Maintenance Phase
A goopy Hexxus from Fern Gully (1992)
Content Warning: mention of weight, dieting, and fatphobic doctors.
This past winter was cold; my teeth chattered the rest of my bones into a series of convulsing aches each time I walked out to my car and waited for the windows to defrost. It was an unfamiliar feeling: I’ve always run hot. I have an iconic childhood photo that shows me cross country skiing in a red, hibiscus flower tank top (almost as red as my face is most days), and up until this winter, I’d wear shorts any day the temperatures were over 32 degrees. One of my core childhood memories is a friend and I talking about mammals, then stripping down to our underwear and running out into the fresh snow on the porch, shrieking “warm blooded,” sprinting in circles, and making snow angels until my mom finally tempted us inside with warm drinks. Feeling the cold was a surprise.
The change likely has something to do with the fact that I’ve lost 40 pounds in the last eight months. After being at the same weight for almost 12 years, with slight variations only when I was a collegiate athlete, or twice during depressive episodes, this last year, without a real shift in any of my habits, my body shifted.
This weight loss wasn’t intentional, so what became even more chilling than the cold was the resurgence of a pietistic, moralistic voice in my head. I haven’t been trying to lose weight, yet this voice congratulates me for “doing so well” or finally “figuring it out.”
According to doctors, I’ve been “obese” since I was 16, when I was put on hormonal birth control to try and manage my horrific heavy periods and cramping. I had a hard time accepting that when I was younger, especially since I had a whole suite of health issues, and doctors often dismissed all of them with the instruction to first try losing weight. Unable to figure out how that word “obese” fit in with my other identities (at the forefront of those “athlete”), I tried to shape my body into the able “athlete” image with food. For a year of high school I ate for breakfast each morning: one piece of whole wheat toast with a smear of peanut butter and half a grapefruit. Lunch was an apple and a cup of raw spinach. I’d exercise for nearly four hours a day. My weight didn’t change, but I felt dizzy and weak constantly.
One day my mom approached me in tears—she was worried about my weight: I’d stopped more times than usual on our hike up Manastash Ridge. She thought it was because I was fat, and I didn’t know how to tell her it was because I was eating less than 1000 calories a day. That moment always stands out to me as the one when I first realized that fighting my fatness was the thing keeping me from power, not being fat. Being “obese” wasn’t causing my health issues or preventing me from doing what I loved: it was doctors refusing to listen to me and extreme dieting that was hurting my body.
The first time I went to an orthopedic doctor about my knee pain at 16, he had me get an MRI, then told me my knees hurt because I needed to lose weight. I spent almost a year trying to eat less and exercise more (even though I was already biking the ten miles to school and participating in multiple sports). When I finally got a second opinion, the doctor told me that my first MRI clearly showed that my ACL was torn, and by the second MRI it looked like two ends of a frayed rope: I’d been literally running around for a year without an ACL and had torn my meniscus and MCL and fractured the base of my femur in the process. If the first doctor had actually looked at the scan he’d ordered, it would have saved me a year of excruciating pain and extended damage. But he never looked past my waistline.
As a collegiate rower, I started passing out from menstrual pain and blood loss, and I noticed that intense exercise worsened the issue. While I was explaining this to a doctor, she interrupted me to ask if I’d “ever tried exercising.” When I reminded her that I’d just said I was an NCAA athlete, she casually suggested that I quit, as if someone who looked like me couldn’t possibly be that invested in the sport. By then, though, I knew that her bias was a reflection on her practice, not on my health.
Many doctors see a fat person and don’t bother looking any further. They recommend losing weight not because there’s evidence it will alleviate any of the specific health concerns you’ve brought forward, but simply because they believe it is bad to be fat.
I watched this fatphobia resurface in many frustrating and baffling ways over the years, including when I would start new medications for my mood disorder. Twice, I had psychiatrists recommend medications they admitted were “less effective” than others, but the others, they said, would likely make me gain more weight. They were surprised when I asserted that I would rather gain 20 pounds and be stable–mentally healthy–than be slightly thinner and unhealthy. Having health professionals openly prioritize weight over the effectiveness of medications didn’t surprise me, as disappointing as that is to write.
About a year into being on the medication I take now, I posted this on Instagram:
I’ve been thinking a lot this last week about the way our culture views weight gain, specifically the euphemism “they let themself go.” Partly, that phrase has been stuck in my head because—if you consider it for a second—you begin to wonder why letting yourself go is considered a terrible, no-good, very bad thing after all. I’ve been gaining weight steadily for the last couple years, and, yes, I’ve let myself go: I let myself go to trivia night at the bar; I let myself go to brunch with my parents; I let myself go out to eat to celebrate a friend’s birthday; I let myself go on long hikes fueled by lots and lots of delicious snacks; and I let myself go on a medication that causes significant weight gain, because I’d rather be happy, and round, and free than in a constant battle to be slim. And that’s what I am, and what I have been for a while: happy, and round, and free 🍊
I thought, then, that I’d finally fully made peace with my weight–with being perceived as fat. I thought I’d vanquished the fatphobic voice inside my head, planted there by doctors who shamelessly mismanaged my health and by a culture that values appearances over acceptance and support. Yet there it was this winter. With every pound that melted off me, it congealed into a larger, goopy, Hexxus presence in my subconscious. Unbidden came the thought: “you’re doing something right.”
Something right?
The only real differences that I can identify in my “lifestyle” in the last eight months are that I mostly stopped eating a food I’m slightly allergic to (except for when I really want carrot cake or a bahn mi), and that this is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without a major medical disaster.
This week marks two years since my partial lung collapse. Aside from an ER visit earlier this year for a bad reaction to a new medication, that lung collapse two years ago was my last real emergency. I’ve also noticed my proneness to injury and chronic fatigue and pain steadily fading as I entered my fifth year on Testosterone. I haven’t had a monster period, or any period for that matter, in over two years. Maybe it’s the hormone therapy that’s made me less disabled. Maybe it’s not. I’m an anecdote; there’s no science and no theory here.
I see in the unreliable, n1, self-reported timeline that my body has been “healthier” as of late, and only later, I noticed a change in my body’s shape. So what does this self-righteous voice even mean by “doing something right” when I’ve not been “doing” anything at all? And how dare it look back at my years of self-advocacy, self-compassion, and self-led learning as if that version of me were doing something wrong?
This insidious, polluting presence in my brain is the same voice that must have played in people’s minds as I described my habits, and they still ignored everything I was saying in order to skip to the part where they dismissed my body as a moral failing. So, when it first started it’s gurgling whisper like Fern Gully’s Hexxus, my gut reaction was “oh fuck no.”
There’s a phrase in diet and weight loss culture: “maintenance phase.” It refers to the period in weight cycling where you try, desperately, to maintain your current weight. When I had the thought pop into my head during this unintentional weight loss, “I hope I don’t gain it back,” I realized there was something much more important for me to maintain than the weight. I need to maintain my resistance to moralizing weight. To associating worth with something that has nothing to do with it.
As people around me began making more and more comments about how I’ve been looking “so much better” lately, I had to seek out some external support. Luckily, I stumbled across the perfect voices to counter my Skinny Hexxus brain worm: Aubrey Gordan and Michael Hobbes on their aptly named podcast, Maintenance Phase. These two researchers-turned-science-communicators dedicate their episodes to debunking pop science and wellness-industry myths. They take delicious deep dives into the origins of faulty statistics, quack doctors, messy methods sections, and suspicious supplements.
These self-described “Methodology Queens” have been an enormous help in reminding me that I’m not privy to some special, secret knowledge, I’m just a little skinnier than I’ve been in a while. And from them, I’ve been learning so much. In the delightful structure of their show, one of them will pull together an enormous amount of research and explain their chosen phenomena or celebrity health claim to the other. Aubrey Gordon’s laugh and Michael Hobbes’s snarky comments never fail to make me smile, even as they tackle serious topics. Please, please, please add them to your podcast rotation for a healthy dose of humor and rigorous research (and so that we can talk about Maintenance Phase!).
It’s Beltane–the start of summer–and I no longer have a chill in my bones, and–now–less of a chill in my heart. I lost 40 pounds in the last eight months, and my goal is not to maintain the weight I’m at (I don’t need to be a popsicle again next winter); instead, my goal is to maintain my curiosity and compassion, a task with actual ethical obligation, unlike losing weight.
