Find Love Together – Logan Briana

“How did you lose the weight?”

That is a question I have received over the recent months. I have lost around 40ish of the 60ish pounds I gained starting at the end of 2019. This isn’t a how to lose weight kind of post. But the answer to that question is another question. “What caused me to lose the weight?”

I went on antidepressants and I do believe that might have been a fraction of the reason I gained weight. In reality, I gained weight as a protection for myself. On top of that, I did hit an extreme depressive episode.

If you are a woman you know how much unwanted attention you can get from men. Some of that attention can be dangerous. Many women get hurt and even killed if they say no or respond in the wrong way.

I didn’t want any attention from men. I didn’t want them to look my way. I wanted to blend into the background. To an extent I did. It’s wild the difference of experiences I have had when I was fifty pounds heavier than where I am now. As much as I hate it, people, men and women, treat you differently depending on how you look.

I have had a couple of situations where I had people who should not have been interacting with me in the way they did. For a while, I thought it was my fault despite doing nothing wrong. I thought if I made myself less appealing then I would finally be doing what I needed to do to not attract these men. Men who should not be pursuing another woman. In my head, it was my fault that these men were having un-pure thoughts. It wasn’t.

For a while, shortly before and during the weight gain, I would have panic attacks just at the sight of a man let alone if he showed any acknowledgment that I existed.

It didn’t help that one day I was driving home from work during my lunch and a truck pulled right next to me blocking me into my driveway. There was no way that the men in this truck had seen me before I got into my car. So it wasn’t my body or clothing though that’s what people like to argue in these situations. The truck had pulled up out of nowhere. I hadn’t even closed my car door from getting out when the men were crawling out of the windows barking at me and yelling gross things. For the first time in my life, I was afraid. For one, there were at least four of them and just me so if they were to do anything I wouldn’t be able to fight back. They knew where I lived. Though they did eventually drive away, I was afraid they’d come back. Unlike other situations, they felt feral and I was their prey. Nothing else. Let alone a human.

The gained weight helped fend off some of the unwanted attention. It also came with its own issues. For one, my body couldn’t handle that much weight. Like my mom, I can hold my weight in the sense that I don’t look as big as I actually am. Though I didn’t look 220 pounds, my bones and other parts of my body could feel that weight. I was in physical pain.

Shortly before I chose to lose the weight I had hit one of my biggest depressive episodes. I had been working on eating in general. I have always been an emotional eater, but I was also one who chose not to eat as a form of control. I’ve always had that back-and-forth battle. I was in a place where I was emotionally eating. I also fixate on and have safe foods. There are many times if I can’t eat these foods, then I can’t eat.

When I chose to lose weight it wasn’t actually to lose the weight. It was me choosing to get my life back. In reality, it was me choosing to be more active even if that meant I went on walks and nothing else. I tried to eat “healthier” and more consistently. I chose and began to heal. I was holding onto so much of the trauma pre-2019 and then the aftermath of it the following years. Thankfully I have never been sexually assaulted, but I have been harassed in a sexual way many times over my life.

A big part of my healing was when I found a man who could love me in the ways I needed but didn’t see me in the ways men had always seen me. I was finally able to experience and see that there were men who could interact with a woman and not in a sexual way.

That gave me strength. I knew I would probably begin to get more attention as I lost weight. I was becoming happier in general. I believe no matter what you look like if you are genuinely happy people are attracted to that. I was worried about where it would send me. I had to get through a lot of triggers throughout the last year of losing weight. There were things I loved to do and wear that I couldn’t because it put me back in a negative place. I had to fight for what I wanted and the things that once made me happy but others had taken that happiness away.

During quarantine, I binge-watched My 600lb Life. The majority of these people had gained weight and found comfort in food after they had been sexually abused or assaulted. I know people personally who have done the same thing. When something like this happens you have to reanalyze your relationship with food. It is always going to be a necessity. I have a feeling the comfort it brings is always going to be there. It’s learning how to not make it solely a thing that you need but that you can enjoy but enjoy healthily.

When I first chose to get my life back I had the goal of being healthy. Not pretty. Not thin. Healthy.

Are the things I am doing, not just related to food, healthy?

My mental and spiritual health. Am I doing what I need to satisfy those needs? You learn that food and exercise do play a huge part (especially in my case). I also need to ask myself, am I giving myself time to read, do art, write, etc? I catch myself doing these less, especially in a world full of phones. I am and will always be a TV girl. Give me all of the shows and movies. At least when I was younger I would also draw or do something creative. Now, I am scrolling on my phone. It is one of the reasons I enjoy watching shows and movies in other languages because it forces me to not be on my phone.

It’s finding that balance. It’s finding the parts in life that are worth working for despite what hardships might come with that.

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Iris Murdoch