Changes

Yesterday, C was tired, and I went for the Sunday Shop at the grocery store alone. It was late in the day, the sun just beginning to set, and the parking lot was almost deserted. Instead of my usual hand-held basket, I got a cart, and began shopping. I filled my basket with cans of crushed tomatoes, ground turkey, sliced turkey breast, whole wheat bread, romaine lettuce, strawberries, onions, garlic, a few light TV dinners for those emergency moments where cooking isn't an option, dry curd cottage cheese, skim mozzarella. I put my purchases on the conveyer belt and refused help out to the car. I loaded the groceries into the trunk, and as I put on my seatbelt, I realized something. Lifting and carrying heavy grocery bags is easier than it used to be; I no longer heave myself in and out of the car; I don't have to pull the seatbelt out to its longest setting. These are very small things, very small effects of the thirty pounds I've lost so far, yet they are profound, and important.

It has been shown by neuroscientists that human beings can remember the experiences of pleasure, pain or ease, but they can't feel the sensations. So while we recall that something was painful or pleasurable or easy or hard, we don't get the oomph that comes with the actual experience. We begin to forget the pain, lose the memory of the pleasure. I've been doing it for decades with my weight. Forgetting the embarrassment of not being able to fit in a seat, not noticing when my feet got sore from standing too long, generally ignoring all goings on beneath my neck as a coping mechanism. And every day I woke up and forgot it all so that I could stay sane and okay enough with myself to just keep going, to keep living. I can't say there has been all that much pleasure to my physical existence, other than the time I spent with C, so I haven't lost any memories there.

My mother is my height, and used to keep her weight between 130-150 pounds. In the last five years, she has gained more than 100 pounds, and is for the first time in our lives, morbidly obese, like me. She frequently tells me what it feels like to be thin -- I don't know the feeling, because I have never been thin -- but I think I am finally beginning to get a glimpse. Getting healthier, getting thinner, isn't going to come with some kind of bright golden light and revelatory, seismic shift between fat and thin. It's going to be marked by little things, like getting up from the couch without any effort, like being able to sit Indian-style without my legs going to sleep, like putting on clothes and not having them cut painfully into my belly. I never realized how much those things hurt until now, when they're gone. I'm writing this down now because while I know I will forget the sensations, I want to remember feeling them.