrows together in my presence, now praised me—a star pupil as I watched the counterweights on the sliding scale stop earlier than ever before. I suddenly registered to the grocery-store strangers who’d always looked right past me; now, they nodded, even smiled. I could traipse into any clothing store and sweep some stretch of fabric cleanly over my body, suddenly one meant for them—suddenly one meant for anything, everything in this world.

And while the effect hasn’t been as stark this time around—I only ever gained back about half the weight I’d lost in my 20s, and estimate now I’ve lost about half of that—there are some appreciable differences.

Namely, the boys again.

After my retreat, I flew to Fort Lauderdale, my hometown. It seemed right, after such an intense and rebirth-adjacent experience, to go back to the place I grew up. As I walked through the sliding glass door toward hotel check-in, the boy behind the counter—and I say boy and mean it, he was probably ten years my junior—flashed a killer smile at me in the midst of his interaction with another guest. Before the night was over, he’d asked if he could take me to dinner, to get a glass of wine, maybe for just a walk. He was cute—and insistent. 

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I felt dazed when I saw you.”

For a number of reasons, I demurred. (And, through the sheen of flattery, felt a thread of anxiety as I curled up in bed that night; did hotel employees have a universal key? I flipped the deadbolt.) Still, this felt like an external validation of the change I’d already been noticing: It had been a long time since a stranger had asked me out in person. At my thinnest, it happened often.

A couple weeks later, after I’d returned home and started settling back into my life, a man from the ayahuasca retreat slid into my DMs. He’d caught my eye; he was tall and tattooed with a thick Cockney accent, and by happenstance, his mat had been placed next to mine in ceremony.

He asked how I was doing now that we’d all gone back to our real lives, then apologized if he’d been “acting weird around [me]” for the last couple days of the retreat. 

“I hadn’t noticed anything,” I said—though my pulse quickened. I’d felt certain I’d been entirely invisible to this man, that he was approximately a light-year out of my league. Cleary, the eye-catching had been mutual.

A couple days later, another message from him came through: “I really wanna tell you something haha.”

Here we go, I thought. It came back to me so quickly and easily: the simultaneous spark and dismissal I felt toward the men who were attracted to me in a way I had, having worn all my bodies, enough context to understand was conditional.

I won’t recapitulate our text stream here, but we acknowledged our mutual attraction in a brief, sweet exchange; it wasn’t going anywhere, we agreed, but it was nice to know. He then went on, not five minutes later, to solicit me for—I could not possibly make this up—feet pictures. When I said no, he went on to ask for photos of “those perfect soles” at least three more times over the course of as many days as I tried, failed, and eventually gave up trying to stir up a conversation about any other topic.

Everyone’s got their thing, and though I don’t understand the foot thing, there’s no intrinsic shame in it. But never—not when an anonymous young man lifted up my skirt on a main Albuquerque drag in broad daylight; not when a dance-floor stranger fitted his palm suddenly and silently around my breast—had I felt so objectified as in this moment. I’d sat beside this man for long, dark hours and heard him heave up his guts; I’d listened as he delved in our daytime gatherings into his trauma. I’d remembered his sad smile, his quietly chaotic energy, his story—the details of which, to protect his anonymity, I won’t recount here. He’d remembered… my feet. (Update in the interest of fairness: He has since apologized in earnest.)

In all the times I’ve been heaviest in my life, I’ve carried this sense of invisibility—one that, as discussed above, is at least a little bit true. As a corollary, I always feel like as soon as I’m thinner, everything will break wide open. I’ll be seen again, and therefore understood, and therefore loved.

But these boys whose eyes suddenly swivel once my curves are more curated are not seeing me. They’re just looking. And though, yes, such looks can sometimes evolve into intimacy, they most often remain at a surface level that’s it’s own kind of invisibility.

Later, I’m trying to express this dynamic to someone close to me. I’m still figuring out what I mean.

“It’s like when I don’t have it,” I say—it here being some nebulous level of hotness—“I’m not good enough. But when I do have it, it’s all I have.”

“That’s a good line,” says my interlocutor.

“Thanks,” I respond. “I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years.”

And I have. And I’m so fucking annoyed that I have. I’m definitely not the first person to point this out, but Jesus: How much of my one wild and precious life, how much irretrievable time and energy have I expended on worrying about my body?

And there’s the kicker: In some sense, you’re invisible either way. At least to the wrong people. And maybe, just maybe, there really is something to the “it’s all about confidence” approach. Maybe that aphorism’s corollary is also true: You’ll always be visible to the right people, no matter what. 

I don’t know where my body is going, weight-wise—or by any other metric, for that matter. We never really do; one of the things that kickstarted my recovery from anorexia was the realization that I would continue to age in ways that had nothing to do with my weight, ways that are completely out of my control. My hair will continue to gray (a process that started when I was only 24). My skin will continue to lose its elasticity.

And—tellingly on many levels—I feel the need to add in some disclaimer here: My body is still so imperfect. My loose, round belly persists. My thighs rub as they always will. I’m still not what I think anyone would call thin. But of course, I have also come to understand that I’m an unreliable narrator. I didn’t think I was thin at my very smallest and sickest, when my hair was falling out in fistfuls, when I didn’t have a menstrual cycle for three solid years.

I feel fairly certain I’ll regain some amount of this weight—that’s just statistical probability. And I know I’ll always fluctuate. Bodies change, and circumstances change, too. For now, all I can do is sit with the fact that, unfortunately—and extremely understandably—I do like my body more when it’s smaller. Even if it’s another type of invisibility, objectification sure feels a lot better than being ignored does.

Because it’s still power. And it’s still something like, some thin facsimile of, belonging. 

The work to do now, I think, is to try to find the better version of that feeling internally—to offer belonging to myself in a way that is unconditional. To look in the mirror and see less my body, in all its ongoing permutations, and see, simply, me. To pay myself a kind of attention that is not contingent on something as ultimately irrelevant as a few inches of flesh.