When I heard that Phen-Fen and Redux were being pulled from pharmacy shelves, I panicked. Could my druggist still be in the dark about this news? Could I convince him to dispense all of the refills left on my prescription?
I hadn’t taken either Redux or the Phen-Fen combination in months, but I still felt that my one chance at losing weight was being taken away. How could my thin self ever emerge without drugs to help me along?
Considering that Redux only helped me briefly in my first round with it and Phen-Fen made me feel insanely hyper and out of control, I’m not sure what made me clutch the remaining pills as if someone was coming over to take them from me. Why had I kept them this long anyway?
When your body feels too big for you, you grasp at any promise for achieving the size, the life, you feel that you deserve. I remember when I first heard that a weight loss drug was being developed. I took an article to my doctor, begging for the prescription, even though the drug hadn’t been named yet.
At first, I felt disappointed that I didn’t weigh enough to take the new drugs. I wasn’t clinically obese. Yet. Eventually, I was. Now, I thought, NOW, I could begin to lose weight.
No pill, no diet, no exercise program, nothing that comes from outside of us can EVER cure our emotional obesity. Now, I do not suggest that physical fitness cannot affect our weight. There is, however, a difference between physical and emotional weight. My emotions are what sent me into a panic over the news on the dangers of these weight-loss pills: if I have no safety net, how can I eat what I want?
These are not issues of someone with a weight problem. These are the issues of an emotional attachment to weight. No prescription drug can ever dissolve THAT cellulite.