Guest Post: Liz Mallory

THIN WOMAN GAINS WEIGHT

So many articles and vlogs have titles like that. They're followed by a deluge of derision, praise, and censure. They make me uncomfortable, even if I agree with whatever point the author's making.

I've always been on the narrower end of the body scale. I come from slight-framed people and I have a host of food issues--severe hypoglycemia, super-tasting, and a finicky stomach--which keep me smaller. It's nothing I've done: it's my genetics. On the flip side, it's only happenstance that I live in a time period where being a lower BMI is a good thing. This makes me culturally lucky. I don't have to try so hard to meet common standards of beauty.

But it's wrong to assume only larger women are affected by our Western craze over skinniness. Being thin leaves me in constant fear of losing my status and desirability should my body decide to change things up on me. Call it shallow if you will, but I can't help fearing what I would look like if I were to gain weight.

My main "problem" that kept me skinny all these years is that I'm a hypoglycemic who sometimes doesn't want to eat. I have chronic low blood sugar that requires me to constantly snack, plus a stomach that gets upset for no reason every other day or so. Between the two, I don't eat enough and what I do eat goes to maintaining my blood sugar levels.

On one of my ER visits after a blood sugar crash, the doc told me that gaining weight would help me with my health. I wouldn't crash as quickly if I had more fat reserves. (Especially around my liver. How am I supposed to gain fat around my liver?)

On the outside, I joked, "I have permission to gain weight!" But internally, I thought, "I'll just keep carrying food with me everywhere I go. And a note on my phone's home screen saying SEVERE HYPOGLYCEMIA in big letters. That'll be enough."

But finally, in the last year, I have gained weight. I have a husband who checks in with me and makes me eat. He encourages me to eat the foods I feel like eating, even if they're "unhealthy," because my body needs the sustenance more than the censure. He's nice to me, and that makes me be nice to myself too.

So my salad-and-cheese regimen includes things like ice cream and chicken. Spaghetti with ground beef. Orange chicken on rice--real chicken, not the Trader Joe's vegetarian option. Food with heft.

So here I am. A new weight.

On the one hand, I haven't had any dangerous blood sugar crashes in a while. And I have better curves. I should be excited. But on the other hand, not all of that fat went places I want it to. I bend over and I actually get a crease in my abdomen. The world must be coming to an end.

I know in my head that gaining weight is good for me. It was one of my resolutions for 2015. Sometimes I look in the mirror and see the woman I want to be, the one who's got a little extra padding and who is healthy and who feels like she can actually make it through the day without starving to death.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see someone who is fat and ugly, even though I don't want to see her, even though I know she's not real. It's a battle in my head that goes down every time: which woman will I see? That in itself makes me ashamed. I'm not an insecure person. I like who I am. I'm confident. I'm unafraid. But even confident people have their doubts. We all see the ugly in ourselves.

Everyone has inspiring messages about how to beat yourself at the mirror game, how to overcome your brain's tendency to increase the amount of flesh it sees and make your body appear soft and mushy around the edges. I don't. I don't know if that insecurity ever goes away for any of us, or if we simply decide to stop looking mirrors. I can't tell you how to stop caring how fat or thin you are. I don't know.

All I know is that winning at the mirror game doesn't actually matter. Even when I don't like what I see, I know in my head that I'm healthier. That's the point of what I'm doing. I'm not doing this for my looks. I'm doing this so that I survive longer and have more energy to enjoy my life. I'm doing this so I can be happy.

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Elizabeth Mallory is a writer, editor, and blogger at elizmallory.com. When she's not drowning in well-brewed tea and an overabundance of cat fur, she can be found in a nook somewhere reading fantasy novels and watching too much Buffy. As a bisexual Christian, Liz loves dialoguing about spiritual intersections and seeing diverse representation in fiction, and is a staunch advocate of the We Need Diverse Books campaign. You can follow her on Twitter: @Eliz_Mallory.