Weight: A Love Story

“Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.” ―Geneen Roth

I’m not sure if it was WWI or the Irish potato famine that caused my grandmother to be such an enemy of the plump, the chubby, the…fat. She passed this down to my parents who, especially my mother, were capable of judging an entire population based on their weight. When they visited me in Chicago they told me, “We love it here. Why is everyone so fat?” Which they weren’t except they were but who cares? My years of living in New York City during the eighties, one of the most fat phobic decades ever, I was broke so I walked nearly everywhere, but like most New Yorkers also took public transportation which burned plenty of calories. You were thin, you wore black. I had seen eating disorders up close, a woman I stayed with in Paris kept horrible bits of food in jars all over her flat and often arrived at the end of a restaurant meal to eat scraps from the table.

photo by Jessie Shaw

I was trying to be an actress and you better believe thinner was better. I had never been overweight, especially as a serious workout person but until my oldest sister was killed, I had been average or maybe, in the eyes of some fascist aerobics instructor, chunky. I definitely had a broad frame and big bones so when I dropped thirty pounds in a severe depression people who knew me were worried while the roles I was asked to audition for greatly increased. The meds kept me in a low fugue state, but nobody cared. I was skinny! I was young! I was pretty and made prettier in the eyes of some by the jutting hip bones and knife sharp cheekbones. My parents nodded their approval while total strangers approached me to ask me out.

As I lay on my futon crying, I realized the power of the thin thing. I no longer had to pay for meals; I was treated like a precious object. Never mind the deadness of my eyes, my posture of defeat and grief. I was thin. But it meant absolutely nothing. Attaining this coveted attribute helped me realize that like so many things, it had been oversold. I was still heartbroken and exhausted, incapable of joy, a walking wraith of a girl.

It got better. I met my ex-husband, no longer skinny but still thin, New York City thin, and we got married. I got pregnant and for the first time in my life felt completely at peace with my body. I ate crab cakes, banoffee pudding, whole milk in my one cup of coffee, until we moved to London and I had my baby.

“Can you give me a timeline for losing the baby weight?” This was delivered to me by the father of my child who, three months previous, had witnessed my seventy-two hours of back labor. We were at a pool, and I was wearing a bathing suit feeling, God forbid, as if I could finally exhale. It was a moment that destroyed so many things, my self-confidence, my trust in this man, my self-hatred returning like a long-lost enemy to tell me that I was worthless. But I was a mother and could not descend into the darkness I knew too well. I had a gorgeous, healthy baby boy and when I looked back at old pictures I saw I was a beaming, potbellied little girl, with a bad haircut, who smiled at the camera like she knew the truth.

Now, sixty-eight, I haven’t weighed myself in years. Occasionally I see my weight in a doctor’s report, and I am amazed that I look so good and weigh so much. I can swim a mile in open water; I am without cancer or any life-threatening illnesses. I am grateful for this strong, aging body that has provided me with a life filled with joy. 

– Molly Moynahan