The Skinny Little Bitch Project: Naked, Slimy, Ponies.

The Skinny Little Bitch Project is a biweekly feature dedicated to examining the role of weight in celebrity culture and the impact of size in one woman’s daily life. The entries may be triggering should you suffer from an ED or body image issues. For more info on the project, or to read it from the beginning, please go here. This is not a health plan we are endorsing, we do not promote dieting and hope this project will increase awareness.  Please read at your own risk.

“It’s like I’m a newborn pony,” I said, ignoring the Scotch in front of me because my head is throbbing. I’m chewing ice and chugging water hoping to shut it up. It’s been a long week, between my new play closing, out of town guests, and no access to bread.  My friend nods, he gets what I’m saying but it’s like I’m not communicating exactly what I want to say -my life’s problem, when it comes to really talking versus oh, writing it all down. I don’t just mean that a version of me losing weight has me feeling physically and emotionally ungainly, although that’s part of it. Sure, I stumble and fall, and emotionally I’m a bit precocious, all “this is a feeling?” and then falling over, only to get back up again and try to get all four of my legs working. That’s the part of what I’m saying that’s easy to understand. It’s the other part that I haven’t managed to say right yet.

Let’s try it here: I feel slimy and foreign and odd – like an alien, and I don’t know if I like who I am or if I’m grossed out by this funky little creature.

“You okay?” asks a friend, when I check out my appearance with her, looking for praises and assurances. “Yeah, I’m fine, why?” I ask. “It’s just you’ve been asking me that a lot likely and it’s different for you.” She’s right, I don’t normally check in with other people about how I look – I tend to breeze through that aspect of my life with a false bravado, and a joy for employing the costume we select to face the day. Not these days, now I carefully consider the clothes and the makeup – and all to the end of journalism. I wear things I might not usually wear to see how it changes my behavior. The joke is it’s only making me more self-conscious – which means I’m not really wearing the costume. Wearing it would mean walking out the door and asking no questions. A woman who looks the way I have been pretending to look doesn’t need the assurance of every passerby.

It’s a shit or get off the pot thing – I want to do a study about how being this way changes my life, but I’m scared to JUST DO IT because I don’t want people thinking I’m casting off who I really am. The funny thing is, I think people get more worried about me when I don’t just straight up commit – it’s the lack of commitment to the physical presentation side of this project that reveals my slimy, baby pony side, not the actual project itself.

“Hi! I pretend to have my shit together, but really I’ve stalled out at the emotional age of 12 because my self-loathing for my looks and my body kept me from really allowing true intimacy!”

I’m reading this book called A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. In it, he says, there are two types of women – the kind with clear, easy to understand edges, and the kind whose edges are out of focus, fuzzy – the kind of woman identified as mysterious, and they are mysterious – very often they are a mystery even to themselves. There are also two types of men – and these types can be distinguished by their preference for these types of women. I think regardless of how I present physically, I’m always going to the second kind of fuzzy-edged, mysterious women and this will always present a certain challenge in how I relate to people. When I approach it all rationally I know that to be true, I know I’m capable of engaging with other people fully. I can’t honestly see how tight pants and mascara could change something so elemental in my own nature – but it’s fascinating that using the tricks and tools of womanhood fully would shake my core that way.

This week I hit the month mark in terms of a change in my diet. As if to reward my bestial diet-mind, I lost two pounds this week instead of just the one I’ve been averaging. To be fair, I was stuck in bed vomiting up my soul for one full day this week, which could also speak to the rapid loss. Everyone is being really gracious and calling my day of puke a stomach bug, but the truth is probably closer to me, scotch, a shot of a licorice liquor, and not enough food in my belly, mixed with my stressed to the breaking point body, equaled complete intestinal rebellion. I couldn’t hold down water, I thought about going to the ER for fluid replenishment because I’m dramatic by nature.

I ruminated darkly that maybe I’ve been drinking too much. booze being the totem I put all my other food lusts upon, and then I wept because I could not eat saltines. I settled my stomach with sugar free Jell-o, but the shame took a while longer to cure. You can always tell a hangover by the endorphin crash and subsequent sense of total and complete self-loathing. Luckily I rallied from even the cruelest chemical byproducts of the damage I’d done, and realized, after an assist from some pork loin,  that with a mostly-protein diet, I have to double check on how much I’ve eaten before I do things like drink alcohol and exercise. I thought I’d crossed this one off the list during my first week, when I realized just how quickly I could go from fine to kill-a-man hungry, but apparently learning what my body actually needs to keep it moving and healthy and well isn’t so easily done: A supplemental bar in my purse is fine for a between meals crash, but it probably won’t sustain me should I plan on painting the town in any sort of flaming hue.

I found out yesterday that my sister has lost 50 pounds! I knew she’d taken up more exercise and she has been searching for a diet to make her feel better and healthier for as long as I’ve known her – but I hadn’t realized how intensive her new regime was. It’s funny that we’ve both taken up this stuff, at similar times, and without any sort of discussion of it. Sister twin-ness sneaks up on us a times – I buy a pair of pants and find out that she, halfway across the country, has purchased the same pair. I look at photos she’s sent me and cannot get over the physical transformation. As proud as I am of her and as clear as her happiness is shining from her eyes, I have to check myself and make sure my first response to these photos isn’t “None of this matters – I love you, I will always love you, and I’m so honored to be able to watch you grow into the amazing woman you continue to become regardless of shape, size, color or dimension!” I tell her this too, but I congratulate her first. It’s not tricky to congratulate someone who’s been working towards something with such vigor – it seems to come naturally. But anyone who’s lost weight or changed their appearance dramatically will tell you – it’s weird to be on the other end of that rallying cry. As happy as you are, part of you wants to laugh, “Was it really so bad? Come on, guys, my fat didn’t hurt you, it was a harmless, fluffy little guy, let’s maybe not be so aggressive in our appreciation of his vanquishing.”

STARTING WEIGHT: 205 lbs

GOAL WEIGHT: 130 lbs

JULY 23TH

WEIGHT: 198.6

AMOUNT TO LOSE: 68.6

JULY 30TH

WEIGHT: 196.6

AUGUST 6th

Weight: 194.6

AUGUST 20th

WEIGHT: 193.6

AUGUST 27th

WEIGHT: 191.6

AMOUNT TO LOSE: 61.6

TOTAL WEIGHT LOSS TO DATE: 13.4 POUNDS.