Hi. This is a disheartening article. It really is. I would rank myself in the paradoxical group of people as I find myself able to relate to both sides and, actually, I’ve been privileged by fate. It made me complete, it made me better and it and it gave me first hand understanding which cannot be acquired otherwise. Not really, anyway. I’ll explain: I started out as a skinny girl, my father even worried that no man would like me, he belonging to the old school of preference: a woman should have some ‘meat’ on her in order to be desirable, hence no man would want to marry me, he thought, and he would always try to get me to eat more. I didn’t have a problem with eating, I ate a lot actually, only my metabolism consumed it all, I was lucky that way. But then, in my late teens, I fell ill with something the treatment of which wrecked my metabolism and I gained about 25 pounds, which didn’t make me really fat, as I started from very low body fat, but fatter nonetheless, and all of a sudden I was considered fat by my teen peers. It was devastating. I couldn’t believe the reactions I had got and the changes in my relationships that it incumbered. I was a wreck, but I emersed myself in study, as highschool was over and had to secure myself admission to a good university and practically severed all ties with the outside world to concentrate on that. You would think my father was happy with the new me, but the damnedest thing happened: now he thought I was…disgraceful, and that no man would want to even look at me because of that. Go figure!!! I was befuddled. I couldn’t wrap my mind around anything anymore. It didn’t matter that I was admitted to an esteemed university to him, not that much anyway, although he sometimes led me to believe that he was proud of me, but somehow it wasn’t enough. This ‘fat' version of me lasted only for a few years, as my body repaired itself and my metabolism recovered and slowly but surely I lost the weight and I was skinny again. My father was now conflicted and he didn’t know what to make of me: he was confused about his own perception of women and he didn’t comment again on whether men would like me or not (God rest his soul). He left me to my own devices in that area. As for my ‘friends’, some of the old ones tried a comeback and I accepted some back, but my relationship with them was never the same. I made new friends (fat and thin), and my double sided experience helped me to be a better judge of character, it helped me see people past their face value, so to speak. I came to pitying some of them for their shallowness, as I saw them becoming my father, because his confusion made him unhappy, all the more that he didn’t try to understand his confusion, or he just couldn’t, him being the victim of societal norms according to different periods in time and fashion tastes.

So, I consider myself lucky to have been through both stages. They made me whole and a better person and they helped me evolve. Don’t you agree?

(Sorry for the long reply)