Trigger warning for talking about weight loss/gain.
In the fall of 2017, when I was 19 years old, I lost a lot of weight. I was on a medication for chronic migraine that was working well at first, but did come with a lot of side effects — including weight loss.
I didn’t mind the weight loss. At my lowest adult weight, I was about 10-15 pounds away from what is considered “normal” or “healthy” for my age, height, and sex. And I got lots of compliments on the weight loss, too.
But that wasn’t the full story.
That semester, I was often bedridden. I failed all of my classes that semester. I had a really hard time getting up even just to eat or go to the bathroom (I had a friend who would walk over to my dorm sometimes and walk with me to the cafeteria because he wanted to make sure I was eating something, even if it wasn’t a lot). I had awful brain fog, my memory sucked, and eventually the medication was no longer helping at all – meaning I ended up dealing with not only the side effects, but also the terrible migraine pain I’ve become so accustomed to throughout my life.
And yet, even when people knew how sick I was and knew why I’d lost weight, they still complimented me.
Now, as an almost-25-year-old, my body at its healthiest tends to be in the 200-230 pounds weight range. Is it ideal? Not really; I wouldn’t mind losing weight if I could do so in a healthy way.
But when I am staying fed, hydrated, and rested, when I’m moving my body around a lot, I tend to stay in that range. When I am at my overall healthiest, I also weigh more.
I’m learning that’s okay. I’m learning to love and care for myself as I am, not as some idealized future thin version of myself that may or may not ever come to be. This life is too short to waste time trying to make myself fit into the boxes of diet culture and fatphobia. And if I do lose weight, I don’t want sickness to be the reason I lose weight.
I want to be healthy. And right now, with my medications and routines and day-to-day life, I am (relatively) healthy. My pain is mostly well-managed.
I’m still disabled and chronically ill. I don’t anticipate that changing. And I can take pride in my identity as a disabled person because disability isn’t inherently negative.
But I feel so much better than I did in the fall of 2017. I weigh more, and because of that I may seem less healthy; but the reality is, I do *feel* significantly better. My body seems to be content, happy, healthy at a higher weight, and that is okay.
So when people open up about weight gain or loss, please remember this: not all weight gain is bad, not all weight loss is good. Both can be healthy or unhealthy; they can both be extreme or mundane. They can both impact a person’s health, positively or negatively.
Believe people about their own bodies and lived experiences.
This is my body and my experience: that I tend to lose weight when I am sicker and weigh more when I am healthier. And I don’t want to punish or harm my body for simply existing and doing its best to keep me alive.
Through Her Eyes 