Too Rich or Too Thin -- Part I

“You can never be too rich or too thin.” True or false? Well, we know you can be too thin, actually. As an American, my mind’s eye flashes to those grotesque pictures of anorexic actresses gleefully displayed on the cover of Us magazine. But anorexia is only a symptom of other problems – and lack of food is not usually one of them. In real life there are stick-thin Sudanese refugees, street junkies, cancer patients whose bodies waste away, inmates of Nazi death camps. Yes, you can be too thin.

You can also, obviously, be too fat. Bariatric surgery is becoming more popular as more and more bodies grow to the point where their own flesh becomes a disease. And there are diets and exercise plans all meant to thin us down. But not too much. There is a balance point. There is, despite the cliché, such a thing as “thin enough”.

After 11 years of participating in a support group for compulsive eaters, I thought I was thin enough. My weight had been the same for years – 168, plus or minus a pound or two. At 5’ 11”, that was a perfectly fine weight, and it was great to rest there instead of constantly yo-yoing up and down. I knew, for the first time in my life, exactly what size I was. I could go to a rack of pants, grab a size 12 and know it would fit. Doctors never said I needed to lose weight. I didn’t mind seeing myself naked. I was thin enough, for the first time in my life.

 Of course this was actually a mental state. This was not the first time in my adult life that I had been 168 pounds or even less, but it was the first time I’d been able to face my thighs in the mirror without flinching. Since I was nine years old, I’d been convinced I was fat, starting new diets each morning only to finish each night with a binge, if I even made it to night. I devoured magazines like Seventeen, Vogue, Elle, and Self. Self was my bible. I felt comradeship with all those women who, like me, would be fine if we could only firm our thighs, lose five pounds, get in shape. Never mind that I was not a woman yet, being only nine. I had bought the line. I could never be too thin. I kept trying.

I was well into my thirties when I finally became thin enough. I stopped thinking about my weight. My clothes fit. Each day I woke up and put on my size 12s. There was no need to weigh myself. When I would pick up one of those magazines in a doctor’s office, I would quickly put it down, disgusted with that shallow world of diet and beauty that used to fascinate me with its wonders that were just out of reach. I just needed to try harder and have more willpower. Finally I realized that I was not just thin enough but also pretty enough. I stopped thinking about it.

Then I lost 10 pounds. It just happened. People kept saying, “You’ve lost weight,” and I would say, “No, I haven’t, but thanks.” I don’t weigh myself that often, and when I did I thought the scale was broken. But then my pants started getting too big. I tried a few different scales and they all confirmed that I was somewhere between 153 and 158, depending on the day. Suddenly I was worried. Was I too thin? Trying on clothes at a thrift store with my mother one day, I saw my projecting collarbones in the mirror and said, “I look gaunt.” My mother helpfully told me not to lose any more weight. I said I’d do what I could but since I didn’t even know how I had lost the weight in the first place, I wasn’t really sure how to stop. It doesn’t matter. My weight seems to have stabilized. I am now a size 10, but I don’t trust it. I don’t know if I’ll ever have that unconscious confidence I had when I was a size 12.

The thing I’m trying to get at is that I was thin enough, and now I’m thinner. So what happens when you have “enough” of something but then you get more? What does that do to the “enoughness”?

Unfortunately, I think what happens is that the standard for what constitutes enough just goes up. For me, I have to say that I’ve become attached to being this thin. When I eat too much and feel like I could start putting the weight back on, I immediately cut down or exercise more. And this is odd because I had been happy where I was and in fact was disturbed when I first started losing weight. But now I don’t want to give the extra thinness up. What if I discover that cancer is the reason I lost the weight, and once the cancer is treated, my weight will go back to where it was? How will I feel about it then? Will I feel lucky to be alive, or will I just feel fat?