Today, September 27, is the exact day, four years ago, when I started losing weight. Over the last four years, I've lost 113.8 pounds.

This is not a particularly easy post for me to write. There are certainly a great number of people in my life who know about my weight loss, as I'm still quite close to many of the people who were in my life four years ago, but there are also a great number of people who know nothing about it whatsoever. I've met a lot of new people in the last four years and I don't really walk around wearing a tshirt that says "Former Lardass." (Although that would be an awesome tshirt.) (Hmmmm....)

It's not a pleasant memory, it was not a pleasant time, and for as little as I invest in a belief in a higher power, I feel nothing short of blessed for having gotten to the other side of it. So it's not necessarily enjoyable to broadcast, especially to people outside of my safe little bubble of close friends and weight loss supporters. More frightening for me, though, than discussing it, is showing people the before photo. No matter how thin a formerly fat person gets, she still feels ashamed of what once was. So this is not an easy post for me to write. Yes, and. Follow the fear, right?

I sat at a diner late last night with a group of improvisor friends and classmates, none of whom knew me when I was heavy, none of whom know I've lost a lot of weight, which is definitely not something you can tell just by looking at me. We were playing a game at the diner called "two truths and a lie" where you share two true things about yourself, you tell one lie, and everyone guesses which are which. Once the game really got going, some people were sharing some really vulnerable stuff...stuff about death or surgery or other painful experiences in their lives. So I jumped in feet first and chose as one of my "truths" to share that I've lost over 100 pounds. It wasn't a terrible thing to share; people don't run away or cower in fear or turn their heads in disgust when you share something like this. But it still isn't a comfortable discussion for me, so watching myself make an active choice to share this information was interesting to me. For some reason, I felt compelled to share with this table full of new friends this piece of my history. (Does anyone want me to use the word "share" again? I'd be happy to.) Perhaps some of the shame of that which "once was" is dissipating. I'm so far away from that fat person now, and today, four years later, I'm going to honor that.

I will never forget the sensation of being heavy. It's a terrible, painful, lonely, constant struggle. It is one of the most crippling diseases a person can live through, especially a young woman, because it impacts literally every aspect of her entire life. Being fat is a filter through which she experiences the world, the same way being blind might be, except that being fat is not a condition that society has much patience or compassion for. Being fat alters her sense of her friends, her job, her family, her education, the men in her life. It impacts her understanding of communication and need and want and desire and love. It's like some kind of drug that skews her perception of the whole world around her until she can no longer see where normal problems end and fat problems begin and, like substance addiction, the longer she tolerates this condition, the more mired she finds herself in a spiral of confusing, murky, cuttingly difficult feelings and experiences that never seem to improve.

I would never go back to that time for anything in the world, but I suppose I do feel a little lucky to have a very intimate relationship with such a different world view from the one most healthy, thin people experience. It's a unique perspective on life to have seen it from two completely different windows, almost like I've lived two separate lives. It has, if anything, provided me with a wisdom and depth of which I'm not afraid to be quite proud. (Who's gay? Me.)

It's incredibly strange to be so far away from being fat that it's only a vague memory. In this case, though, incredibly strange = really fuckin cool.

Here's to Four Years.

(I love how I'm making the same face in these two photos. It's the "Fine. How's this smile?" face.)

Okay. Enough with the serious topics. Back to hilarity and guffawing....