I’ve been struggling pretty badly with body issues lately. I’ve been working on losing weight for over 3 years now with a lone 6-month break when I was going through my divorce where I regained 25 pounds (now lost).
One rather unsexy problem I’m having is that of loose skin. I’ve lucked out during the process and have had virtually no overhang on my abdomen whatsoever, a pannus or “belly apron,” and most areas of my body have snapped back quite nicely over the months and years. Really the only place that’s problematic at this point is my breasts:
“I have to warn you,” I’d told Skyspook that first night in his bed last May. “I have a lot of loose skin.” I said it shyly, and it seemed to take him aback. After all, I was the one who had stripped down into my bra and panties and climbed underneath the covers, hot and bothered from kissing on the stairs. “It’s the worst on my breasts,” I added. “I’m a work in progress.”
He accepted it easily, told me that some people even have a fetish for it (loose skin), said to him it represented how far I’d come, how much hard work I’d put into losing weight.
As my weight has stayed more of less stable (slight gains and losses) over the time I’ve been in Ohio, I found miraculously my loose skin had virtually disappeared in November/December. I was doing scenes naked at the dungeon, confident about my body in a way I hadn’t been in a while. Sure, I still could stand to lose a few pounds, but I felt like I was looking pretty good. I’d even found bras that fit me great.
Enter January 3. Since then, Skyspook and I have been working really hard at diet and exercise, and I’ve lost a fair amount of weight in a short period of time. Enter doughy, floppy weird breasts. Doing the constant checks to make sure my cleavage isn’t crooked.
I know it’s only temporary, that time, water, and exercise will help tremendously, that I’ve inherited good skin elasticity from my mother and am still relatively young, and that if I truly feel the need when it’s all said and done (2 years after I FINISH losing 100% of my weight) that I can get corrective surgery on the excess skin.
Still, it plays the most fiendish games with my mind and mood.
My body image problems leave me feeling conflicted. The feelings of insecurity and stress are there. They’re real, but at the same time, I feel like I’m betraying my past self.
I can just see her now. I’ve turned into one of those “skinny bitches” I used to hold in secret disdain, a relatively normal-sized girl totally fixated on a handful of vanity pounds, aspiring to get to a lower than average size because I’ll be able to easily score cheap designer duds on eBay and in consignment and thrift stores if I get to a more unusually small size. I want to look good in a cat suit. And I’d like to get running short races again.
I’ve lost sight of the things that matter, that people no longer stare at me when I eat out at restaurants, that I can walk more than 5 feet at a time without crippling back pain, that I don’t have to layer 4 much-too-small bras to support the weight of breasts larger than my head, that my size no longer prevents me from performing proper hygiene.
I’ve become fixated on my remaining imperfections and ungrateful.
Yet the feelings refuse to yield to logic.