As far back as I can remember, I was always The Resident Fat Kid. And, like most fat kids who lived through the 90s, I have all the baggage that comes with it.
If I wasn’t being teased mercilessly, I was harassed by my family.
“You don’t need to eat that.”
“Haven’t you eaten enough?”
“You know, you have a very pretty face.”
Being a fat kid in the 90s meant going to school looking like a grandma because you had to buy your clothes at the Dress Barn. It meant living through the revolving door of fad diets, the fen-phen, those disgusting-ass Snackwells devil’s food cookies, and the rising popularity of shows like The Biggest Loser.
Eventually, I leaned into being fat — mostly because I wanted to protect myself. If someone wanted to negatively criticize my appearance, joke’s on them — I already hated my body! I just used self-deprecating humor to mask the truth.
(And don’t get me started on the exercise addiction and orthorexia I subjected myself to at the end of undergrad.)
As I reached my late 20s, something remarkable happened. One way or another, I discovered the body positivity movement. I began surrounding myself with fat role models. I saw beauty and talent and ability and possibility and potential in everyone, even myself. For the first time in almost 30 years, I finally felt like I had a wholesome relationship with food and physical activity. (Admittedly, it did help that society decided that people who wore a 3X and a size 26 pant didn’t have to look like they were wearing curtains.)
Of course, my body has suffered all the ailments caused by morbid obesity — diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. There is certainly a fine line you have to walk between body positivity and taking care of yourself, and I’ve been seeing an endocrinologist for about ten years now to address these health challenges.
So imagine my disdain when the endocrinologist and I finally discovered an effective and sustainable method for regulating my metabolism in the last eight months or so, and I began to lose weight — FAST.
Yes, I felt disdain. Still do.
I think the disdain comes from several places:
- I went through hell as a fat kid and young adult, and had to put in a lot of work to healthily process those experiences. To allow my trauma to inform how I treat people to this day. Work that spanned literal decades. I’d only been granted a few years to live at peace and resolve with the way things were as a fat person before I suddenly started dropping pants sizes faster than I could purchase new pairs.
- I regret the earnestness I felt as I desperately prayed to be skinny. How I’d fight for my life mentally so that I wouldn’t give in to eating a piece of candy. How I’d count Weight Watchers points at FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. How I’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. to work-out for two hours every day. Now I’m here, not even trying, and I can’t control it.
- It’s expensive. I think I’ve spent at least $1,000 on a new wardrobe since October — and I buy most everything secondhand!
- I feel like I’ve lost myself. Since my heaviest days, I’ve lost just about 100lbs. Because so much of my identity has been tied up in being fat for basically 75% of my life, I feel like that identity has been snatched from me against my will.
- Nobody prepared me for this. Because society elevates weight loss as some kind of lifetime achievement award, nobody talks about how identity loss and grief are a HUGE part of significant weight loss.
- Nobody thinks I should be upset about this. See above. It’s really hard to hear, “Must be nice!” or be admonished for my disdain.
And, even as I feel disdain and regret, there’s more work to do. I’m understanding that contentment, satisfaction, and self-assurance are feelings not to be informed by a pant size or a number on a scale.
At my heaviest, at my skinniest, my philosophy on body positivity remains. I can be content, satisfied, and self-assured at any size.
musings of an everywoman 