My Formerly Hot Life (10 page)

If you forget you’re a Formerly and feel the abovementioned effects, you may think you’re unwell. This would not be illogical. The conventional health wisdom is, if you’re doing what you always have and notice your body reacting in a way that’s not normal for you, there might be something medically wrong. If the problem persists, it would be wise to consult your physician.

That’s what I did when I started feeling a little funky. Around the same time as TBMFU hit, and around the same time I noticed my energy falling off, I also began to notice that I had a lot less hair (on my head) than I used to, and a lot more hair (on my face) than I used to. I didn’t go right to the doctor, but began doing what doctors hate us to do but do all the time themselves: I Googled my symptoms. The condition that kept coming up was hypothyroidism, which is when your thyroid, that little butterfly-shaped gland in your neck, doesn’t crank out enough of the two big thyroid hormones. This, in turn, has a cascade effect on a bunch of other hormones and systems in your body and causes you to turn into a man. Well, not really, but the symptoms are unpleasant (unexplained weight gain, fatigue and depression, to name a few) and if left untreated can lead to heart disease, infertility (Hello! Already had that!) and a few other lovely things that no one wants.

When I saw unexplained weight gain and fatigue—problems
I’d reluctantly concluded were the by-products of not being 25 and of having twins and a full-time job—on the list of symptoms, hope sprang anew. Hmmm, maybe I have a sluggish thyroid. It says here it’s very common and underdiagnosed! It says women often get it after childbirth! And it says it’s easily treatable! Yes!!

I practically tap-danced to my GP, who ran some tests and told me my thyroid was normal. Then I went to my gynecologist and she said the same thing. I asked her if I had a “subclinical” problem—perhaps, while my thyroid hormone levels were within normal range, they were at the low end and hence too low for me. She shook her head sternly. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I called my mom. “Mom, the doctors say my thyroid is normal!” I moaned. “That’s great, honey. What a relief!” she said. I almost hung up on her.

The fact that my thyroid was normal was bad news because, in my twisted Formerly way of thinking, it means that I am not, in fact, slightly off-balance hormonally, but simply fatter, more sluggish and hairier than I was when I was younger. WTF kind of diagnosis is that? As sick as it sounds, at the time, a part of me would have preferred to pay some huge pharmaceutical company thousands of dollars over the course of my lifetime through a bloated, mismanaged health-care system that is burdening the big steaming pile of dog do that we call the American economy for a synthetic thyroid hormone replacement (that may ultimately cause bone loss) rather than accept that my body is changing, that
a certain amount of change is part of life and that the best course of action may simply be to ramp up my efforts to take care of my body so I don’t put on too much weight or grow a full beard.

It’s like back in my eating disorder days when I used to pray for a tapeworm or be halfway psyched to have a stomach virus because it meant I’d drop a few pounds—it’s such a warped mentality, and I’m not sure if I feel comforted or horrified about the fact that many, many Formerlies share this view. One article I read referred to doctors having to wipe away tears from women patients who were so attached to the idea that they had a thyroid problem (and thus a solution for the fat-tired-hairies) that they broke down when pronounced healthy.

My friend Jen M. has many of the same symptoms I have. “I was training for last year’s Chicago Marathon, and in the past, anytime that I trained that hard, I lost weight,” she says. “This time, I not only didn’t lose weight, but I gained some, and I didn’t do anything differently.” Jen, too, went to several doctors, each of whom confirmed that there was nothing wrong with her thyroid. One had the gall to suggest that—get this!—she was simply getting older. Jen hasn’t given up on the thyroid theory just yet. She’s taking sea kelp, which is thought by some (and by “some,” I mostly mean those who manufacture sea kelp supplements) to help stimulate the thyroid; as of this writing she hasn’t noticed a change, and has also been watching what she eats even more closely. “I don’t want to believe that it has to do with my age,” she says.

(In fairness, it could be that there’s no solid scientific evidence behind sea kelp as a thyroid stimulator because there isn’t much financial motivation for pharmaceutical companies to fund double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on things like sea kelp, which is abundant and inexpensive and so they can’t make much on it. Those gold-standard studies are the best way to know how well a drug or a supplement works. That said, considering how desperate people are for a metabolism fast-forward, somehow I think it would have risen to the top of the market if it was the proverbial magic bullet. Although I hear the Little Mermaid swears by it.)

What makes this particular condition, hypothyroidism, so bizarrely desirable among Formerlies is that it’s at the center of the health/vanity nexus (Weight gain! Hair issues! Zits!). It also shines a white-hot spotlight on the question we seem to be deeply ambivalent about finding the answer to: What is simply a normal part of getting older, and what is a disease, or the beginnings of one, that can be treated, thus making your life better while you’re living it?

I, for one, am not sure I want to know the answer to that question—am I getting older the way a healthy person generally does, or are my symptoms a sign that something is off, and once I’m better, I’ll be back to my old self?

If the answer is,
Sorry sister, suck it up, hair thins as you age and a little weight gain is typical if not healthy, and well, you’re Jewish, and women of Mediterranean descent can be furry creatures, especially when their hormones go haywire
, that may just deplete
my self-acceptance account for the foreseeable future. It took me all of my 20s and a chunk of my 30s to get over the whole you-have-to-be-perfect bullshit. Don’t I get to enjoy myself for a while before I become even less perfect? Do I
really
have to start accepting that no matter how much laser hair removal I have, there will be more hair? I’m so over it.

If, on the other hand, the answer is,
No, you’re fine, take a pill, or an herb, or some sea kelp
, then I don’t have to deal for a while. That’s rather appealing. I remember the rush I felt when I thought maybe—just maybe—all these little thieves of my hotness were merely symptoms of a treatable medical condition. The hope I had, until it was shot down by the doctors I saw who assured me I was healthy, goddamn it, was exhilarating. And that’s what keeps us looking for that magic bullet, whether it’s a diet pill or a thyroid pill or a tea brewed from a type of bark natives of the South Sea Islands have been using as home insulation for centuries. Even Formerlies who know there’s no such thing as a magic bullet still pray to get hit with one.

Since that’s not likely to happen, I have one thing to say to my old friend metabolism: You do what you have to do. I respect your choices, even if I don’t agree with them. Yes, I’ll pay attention to what I eat—I’m plenty vain and health-conscious enough to do that. I’ll keep exercising and eating right, within reason, for God’s sake. But you know what? If enjoying my life means forgoing the skinny jeans (which didn’t look good on me in 1982, the first time they were in
style), I think I can live with that. You hear that, metabolism? I’m moving on. And you can keep the Indigo Girls CDs, even though they were MINE in the first place. Someone has to take the high road. Besides, I can download the good songs.

P
redictably, a few years ago, my Formerly husband and I went in for the all-inclusive resort family vacation we thought we’d never take. All of a sudden, the upside of a Kidz Club and a pool with a waterslide outweighed the fact that we had turned into the supremely uncool pair that we swore we’d never be on our honeymoon, when we climbed Mt. Etna with nothing but a couple of water bottles the day before it erupted.

All this to say I had to go swimsuit shopping. The only thing I had in my drawers were bikinis, which were ill-advised before I had twins. I had never had a flat belly, but as a younger woman, I sincerely thought it was a good use of my time and energy to do a zillion ab exercises and, what’s more, to consciously try and hold my navel to my spine all day long at the beach or the pool so I could wear a bikini. As a Formerly, I now have way too many things to think about to waste one second mapping out exactly how to rise from a towel without accentuating my belly rolls. What’s more, no
amount of not breathing or not eating would make my tummy flat. Yes, it was definitely time for a one-piece.

I went to a large department store, figuring on a wide selection. An older, career saleswoman approached and asked if she could help me, and I told her I was open to anything, but no bikinis. She nodded knowingly.

I felt as if she were a flight attendant walking me slowly and cruelly past First Class, through Business, past the comfy bulkhead row, to my nasty seat by the toilet with the broken lock in the back of the plane. She steered me beyond the pretty prints to an area where the suits were mostly brown or black and had words like “miracle” and “tamer” and “molded cups” in their descriptions. She was a “helper.” Had I asked for the serious supportwear, that would have been one thing. But I hadn’t. It was as if a waiter brought me a Diet Coke, when I’d merely ordered a cola.

I looked back over at the sea of suits we’d passed, told her these “miracles” were a bit much for me and declined her further service. I didn’t think my body needed to be
too
tamed or molded, and I was saving any miracles I might have coming for if, God forbid, one of my children got sick.

My remaining choices, however, after eliminating the miracles and the bikinis, hardly made me want to go on a bathing suit buying bonanza. In fact, these paltry options seemed to create more problems than they solved. There were the one-pieces meant for serious lap swimming, with the high necks, boobs smushed down and the racer-backs. Those look brutal on everyone. I tried a few “tankinis,”
which are like the assisted-living facilities you go to before you need the round-the-clock nursing-home-type care of the Miraclesuit. The separate top and bottom allow for ease of peeing—always appreciated—but otherwise it’s unclear why you’d bother. Do the swimsuit manufacturers want to gradually get us used to the idea that our two-piece days are ending, and see the tankini as some kind of a step-down system? I suppose by revealing just a sliver of tummy at the bottom, one hopes to create the illusion that the rest of the abdomen is just as pristine as that one-inch strip, instead of the pale, stretch-marked, possibly postpartum pile of pooch that it is.