Body of evidence
I am fat.
There... I said it. Yup, now you don't have to - I said it myself, and I'll say it again - "I am fat."
Thing is, many of you reading this probably won't agree with me. That's okay. I hear it a lot from friends - "There's no way you weigh almost as much as I do!" exclaimed a former coworker one time, who stands around a foot taller than me and is now a licensed personal trainer, and a recovering obese person himself. He'd swiped my license and seen the "230lbs" printed so plainly on it, and refused to believe it was true. I didn't tell him that it was an old number, and I really was sitting closer to 245 at the time. He'd have been happy to assume that the number was lower, though, the same way that many friends will dismiss me from discussions on obesity and fat-shaming by saying, "But Dana, *you're* not one of those people." Sometimes they think they're being less obvious about it, when discussions on weight come up in mixed company, and they shoot me a covert glance and hurriedly add "Well, only people who are *really* obese."
I'm not sure if I'm fooling anybody. Maybe they're just being polite and skirting my weight, saying I look good for it out of some kind of loyalty. I don't mind. But I think it's more than that - I think people really don't have a solid idea of what "fat" really means. And when my friends exclude me from that category, I'm sure they mean well, but there's something really critical that they're missing.
I *am* fat. I weigh in now at around 260lbs. Even though the BMI calculators are arguably bullshit, I'm far into the "obese" category according to my weight to height ratio. More than 30lbs over the highest recommended weight? Yup. Plus-size clothing? Well, depends on your definition - and the clothier - but for the most part, yes. 38DDD (or a 40DD in a pinch) has been my bra size for the last decade. I've got stretch marks, and jiggly bits, and my thighs rub together and I can make a double chin without trying too hard.
I don't think any of this makes me less beautiful. And when I bring up my weight, people try to explain it away with "Well, maybe a lot of it is muscle weight?" Sure. Some of it probably is. I dress well, and carry myself well, and there could be other explanations (like asthma, and strained knees) for my inability to run a mile without stopping. Maybe I just don't look to some people like a fat person for these reasons. But maybe there's another problem, too - one of justification, and a certain kind of ignorance.
When we talk about the obesity epidemic, and statistics get quoted - X percent of Americans are obese! Y out of 10 children are overweight! etc - people don't imagine people like me. They imagine X percent of people who are too fat to walk without help, people who are wider than they are tall, or who have five chins or whose arms are wider than their heads. And a lot of people I hear arguing against obesity are also talking about these people - the one person on a plane of 150 passengers who had to buy two seats, the one person on the news they saw that one time, the one person they know out of all of their friends and acquaintances who uses their obesity as an excuse to get away with poor hygiene or whatever else.
I begin to suspect that the person most people picture when we talk about obesity is someone like that - not someone like me. But the thing is, *I* am the one they're talking about when they talk about obesity. And when we talk about body image, and the myriad subtle kinds of discrimination society has against fat people, we're talking about me. We're talking about me because I have to spend more money on (and time finding) clothes that fit me well. We're talking about me because there are restaurants with chairs I can't sit in, cars with seatbelts that don't extend enough to fit me comfortably, scales that won't accomodate me. We're talking about me because I have heard the comments about my weight, the assumptions about my eating or exercise habits, seen the look in an interviewer's eye that says they're just not sure if I can be responsible for their job if I can't be responsible for my own health. So while "But you don't look it!" and "But I mean people who are *really* obese" may sound like compliments, they have a way of subtly dismissing my struggles.
I count myself lucky in that I never really had any body issues. I'm fine with me the way I am - sure, it'd be nice to have more choices of places to shop, but my weight doesn't make me feel like I'm any less of an awesome person. But there are a lot of girls out there not so lucky, and when they get dismissed by their friends in the same way, I imagine, what does it feel like for their story not to be heard?
So I felt like telling my story. It may not be the same as anyone else's, but I feel like I'm not unusual. I'm a person, with a history, with a life, with daily choices I've made and struggles and priorities, just like everyone else. So maybe telling my story, someone might think about the story behind the next person who is included (or not) in their next grand sweeping statement about what is or isn't an acceptable body image/size/shape.
Although I was fascinated by the human body as a child - my favorite book was the section of the Children's Encyclopedia on the body, with its clear plastic layers that peeled back showing the cardiovascular, skeletal, and endocrine systems - I was never very aware of my own. I remember a day - I must have been four or five, because I think we were in the back yard of our house in Texas - I was swinging with my sister on our swingset, and she called me fat. I don't remember how the conversation started, or if that was the word she used, but I remember shooting back that "muscle weighs more than fat," and she responded that she had more muscle than I could ever hope to imagine, or somesuch similar childish exaggeration. I wasn't particularly hurt by this, but I was confused. Why did she care? I think even then I had a vague awareness that she was trying to make herself feel better rather than directly trying to hurt me.
The thing is, I wasn't a fat kid. I was tall for my age - if I was self-conscious about anything, it was that - and very active. I biked everywhere, climbed trees, took ballet lessons in which I had to stand behind all the other girls lest I block them. I wasn't particularly athletic, though. I took gymnastics and quit because I was afraid of the trampoline and didn't want to turn a cartwheel because I thought I'd fall and break my neck. I played soccer and never really understood what was going on. I hated baseball - or anything where a ball might hit me in the face - and only ever tried out for teams when my parents would cajole me into it. Asthma made things difficult, and my rigorous academic pursuits constantly interfered with my gym classes. But I still loved to explore, so even into high school I took my bike out to the trails and followed a different one every day, and climbed hills with my friends and imagined we were on adventures. I still loved to dance, and took lessons where I could find them, and went to every dance we could get invited to and danced all night at least twice a week - high school dances, church dances, neon bowling thursday nights at the local bowling alley. I didn't want to drive, so I walked everywhere.
There's an old journal entry - I can't remember when exactly, but sometime early in my junior year, I had gone to the doctor for something, and weighed in at 130 lbs. Being an early bloomer, I'd essentially reached my adult height by then - I've been 5'8" and change for as long as I can remember - and I remember fretting that that seemed a little high. I had no real idea of what was high or not. Statistically speaking, that's on the low end of the weight range for my height. Later that year, I remember joking that I was "just a little better than average," since I'd apparently researched the average sizes for a lot of things, and determined that the average woman was just a little shorter, just a little lighter, had half a size smaller feet and hands, etc. I loved the idea that I was just a little larger than life - apparently perfectly averagely proportioned, just a *little* better.
So what changed?
Well, high school happened. My parents happened. Over the course of about a year - the end of my junior year and into my senior year - I gained about 100lbs. Every day of my life then went something like this - 5am seminary class, 7am-2pm high school classes (in which I had high grades, but not high enough for my parents), then straight to whatever house construction project my parents had roped us into helping with, where we'd work until it was dark and we couldn't anymore, around 8pm, at which point my parents would realize they should probably feed us something and ask whether we wanted McDonald's or Taco Bell. That would usually be the first time I'd eaten that day, too, and then I would settle in to do my homework, and end up staying up to talk to friends until I realized it was time to get going for Seminary, and start all over again. I had every known cause of weight gain going for me - stress, depression, lack of sleep, a horrible diet, and (thanks to the depression and stress) was nowhere near as active as I'd been all my life. I noticed my clothes didn't fit right, but was too busy to stop and assess. So when I took a weight training class the second semester of my senior year and weighed in at 230lbs, I hardly had the brainpower to remember my previous weigh-ins. Even then, I didn't consider myself fat. And I still loved to be active - Mr. Gasperland, the weight training teacher, loved having me in his class, because I was the only girl who actually tried. The boys in the class all crowded around the free weights, working on their "guns," and the girls would take turns at the abdominal crunch machine, obsessing over their little pooches and side-eyeing me when they thought I wasn't looking. I showed up to work, though - warmed up with successively larger numbers of crunches and even pushups (and pushups are a thing I have always hated), pushed myself with my routines, alternating upper and lower body workouts daily, and hit the treadmill with a few minutes to spare, always wishing I could stay after class and just run for a while.
But an hour a day of hard exercise didn't make a difference in my weight. I spent a summer in Utah after graduation and after being severely ill, had dropped about 15lbs, and wondered at how that had happened so effortlessly, since months of trying had yielded no results. But the weight came back as I recovered, so I chalked it up to elevation differences and water loss. Since then, I haven't really gained any weight, either - except for two instances of relatively quick gain: first, when I got on a hormonal birth control regime for endometriosis, and almost immediately gained about 15lbs that never went away, and second, more recently, when I lived in a horrible unsanitary and highly stressful room rental situation in Washington - again, gained about 15lbs, and it hasn't come off.
I've had times in my life since high school when I've been active and tried to eat right. I've had gym memberships, routines at the student health center at university - I still walk everywhere. I've gone through periods of time when I've counted calories, paid attention to my diet, cooked at home, etc. And the conclusion I keep coming to is that it doesn't matter what I do - the weight isn't coming off, and it's not likely to pack on either - unless I get horribly stressed again, mayhap.
I read articles on health. I do have a pretty decent basic sense of what is good for my body and not. And I'd read articles on people who dropped a lot of weight, and they usually would start with "Well, I just stopped eating junk - I cut soda out of my diet and stopped eating a dozen twinkies for breakfast every day."
That's not me, though. I don't drink soda - up until about 15 months ago, I didn't drink alcohol, and when I started doing that, I stopped buying juice. I still don't drink much - get a cocktail when I go out to dinner maybe every two weeks. I do perhaps eat too much - the last time I started keeping a food log, around six months ago, I found that I was consuming an average of around 2500 calories a day. Not low enough to lose weight, I guess, but not high enough to gain much either - especially because it's not 2500 calories in twinkies, but in snacks like fruits and nuts, dinners made of lightly sauteed meat and vegetables, etc. Yes, I eat lean cuisines for lunch and have fruit snacks and string cheese for snacks. Breakfast is usually toaster waffles, and I drink whole milk instead of skim. I have indulgences - I like cream cheese on my bagels, whipped cream on my strawberries, and can polish off a slice of cheesecake after eating a whole 8oz steak for dinner. My diet isn't tops. But it's not the worst, either.
I'm not making excuses for my weight. I could probably put a lot more effort into it and maybe drop some weight, and a lot of the reasons I don't is that I want to put my money towards other goals right now and my energy towards other functions. But the point is, I'm not lazy. I'm not a slob. I don't have discipline problems. I had my thyroid checked about a month ago, nothing wrong with that. Maybe a lack of motivation, but I don't sit at home every day and drink beer and watch TV. I'm not what you picture when you talk about the obesity epidemic - and the solution to my being fat is not as simple as "putting down the donut and picking up a dumbbell once in a while." I'm just an average sort of gal - and that's okay. That's what I want people who struggle with body image to see as okay - okay to live your life, okay to enjoy what you enjoy, and okay to be who you are.
I won't apologize for being fat. Nobody else should have to.
There... I said it. Yup, now you don't have to - I said it myself, and I'll say it again - "I am fat."
Thing is, many of you reading this probably won't agree with me. That's okay. I hear it a lot from friends - "There's no way you weigh almost as much as I do!" exclaimed a former coworker one time, who stands around a foot taller than me and is now a licensed personal trainer, and a recovering obese person himself. He'd swiped my license and seen the "230lbs" printed so plainly on it, and refused to believe it was true. I didn't tell him that it was an old number, and I really was sitting closer to 245 at the time. He'd have been happy to assume that the number was lower, though, the same way that many friends will dismiss me from discussions on obesity and fat-shaming by saying, "But Dana, *you're* not one of those people." Sometimes they think they're being less obvious about it, when discussions on weight come up in mixed company, and they shoot me a covert glance and hurriedly add "Well, only people who are *really* obese."
I'm not sure if I'm fooling anybody. Maybe they're just being polite and skirting my weight, saying I look good for it out of some kind of loyalty. I don't mind. But I think it's more than that - I think people really don't have a solid idea of what "fat" really means. And when my friends exclude me from that category, I'm sure they mean well, but there's something really critical that they're missing.
I *am* fat. I weigh in now at around 260lbs. Even though the BMI calculators are arguably bullshit, I'm far into the "obese" category according to my weight to height ratio. More than 30lbs over the highest recommended weight? Yup. Plus-size clothing? Well, depends on your definition - and the clothier - but for the most part, yes. 38DDD (or a 40DD in a pinch) has been my bra size for the last decade. I've got stretch marks, and jiggly bits, and my thighs rub together and I can make a double chin without trying too hard.
I don't think any of this makes me less beautiful. And when I bring up my weight, people try to explain it away with "Well, maybe a lot of it is muscle weight?" Sure. Some of it probably is. I dress well, and carry myself well, and there could be other explanations (like asthma, and strained knees) for my inability to run a mile without stopping. Maybe I just don't look to some people like a fat person for these reasons. But maybe there's another problem, too - one of justification, and a certain kind of ignorance.
When we talk about the obesity epidemic, and statistics get quoted - X percent of Americans are obese! Y out of 10 children are overweight! etc - people don't imagine people like me. They imagine X percent of people who are too fat to walk without help, people who are wider than they are tall, or who have five chins or whose arms are wider than their heads. And a lot of people I hear arguing against obesity are also talking about these people - the one person on a plane of 150 passengers who had to buy two seats, the one person on the news they saw that one time, the one person they know out of all of their friends and acquaintances who uses their obesity as an excuse to get away with poor hygiene or whatever else.
I begin to suspect that the person most people picture when we talk about obesity is someone like that - not someone like me. But the thing is, *I* am the one they're talking about when they talk about obesity. And when we talk about body image, and the myriad subtle kinds of discrimination society has against fat people, we're talking about me. We're talking about me because I have to spend more money on (and time finding) clothes that fit me well. We're talking about me because there are restaurants with chairs I can't sit in, cars with seatbelts that don't extend enough to fit me comfortably, scales that won't accomodate me. We're talking about me because I have heard the comments about my weight, the assumptions about my eating or exercise habits, seen the look in an interviewer's eye that says they're just not sure if I can be responsible for their job if I can't be responsible for my own health. So while "But you don't look it!" and "But I mean people who are *really* obese" may sound like compliments, they have a way of subtly dismissing my struggles.
I count myself lucky in that I never really had any body issues. I'm fine with me the way I am - sure, it'd be nice to have more choices of places to shop, but my weight doesn't make me feel like I'm any less of an awesome person. But there are a lot of girls out there not so lucky, and when they get dismissed by their friends in the same way, I imagine, what does it feel like for their story not to be heard?
So I felt like telling my story. It may not be the same as anyone else's, but I feel like I'm not unusual. I'm a person, with a history, with a life, with daily choices I've made and struggles and priorities, just like everyone else. So maybe telling my story, someone might think about the story behind the next person who is included (or not) in their next grand sweeping statement about what is or isn't an acceptable body image/size/shape.
Although I was fascinated by the human body as a child - my favorite book was the section of the Children's Encyclopedia on the body, with its clear plastic layers that peeled back showing the cardiovascular, skeletal, and endocrine systems - I was never very aware of my own. I remember a day - I must have been four or five, because I think we were in the back yard of our house in Texas - I was swinging with my sister on our swingset, and she called me fat. I don't remember how the conversation started, or if that was the word she used, but I remember shooting back that "muscle weighs more than fat," and she responded that she had more muscle than I could ever hope to imagine, or somesuch similar childish exaggeration. I wasn't particularly hurt by this, but I was confused. Why did she care? I think even then I had a vague awareness that she was trying to make herself feel better rather than directly trying to hurt me.
The thing is, I wasn't a fat kid. I was tall for my age - if I was self-conscious about anything, it was that - and very active. I biked everywhere, climbed trees, took ballet lessons in which I had to stand behind all the other girls lest I block them. I wasn't particularly athletic, though. I took gymnastics and quit because I was afraid of the trampoline and didn't want to turn a cartwheel because I thought I'd fall and break my neck. I played soccer and never really understood what was going on. I hated baseball - or anything where a ball might hit me in the face - and only ever tried out for teams when my parents would cajole me into it. Asthma made things difficult, and my rigorous academic pursuits constantly interfered with my gym classes. But I still loved to explore, so even into high school I took my bike out to the trails and followed a different one every day, and climbed hills with my friends and imagined we were on adventures. I still loved to dance, and took lessons where I could find them, and went to every dance we could get invited to and danced all night at least twice a week - high school dances, church dances, neon bowling thursday nights at the local bowling alley. I didn't want to drive, so I walked everywhere.
There's an old journal entry - I can't remember when exactly, but sometime early in my junior year, I had gone to the doctor for something, and weighed in at 130 lbs. Being an early bloomer, I'd essentially reached my adult height by then - I've been 5'8" and change for as long as I can remember - and I remember fretting that that seemed a little high. I had no real idea of what was high or not. Statistically speaking, that's on the low end of the weight range for my height. Later that year, I remember joking that I was "just a little better than average," since I'd apparently researched the average sizes for a lot of things, and determined that the average woman was just a little shorter, just a little lighter, had half a size smaller feet and hands, etc. I loved the idea that I was just a little larger than life - apparently perfectly averagely proportioned, just a *little* better.
So what changed?
Well, high school happened. My parents happened. Over the course of about a year - the end of my junior year and into my senior year - I gained about 100lbs. Every day of my life then went something like this - 5am seminary class, 7am-2pm high school classes (in which I had high grades, but not high enough for my parents), then straight to whatever house construction project my parents had roped us into helping with, where we'd work until it was dark and we couldn't anymore, around 8pm, at which point my parents would realize they should probably feed us something and ask whether we wanted McDonald's or Taco Bell. That would usually be the first time I'd eaten that day, too, and then I would settle in to do my homework, and end up staying up to talk to friends until I realized it was time to get going for Seminary, and start all over again. I had every known cause of weight gain going for me - stress, depression, lack of sleep, a horrible diet, and (thanks to the depression and stress) was nowhere near as active as I'd been all my life. I noticed my clothes didn't fit right, but was too busy to stop and assess. So when I took a weight training class the second semester of my senior year and weighed in at 230lbs, I hardly had the brainpower to remember my previous weigh-ins. Even then, I didn't consider myself fat. And I still loved to be active - Mr. Gasperland, the weight training teacher, loved having me in his class, because I was the only girl who actually tried. The boys in the class all crowded around the free weights, working on their "guns," and the girls would take turns at the abdominal crunch machine, obsessing over their little pooches and side-eyeing me when they thought I wasn't looking. I showed up to work, though - warmed up with successively larger numbers of crunches and even pushups (and pushups are a thing I have always hated), pushed myself with my routines, alternating upper and lower body workouts daily, and hit the treadmill with a few minutes to spare, always wishing I could stay after class and just run for a while.
But an hour a day of hard exercise didn't make a difference in my weight. I spent a summer in Utah after graduation and after being severely ill, had dropped about 15lbs, and wondered at how that had happened so effortlessly, since months of trying had yielded no results. But the weight came back as I recovered, so I chalked it up to elevation differences and water loss. Since then, I haven't really gained any weight, either - except for two instances of relatively quick gain: first, when I got on a hormonal birth control regime for endometriosis, and almost immediately gained about 15lbs that never went away, and second, more recently, when I lived in a horrible unsanitary and highly stressful room rental situation in Washington - again, gained about 15lbs, and it hasn't come off.
I've had times in my life since high school when I've been active and tried to eat right. I've had gym memberships, routines at the student health center at university - I still walk everywhere. I've gone through periods of time when I've counted calories, paid attention to my diet, cooked at home, etc. And the conclusion I keep coming to is that it doesn't matter what I do - the weight isn't coming off, and it's not likely to pack on either - unless I get horribly stressed again, mayhap.
I read articles on health. I do have a pretty decent basic sense of what is good for my body and not. And I'd read articles on people who dropped a lot of weight, and they usually would start with "Well, I just stopped eating junk - I cut soda out of my diet and stopped eating a dozen twinkies for breakfast every day."
That's not me, though. I don't drink soda - up until about 15 months ago, I didn't drink alcohol, and when I started doing that, I stopped buying juice. I still don't drink much - get a cocktail when I go out to dinner maybe every two weeks. I do perhaps eat too much - the last time I started keeping a food log, around six months ago, I found that I was consuming an average of around 2500 calories a day. Not low enough to lose weight, I guess, but not high enough to gain much either - especially because it's not 2500 calories in twinkies, but in snacks like fruits and nuts, dinners made of lightly sauteed meat and vegetables, etc. Yes, I eat lean cuisines for lunch and have fruit snacks and string cheese for snacks. Breakfast is usually toaster waffles, and I drink whole milk instead of skim. I have indulgences - I like cream cheese on my bagels, whipped cream on my strawberries, and can polish off a slice of cheesecake after eating a whole 8oz steak for dinner. My diet isn't tops. But it's not the worst, either.
I'm not making excuses for my weight. I could probably put a lot more effort into it and maybe drop some weight, and a lot of the reasons I don't is that I want to put my money towards other goals right now and my energy towards other functions. But the point is, I'm not lazy. I'm not a slob. I don't have discipline problems. I had my thyroid checked about a month ago, nothing wrong with that. Maybe a lack of motivation, but I don't sit at home every day and drink beer and watch TV. I'm not what you picture when you talk about the obesity epidemic - and the solution to my being fat is not as simple as "putting down the donut and picking up a dumbbell once in a while." I'm just an average sort of gal - and that's okay. That's what I want people who struggle with body image to see as okay - okay to live your life, okay to enjoy what you enjoy, and okay to be who you are.
I won't apologize for being fat. Nobody else should have to.