Fatness Isn’t Always Simple Obesity
June is Lipedema Awareness Month.
My legs have been enormous for nearly as long as I can remember. Monstrous, manly even, and decidedly unfeminine.
First my calves, so I quit wearing shorts or short dresses when I was 12.
And then my thighs, so I quit going to the pool. Which means I haven’t worn a swimsuit in… more than twenty years.
In high school, I wore wide-leg jeans and I used to spend entire class periods feeling paranoid about the hems riding up when I sat. I didn’t want anyone to see my bizarre, puffy ankles and calves.
I was five-foot-six and 145 pounds through much of high school, so it’s not like I was massively obese. But I still had a bizarre body I didn’t understand.
Intimate relationships later befuddled me because of my body. I have always felt as if I owe people an apology for having to look at me.
We’ve all been trained to see fatness as an individual and moral failing, but what if there were diseases out there that could actually make a person fat and it wasn’t completely their fault?
People scoff at the notion. After all, true metabolic diseases which cause weight gain are much more rare than fat people would have the world believe. That’s what we’ve been told.
