Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

My therapist asked me yesterday if I had any concept of what it would be like to weigh under 300 pounds. Now, I’m a smart girl with a very rich imagination. I’m an artist, who likes to explore new concepts and push the boundaries of reality and thought. I’m a researcher, who enjoys envisioning new frontiers.

But, no. Try as I might, sitting there in her office, I just couldn’t imagine life at anything under 300 pounds. Sure, I hemmed and hawed a bit. I mused about the carefully built persona that didn’t care about weight — a desperate defense against what I was doing to my body. I explained that for years I’ve derided scales and weight-loss programs and fashion magazines.

I honestly have no idea how much I weighed when I graduated from high school. I remember wearing a size 18 dress to Sophomore Slide with Chris Adams when I was 16 years old, and I got some mileage out of that dress for another year or so after that, but I also remember plumping out of it. I think the chemistry of my body really began to change, and I experienced my first true bout with depression, at the end of high school and beginning of college. The collision of those two events produced what I can only assume was a rapid acquisition of 100 pounds or more. I’ve kept those 100 around (plus or minus 20-30 of their brothers and sisters) ever since.

It wasn’t long before I outgrew the average bathroom scale which, as is advertised right there on their cheerless dial faces, do not weigh anything over 300 pounds. Sometimes I got curious, but I was never able to get an accurate reading except at the doctor’s office, and even then I usually asked them not to tell me.

But, as my therapist pointed out, with all of this occurring around the end of high school, I’ve never in my adult life experienced a body that weighed less than 300 pounds. I can’t imagine a job interview, a first date (which occurs anywhere but at a gymnasium dance), or a rent payment made with anything other than a body weighing over 300 pounds. Not to mystify the number or assign too much significance to it, but… man. That’s going to be quite the head trip.

I don’t actually know how much my highest weight was. I do know that it was over 350. The doctor’s scale only measured up to 350 so, when I stepped on it and obviously hung far past the 350 mark, the kind nurse simply wrote “360?” on the chart and walked away. I imagine that it was more like 370. Anything below 330 is completely new territory for me.

It’s terrifying.