Body Issues

I have so many, from my well meaning (and really generally wonderful) Dad mentioning stretch lines on my legs one summer in high school (I was 137lbs and 5'8", btw, and though we didn't know it, was developing lymphedema) to kids in middle school calling me thunder thighs (evil children. Can't we just skip middle school, it's when so much of the damage to our psyches happens and it takes up until our thirties and beyond to recover from the idiot comments made during that fragile time.) 

If you don't know much about lymphedema, your body doesn't properly move around the lymphatic fluid in your system, and you retain a LOT of water. Like, a LOT lot.  When we first started the treatments (which include binding the legs up in bandages firmly to make them work better) we got over three liters of fluid out of my CALVES. SO you can imagine the rest of me... I still am the same height as high school, but now weigh close to three- 3!!!-- hundred pounds.  I hate it, and there is no magic pill to use, no exercise I can do to diminish it, no diet that will work.  I just get to be bound with bandages like a mummy. Thankfully, I've graduated to expensive spandex bodysuits under my clothes now. We call them my supersuits. They make it so I can walk. 

But the point is this:

It still makes me uncomfortable that my husband thinks I am gorgeous.  Drop down, flat out gorgeous.  This is NOT a problem, right?  To be sexy to my husband of fourteen years, who is bluntly honest in everything else he says, and basically is hardwired to find it impossible to lie (think extremely mild aspberger's) and yet every time he caresses me and tells me how incredibly hot I am, I have a little voice in the back of my head that says I am hideous and disgusting and how in the world could he think that I am beautiful?  I see myself in the mirror, and remember how I thought myself fat when I weighted less than 150lbs, and realize that I will not in this life ever see that side of 200 again... and I just have SO much trouble believing him that I could possibly be desireable.  But it must be true to him.  He really does love and find me extremely sexy, and I doubt it's because he has some perversion.  He loved me little when we married, he's loved me while sick and sicker, and he still loves me, though he doesn't like a lot of things about how I can move, my pain level, etc.  yet he thinks I am beautiful.

And yet I cannot psychologically believe him.  

And that's my problem, not his.