Category: Overexposed: A Self-Love Project.

Hello, my name is Liz, and I’m a Pepsiholic.

This is my intervention.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with Pepsi. Maybe it was even before I was born; you know how when mothers are pregnant with their children and they eat or drink something constantly through that pregnancy and the children come out loving that specific food/drink?

No? Maybe I just made that up to justify my unhealthy relationship with Pepsi.

My earliest memory with the beverage dates back to my childhood; my two front teeth were rotten due to the fact that I liked to drink Pepsi out of a baby bottle way later than I should have. I don’t understand how, nor why Pepsi is a literal addiction for me, but it was, it still is, and it’s honestly the #1 cause of me gaining weight all these years.

I’ve tried to kick the old habit for years now, and if quitting smoking feels the way that it feels quitting Pepsi, then I now understand why it’s almost impossible to quit smoking. Addiction is addiction no matter what it is, and mine so happens to be the sugary concoction that is Pepsi.

The first time I quit Pepsi for good, I didn’t drink it for almost a year. Then I turned 20 years old and decided to have a celebratory drink of Pepsi and bam, back at it again with the constant soda drinking.

Like an addiction, I have a love/hate relationship with the beverage. For starters, it tastes so good after a long day of whatever you were doing, yet I know how bad it is for me and is probably the #1 cause of why I’m now considered pre-diabetic at the age of 25.

Maybe I should’ve listened to my father when he told me at the age of 12 that I’ll get diabetes if I don’t lose weight…

Anyway, it’s something I’m not proud of, but I acknowledge that it’s a problem. No matter how many times I try to quit cold turkey, it’s never a good time.

But, at least I’m trying.

Instead of hating myself and blaming my body for not being able to just pee the goddamn drink out like the skinny consumers of Pepsi probably do, I’m learning that with time, I’ll drink less and less until I just don’t feel like it. Of course, in hindsight, that sounds ridiculous, that’s like telling an alcoholic they can only drink in moderation, but quite frankly this is Pepsi we’re talking about. I know that drinking more water will help me feel way more hydrated and full, and yeah, maybe a glass of soda with my dinner could be the reward I get for staying away from it!

As you can see, this is still an ongoing problem of mine, but I will not link the disgust of my growing fat to my Pepsi addiction. I simply can’t; cutting out Pepsi isn’t going to automatically make me 100 pounds lighter. And that’s the problem I encountered in the past: thinking that Pepsi was causing me to gain so much weight. 

Cutting out Pepsi from my life will probably only help me stay diabetes-free for longer, and that’s what I need to focus on when trying to quit drinking Pepsi. This idea that it’ll make me lose weight simply isn’t true; sure it will stop me from gaining more weight, but cutting one thing out of my diet isn’t going to do it.

So, after all of this, what am I really going to do with this Pepsi addiction?

Well, a couple of things:

• Stop linking the idea of cutting out Pepsi with this automatic weight-loss; it simply isn’t going to happen.
• Drink it in moderation to train myself that I don’t really need to drink it 24/7.
• Lastly, stop punishing myself for gaining weight because once again, drinking Pepsi is not the only thing that is causing weight gain, nor I stop drinking it will solve my weight problem.

But what do I know, maybe I’m just justifying my addiction like any other addict.

 

It could be hard loving yourself, especially being a size 26 knowing that you were a size 20 when you were out of high-school. Sometimes, looking at yourself in old pictures isn’t about missing the memories behind them, you look at them because you think you were prettier back then and now you’re just this “fat blob of a woman.”

But then I remember that I was thinking the same thing even when taking this picture. The deal is: weight doesn’t define self-love.

Hello. I’m Liz, and I am a fat girl with some deep-rooted issues.

Welcome to my world.

I come from a family of Italians and Puerto Rican’s. While my Puerto Rican family is not fat, my Italian side is, and I guess my sister and I just got that “fat gene” in the family. When we were younger, nobody cared if little Liz was chubby; she was a baby, and being a chubby baby met that you were the cutest thing in the world. But then you get older and that same family tells you that you’re getting bigger. “You should lose some weight”. “She’s gotten heavier since I last saw her.” And my personal favorite: “I’ll pay you $100 if you lose 100 pounds.” I’m not joking, that’s a true story.

We have this idea that fat is ugly, fat is bad, and fat is something that you shouldn’t want to have a lot of. We get fed these bullshit ideas that you can lose 16 pounds in 4 weeks (right, Jenny Craig advertisement in Bay Ridge?) and hear other people’s bullshit stories on how they are so much happier being “skinny” and “a couple of dress sizes smaller.”

And I fell for it time after time, thinking I was ugly, that my depression or sadness stemmed from a place of being fat, thinking that skipping meals and drinking only water in middle school would help me get skinny and stop being bullied by my own friends, and thinking that being skinny would stop making me be everyone’s second choice.

So as I got older and as I got fatter, I stopped caring, in all honesty. I stopped holding my body accountable for growing in the way that it does. Could I eat healthier? Of course. Could I be more active? Sure. But those things aren’t going to ultimately help me lose the 100+ pounds that won’t consider me “obese” on the “average height and weight chart.”

My body can’t even get to be that small even if it’s the ideal “weight for my height”, and I learned that from witnessing a family member of mine battle anorexia a couple of years ago.

Yeah, who would’ve thought that projecting this idea of “I’m happy being skinner” could cause eating disorders?

As of this moment, I am focused on loving my body in the skin that it’s in, whether it’s in a size 20, size 26, or in the baggier size 30.

This isn’t just a fat girl story learning to love her body. This is a story on how a fat girl learned that her self-worth isn’t measured in dress sizes, real romance isn’t just a skinny person’s privilege, and that respect, power, and confidence could walk in a body like mine.

This a project about self-love.

To build yourself up after years of abandonment is challenging; you don’t know where to start, you have to clean up the mess that’s gathered over the years, and ultimately you have to create the foundation in order to start building things up strong and tall.

And this is the story of how it began.