Skinny Island: Part 3

Xiang

Dear diary,

Today was a rough one. I don’t know what really brought it on all of the sudden but for the first time in a long time, I felt….Fat. I know that I’m pretty and I know that there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ body, but for as much as I preach self love and body positivity I still have days where I feel insecure. Today was definitely one of those days.

I went down to the local marketplace to do some shopping and have some fun, but I started realizing that most of the shops don’t really cater to girls my size. Anything that had to do with food was laughable since I eat more than all but two people on the island and any vendors selling clothes were never going to have anything that fit me. Even worse, all the vendors were thin. Like REALLY thin. I feel like by now I should have gotten used to it, but today it just felt awkward and kinda jarring to walk down a street where everyone was so much smaller than me. Everything I saw made it clear that Skinny Island is for skinny people and I’m just some flabby outsider. Even though I’ve lost weight, I am still twice as heavy as all the other girls and it shows. The clothes are not for me. The food isn’t for me. The seats and benches aren’t for me. Now, I’m stronger physically than the other girls, but on an island where every girl is dainty and delicate, it just makes me feel…mannish. Originally I thought I'd be bringing hot guys and closet feeders back to my hotel and having sex or at least hanging out, but not a single man has looked at me in any way that resembles attraction. They talk to me, sure, but it's always this overly polite way to convince me that I'll look great when I try their new weight loss gig. It makes me feel gross, flabby, and unattractive. I just feel... Fat.
So with nothing else to really do... I just sorta wandered the alleys and aisles, keenly aware of how huge and gelatinous my ass is.

(1)

I realized I was sort of moping around when I ran into Kelly in an alley. I felt shitty because I’m sure she noticed me, but I still pretended to not notice she was there and turned a corner to avoid her. I know it wasn’t the “good friend” thing to do, but the last thing I could handle was being seen with another fat girl just then. It’s an ugly feeling, but I thought that if the fat girls were separate instead of together, it would seem more common for me to be too big.

Sigh

I need to send her a text later about it.

The day DID pick up though. Conveniently, I ended up bumping into a cute guy after I went down that alley. She was super nice and cool about it, though I could tell from the way he was looking that he was really put off by my figure. I actually asked for his number, but instead he gave me a card for his fitness center class and told me I could see him in person and maybe get me on a diet plan like the other islander girls. It wasn’t the most romantic thing to hear, but he’s hot and…fuck it. I know we came here to make a statement, but the longer we stay, the more I feel like it might be time to stop kidding myself and at least TRY to lose some weight.

Still, not all hope is lost. We got lunch afterward and he even helped me with a photo shoot. I joked that they could be my “before” pictures. He seemed to like that quite a lot. Frankly, I don't hate the idea myself.

Kelly

I’m genuinely starting to regret coming here. When we first decided to do this stupid protest, I expected more people to care. I thought there would be news reports and complaints  Hell, I even expected bullies.

….But there are none.

Everyone on the island is either weirdly polite or doesn’t seem to even notice that I’m fat. At a worst they just sort of hang out and gawk silently from a distance. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about people being nice to me, but it just wasn’t the impact I was expecting to have.

The shitty thing though is that for as nice as this place is in some ways, it’s still a psychotic thinspo cult. Every inch of this place is covered in some kind of weight loss promotion and every piece of media promotes these extreme weight loss goals. Even the health classes teach an altered BMI classification chart that effectively considered any adult woman over 100 pounds to be obese. Given the fact that I’m still like 270, I suppose it makes sense that some of these people would look at me weird. Still, no one is overt about it. Even if they were, I’d be on my own to deal with it.

That’s another weird issue I’ve been running into: My friends never spend time with me.

We all room in the same hotel but after the first few days, I noticed that both Xiang and Val wake up and leave without saying anything to the other or me. Granted, I’m always the last one awake, but it’s still kinda shitty that neither of them even try to me up to go hang out when we all came here together.

Originally I thought I’d pissed them off somehow and they just weren’t telling me, but as time goes on I’m becoming more and more certain that this place is getting to them. Xiang is normally really charismatic and upbeat like she’s actually on vacation promoting herself as a model, but lately she’s been really low energy and avoidant. Today I saw her while I was walking around the marketplace and it looked like she took one look at me and bolted. I don’t know if she was on her way to meet someone or if she was in some kind of trouble, but whatever it was, it looked like she REALLY didn’t want me talking to her. I decided to leave her alone but it still felt shitty.

(2)

Val on the other hand is completely losing it. She was always really keen on “blowing the lid off this place” to prove that something sinister was being done here. We agreed with her when it was just that, but now she’s constantly asking how much weight we think we’ve lost and insisting that we’re a hundred pounds down after a couple weeks and just don’t remember. She’s always going on about chemicals in the water or brainwashing subliminal messages in the music, forcing us to be thin even though we’re still fat as hell. I tried to tell her we’re huge because we eat too much and don’t exercise, but she won’t hear it. Yeah, we’ve lost weight, but I’m pretty sure it’s from living on an island for almost a month with barely any food and nothing to do but exercise in one way or another and not from the government putting diet pills in our drinking water. The other day she was freaking out about her clothes fitting properly and insisted that the island government must be magically altering their sizes or something. I played along and suggested that maybe the secret island service is replacing our swimsuits with smaller versions but she only got more upset and couldn’t tell that I was making fun of her. Oh well.

Personally, I just feel like the trip is turning out to be a total bust. We haven’t gotten any real attention or changed anyone’s minds. If anything, we’ve been dropping weight like crazy and proving that their system works. I’m ready to go home and get back to my life. I feel shitty saying this, but I actually do feel a lot better after staying here and losing weight. I’m not super motivated to try and fit myself into a size 4 or anything, but even I can admit that maybe being healthier wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Valentina

Day 23.

225 pounds.

It’s happened again. Every day I wake up smaller and smaller and I shouldn’t be. I keep wondering how it’s possible to be losing so much weight so quickly but can’t figure it out. Even mathematically it makes no sense. If 3500 calories is a pound of fat and my body burns around 2000 just from normal bodily processes, how am I losing five to seven  pounds a DAY??? There is no possible way for me to be burning  twenty-one THOUSAND calories a day whether I’m sleeping, moving, eating, whatever. I’ve done the math. No matter what I do, I somehow have to be burning 875 calories per hour. That’s like walking on a treadmill for 3 hours straight every single hour of my life. Or just sprinting, which I can’t anyways. It’s ridiculous and impossible.

…But here I am.

The other girls have noticed and acknowledge their weight loss, but neither of them seem to know or even care about how much or how fast. According to them, they only think they’ve dropped fifteen, maybe twenty pounds from living on the island and living off of 1000 calorie a day diets. That’s definitely part of it, I’m sure, but there has to be more to it than that. I tried to tell them that even eating only  a thousand calories shouldn’t have resulted in them losing what they think is a pound of fat per day, but they just look at me like they think I’m going crazy.

The troubling thing is that I only know that my weight has dropped significantly because I wrote it down. I never took their weights or measured anything on their end because honestly, why would I? Originally there was no reason to have my friends get to the hotel and for me to be like “Hey, let me weigh you guys just in case we start getting skinnier.” I know that they’s slimming down too, but in my mind I’m in the same boat as them. They only LOOK twenty pounds lighter to me, but that can’t be possible because I know that when we got here, we were all around the same size. If my journal entries are telling me I’m getting thinner at this rate and they seem to be proportionately close to me in size, then that can only mean they were bigger than I am able to remember.

It's the same for me too. I remember living my whole life massive. I remember growing up and being the fattest girl most people were ever going to meet. Years and years of torment in person and online, not getting jobs because of my weight, and never, ever being able to do anything even remotely athletic. But for some reason it’s incredibly hard to remember what that was like specifically. Like I know what happened, but when I imagine it, I can only picture myself a little bigger than I am now.

Kelly and Xiang tell me to just chill out and enjoy the benefits of being thinner, but how can I do that when we came here to show the world that being thin isn’t what matters? Wasn’t Kelly the one foaming at the mouth over Anorexia Island telling girls that having boobs means you’re obese? Wasn’t Xiang the one running around trying to flaunt her fat in people’s faces to show that she loved being bigger? We haven’t protested, audited, vlogged, recorded, demonstrated or boycotted even once since we got here, and that includes me. It’s like we forget why we’re here every morning and get distracted doing resort shit. Even I spent most of today lounging around the beach until I walked past Xiang giggling and hanging on some dude with a camera, gushing about how she could use the photos he took as her “before” pics to show off her weight loss or whatever. She certainly didn’t seem too interested in showing off her fat body then.

(3)

But that’s part of it too. This place isn’t just changing our weight. It’s changing everything about us like our clothes and bodies as well as our minds.  It’s the little things that show it. Since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed that my hair has been growing out faster than usual and I never seem to use up any of my makeup after applying it every day for three weeks. Despite our significant drops in weight, whether it be big or small, all of our swimsuits and clothes fit us just as well as they ever have and no one has said a thing about it. We should have at least needed to buy a new bikini top or a pair of smaller shorts after dropping as much as twenty pounds, right? But nope. Everything seems normal when I pull out my clothes from the hotel dresser. Kelly asked if I thought they were being replaced, but I told her that that wouldn’t make sense because they don’t carry larger clothes on the island, nor does it seem likely that they would have the exact same stuff as us on hand in descending order of plus sizes.

Something on the island, or maybe the island itself is changing us and everything we see, own, or think.

The real question is: How?

Why?

What is the purpose of drugging and brainwashing people this way? Why would the people running this island go to such great lengths to make fat girls thin?

I’ve tried investigating several times but either find nothing or get distracted. I’ve tried recording and slowing down the music to listen for any hidden messages, but I just ended up bored and paying more attention to the island tv top model contest “The Next Miss Skinny.” I started going off of the beaten paths looking for hidden entrances and following suspicious looking workers in hopes of finding a secret bunker, but all that did was land me in some secret island spring party drinking 0 calorie vodka martinis or invited to a yoga session in the middle of a misty jungle. Several times I’ve scoured the beach for transmitters or caves hidden behind the admittedly gorgeous waterfalls, but I just end up playing in the waves or getting tipsy on the beach.

(4)

Anywhere else, this would be amazing. It’d be the adventure of a lifetime AND I’m getting thinner at a miraculous pace. Or I was never as fat as I thought I was and I’m just freaking out over nothing. Instead of feeling sexy, skinny, and free, I’m trying to record seagull cries to play in reverse and hunting for supervillian minions in hardhats and jumpsuits while they try to…..Give me the body I wished I had all of my life.

Sigh

Maybe I am going crazy.