I suspect that even if I do get down to 160 or 140 pounds, I will still feel like a fat girl. Being fat has become part of my identity, just like being smart or being good with computers.

To not be that girl anymore will be weird. It would be like suddenly becoming very stupid or to suddenly have excellent social skills. It’s not part of what I’ve come to define as “me.”

I think if I do lose weight it will take me several years at least to adjust to the personal changes it causes in me as well as the changes in which society treats me. I’m used to being ignored in public, to never have guys check me out or hit on me, to shopping only at the fat girl stores like Lane Bryant. I think I’ll come to realize just how much obesity changes the way people treat me when I cease to be obese.

I look forward to seeing how much my physical change will change the perceptions of everyone around me as well as my perception of myself.

After someone starts topping 200 pounds or so, the general public has a hard time determining just how much they actually weigh.

If I were to ask people to guess my weight, I doubt many people would get within 50 pounds. Granted, they might be guessing low just to be polite. But I think once you start to get really, really, fat, people lack a frame of reference to determine your weight. It goes so far off their weight radar that they will guess anywhere from 50 to 100 pounds off. Would they similarly guess a 100 pound woman weighed 200? Not unless they needed new glasses.

Vice versa I cannot tell when someone has gained only small amounts of weight. If a friend put on ten pounds, I would probably not notice. I just don’t perceive those things. Perhaps the lack of this ability contributed to my weight gain in that I didn’t notice when I myself gained ten pounds.

I saw an article online recently about celebrities who had recently gained or lost weight. Looking at the pictures, I could honestly not tell any difference. If I had to choose which was the “before” and which was the “after” photo, I would have gotten only 50/50 at best.

I think some people are just more focused on weight. I had a friend in high school who would always point out when someone had gained or lost pounds. She was a human fat detector. She was never satisfied with her own body either, making me wonder if her own self-obsession with weight was being projected upon others.

I have an inaccurate self image, like reverse anorexia. Anorexics typically see themselves as much fatter than they actually are. Even when their ribs show through their flesh, in their heads they still think they’re fat.

In my case, even though I am morbidly obese, the image that I have of myself in my head is normal weight. If I were to draw a picture of myself, I’d probably make myself skinnier than I am without really even noticing it. In the movie The Matrix this is called “residual self-image.” Even though the character of Neo has a closely shaved head of hair in the real world, he has his full head of hair in the matrix. I’m fat, I know I’m fat, yet if I were to enter a matrix I would be thin.

This image gets shaken whenever I see photos of myself or the worst – a video. For my junior year of college, I took a speech class where all our speeches were taped. We then had to review our performance and critique ourselves. This was excruciating for me. The round, obese girl on video was in dichotomy with the image of myself in my head. I did not move like that. I did not look like that. I would only watch a couple seconds at a time, then fast forward through the freak show.

Even though I can see the difference in the mirror or on a tape, these moments of clarity last less than a minute. The majority of my day I do not look at myself. I look at other people. I suppose I am like a cat, raised by dogs who then thinks she’s a dog. Most people in the world are an average weight or only mildly overweight. Finding someone 300+ like me is rare. Being surrounded by people of this size makes me think that I myself look like them.

Even when I work with other fat people, I disassociate myself from them. I worked with an overweight diabetic middle-aged woman at one job who would trudge slowly from the door to her chair. On some level I knew that I could be her in 20 years, yet I would also bar her off from myself in my mind. She was not like me. I was not that fat. I did not look like that. Though most likely I did.

This erroneous self-image is partly what prevented me from acknowledging my weight problem. Even as the pounds kept piling on, my self-image remained skinny and allowed me to live comfortably in denial of the problem creeping up all around me.

Current Weight: Unknown because scales won’t function that high, but guessing around 385

Mini-Goal Weight: 350

Goal Weight: 160

Every week I’m going to do a self assessment of my weight, my goals, and my progress to my goals.

I’ve included my ultimate weight goal as well as something I call a mini-goal. This idea comes from Touching the Void, a film about a mountain climber who is injured on the way down a climb and has to make his way back to camp with a broken leg. When recounting the event, the man said he would force himself to get to a certain rock in 15 minutes. Instead of looking at the immense goal of walking miles back to camp, he just focused on a viewable point in front of him.

Luckily, I am not dying on a mountain in South America, but my task is in its own way just as daunting. Losing 200 pounds is going to be difficult task that is discouraging to think of all at once. Instead I’m going to focus on losing about 15 or 20 pounds at a time and celebrate when I reach that small goal.

Weekly Goal: This week is to start exercising. My mother is a goddess and bought me a treadmill. Walking has always been my preferred method of exercise. It’s low impact and I like being able to do it in the privacy of my own home. I’m too self consious to walk at a gym or the like.

Upcoming Goals: In the coming weeks I’m going to start adjusting my diet and incorporate a weight routing of some sort. I think it’s better to phase myself into a new lifestyle gently instead of trying to do everything at once.

It’s weird to think that it’s possible for me to walk around with 200 extra pounds of weight. For instance, I bought a 25 lb. box of kitty litter this week and it was a struggle to get it to the car. The flimsy plastic “handle” rolled up on itself so all 25 pounds of pressure were ripping through my knuckles. It hurt. It was heavy. It sucked.

And yet, I am 200 pounds overweight. This means I’m carrying around 8 of these kitty litter boxes on my person! I can not lift that much weight, yet if you incorporate it into my body it somehow works.

Well, works in a way. I have limited mobility compared to average-weight people. Walking half a mile to a concert up and down hills really exhausted me. Doing more than a couple flights of stairs requires frequent panting breaks on landings. And at the book store today my feet start to hurt after standing around for 10-15 minutes.

Even with this abuse, my body is still currently functioning. But even lacking a gift of clairvoyance I know my body will not stand up to this forever. Bad joints and painful feet are in my future if I don’t start shedding kitty litter fast.