There are 150 pounds between 2 photographs of me, and the thing I can’t stop looking at is my chin.
I’ve spent a truly unreasonable amount of my life looking at my own face.
Mirrors. Photographs. Zoom calls, where you get to observe your own reactions in real time, which I remain convinced is bad for a person. And the front facing iPhone camera, which should come with a warning label for women over 40.
Add it up and I’ve probably looked at my own face more than most people look at anything.
So you’d think I’d know what I look like.
I did not.
A few days ago I put 2 photos of myself side by side. One from last year, before I started losing weight. One from last week. There are 150 pounds between them and I still can’t type that sentence without stopping for a second.
The body, obviously, you can see. But I keep going back to the face.
There’s a jawline in there. There are cheekbones. Apparently those have been in the building for 54 years, waiting for a good moment.
I Never Ordered Cheekbones
Here’s the thing nobody would guess about me.
When I started losing weight, I never once sat around picturing a thinner version of myself. There was no old photograph taped to the fridge. I wasn’t chasing the body I had at 25. There was no imaginary future Jo in my head doing lunges in expensive jeans.
I just wanted to feel better.
I’d been overweight long enough that the face in the mirror was simply my face. I knew her. I recognized her. That was the whole relationship, and I want to be clear that it wasn’t a hostile one. She was just who was in there.
What I actually wondered about was walking.
That’s the part I don’t think thin people understand, and I don’t mean that as an accusation, it’s just information. When you’re carrying an extra 150 pounds you run a calculation before you go anywhere. Not sometimes. Every time.
How far is it from the parking lot to the door. If I park between two other cars, will there be enough room for me to get back in my car. Are there stairs, and if there are stairs, how many, and is there a railing. How long am I going to be standing. Is this the kind of place with chairs, and if it has chairs, are they the kind with arms on them, because that’s a different question entirely. If it’s a long walk, where’s the halfway point, and is there anywhere at the halfway point that I could stop at without it looking like I stopped.
That last one is the exhausting part. Not the walking. The choreography around the walking. The constant background hum of arranging your life so nobody has to see you struggle through it.
You do that math so many times it stops feeling like math. It just becomes how you move through the world. And you don’t realize you’ve been doing it until one day you notice you’ve stopped.
Those were my questions when I started. Would the math get quieter. Would my knees quit filing complaints. Would I have more energy for the parts of my life I actually like.
Not once, in any of it, did I think: I wonder what’s under my chin.
Who Was That Woman
This is the part I’ll be telling for the rest of my life.
I’d done my hair. I was on the phone with my mother and she asked me to send her a picture, so I sent her a picture. This was 3 or 4 months ago, before the extensions. Just me, good hair, considerably smaller face.
She didn’t open it right away.
Two days went by. I called her again, we talked about the usual things, and then somewhere in the middle of the conversation she remembered the photo.
And she asked me who that woman was.
Who was that woman.
Mom. It was me. Your daughter. The woman in the photograph you specifically requested a photograph from.
She wasn’t being funny. She genuinely did not recognize me. And this isn’t a case of 10 years apart, we’re talking a couple of months.
Apparently a couple of months was enough.
I laughed for about a week about that. I’m still laughing about it. It’s the single best thing anyone has said to me during this entire process and she wasn’t even trying.
But underneath the laughing there’s something else, and it took me a while to find the words for it.
That’s my mother. She’s the reason this face exists in the first place. She’s had it memorized since 1972. And she looked at it and came up empty.
I get the daily version of myself. There’s no reveal. One morning it’s slightly different, then slightly different again, and my brain quietly updates the file overnight while I sleep, so I never notice the update happening. I’m not more perceptive than my mother. I just had every single frame.
She missed several updates. She went straight from the old version to the new one, and the new one required identification.
Which means the change is real in a way I can’t see from the inside, and the only way I’ll ever know how real is by watching it land on the faces of people who love me.
My Eyes Did Not Grow
I want to be clear about this because it’s the thing that surprised me most and I don’t want anyone getting alarmed.
My eyes look enormous now. My eyeballs did not grow. If they had, this would be a very different post involving several specialists and probably a diagram.
It’s proportion. The cheekbones came forward, the jaw showed up, and every feature on my face renegotiated its position relative to every other feature. Even my nose looks different to me, which is absurd, because it is aggressively the same nose it has always been.
So now I’ll catch myself in a mirror on the way past and get a small, quiet moment of: oh. Hello.
Not because I don’t know her. I do.
It’s more like running into someone you knew years ago and needing half a second to place them. Everything’s familiar. Nothing is quite where you left it.
At 54 years old I’m being introduced to my own bone structure, which is a strange thing to schedule that late in a life.
An Inventory of Things That Are Now Too Big For Me
Nobody warns you that weight loss is partly a real estate problem.
I drive a Ford Explorer. For years Remo and I ran essentially the same seat settings. He’d drive it, I’d get in after him, and everything was more or less where I needed it to be. We never discussed this. It was simply the arrangement.
The arrangement has collapsed.
Now I get in after him and I have to bring the seat forward. Then I have to bring the steering wheel down. The first time I noticed how much I was adjusting, I sat there in the driveway and laughed, because how exactly does a person become too small for a car.
He gets in, hits his setting, drives off like a normal man. I get in afterward and feel like a child who has stolen her father’s vehicle.
Then there’s the clothing situation, which is a slow financial event disguised as a wardrobe. You buy something smaller. It’s perfect. You love it. Then it isn’t perfect, and then it’s a tent, and then you buy something smaller than that, and it has the nerve to do the same thing.
So here’s the milestone list nobody hands you at the start:
Lose 150 pounds.
Walk for an hour without huffing.
Discover cheekbones.
Become unable to comfortably operate your own Ford Explorer.
Check, check, check, check.
At this rate I’m going to need a smaller couch, and honestly at this point nothing would surprise me.
And Then There’s the Hair
Because my body apparently could not hand me a jawline and improved stamina and call it a day, it also decided to start thinning my hair.
Wonderful. Thank you. Very generous.
To be fair, losing a large amount of weight can do that. I’m also 54 and going through menopause, which can absolutely do it too. So it’s either the weight loss, or menopause, or the 2 of them collaborating on a joint venture.
I wasn’t interested in sitting around with progressively less hair while they sorted out whose turn it was. So I got extensions.
I love them. I was a little nervous I’d feel like I had someone else’s hair attached to my head, which technically I do, and we’re going to move past that quickly.
But here’s what I didn’t expect. I thought the extensions would feel like a costume. They don’t. They feel like a correction.
Because that’s the odd position I’m in right now. I’m not returning to a previous version of myself, I’ve never looked like this before. I’m assembling somebody new, in real time, at 54, with no instructions, while she keeps changing size on me. The hair, the clothes, the way I hold my face in photos now. All of it is guesswork.
Between the weight, the hair, and a body that changes measurements mid season, I occasionally feel like I’ve wandered onto a makeover show.
Except nobody gave me a wardrobe budget, which I consider a serious oversight.
The Part That Actually Matters
The cheekbones are fun. The car thing is funny. But if you want the real headline of the last couple of years, it isn’t anywhere on my face.
I can get on my treadmill and walk for an hour.
An hour. Without huffing, without checking the clock, without negotiating with myself about how much longer I have to stay on it.
And the part that gets me, the part I actually think about, is that it’s become ordinary. I don’t step on there feeling like I’m attempting something. I get on, I walk, I get off, I go do the next thing. It’s not an event. It’s just a Tuesday.
Do you know how long it’s been since my own body was unremarkable to me?
That’s the thing I’d tell anyone at the start, if they asked. We talk endlessly about what weight loss looks like, and almost never about what it feels like, and what it feels like is that the math stopped.
How far is it. Are there stairs. Will there be somewhere to sit. Where’s the halfway point.
I don’t run those numbers anymore. I go places without doing reconnaissance on them first. I get out of the car without a plan. And I only noticed the calculating had stopped because of its absence, the way you notice a noise you’d stopped hearing only after somebody turns it off.
My body takes up less space. My life takes up considerably more of it.
Nobody told me that was the trade, and it’s the only part of this I’d call a gift.
The Woman in the First Photograph
I want to say something about her, because it would be very easy to treat her as a before.
That’s what the format does. You put 2 pictures beside each other and the whole grammar of it says one of these women is the problem and the other one is the solution. I’ve seen a thousand of those and I understand why they work. I just don’t think it’s true, and I’m not going to write it about her.
Look at that photo. She’s laughing. She’s holding a bowl of soup. It’s an ordinary Thursday afternoon with friends over and she’s having a perfectly good time, and she has no idea that photograph is going to end up on the internet as an argument.
And look at this one, because this is the one I’d want you to see if you only got to see one.
That’s Remo and me at Christmas in matching shirts, and if you can’t read them, mine says CHEST and his says NUTS, and I’d like it noted for the record that I bought those on purpose, wore them on purpose, and posed for a photograph in them on purpose.
That woman is not hiding. She’s got her arm around her husband, and a joke about her own chest across the front of her, in a photo she knew was being taken.
I mention this because there’s a story people like to tell about women that size, and it’s a story about shame. About avoiding cameras and dodging mirrors and waiting quietly for life to start. I’m sure that’s true for some women and I have nothing but sympathy for them.
It was not true for me.
I was out here in a novelty Christmas shirt.
But that’s just what she was doing on a Thursday or around Christmas. Here’s what she was doing with the rest of it.
She’d already had a whole career before this one. She wrote software for a living, and she was good at it, and by any reasonable measure she was done proving things to anybody. Then she started a food blog in 2011, back when food blogging wasn’t a job that existed yet and certainly wasn’t one you could explain to your relatives, and she built it from nothing into a business. She wrote 2 cookbooks. She cooked roughly 9 billion chicken dinners and accumulated enough bowls and platters to cater a midsize European wedding. She did every one of those things while carrying 150 pounds that I am no longer carrying, and while running that calculation in the background of every single day.
She wasn’t waiting to start her life. She was already living it, at full volume, in a body that made everything harder.
I don’t feel sorry for her. I feel something closer to respect, and a little bit of protectiveness, and a strong urge to tell anyone who looks at that photo and sees a cautionary tale that they’ve got it exactly backwards.
And then, eventually, after doing all of that for everybody else, she decided to do one thing for herself.
That’s the only reason I’m here typing this.
So when I look at those 2 photographs I don’t see a before woman and an after woman. I see one woman, and the one on the left is the one who did the hard part.
I’m Not Finished
Here’s what messes with my head.
I’m not done. There’s more I want to lose, which means the face I’m looking at right now probably isn’t even the final version. I might be doing this exact double take again in a year at a completely different face.
I don’t know what size I’ll land on. I don’t know what happens with the loose skin, and I’d be lying if I said I never think about it. I don’t know how much more this face has planned or what else in my house is going to become too big for me.
Two years ago that amount of not knowing would have kept me up at night. I’ve spent most of my life needing to know how things end. It’s the same instinct that makes a person check whether there’s somewhere to sit before she agrees to go.
But somewhere in the last while, that stopped.
I’m not anxious about what she’ll look like. I’m curious about it.
Those are completely different animals, and it took me 54 years and 150 pounds to learn the difference between them, and I think that might be the actual thing I got out of all of this. Not the jawline. The ability to walk into something without knowing where the chairs are.
I’m looking forward to meeting her.
Although we already know one thing about her.
She has cheekbones. Who knew. ❤️
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