Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Fat. Not Fat.

When I was young, I thought I was fat. Like many young women, I was wrong about this: photographic evidence shows that I was quite trim and adorable as a young woman. Thinking you're fat when you're not is one form of distorted body image.

I suffer from another form now. Although I am, by any definition of the word, fat, I rarely feel fat. I feel attractive in my clothes; when a man smiles at me at the bus stop, I think it's because he finds me appealing, and this does not surprise me.

And yet, I am fat. Photographic evidence confirms this. It cannot be denied. Why, then, do I not feel fat?

I think it's because of what our culture tells us about being fat. I hear the same stories you do in the media: about women so fat they can't walk half a block, can't care for their children, can't find anyone to love them. Women who've ballooned to such an extremely large size that they are willing to undergo dangerous and mutilating surgeries that carry serious side effects and leave them--for the rest of their lives--unable to eat normally, because they simply must lose weight.

The women in these stories are often about my size, or even smaller.

We think this is what it means to be fat: to be unhealthy, to be constantly out of breath, to find ordinary daily activies impossible, to be out of control around food. I don't feel fat because none of these characteristics fits me. I can walk much farther than half a block. Miles farther. And, while I'm not especially speedy, I can do it with pleasure and good energy. I can drop down onto the floor to build a tower out of Duplos with my two-year-old, and pop--OK, "pop" is perhaps too strong a word, we'll say I can climb--back up again without requiring a block-and-tackle to be constructed for my aid. I do not suffer from back or knee pain, though I do have gouty toes that give me trouble from time to time. I have good eating habits and bad eating habits, but I do not have an eating disorder.

Since fat people inevitably have all of these problems and more, according to our culture, I must not be fat. And so I sail through my days, feeling entirely content with my body, and I'm shocked every time when the pictures come back from the lab and there's a fat woman in them. Not an unattractive women, mind you. But a fat one, for sure.

I used to think, with practically everyone else, that being fat was bad. And then I became a fat activist, and while I didn't exactly think that being fat was good, or better than being thin, I thought it was an acceptable way to be, for everyone, and whenever I heard someone talking about losing weight, for whatever reason, whatever size they were, I thought they were weak dupes of a malignant culture, and I felt betrayed.

Now I believe that some medical conditions are exacerbated by being fat, and that losing weight may help these conditions improve. I wish more people understood that this doesn't necessarily mean that being fat causes these conditions, or that every fat person is unhealthy, but perhaps that will come in time. In the meantime, when I hear someone say they want to lose weight, even if they say it to me and I weigh a good hundred pounds more than they do, and that feels a bit rude, well, I let it roll off me, while offering up a little prayer for their wholeness and well-being, in whatever form wholeness and well-being takes for them.

This is the form wholeness and well-being take for me right now: 5'4" tall, 240 pounds. Sometimes those pictures, when I open the envelope, strike a blow at my self-esteem, for a day or two. But when I'm not looking at photos, when I'm just living my life, I like myself, inside and out, every cubic centimeter of me, from the innermost innards to the tips of the tiny hairs on my arms, and I do not wish one bit of me away.

Imagine this: I'm strapped into my hiking boots and pushing my son in the jog stroller over the trails at the nature center. I am stretching my stride out long and picking up the cadence a bit. I feel my muscles working hard and my joints loosening up, my lungs moving air and my heart moving blood. My sharp-eyed sweetheart, David, touches my hand and points to a bird on a branch, and we pause, hand-in-hand, to watch it. The moment is perfect. My body is perfect. Snap a picture: the picture is perfect.

This is why I don't feel fat: fat people cannot love themselves, so we are told; fat people cannot love their bodies. But I do.

Posted by Su Penn at August 29, 2003 03:43 PM | TrackBack