sure can run. I would be praised. If a really beautiful person gets a degree in law, they make movies about it. Wow. But why can she think? She doesn’t need to.
The idea that there is an objective beauty is soul-destroying, and it begins to feel like currency.
There is a scene in the movie Seven where a fat man is used to symbolise gluttony. He is also, surprise surprise, seemingly mentally ill, definitely poor, definitely unhygienic. Four traits that are always mushed together in Hollywood as if they are interchangeable. In another scene, the murderer has disfigured a supermodel and given her a choice: to keep on living, being ‘ugly’ for the rest of her life – or kill herself. Spoiler alert: she kills herself. This is not even that far from the truth. A study conducted by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida in 1991 shows that out of a group of formerly fat people, given the choice between becoming fat again or going completely blind, 89 per cent will choose going blind.3 In another 2006 survey conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, almost half of those asked indicated that they would happily give up a year of their lives if it meant they were not fat.4
I never believed that I could be found attractive. Part of me loathed the boys and girls who liked me, because surely they were either lying or horrible people themselves. Why would they want me, when they could get someone better? Someone thinner?
I remember a desperate boyfriend hissing into my face, ‘If only you could see yourself the way I see you,’ and me rolling my eyes at him saying, ‘You have to say that.’ And I laughed when he eventually cheated on me with a thin woman, because the joy of being proven right was more powerful than the pain of being cheated on.
Another boyfriend joined the military and had to be gone for long periods of time. I was so scared of being alone, of not being validated, that I joined yet another gym and started working out. Within a day, my entire world went back to revolving around weight loss. I started starving myself, counting calories, skipping school, so I could spend upwards of six hours in the gym, weighing myself four times a day and losing weight rapidly. By the time my boyfriend finally came home to see me for a weekend, I was angry at him for interrupting my stride. I blamed him for accepting me as I was, so I stopped feeling the need to exercise. As soon as he came back for a weekend, I started binge-eating again, gaining all the weight back and then some. I blamed him for that. I would not let him in. I would let no one in. I would let no one love me. Because I refused to believe it was a possibility. I was fat.
Looking back, I was in a fairly fortunate position. I was fat, but I was a small-fat. I was just about excluded from being able to buy clothes in straight-sized stores. I was ‘Aw, you’re not that fat’-fat. At the same time I had stumbled into a group of friends who cared about me and who had forced me out of my shell. It’s important to note that a lot of fat teens are pretty secluded and isolated – a consequence of bullying and having internalised the fatphobia they’ve experienced and witnessed. I talk flippantly about my teen years and the dramatic stories of love and sex, but I do so with the knowledge that not all fat people have had this experience. I especially feel this as I have grown older and fatter and my anxiety has risen. Being able to date and fool around is not a given for everybody.
I am not even sure you know how horrible it is being a teenager before you’re an adult. When you are a teenager, your hormones take full control of your every move. When I was a teenager and I fell in love, I loved more than anyone had ever loved before in the history of the world and I would die, simply die a violent death for a person with whom I had never even spoken. It’s truly a matter of swaying between all the extreme versions of every emotion to the sound of a hundred adults asking you to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you are both scared and at the same time, convinced that you definitely know better than these adults. Your teen years are also full of warnings. All the monsters that you thought were under your bed when you were a child are suddenly real – and they are not under your bed where you can see and contain them. They are the reason you are asked to never leave your drink out of sight, the reason you don’t walk home alone, and the reason you have to learn how to say no if there is something you don’t want to do. Yet, fairly often, we are not warned about the monsters that we can see – the people controlling everything that we consume. The people targeting marketing campaigns at teenagers’ fragile self-esteem, confirming their worst fears: that they are not okay, that they should be prettier and thinner and better. Basically shaking the groundwork for the person they are to become. You don’t know who you are or who to be? We will tell you. Be thin and pretty. How? By using our products. Daddy, is there a monster under my bed? Yes, actually, and he is holding a Slimming World brochure.
One day, when I was single and in my late teens, in the first week of my new job, I met a man who openly declared that he liked fat women. It was not directed at me, it was not to get me into bed, so I trusted it, weirdly. He told us, after a shift when we were getting drunk in the pub next to the office, that his father used to say to him: ‘Get yourself a woman with curves. They’re the best ones.’
He told me this with pride. I disregarded the problematic nature of that sentence because suddenly, I wanted to be the woman that he ‘got himself’. Hey, fuck feminism, this guy with sandy blond hair and wide shoulders who smokes a pipe despite being only twenty-one just told me he might fancy my fat stomach. Feminism can wait. Sure, Emily Davison threw herself under a horse to get me the vote, but I was not willing to challenge this man now – because there was the faint shadow of a promise of a kiss within his charming anecdote.
A year later, I found myself wishing that his father had told him, ‘Son, go get yourself a woman who is wilfully obsessed with you and who will write and send you poetry and always be so close to you that you can smell her breath,’ because then maybe, I would have had a chance. Instead he moved to the Danish island furthest away from Denmark. I take no responsibility for that.
Some people have fathers who do positive PR for fat women from an early age. I remember falling in love with him for just this reason. It was hard to believe that other people like that existed. Most people will have parents who tell them to ‘never get fat’, who will pinch their own stomach fat and say ‘eww’ and who will point at fat people in the shops and say words like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘gross’. The negative attitude towards weight is so all-encompassing that the chances are that whoever you meet has been taught to hate fatness, long before they even had a chance to make up their own minds about what it is they like and don’t like.
So I spent all of my teenage years hating myself, hating fatness and hating women and hating thin women, hating people who loved me and hating myself. I wasted so much time. I wasted so much money on attempting to make my body smaller.
When I was seventeen, I applied for part-time jobs. There was a plus-size clothing store selling everything from tent-like ponchos for fat people, to tent-like ponchos for fat people – with tassels. I had circled the shop a few times before I gathered the courage to go inside and apply. A large, older woman with a smile on her face took my application, looked me up and down and led me into her office. After a bit of chit-chat, she told me that she’d love to hire me. I said, as confidently as I could manage, ‘Just so you know, I am going to lose this weight soon.’
The woman’s face burst into a huge grin as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, sure!’
Today, I like her. Back then, I detested her and the shop and I never, ever wanted to work there. I stormed out, furious that she did not believe me because I would lose the weight, I would lose all the weight and I would be thin. The alternative did not even bear thinking of.
Sometimes you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me
