Existing while fat is hard. I feel like, intended or not, I am constantly put in a position to acknowledge, apologize for, or explain my fatness. I’m active. I’m vegetarian and am only physically capable of eating limited portion sizes. I’m anything but lazy. People often get confused (or just plain curious) about my journey with fatness. But my experience with fatness has been very personal and I will summarize it very simply: it has been a journey.
I’ve been bullied frequently. But as I got older, the bulling got more clever. It hides under a veneer of caring about what’s best for me and my health. Let’s be honest, people who are not medical professionals who criticize my weight are not emotionally invested in my physical or mental well-being; they don’t give a fuck if I live to be 35 or 105. What they are emotionally invested in is being able to bully me without being judged for it. Their perceived and constant moral high ground, their superiority, their lack of attraction to me as an overweight female: that’s their emotional connection to my life experience.
As a fat person I must obviously be lazy and weak-willed and all my physical problems would be solved if only I had a little discipline like the thinner and therefore obviously superior people judging me. I won’t motivate my fatness. I won’t give you, dear reader, justifications for why I personally do not self-identify as lazy or weak-willed. I am a person. I am fat. My life is a continuous (but not necessarily linear) journey of self-improvement. But if my life experiences have taught me anything, it’s that self-improvement has to be centered on the self. Knowing myself, understanding myself, being willing to acknowledge my flaws but still love myself anyway. Being able to balance loving who I am now while acknowledging that there are areas I want to improve upon. That is what self-improvement means to me. And snide comments from people whose life experiences have differed from my own will always make that self-improvement journey harder for me, not easier.
I know I’m fat. You know I’m fat. Anyone who sees a single picture of me knows. I don’t owe it to anyone to be ashamed every second of every day for existing as a person who is fat. So, let’s just let each other live, you know? No one is asking anyone to be attracted to me or be my friend or want to be in my life if they don’t like my fatness. People are totally entitled to their own preferences in terms of who they are attracted to and who they spend their time with. Does it make someone a shitty person if they never want to get to know me as a person at all because I’m fat? You tell me. But let’s not pretend that anyone who mocks fat people is anything more than a societally approved bully. Because if they truly wanted to make my life better (or anyone’s life better, for that matter), compassion would go a lot further than vitriol.
I would also like to acknowledge how much fat phobia effects people of all sizes, especially women, and can lead to disordered eating habits in an effort to achieve unachievable beauty or thinness standards. The fear that people with disordered eating have been socialized with is based in reality: people do hate fat people, find them unattractive, use fatness as the utmost horrible thing that can happen to a person (I’ve heard things like”I hope this person gets fat so she suffers” and the like from friends all my life said with no irony in front of me, a fat person). When I talk about fatness with thin friends it is often uncomfortable for them. As if our struggles are so far apart that it is hard for them to participate in the conversation. But most women I know were shamed, particularly by their mothers, to eat less and be thinner no matter how tiny they already were because no one would be attracted to them, want them, or marry them if they weren’t thin or pretty. And, again, this anxiety doesn’t come from nowhere. It doesn’t matter what size a woman is; fear of fatness–and all the shame and perceived unattractiveness and unlovability that comes with it–truly affects women of every size (and people, more broadly). Being kind to everyone–including fat people–gives people of every size the opportunity to be kind to themselves.
*Note: I am fully vaccinated and unmasked in a private indoor gym space where no other person is unmasked at the same time. I encourage everyone to be cognizant of covid safety in their fitness journeys but have a lot of hope for this and future fitness opportunities.
Millennial's Delight 