Seroquel and That Girl [Updated and Redo]

At some point, it became apparent to the team that even though I was doing relatively well, and I don't remember who started the conversation during a standard psychiatric appointment, someone mentioned (maybe even me) that I had gained weight on Seroquel (and stop taking the medication was not an option). I was probably around two hundred and ten pounds to two hundred and fifteen pounds. Those days, I was doing my best to hide my weight gain with lots of layers, and desexing myself. If I didn't draw attention to myself, if no one noticed me, all the better. I would just hide behind a spoonful of Ben&Jerry's, a pair of friends who visited me frequently in my bedroom for a threesome, who kissed me diligently, sweet breath, thick on my tongue and gave me immediate pleasure but left me feeling like a used, if bloated and beached, whore.

My psychiatrist himself tried not to scold me, knowing that it was hard to maintain a healthy weight on antipsychotics even for the most dedicated, and only prescribed 25mg of Topamax (which isn't a high enough dosage to do anything). He also told me he didn't know how it worked for weight loss.

Later, after he left, I was alone with the resident. The only features I remember about her: her thinness, her beauty and her youth.

"Try to eat about fifteen hundred calories a day," she told me. "And realize that you are going to be hungry sometimes...You'll lose weight."

Yes, I would lose weight if I ate like this. I wondered if she ate like that, if that what it took to be her.

If you know anything about dieting: this is a plan for starvation. People who eat these few calories obsess about food all day long, and it completely takes over their lives. It is not a plan for sustained weight loss. (Please read Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again)

Did she obsess about food? Was she just casting her doubts, hyped up fears and infatuations unto me? Did she see in me what would happen to her if she just loosened up on her rules just a little bit? One bite more, and bingo--you turn into obese patient A.

I was just grossly overweight, and embarrassed--I had had my confidence completely stripped from me. Those days of dancing naked in front of a crowd? Who was that girl? Would I ever see her again? I doubted that very much.

 I had never been in that fat girl role. I couldn't imagine feeling attractive again like the young doctor before me. That September 2007 on the beach was so long ago that it never existed. God had struck me down because I was once vain and haughty.

(Today, I am only a few pounds heavier than what I was when I danced.)