YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I obsess over my weight all of the time and I really feel like a worthless piece of shit because of it. Not the obsession, but the weight. I don't like seeing people who knew me when I was thinner. I try to avoid it. And, also, I really really hate when people tell me I'm just "natural" and I should be fat. Or that I would look weird skinny. To me, it's like they're telling me I was born to be a worthless piece of shit. It's ok, you're meant to be miserable and pathetic. I have anxiety and depression. When anxiety wins, I can harness it to be skinny- sometimes it gets a bit disordered. When depression wins, I become a fat lump- sometimes that gets disordered. It's difficult to get the energy to be healthy because being this way just really fuels the self-hatred. I just wanna be invisible until I'm a size 0. hehe. But, even when I'm thin, I still want to be thinner. But I think I'd rather be skinny and miserable than fat and miserable. It's shallow, I guess, but it's real and common and shitty.

I totally understand feeling like a piece of shit. For me it's occasionally my weight that makes me feel worthless, but more often it's a laundry list of other things instead. I wish none of us felt that way about ourselves. It hurts. One sure way to make myself cry is to look at a picture of myself when I was a kid and imagine myself saying those things aloud to that boy--the same words that rattle around in my head all day now. That was hard to write.

I obsess over my weight all of the time and I really feel like a worthless piece of shit because of it. Not the obsession, but the weight. I don't like seeing people who knew me when I was thinner. I try to avoid it. And, also, I really really hate when people tell me I'm just "natural" and I should be fat.

I do this, too. I'm a guy and generally don't feel comfortable talking about my body issues with anyone -- even with other guy friends who openly discuss their body issues. To the best of my ability, I try to conceal how much it bothers me.

This one time, I was at some friendly gathering and saw this older woman I hadn't seen in a few years. She came up to me, all smiles, gave me a hug, told me that I looked great. Then she unleashed the payload: "You've gained weight -- I think your body needed it!" I wanted to die.

I would rather be sick and thin than healthy and fat. Even when I'm relatively thin/fit, as I am now, I obsess over the imperfections. There are times, I just don't want to be seen. Times it's a challenge just to step out of the apartment. I'll avoid going to a party if I don't feel like I look good enough. I unfriended and blocked a girl on Facebook who was always tagging me in pictures when I'd hang out in her social circle. (There were other reasons I blocked her, too.)

I just started dating someone. We were lying in bed and she remarked to me, "I'm so glad you're comfortable with your body." And I just thought, "You have no idea..." She doesn't know that I'm working out extra hard right now so that I can "earn" her. Because there's a part of me that feels like I don't deserve someone like her.

I was overweight growing up, through adolescence. Dropped a lot of weight right before I got to college and reinvented myself as a thin guy. Ever since then, it's been a war.

Ugh, this is a subject I can totally relate to. My mom (who at 78 weighs the same as she did in college - we are forever hearing about her 6 am exercise class) was the "fattest girl in her 4th grade class." I was unfortunate enough to be chubby for a few years as a child and was put on weight watchers in 4th grade. When I graduated from college I was overweight - I was a size 10 at 5' 4", 140 lbs, borderline overweight. The first thing my mom said when I moved back home after college was "the family thinks you're fat." Then she gave me some dexatrim and told me not to tell my dad.

My best friend from childhood said it's a fucking miracle that my two sisters and I don't have eating disorders. Fortunately I realized the benefits of healthy eating and exercise. But it plagues me. I track what I eat and weigh myself almost every day. Lately I will give myself a break for a day or two on the weekend and I feel so much better about myself when I do that. Intellectually I know that no one really cares (well except my mom LOL) if I'm a size 8 or a size 6. But at 46 these bad habits are ingrained. I'm trying my damnedest not to pass this craziness on to my own daughters.

I can't even imagine what people in LA go through with this body image crap. At least I'm in Chicago where we're pretty well covered up for 6 months out of the year.

Thanks for your touching responses, guys. I felt like such shit about myself I couldn't even come back to the forum for some reason.

I just opened the website now, actually, and closed it cuz I...well I just kind of hate me right now.

But, reading this actually made me feel better. I feel so stupid that I care this much about my weight, but I do. I cry over it. I think about dying because of it. It's stupid, and it's not centralized on weight.

I have been going to the gym every day before work, and it makes me feel better. I am doing it more for the depression than weight, but that's lurking there in the back of my head.

I can relate about your mom, nextyear. My mom is super petite, less than 5 feet tall and super tiny and I am probably the fattest person in my immediate family. My dad was fat. He abandoned me but left me fatness to remember him by. lol. Anyway, here's something incredibly sick- my mom had a heart attack a few years ago and lost all kinds of weight in the hospital, and I swear I resented the shit out of her for it. But she also bragged about it. I'm like, you almost died! That's why you lost it. No will power. lol. I am really fucked up with my competition with my mom, so everything like that...I feel like I can relate to it.

It's important to remember that society constantly tells us about an impossible standard. For women, especially, it can be hard. I think the writings of Susan Douglas (Enlightened Sexism), as well as the recent documentary Miss Representation only recently shed light on this. But everything - from beauty product ads to sitcoms - tell us that looking normal is hideous and we should feel ashamed of ourselves.

I consider myself a feminist, yet I've been diagnosed with an eating disorder recently and fat-shame myself far more than I'd like to admit. I think it's ironic that these messages are so prevalent that even the smartest of us end up believing them after a certain point - and the majority of Americans actually are overweight.