I am fucking livid.

As I may or may not have mentioned on this blog before (I’m too angry to go and check), I am of the fluffier persuasion. I had weight loss surgery in 2021, but it didn’t get me to my goal weight, so in 2022 I began trying weight loss drugs. They helped maintain my weight at a steady amount, but I didn’t really lose any weight. Then, this year, when I got my new job, my new insurance wouldn’t cover the drugs so I stopped taking them.

Last week I went to the doctor and I was back up to my weight the day I had my weight loss surgery.

My GP prescribed weight loss drugs earlier this year. The insurance company denied them. I can’t afford them out of pocket, or even the compounded ones I’m sure you see in your Instagram or Facebook feed.

So I’m pissed off at the drug companies and the insurance companies, who basically are people without medical degrees deciding what people with medical degrees are allowed to do.

But I’m livid at my cousin.

My cousin weighs maybe 150 pounds. She recently (well, two years ago) had a baby and wants to lose “15 pounds”. Somehow she got a doctor to prescribe her weight loss drugs. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that either her insurance is covering them or she’s paying for them out of pocket — which I don’t understand, because she makes about a third of my salary and takes trips to Disney every few months.

What’s wrong with my cousin? She “needs” to lose 15 pounds. What’s wrong with me? Well, I’m overweight — and, unlike my cousin, you can actually see it when you look at me — and I have high blood pressure and sleep apnea. I’m the perfect person to be on weight loss medications. So of course the insurance company denies them, and of course I can’t afford them.

The other problem is that nothing really works for me. Exercise is mind-numbingly boring, and when I do manage to do it I don’t lose any weight. Changing my diet doesn’t help. Weight loss surgery clearly didn’t help. Even the drugs didn’t help — they just kept me from gaining weight. I’m hungry all the time (except for maybe the 15 minutes after I eat something). Like, legitimately, I had three-quarters of a stromboli the day before the appointment and somehow I was hungry again in an hour. I can eat a couple of servings of carrots and be hungry again in ten minutes. It’s weird and beyond annoying. The surgery was supposed to resolve the hunger issue, but somehow it didn’t work on me in that way. Either I eat when I’m hungry or I get angry and miserable and I’m no fun to be around.

I know I’m to blame for letting myself get overweight in the first place. I’m sure if I’d been more careful from ages 16 to 26 I would maybe only be 30-40 pounds overweight right now. Hell, my weight loss goal is to be only 50 to 75 pounds overweight. Right now I need to lose about 70 pounds, and if I’m going to be eating all the time then what the hell am I supposed to do? (Oh, and they won’t prescribe me a non-GLP-1 appetite suppressant because of my blood pressure. I tried that too.) I guess I’m destined to look like this for the rest of my life.

At least I can buckle an airplane seatbelt and fit in a single seat without needing to use a “person of size” policy. Small victories.

But I’m still livid.