I am fat. I have gotten fatter in this year of pandemic. I struggle with this. I had gotten to the point where I was ok with my body not being thin. I was proud to have gotten to a point where my body was steady, no more big downs and ups. I was not ready for my body to change again. I have been terrified of losing weight for a bit, scared of what it would trigger and mean in terms of relapsing. But it turns out I also wasn’t looking forward to the potential of continuing to gain weight.
This is complicated. I consider myself a fat and body liberationist. I know that all bodies are worthy and deserving of so many things that many bodies–fat, black, brown, indigenous, Asian, disabled, ugly–are not getting. And also, I sometimes still wish I were thinner. Not because I believe thinness is more valuable, but because I live in a society where thinness is more valued.
After more years of being fat and getting fatter. More years of being around newer friends. I am starting to realize that as long as society believes that weight is something that people can control, anti-fat bias isn’t going anywhere. And that sucks. That belief is so deeply embedded in our culture. So many thin people believe that they earn their thinness, don’t realize that they struck gold mine with their genes.
I have some friends, thin and fat, that I know don’t believe this. That know that they do nothing to “maintain” their bodies. But I also have friends that I suspect do believe this. I sometimes wonder what those friends think when they look at me. What they think when I express my anxiety around going to the doctor or dating while fat. Around going to the doctor for anything and everything (from heartburn and foot pain) because I am always met with mandates to lose weight. Around telling a person I know that I wanna go on a date with them because I still have a hard time believing that they, or anyone really, could be attracted to a body like mine. I wonder if they’re thinking “why doesn’t she just lose weight then?” I wonder if they’re thinking “yeah…how could anyone be attracted to you?”
But what I realized this morning, in the early hours that my body decided it needed to be awake for is that while a lot of people see fatness as a sign of laziness and stupidity and lack of self-control, for me, my fat signifies survival and resilience. My body survived 16 years of my starving it. Sixteen goddamn years. And my fat is at least partially a direct result of that. Fat was and is my body’s way of ensuring that I survive another round of starvation. I may still struggle to believe that fat is physically beautiful all the time, but recognizing this truth I have a new appreciation for my body. My fat is here as a reminder that my body worked overtime for sixteen years to keep my alive.
Some people aren’t so lucky. Eating disorders are deadly, moving between number one and number two in the list of deadliest mental health disorders. For those of us that do survive years and sometimes decades of undiagnosed and often prescribed eating disorders and eating disorder behaviors, we are often left with a fat body that is preparing for another round, a body that is fatter than where we started. It’s ironic and often so painful to realize that dieting reliably leads to weight gain in the long term, not weight loss.
I am fat. I have gotten fatter in this year of pandemic. My body survived this year of pandemic. This year of stress and isolation and fear. My fat body survived this year of pandemic and it got fatter in the process. Other people’s bodies reacted differently. None of us is better or worse for how we survived this year. For how we survive our culture. And I am white and moneyed in ways I didn’t earn. There is a plethora of evidence that anti-fatness is directly linked to white supremacy and specifically anti-Black racism. I’ll be reading Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings to learn more about that. If you’re interested, please join me.
tmd 