Fat
On growing up as a fat girl, 'not quite' having an eating disorder, and the horror of gaining weight
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p.s. I have tried to broach this topic with care, and I hope that some may find it comforting, but I do explore body image issues and anti-fatness feelings in this essay. There is no mention of calorie-counting or specific weights or measurements, but I recognise that this may not be something that you can read right now. If that’s the case, please give this one a miss, and I look forward to seeing you next time!
& a note for anyone interacting with me for the first time — I’m non-binary and use he/they pronouns. This essay spends some time exploring my experiences growing up as a girl before I transitioned, but please bear in mind that this is not how I exist in the world today.
I’ve been walking more recently, since the sun’s come out and the daffodils are in bloom and I have remembered just how much better I feel at this time of year. During our brief warm spell here in the UK a couple of weeks ago, I caught sight of my shadow, stretched out in front of me on the road. I remembered how I used to watch my shadow (how I still do, sometimes), move my arms and see the longer, more slender versions mimic me, study my smooth legs and my small tummy, and wish I could look more like my shadow.
My issues with body image started young. I could actually give you a specific event which set them off. I was five or six years old at the time. I stood in a line with my classmates in the playground, and a boy called Dominic stood a line across from me, with hair so blond he almost looked bald, and sharp, rodent-like features. He laughed at me and said, Your legs are fat! with boyish glee I’ve seen many times since in boys who bully girls. As an adult, I still see it in men gossiping about the women they’ve fucked; their bodies, their downfalls, their distasteful feelings.
It was the first time I’d looked at myself and asked, Am I fat? It was the first time ‘fat’ became a word to describe me, not as a neutral descriptor but as a word which meant grotesque.
I went to my friend Keira’s house that afternoon and, sitting in the car with our feet up on the backseats, Keira told her mum what Dominic had said to me while I studied our legs. Mine were much bigger than Keira’s. I was taken aback by her mum’s response — she was horrified. Looking back, I understand it better. It’s awful that a six-year-old boy had already internalised enough fatphobic and misogynistic rhetoric to turn around to a six-year-old girl and tell her, with pleasure at the idea that he might hurt her, that she has fat legs. Equally, I wonder if it would have helped for Keira’s mum to respond differently. Instead of gasping, Really? and going on to insist that I wasn’t fat, that Dominic was a nasty little boy and I should ignore him, would it have made me feel better for her to say something along the lines of, There’s nothing wrong with fat legs, or arms, or bums, or stomachs. They don’t make any judgements on the kind of person that you are, or the beauty that you hold.
Not that I could possibly hold her response against her. It came from a place of love and empathy for me, and despair at the world that had already started working to beat me into submission.
I started restricting food in primary school, after countless more scenes like that one with Dominic: a friend looking at our legs next to one another and gasping, And I thought my legs were fat (what is it about legs? Is it just more socially acceptable to say someone has fat legs instead of saying someone is fat?); my grandad joking that they should keep the snacks away from me so I didn’t eat them all; my mum always asking for a small bit of cake, and never failing to leave some food on her plate because she was stuffed. When I was eleven and experiencing PTSD, my counsellor sent me to a nutritionist instead of supporting me through feelings which were too big and violent for me to handle. In case you were wondering, no, eating Trek bars instead of biscuits and taking fish oil tablets every evening so that whenever I burped it tasted like fish didn’t help with my PTSD.
I remember making myself eat a satsuma for breakfast when I was nine, picking at lunch, and then binging on biscuits and chocolate in the evening because I was so hungry from restricting food for the rest of the day, and because I was miserable and sweet food provided fleeting comfort. Then the guilt would hit, and I would sit in my bedroom in despair, watching Onision (don’t know who he is? Good. Don’t look him up) share pictures of women’s bodies on YouTube with his hundreds of thousands of subscribers and judge whether they were fat, ugly, beautiful, sexy, and I would compare myself to them, pulling up my top to look at my stomach in my floor length mirror and sucking in to see what I would look like smaller, flatter.
In 6th form, I went through an episode of depression and started skipping meals again. My therapist at the time (who, I would like to note, did me a lot of good over the years, and this stumble doesn’t take that away) asked me if I’d been trying to lose weight, and said I looked ‘good’. My stomach turned. It was my lovely singing teacher, to whom I owe an endless debt of gratitude for all that she did for me over the years, who was the first to show concern. She gave me a searching look and asked if I’d been eating. I shrugged her off, but I could have cried. No one else — not my mum, not my friends, not even my therapist — had seen my shrinking body as a symptom of anything other than the enviable god of weight loss. She looked straight through the worship of thinness and saw what was really going on.
Since January, I’ve been taking regular pole dance classes. It’s the first time I’ve willingly been involved in a fitness class of any kind, and the first time exercise hasn’t made me want to cry. I haven’t lost any of the weight I’ve gained since leaving school, but I have become stronger, happier, and more confident.
A friend got me into pole. We’ve both had our fair share of being labelled ‘the fat one’, of our bodies being scrutinised and judged, of feeling afraid of PE at school. We’ve spoken about how pole is the first time we’ve been able to move our bodies without carrying intense judgement and shame, how it’s one activity that hasn’t been ruined by school traumas. I still keep track — persistently, aggressively — of what I eat every day. I watch ‘What I Eat In A Day’ videos when they pop up in my Instagram feed, despite my best efforts, and try not to feel too shit about myself. In pole classes, there’s still a hideous goblin in my brain comparing my body to others’, envying their thinness or (maybe worse?) finding relief in the bodies that are larger than mine. In a room, I always know where I stand on the scale of smallest to largest body.
I only confessed my disordered eating habits and body image issues to a therapist this year. It was the first time I’d spoken any of these feelings — which I’ve been experiencing for at least fifteen years — out loud. Seeing my therapist’s concern, their care and empathy for me and the utter absence of judgement, healed something. I’ve been taught throughout my life (as many people, especially those socialised as girls, are taught) that the most important thing is to be kind to others. I was always meant to put the needs of others above my own. Otherwise, I was at risk of being labelled ‘selfish’, ‘ungrateful’, or ‘a brat’. No one ever stopped to tell me that I should be kind to myself, as well. That, actually, being kind to yourself makes you a kinder person overall, and far more pleasant to be around. And, importantly, you shouldn’t be kind to others for fear of punishment but because, as humans, the most natural thing in the world is to care for one another.
I’ve only started learning the importance of being kind to myself in the last couple of years. It’s been something of a revelation. I often fuck up, and that’s fine. I still feel guilty if I don’t do something deemed ‘exercise’ every day. I still feel horrible for lying down before 9pm. If I’m not tired, I must not be working hard enough. But seeing my therapist’s horror at hearing me tell them that I feel like if I haven’t exercised I don’t deserve to eat, that I’m constantly at war with my own mind and my guilt over eating, made me realise just how vile that sounds. Imagine telling a child that they don’t deserve to eat until they’ve walked at least a mile. Imagine telling your partner or your best friend that they don’t deserve that ice cream or that Twix bar. Imagine how our ancestors would gawp at all the beautiful, delicious things we have access to today. When they invented carrot cake because carrots were the most sugary food they had access to, they couldn’t have imagined the blondies I bake for my family now in their pillowy sweetness. Shouldn’t we do them and ourselves a favour and enjoy the luxuries they worked hard to give us?
Today, I tried on some old trousers and realised I can no longer fasten them around my waist. This afternoon, I’m sitting in my room trying to remember that this is not the end of the world.
At least two people I grew up with have been sectioned for anorexia, one of whom was forced to remain in hospital with no option to leave for two years. I’ve seen what becomes of you when your eating disorder takes control.
People say that being fat doesn’t make you ugly, that you’re beautiful in all of your glory, regardless of how much space you take up in the world. Yes, my fear of fatness is about ugliness, but more than that it’s about grossness. It’s about the moral implications we attach to fatness — the idea that being fat makes you lazy, greedy, grotesque. The reality is that it doesn’t. And if you think about the fat people you adore for more than a second you will recoil in horror at the idea of applying labels of laziness, gluttony, or other sins to their bodies. We are all more than our bodies, and I’m grateful to mine for its resilience in the face of all that it has been through. If I can’t love it yet, I can be thankful for it.
Adrian, your sensitivity is remarkable, as is your honesty and vulnerability in this post. (Thank you for introducing yourself at the beginning. It's good to meet you.) I'm always so grateful when others write about the way our ideas as children can alter our perspectives, individually and collectively
This is an area I understand a (very) little bit. I remember my mother taking me to a doctor in high school to help me lose weight with a protein sparing FAST program, it was called. I had outfits to fit into. I love my mother and don't blame her for what was probably a weight obsession of her own.
I also appreciate the eye-opening moments when sensitive and willing writers like yourself offer valuable understanding for people who can hear it: "There’s nothing wrong with fat legs, or arms, or bums, or stomachs. They don’t make any judgements on the kind of person that you are, or the beauty that you hold." I so appreciated this piece, thank you.