In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. This month, she invited you to present your relationship to your body, to thinness, to weight; to speak to him, therefore, of your inner tyrants or your catacombs. The “News from you” section gives you an overview of your responses.
You talk about bulges, which society uses as a hostage against women by making them believe that thinness is your proof of… (success, excellence, control; add the word you think).
Men also experience this kind of crisis… differently. For me, who always found myself ugly, the weight had little to play in this observation. My “inner tyrant” was that I wasn’t worth much when compared to the handsome guys who had all the attention of the girls I looked at with envy and that my brain would never replace what the handsome guys possess. So why fight? Let’s manage the absence of a woman by our side while eating. This is how I started dealing with failures and anxiety; while eating.
I’ve always been fat, since elementary school, and I still am in my 56e year. I am rather tall, it allowed to dilute the effect for a while, then, on the contrary, to show it enormously since I lost control of it. I have always dealt with my anxiety through food. As I chose a “slightly more” difficult path with graduate studies, career AND personal life gave me enough anxiety to have plenty to drown in food.
Men also often manage their anxiety very badly, but few will admit it. It took the failure of the last attempt to lose weight on my own, “one too many, with 300 pounds approaching”, to make me decide to ask for help. I am rather a typical male being of my generation: I refuse to ask for help, at the risk of being taken for a weakling. And, yet, I decided to force the healthcare community when I lost control after COVID-19. Not for beauty, not to meet any particular standard; I don’t pretend to believe that 40, 60 or 80 pounds lighter would make me more attractive.
A checkup changed everything, when the asthma that I had been carrying around since early childhood was also becoming a serious problem. Weight and asthma, attached to the new diagnosis of prediabetes, are even more dangerous. So, it wasn’t the search for beauty that made me break through the barriers of the healthcare network, but rather the desire to live longer and better.
You talk about Ozempic; I was told that my medical situation was not ideal for this drug. I was prescribed two medications that together end up in the Contrave tablet. Formality, the Contrave is not reimbursed by my insurance, but individually, its two components are. One of the drugs is Naltrexone, a cousin of Naloxone which saves people overdosing on opiates. The other is an antidepressant.
Naltrexone is magic in a pill (for me): for the first time in my life, I can live without being hungry. I try to explain it to the people around me, they don’t understand me. I have always been hungry! All my life, at all hours of the day, I thought about food: during exams, in the car, after a meal… I thought about the next meal. It’s so strange when you discover the feeling of the absence of the idea of ”being hungry”, the mind neutral, just looking around and not thinking about food. I even think that my attention problems have improved, that’s to tell you…
The psychiatrist who follows me in the story, recommended to me by a friend who is himself a psychiatrist, helps me with certain approaches to dealing with anxiety, and she is excellent. But, but, but, really, the effectiveness comes from the absence of this “mad dog” which managed my relationship with the appetite.
With Naltrexone, no bulimic crisis. Nothing, just anxiety-related sleep disturbances that I continue to deal with. At no time did I think of going to dip into a box of sweets or crisps, nothing. I hope you see how this is a miracle. Really, naltrexone is my magic.