By: Mesha Monge-Irizarry

The Horrors of Weight & Body Image Expections:

               A Personal Road to Recovery

Here goes my short recount.

I am Proud & Plump mesha Monge-Irizarry, a sfBayview.com reporter, director of San Francisco Education Not Incarceration and Director of Idriss Stelley Foundation, San Francisco MOOC City Commissioner.

All my life I was morbidly obsessed with weight, battling successive cycles of anorexia and bulimia, combined with compulsive exercising (3 hours at the gym was not an unusual daily occurrence), stemming from multiple incest in childhood, and leading to several near-death intensive care admissions.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I would become intensely nauseated.

What I saw in my reflection was a cross between a pig and someone with severe Down Syndrome (no insult meant here to gentle animals and to my developmentally challenged friends)

 My weight, for a lifetime, fluctuated between 216 lb (when as a teen, my mom forcefully committed me to a “fat farm” for weeks, where we were on 200 calories a day, fainting all over the place…..) to painfully thin skin and protruding bones at 119 lb (I have a large frame).

According to medical charts, my healthy weight is at 143 pounds.

My fridge and walls were plastered with mocking pictures and affirmations. 

On the outside, I was a successful program director in a variety of nonprofit settings, often working up to 60 hours a week, a beast at work, and dying inside, secretly drowning in self loathing, guilt and shame.  

It all changed on June 13, 2001, when my only child, Idriss Stelley, 4.0 average honor college student, was gunned down by San Francisco Police Department, 48 shots, 9 “peace officers”, during a “psychiatric intervention”, at the San Francisco Sony Metreon Complex, while Idriss sat alone in an emptied movie theater, experiencing a manic depressive crisis. It was during the Premiere of “Swordfish”.

 That night, all my obsessions with food and “perfect” body image plunged out of the window forever.

Increasingly despondent, I attempted suicide 8 months later, which lead to a long and exhaustive path of recovery, thanks to daily meditation, grief work and a wonderful, culturally aware therapist, who helped me finally bury my son’s ashes last May 2010.  Along with Idriss remains, we buried my lifetime of self hate and lethal perfectionism.

I am now a vegan, on strict insulin regimen, and satisfactorily plump at 186 pounds.

It would be lower, but what would kill me first, self hate or “obesity”?

Please, Big, Bodacious and Beautiful Sistahs and Mamas, do not wait until a life and death tragedy strikes, as I did, to Honor, Celebrate & Adore Your Fine Selves !

 Much Love, In Unity & Respect,

mesha