Women of all sizes can be insecure about their weight and changes in their body.
Health Life

Even A Skinny Girl Can Feel Like A Cow

Women of all sizes can be insecure about their weight and changes in their body.

I feel like a cow: a big, fat, fucking cow on a quarantined dairy farm. This is the heaviest I’ve been in a long time and, aside from starvation, nothing has worked to help me lose weight. Everything is snug; even my fat pants, and to make matters worse, my hair is falling out.

At first, I blamed it on menopause, I mean, what else could it be? Then a friend suggested I have my thyroid checked, so I made an appointment a few weeks later. But when I shared this alleged condition with the doctor, she brushed it off with a snicker and blood test that was negative while encouraging me to find the origin of my anxiety. Apparently, stress is a lot more annoying than I thought.

I have always been petite—still am, in fact—but it isn’t quite that simple. I work very hard to control my weight. It is a never-ending internal dispute between what I want and what I should have and the cravings rarely triumph.

In my younger days, the gym was my second home. I worked out seven days a week, two hours a day, 364 days a year… and that’s only because L.A. Fitness was closed on Christmas day. But it’s hard to maintain a schedule like that when you’re responsible for another life and, when our daughter was born, my routine became all about taking care of her.

Motherhood is an exercise all its own, but it was never enough for me. I’d sneak out whenever a window of opportunity presented itself and be grateful for the time I had, all while convincing myself that the lull was only temporary.

I was wrong.

Though my workouts are not nearly what they once were, they are something I refuse to give up. Not only is it a vain maneuver to control my weight, but it has also allowed me to burn off an extraordinary amount of unwanted anxiety. In other words, I need to go to the gym to maintain whatever is left of my sanity. Even so, the physical results are no longer visible. There seems to be more flesh and less muscle. It’s like my body is at war with my eyes and waving a hideous flag of victory in my face EVERY FUCKING DAY. I feel like a loser: the biggest loser… the one who never wins.

Oh sure, my party-infused banter online is convincing, but the truth is that I barely drink enough alcohol to kill a fish and only smoke when my hair is on fire. I haven’t eaten red meat since my 27th birthday, rarely touch fried foods, and only over-indulge on granular bait when Aunt Flo makes a pit stop at my menopausal door. Still, I am terrified of becoming overweight and fighting the inevitable certainty tooth and nail.

For the love of elasticity, please tell me I’m not alone!

It is assumed that women who are petite do not understand the compulsion to be thin, that we were born that way and—”Oh, poor you for not being able to zip up your undersized jeans.” The truth is that a lot of us struggle to be thin, even when we already are. And, though it may seem like a shallow objection to complacency, it is an honest concern for those of us tackling the blockade that IS our own fucking pants.

We all know that metabolism slows down as you age, but until it happens to you, the reality is hard to fathom. We see what we see and discipline ourselves accordingly, but I am living proof that things aren’t always as they seem, which is why we should never judge a book by its cover.

It is an egotistical pickle, and it if it were tangible, I’d probably eat it.

This post was originally published on Sassypiehole.