Skinny Island: Part 6

Day 7.

128 pounds

Daily calories: 1100

Today was another happy one here on the island, though I do admit that I am still struggling with the guilt of buying into the program here. Iā€™m enjoying time with friends both new and old while going on all kinds of adventures all over the island be it hiking, surfing, scuba diving, or jet skiing. I even got on a zipline and I am TERRIFIED of heights. That I think was a formative experience for me. Kind of a core memory unlocked situation I guess. I know that Iā€™m much thinner than I used to be, but even so, I was still horrified that I was too heavy for the harness and that it would give out while I was over a cliff or a bunch of rocks or something. I was dead certain I was too fat for it and I donā€™t really know why. All of the girls in my group were cheering me on and it took the leader, Sabrina walking me over to a scale, weighing me, then standing me in front of a mirror. At my height and weight, I have a BMI of 23.4.

The number shocked me to be honest. Even if the details are getting foggier by the day, I expected the number to be up in the mid-30s or for my weight to be like 150 or something. Iā€™m becoming more and more worried as time goes on that Iā€™m somehow going to gain weight again.

But no. For the first time in what must be ages, my BMI is 23.4. By most standards Iā€™m considered ā€œnormalā€ in terms of weight, and Sabrina made sure that I was aware of it. She told me that I wasnā€™t fat, and the moment she did, I felt like my whole world got brighter. I never realized how badly I wanted to hear those words from someone who really meant them, but when I did, I felt like I was floating on air. I was still nervous, but I went down the zipline like a champ. I screamed the whole way, but I really enjoyed it. Maybe Iā€™ll even conquer my fear of heights while Iā€™m here.

Itā€™s amazing how quickly Iā€™m losing track of what I used to be like as the days go by. I know I used to be very fat, but not how big I was. The memory loss is a little frightening, but itā€™s like the only thing I canā€™t remember is how I looked and how heavy I was. I keep imagining something like being 330-ish at one point, but Iā€™m starting to think I might be overshooting it a bit. Iā€™m pretty short at 5ā€™2 and I canā€™t imagine Iā€™d be able to get as heavy as 350 without spending all day every day stuffing myself with trash. Hell, even the thought of eating that much or that kind of slop grosses me out now. Iā€™m spoiled by so many fresh, low-cal options that I kinda dread having to be somewhere where this isnā€™t the norm, and fast food and processed crap is waiting to make me obese again.

ā€¦.Or maybe Iā€™m completely undershooting it and I was way fatter. The more I think about my weigh in and BMI in though, the less satisfied I am. I know Iā€™m at the high end of normal, but the longer I sit with it the more I just feel like Iā€™m fat for a skinny girl. Or rather, I donā€™t feel skinny. My belly is still soft and my butt is still big. Iā€™m fat for an ā€œaverageā€ sized girl on the mainland, but obese for an islander or resort guest. It makes me unhappy with my size all over again even if Iā€™m better off than I ever was. I keep worrying that Iā€™ll regain the weight or that I wonā€™t be able to lose enough before I go back home and thatā€™s both scary and upsetting to me on a level it never used to be.

My BMI almost haunts me though. Itā€™s hard to admit, but I canā€™t help but compare myself to the permanent islanders and wonder what their weight and BMI is. On the mainland I suppose theyā€™d be considered underweight or something more severe, but here it doesnā€™t seem to affect them negatively at all. I donā€™t know that I want to be as bony and scrawny as some of the other girls, but I do want my BMI to beā€¦lower than it is. I just worry about what this place will turn me into by the end of the trip.

 Regardless, Iā€™m here now.

ā€¦And I kind of donā€™t want to leave.

(1)

Xiang

Dear Diary,

Life on the island is becoming something Iā€™m more used to even if things keep changing. Still, I think itā€™s a change for the better in most cases. I finally hit the point where I could no longer fit into any of my old bikinis so I broke down and got new ones, this time in something other than pink. I know that Val has been talking lately about how sheā€™s been wondering why she felt so obligated to cling to her old way of doing things when the new ways she found here are so much better. Frankly, my position is a little different since Iā€™m actually trying to run a business, but I still agree with her anyways. I came here trying to promote body positivity along with my all-pink fashion line but now that we only have 2 weeks left on the island I just feel burnt out on the color, the line, and all the pandering I was doing. It was only because of coming here that I really started feeling my weight and acknowledging how I felt about it. The day I went to the bazaar and saw that I was the fattest girl there was really eye-opening for me.

When youā€™re in the city itā€™s a lot easier to ignore who youā€˜re becoming, especially when everything is made to influence you as much as possible. But now being in a place where everyone is on the same page, I started to come to terms with all the things Iā€™d hid from myself in pursuit of what I thought was my dream. I left high school already knowing that I wanted to pour everything I had into being a fashion designer and model, and to do that I was resolved to whip myself into shapeā€¦ But then I didnā€™t. I was hanging around fat girls, making clothes for fat girls, making excuses for fat girls, and eventually eating and acting like a fat girl. Before I knew it, I was just another ugly fat girl trying to look hot in a designer bikini I was destined to outgrow. I started using body positivity and plus size acceptance as a way to justify being fat while telling myself that I was still making progress instead of ruining it. I wasnā€™t teaching people to love themselves. I was just glorifying obesity.

Even worse, I even tricked myself into getting fat myself. God, itā€™s so weird to think that just a few weeks ago I was 170 pounds. I was just a hairā€™s breath away from becoming obese. Me.

Imagine how my parents would respond. Hell, I donā€™t know what Iā€™d do if I went in for a checkup and my doctor told me I was obese. Itā€™s a scary thought and a super close call. As much as we were against the idea of a skinny-only resort, I feel like this place was what ended up saving us from what we were doing to ourselves. I donā€™t know if the other girls see it that way, but I canā€™t get the thought out of my head. It feels so stupid now that I think of what I was supposedly trying to do.

No one in their right mind wants to be fat when they have the option of being thin and beautiful. No one wants to be a ā€œplus sizeā€ model when they could be a REAL model. And no amount of telling yourself that youā€™re beautiful every way you are will make it true. If it were, then I would have still been turning heads when I was overweight and getting catcalled in the street instead of hit on by fetish creepers online asking me to show them all my belly flab. Iā€™d have been treated better, I would have felt more confident, and Iā€™d have been way healthier.

Here on the island, Iā€™m doing more and better work than Iā€™ve ever done and I owe a lot of it to the miracle weight loss culture this place has. Granted I still need to lose a lot more weight before Iā€™m model-worthy for actual work on the island. Here, only the absolute thinnest models get to promote or advertise anything, and I hear they make tons of money doing it too.

ā€¦.Is it bad that I want to get as close to that as I can before we leave?

(2)

Kelly

Day 44.

145 pounds.

I am now writing in this journal as a means of recording my thoughts and findings on Skinny Island.

Recently I have become suspicious of the actions of my friends who have joined me at the resort after a month and a half of staying here as guests of the Island. The memories I have before coming here have felt diminished for some time and I am unsure as to why. For the majority of the trip I feel like I was under the impression that despite itā€™s quirks and offensive message, the Skinny Island Resort was a surprisingly wholesome and uplifting environment. The people here are kind, the staff are helpful and attentive, and there is no shortage of things to do or communities to join. Where we had all expected some kind of animosity from the islanders or people who were different from me and the other women on the island, we instead found fit, sweet men and an entire city of rail-thin women who welcomed us with open arms. Not one single person ever treated us with disrespect.

At first, I thought we were pleasantly mistaken and that this place wasnā€™t the horrible, misogynistic monstrosity that weā€™d made it out to be and that we really had stumbled onto a community of people who genuinely prized the health, fitness, and well-being of its guests and citizens on a level that we had never seen in any city back home. My friend Xiang and I began taking to the community after a couple of weeks and despite our enjoyment of the islandā€™s amenities, that was when we began noticing that we were losing both our body weight and our ability to accurately and clearly remember what we looked and felt like before our arrival.

Only Valentina remained suspicious.

Only Val went looking for the islandā€™s ā€œdark secret.ā€

That is, until recently.

Last week, Valentina seemed super worried about something, but wouldnā€™t really talk about what specifically. She said only that she was waiting for some kind of sign before she made her choice. A few hours later, I saw her go all the way out to the dumpsters next to the hotel and throw her island journal into it. I thought that that was odd, so I asked her how she was doing and she told me that she suddenly felt free and ā€œlighter than air.ā€ Valentina doesnā€™t fucking talk like that and she never has.

I went down and did some not-so-glamorous investigating of my own. I climbed into the dumpster and found the journal which was thankfully not super far down and pulled it out without making a total mess of myself. Not my proudest moment, but Iā€™m so fucking glad I did it.

I read through the entries and found that she had not only been experiencing the memory blurring like we had but was using her journal as a way of remembering the things that she was worried she would forget later. What fucked me up about it was that each of her entries started with the date and how much she weighed at the time of the entry. The very first ones had her weighing in at almost 400 pounds and claiming that Xiang was close to the same size while I was even bigger than Val was when we first arrived. I couldnā€™t believe what I was reading so I kept going and saw that Valentina was freaking out about the rapid weight loss sheā€™d been experiencing and how me and Xiang seemed almost completely oblivious to it.

I knew that weā€™d all lost a lot of weight, but itā€™s still hard to believe that we each dropped almost 250 pounds in just a month and a half. I wouldnā€™t have believed it myself if each page she wrote wasnā€™t filled with the same confusion I felt upon reading it. She spoke about her memory loss and fading disdain towards the island, and thatā€™s when the entries started coming with larger breaks in between them. It ended with her talking about how she was happier being skinny and was basically going to let the island have her instead of fighting to stay who she used to be.

It was fucking terrifying.

What if this place actually is changing us and weā€™ve all just gotten so caught up in it that we donā€™t even know itā€™s happening anymore? Were we really so huge when we first arrived?

I remember arriving here with a kind of skeptical, journalistic approach to what goes on at a skinny-only resort expecting to unearth tons of pro-anorexia cults and sex rings or something while maybe also dropping a few pounds. But then when I read that we were here as a protest against fatphobia and discriminationā€¦it also sounds completely correct. Iā€™m kind of scared to decide which set of memories I believe more, especially since any memories I have of my past are hard to recall when it comes to my size. I remember being too big to get on carnival rides and roller coasters, but I also canā€™t remember being heavier than 190 pounds, which is plenty small enough to get on. Even if I accept 190 as my original weight, the math still doesnā€™t add up. How is it possible to have lost a pound of fat every single day since Iā€™ve been here? Sure, diet and exercise are a thing, but burning upward of 5500 calories every single day?

Thereā€™s no way thatā€™s possible. Even worse, if Valā€™s notes are correct, itā€™s actually a much higher number.

The biggest tell for me is that not only does this all coincide with everything Iā€™ve experienced and talked about with both of them and even some of the other island guests, Val went out of her way to put her journal somewhere that no one would look to get something so insignificant as a mass-produced notebook. Her notes say that she has been using the book to remember and now that sheā€™s giving up, she hopes to forget she was ever different than she is now.

I canā€™t help but believe it.

So the question is: Now what?

What do I do? I can barely remember what I was like before this place did what it did to me and Iā€™m completely entrenched in everything the island offers. Iā€™m used to the food, I adore the peopleā€¦.

I donā€™t know.

Part of me wants to run away somehow. Cut the trip short and get on the first flight home.

ā€¦But another part is now considering Valentinaā€™s decision. The island has been good to me. Moreover, the thought of being 400 pounds literally makes me want to cry and vomit at the same time and I still donā€™t think Iā€™m as skinny as I want to be.

But itā€™s not me. Or is it?

Val asked the question first: Is it worth fighting for?

Is it really worth trying to tear this place apart just to make everyone fat again? To BE morbidly, hopelessly obese again? I know for certain I never want to be any bigger than I am right now, but that may very well be the islandā€™s influence. I feel pretty for the first time in my life. Not just pretty even, but hot. Like Iā€™m the sexy blonde on the cover of a swimsuit catalog back in the States. Iā€™m still a little chubby in the middle, but if everything I am seeing and reading is right, it wonā€™t be that long before even that is gone.

ā€¦.Isnā€™t that what I want? What every girl wants? To be skinny and sexy?

But what would I be giving up for that? What else am I forgetting? Am I turning into some hollowed-out shell of who I used to be, or am I just getting the body I remember always wanting?

Iā€™m justā€¦.I donā€™t know anymore.

Iā€™ll keep an eye on the situation, but Iā€™ll act like I donā€™t know anything about what Iā€™ve seen until I can come up with a better plan. Until then, thereā€™s no reason not to enjoy whatā€™s left of my island vacation.

ā€¦And maybe shed a few pounds while Iā€™m fighting evil on the beach.

(3)