'How much weight have you lost now?'

Anon

The lowest I have been so far since the surgery was 105. I'm currently 108.5. I started at 112.5.

I stopped posting numbers all the time because I felt like I was putting a lot of pressure on myself about it that might not have been particularly helpful to the whole process. I find posting numbers very motivating when I am losing and very demotivational when I am not losing. So if I don't feel great about my numbers, I won't post them. At the very least, I've managed to weigh myself once per week or less which is better than back at the start where I was doing it multiple times per day.

It's been very hard to avoid the temptation to engage in dieting behaviours - sometimes I wonder if I just should. Then again, define 'dieting behaviours'... I do believe that the implant has made it so much easier to maintain the same weight, if not lose weight. It's not been for null.

You can ask me anything

Day 164

Back to basics.

I want to be somewhere between 70 and 90 kilograms – a comfortable size 14. Knowing my body and seeing the bodies of the women in my family I don’t think it would be realistic for me to expect my body to be smaller than this. I still consider myself chubby at this weight as opposed to say, words like ‘thin’ or ‘lean’ but this feels like the right weight for my body and I feel my best at this weight. At this weight, issues like reflux and joint stiffness in the morning resolve themselves.

I want to be fit, alert, and have energy. Regular medium to high impact exercise gives me this.

I want to feel good in my body as a result of the foods that I eat. My body feels best when I am eating leans meats, vegetables and not too many carbohydrates or sugars. I have concluded that I have some issues with carb addiction/cravings – it is easier for me to eat an appropriate amount of food for my body and to eat better foods when I do not have carbohydrate cravings.

Too much alcohol stuffs around with my feelings of clarity and control over carb cravings.

Too much weed stuffs around with my energy and my feelings of positivity.

Everything else is just detritus, things left over from the past, failed dieting attempts and bad experiences I’ve tied up with my fat. I can take those things, try my best to understand them, and pack them away. They will always be a part of me, but they are not me. My body isn’t a problem. My body is a gift.

You can ask me anything.

Days 161 - 163

When S first left Australia, I was still working in my uni job. To visit, it was necessary for me to get an extra job, I went back to waitressing, to lose the weight I’d gained while he was in Australia AND to save the money to go see him in Germany (and here might be where you really begin to appreciate that consideration of my weight infuses almost every part of my life). I worked with a surprising amount of Germans at this waitressing job – a higher end, but casual, restaurant attached to a higher end, by casual, pub in the city. Mostly business people (read: solicitors from top tier firms) and douchey twenty-somethings there to have something over priced to eat before they drink the night away.

Recently, almost a year since I finished up at that job, through one of the German wait staff, after her return home and via facebook, I was linked with 2 more German boys – both 20 years old, from Dresden and in Australia for one year. Young, dumb, full of cum. Beautiful, warm boys.

My old workmate wanted me to take these boys out to some nice places, maybe show them around a little. She gave me a short list of examples of nice places I should take them. But to be honest nice places aren’t really my bag. So I took them to The Victory, Downunder Bar and (hilariously!) the German Club instead.

Tonight was their last night in town – they’re headed up North with another friend from Dresden in a camper, then onward – so to top it all off we took them to karaoke at the Brunswick, in New Farm.

A guy who reminded me of one of the slimier lawyers I’ve worked with in the past put the crack on (if you could call it that). Pasty, shaved head, rubbery lips and a cheap suit. He opened by suggesting he had seen me at the races that day, which on a level was patently ridiculous being that I was at this point in a pub in boots, tights and a pleather jacket I’d clearly not worn to the races. No, he hadn’t seen my red lipstick and black hair running through the rain that day with my heels in my hands. Somehow he seemingly seamlessly segued into a crack about me being a ‘shemale’ and placed his hand over my vulva to ‘check’ that I ‘didn’t have a dick’. The thing that absolutely blows my mind is that all this ‘material’ was delivered to me with a warm smile, in the style of a come on.

I freeze and my eyes open wide.

He has made another joke. He is laughing. He puts his hand back on me briefly and then takes it off again.

I tell him, tersely, that he is not to touch me like that and that it’s incredibly rude to touch someone’s vagina without invite (what?). He apologised. I did not walk away. I do not want to make too much of a fuss.

I did not walk away.

I do not want to make too much of a fuss.

I did not walk away.

He starts talking to me about shaving. How? How the fuck did we come to be speaking about this?

Maybe I don’t want to drink anymore for a while.

He asks me if I am shaved. I am evasive. He asks me if my boyfriend prefers me shaved.

He is trying to confirm if I am available.

I laugh, I tell him my S is German and German guys shave. ‘Hey, look at this’, I take two steps and lift the arm of one of the German boys and I pull his sleeve to expose his smooth armpit.

When I turn back he has already moved on, he is engaged with one of his party. I am relieved to be disengaged from him.

The German boy with the naked armpit is confused as to why I have displayed him in this way. I explain to him briefly what has happened. He tells the two other boys and they are angry but businesslike – they want to hurt him. I tell them no, Br has already gone to tell the security guard and get him kicked out. This is better, because he will be gone and he boys will not put themselves at risk.

He is outside, he is smoking. I point him out to the boys.

The security guard is in front of me. He is letting me know that he has told this man that if it happens again there will be a problem. The security guard is gone.

I know the security guard, I have met him at closing at the Vic before, he used to work there, he is a friend of Br’s.

The boys are determined that something will happen. They are my security, they say.

I agree that if there is no stopping them then we will all have to leave straight after. I leave with Br to bring the car around so we can leave hastily.

When the boys exit through the front they are not rushing. There has been no fight. They confronted rubber lips and he said it was an accident. A female patron intervened.

I find myself explaining, as if providing a cultural tidbit as their mandated Australian guide, that this does not surprise me and this is not the first time that something like this has happened.

A friend mentioned to me the other day that a girl that he knows was assaulted when she was a minor by someone around my age now. I talk to him about what will be involved legally, incentives and disincentives that she might consider about taking a legal path, we agree that if any action is to be taken to bring this person to a punitive measure direct action is probably most effective. I confirm that many female lawyers do not believe they would not make a complaint of rape. I confirm that I have chosen not to make a complaint about sexual assault in the past.

Sometimes you can’t find any words. I am not a person this happens to often. But when this happens I cannot find words. I am simultaneously disgusted and completely unsurprised, resigned. Different male people have put their hands on my body uninvited so many times in public spaces, as if with no contemplation of rebuff. It’s this sense of entitlement that shocks, appalls and immobilises me. It terrifies me that these persons might act in such a way because they believe that I will not consider myself to be in a position to be picky about how I might receive attention.

How can this happen to me?

I think I am so fearless. I think I am so strong?

I did not walk away.

Happiness, Todd Solondz (1998). Camryn Manheim as Kristina talks about how she hates sex. She confides the story of her rape, eating directly from a pack of ice cream. She is a deer in headlights. I’m not sure that he doesn’t think he is giving her something she would never say no to, so he is unable to recognise or understand her lack of willingness for what it is. She is quietly distressed. She struggles little.

Are fat female bodies more likely to be subject to invasion in this way? I have assumed that I would feel more entitled to defend myself if I was thinner. I could be absolutely wrong.

You can ask me anything.

Days 158 - 160

A client is screaming at me. She doesn't understand that I'm not her enemy. She is crying. She has no food, no money for food, two children. I ask her if she would like a referral. She screams at me with more vigor. She shouldn't have to go to a charity.

She is under 50kg and if this isn't sorted out soon she'll end up back in hospital again.

I wonder if she can hear my fat over the phone. She's still screaming.

You can ask me anything.

Days 148 - 157

I haven’t forgotten about you.

I’ve had all of this swirling ambivalence. The same things again: One the one hand, intellectual, feminist, fat acceptance. On the other, concerns about youth, beauty and leanness which seem so legitimate because they come from what feels like such a primal, natural place, where things make sense just because they are so and for no other reason.

But isn’t that the real magic of patriarchy? It’s ability to convince you that it doesn’t exist.

It’s been quite a few years since I wanted to be thin. I’m not sure what came first, realising that fat girls are just as beautiful, or realising that I would never be a thin girl. It probably doesn’t matter.

Ainsley Crowhurst is the name of the girl who first made me consider the possibility that I did not need to be thin to be beautiful and I wish I knew where she was so I could thank her. In my mind it seems so much more likely that she is somewhere else, somewhere interesting and beautiful.

It occurs to me that it’s not my responsibility to be a role model of any kind. I want only to reassure you that the things you feel are normal and you are not alone. We are both moving toward happiness as best we can with the resources available to us.

Sometimes people will make you feel like you should have already reached a certain destination. Maybe mine is fat acceptance. But it’s ok that I can’t hold myself out to you as a glowing example of FA. I am what I am at this point, just like you. I’m not willing to reconstruct myself for the purpose of this exercise.

I read a story in one my Father’s Picture magazines. I was 12. When my parents would leave the house I would climb onto their bed to reach the top shelf of my Father’s wardrobe to pull out and read Picture. Girls younger than I am now with fake tits and makeup that didn’t match their wardrobe. Someone wrote in and recounted the story of banging some fat girl, they said it was like fucking a bowl of custard. That story haunts me.

So I guess it makes sense that I found it easier to think of myself as beautiful once I had confirmed with an amount of certainty that I was sexually attractive. How sad, the idea that if I was good enough at sex then my aesthetic failings would be somehow more forgivable. I wrapped this all up in a facade of sexual confidence for good measure. If I told a lover, the spell would lift and I would appear before him in unforgiving live action rather than as the bright stylised caricature of myself that I had drawn for him with my pouting, posing, my wit and charm.

The mistress Shame’s workings are mysterious. I suspect I thought that if I articulated it to him, the magic of us would be gone. He’d suddenly see it all: my bad breath, my blackheads, my proportionately too short legs, my old-lady hands. Our fantastic sex life had created a film over all my imperfections—isn’t that how it works with men?—and if I’d explicitly spelled out the problems, the veil would lift.

I comfort myself by drawing to mind all the naked bodies I have viewed in my life. I recall all my tender feelings. My gentle appraisal of the imperfections of the people I have loved.

I am certain we all feel the same.

You can ask me anything.