My Body, A Biography

I'm a fat person.

And I'm not talking about "needs to lose 20 pounds" fat, oh no.  If I were in the weight loss game--which I'm not--I'd be well in the "over 100 pounds to lose" camp.

But I'm not.  I don't do diets.  And I don't particularly do "eat right & exercise", either--although I do try.  I'm just not in a good place right now for either of those things, and the fact that I'm not doesn't mean that I am not deserving of being treated like a human being.  Some people, strangely enough, believe that it's okay to treat fat people as if they weren't human.  Not only is this not right, it's downright cruel.

I'm not here to rant about the injustice of it all, though.  I'm here to tell you my body story. We all have one, but I think fat people tend to live closer to theirs than others--like some other groups, we're defined by what our bodies look like in ways that other people aren't.

I don't remember my body being different from anyone else's--and indeed, it wasn't--until I was probably around 7 to 9 years old--I was 9 the year that Mary Lou Retton was in the Olympics, and I think it was around then that my mother signed both me and my sister up for gymnastics, if not a bit earlier--I know I wasn't 10, because that summer I had a broken arm from softball.  Where I was humiliated by the instructors for being scared to do some of the maneuvers (because I was clumsy and worried that I was going to fall on my head) and further humiliated by some older girls for having a bit of a fleshy stomach.  I clearly remember them pointing at me, while I was waiting to do something on the uneven bars and saying loudly, "Look at her gut." 

That was the first time I felt ashamed of my body. The second was when they started weighing us in gym class.  In front of everyone, so everyone knew how tall you were and how much you weighed--just the thing for a body conscious girl to deal with, on top of those stupid Presidential Physical Fitness test things.  In 6th grade, i was 4'9" and weighed 110 pounds.  So yes, a little bit fat.  But not really a whole lot.  Just fat enough where I couldn't wear Jordache jeans and was stuck in half-sizes from Sears. 

And then puberty hit and I got hips--as a classmate told me in 8th grade, I'd have no problem birthing babies with hips like mine.  And I had breasts, too, and oh, I thought I was so damn fat.  Do you want proof of how grossly fat I was?  Look at that!  Why, my hip bones are not jutting out at all!  I am, actually, a fairly thin--if hippy--14 year old!  (We will pay no mind to the horrific glasses and 80's hair, okay?  Not to mention the weird posture--I didn't want my picture taken and my dad took it anyhow; there are very few pictures of me from this period, so I tend to remember the circumstances surrounding them all.)  

Our society is so fucked up when it comes to body image.  I look at that picutre and think to myself, "How could I have thought I was fat?" and I know it's because I couldn't wear juniors sizes anymore (the hips prevented it; juniors sizes are cut for pubescent girls without hips but I didn't know that) and because I didn't have jutting cheekbones like Linda Evangelista--and because a lot of the fashion magazines I was reading had unrealistic images of girls my age in them--TEEN used to have a teen fashion model contest every year, and for whatever reason, I thought the girls were somehow representative. Which they weren't.  Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, I am looking at you.

At any rate, this was how I felt about myself.  And how else was I supposed to feel?  I wasn't getting any messages that affirmed that my body was okay the way it was: my little sister was allowed to call me fat, my grandfather made comments about my big ass, and no one ever spoke up and said that it was wrong.  And I believed them.  Why wouldn't I?  The main barometer of a teenage girl's sense of attractiveness, i.e., the opposite sex (I was not yet in tune with my inner queer), was not on board with thinking I was good looking, and neither were my friends (thanks, friends).

But my body stayed pretty much the same throughout the rest of junior high and high school.  I was always a bit on the big side, but never so much so that it was noticeable.  And, to my eternal shame, I made fun of the girls who were seen as fat.  Of all the shitty things I did when I was a teenager, that's the one that I feel the worst about.  And I owe those girls apologies--for while I was going through a body image hell of my own, it was at least confined to inside my head.  Those girls--Brandi, Julie, Terina--had it inside and out and I am so incredibly sorry for contributing to their pain. 

And then.  My mother died.  And I plunged into the worst depression I have ever known.  And the entire summer after I graduated high school I did nothing more than go to my very part time job at the library, watch tv, read, and eat.  And I gained about 30 pounds, which was enough to make none of my clothes fit.  And my father was disinclined to buy me many new clothes for college.  I got a few things, but not nearly enough.  My winter coat, a hand-me-down from my mother's closet, wouldn't zip. I went to school in Kalamazoo (not K-College, the other one).  I had no money to buy anything better.  My roommate sucked.  I was in the midst of a suicidal depression and the only thing that saved my ass was that I had a cousin who lived in town who would come around every so often.  I continued eating at the same rate I had been, but I didn't gain because I had a really long walk to and from class--quite literally uphill both ways--so I burned everything I ate off.

I was less lucky the next year when I lived in a dorm that was only 5 minutes from my classes.  Hello, second set of 30 pounds (I tend to gain in 30 pound increments).  Oh, look, none of my clothes fit again.  Yay!  At this point, though, I sort of stopped caring.  I figured that I was fat and I was ugly, so it didn't really matter. I tried, haphazardly, to lose some weight at this point.  I went to the student health center and told the doctor that I wanted to lose weight (he had the decency to tell me I wasn't fat--even though I weighed over 200 pounds at this point--bless you, nameless doctor) and he referred me to a dietician who proceeded to put me on an exchange diet meant for diabetics.  It didn't work, because I ended up coming down with walking pneumonia that semester and needing to not restrict my caloric intake so I could recover.  I was really ill, taking 19 credit hours, writing an honors thesis, and working part time.  I didn't have time to count bread exchanges. 

Post-college, I started working desk jobs, and of course I gained more weight then--and after a couple of years, my stepmother offered to pay for me to go to Weight Watchers--she'd pay half and I'd pay half.  This seemed like a good deal, so I went.  And ultimately I lost 40 pounds, taking me almost down to my college weight.  And then I stopped going, because I was laid off from my job and relocated from Michigan to Nebraska, and you know what happens why you stop dieting, right?  You regain everything, plus a bit more.  Hello, 40 pounds.  And hello 20 pounds more.  So nice to meet you.  At this point, I was well-ensconced into the upper end of plus sizes, size 26 and 28.  And then, while I was working at the job from hell (which I ended up losing, in part, because I had a vindictive bitch of a co-worker who hated fat people), I started going to Weight Watchers again.  And lost about 30 pounds.  And since I stopped going that last time, I've gained about 40--putting me at a bit above 300 pounds. And my weight's been stable.  I go up and down a little bit, as most people do, but not enough to really cause me much alarm.  And it's okay.  I have good days and bad days, but my bad days have a hell of a lot more to do with my fitness level and not my fatness level.  And the fitness level, that can be fixed.  The fatness, not so much.  And that's okay.

To me, what I find interesting is that all the weight I gained is related, pretty directly, to transitional or traumatic incidents in my life: my mother dying, going to college, becoming self-sufficient, going through job hell, et cetera.  And every time I tried to make myself smaller, I ended up getting bigger in the long run, because diets don't work (95% of people who go on a diet end up regaining all the weight they lose, plus a bit extra--they really do mean "results not typical" in the Jenny Craig ad).  I eat, on a daily basis, neither more nor less than anyone else.  Some days, I have food that's good for me, and others I don't.  Just like everyone else.  My eating is not disordered and for me to go on a diet, I would have to choose to eat in a disordered way. 

I have chosen, instead, to enjoy life.  This is the body I have.  I may as well live in it.