God forbid you look like me: a fat manifesto

Imagine this scenario: you’re at dinner with your friends and just finished eating. One of your friends is obese (or, if you are — maybe imagine it’s you). A friend who is not obese turns to the group and says, “Boy, am I full! I’m gonna get so fat from all that food, I swear.” Can you feel the palpable tension in your stomach stirring?

Anyone who knows me or has seen pictures of me knows that I am, by definition, obese. My current BMI is 40. I have struggled with my weight since elementary school. I like to playfully blame my spiral into fatness on the fact that when I was in 1st grade, my stepfather at the time started packing three snacks into my lunch instead of one or two. But of course, I know it’s much more complicated than that.

I have always been a picky eater, even before I started gaining a lot of weight. In preschool, I hid in the bathroom during snack time when they gave us food I didn’t like. Things like this kept persisting. In kindergarten, during my first family dinner with my then-stepfather, my mom, and his two twin children, I refused to eat anything on my plate because there was one food I hated on it. I was sent to my room where I cried it out; when I was out of tears, my mom let me have a bowl of Cap’n Crunch for dinner instead. I found comfort in foods that felt familiar, which, more often than not, were not the healthiest for a growing child. And so on and so forth.

My limited palette started to catch up to me as early as 2nd grade. I was starting to grow like any normal child, but my weight grew alongside everything else. That was around the time life presented me with my first bully. She went to the same school as me and went to the YMCA after school just like I did. I knew she didn’t like me. I wasn’t exactly sure why, until one day, she approached me while I was eating Doritos during recess. She told me, “if you don’t stop eating those Doritos, you’re gonna blow up,” and walked away with a smirk on her face. There were no tears, just shock and sadness. Why? Why would someone come up to me and say that? I told an adult — a recess monitor — who said she would talk to her, or her teacher. But nothing was done.

As I got older and started to be taught in school about the intersection of puberty and nutrition, I began to feel more pressure to be thin. What’s more is, this was a time when I had no inkling that I was trans male. I was a girl through and through, and if I had to explain how much grief girls and women get about their bodies and weight, we would be here all day. No one receives it worse though, than obese girls and women. Even when I transferred away from the school where my bully was, the looks and stares I got from my classmates felt like daggers. Physical education time was absolute torture, especially when it came time to take state tests. Always the last one to finish the mile run, never could do any sit-ups (still can’t!), given a low participation grade at times because I “wasn’t trying my best.” My mom, who also struggled with weight problems, invited me to do WeightWatchers with her multiple times, with the earliest ask being at 10–11 years old (I never ended up doing it). She knew I was getting ridiculed and didn’t want me to be a target anymore.

My obesity even tried to interfere with the first love of my life — music. In middle school, most of my friends were in band and begged me to join in eighth grade. I put it at the bottom of my elective list to humor them, only to discover that I was put into the class anyway. Someone else in our grade happened to be in band too — let’s call him Peter — who relentlessly bullied me about my weight. The comments were never-ending. On the first day I walked into the cafeteria with my chosen instrument, the flute, Peter piped up and said with a laugh, “Wow, shouldn’t you be playing tuba instead?” Whenever I tried to stand up for myself, I got labeled as the mean person, not him. It was just my luck when we transferred out to the same high school and joined band together. He made friends with upperclassmen who delighted in snickering at my body with him. One day, I left my music stand to do something, and came back to a whale sticker plastered on my music folder. I knew it was him. I told my band director, who didn’t do anything about it. Peter transferred to another high school my junior year, which felt immensely relieving. Good riddance.

In adulthood, these experiences have become a lot more subtle and indirect. The one that has always stuck out to me is my journey to get top surgery. It took a year longer than I wanted because most of the affordable surgeons within my insurance network did not operate on patients that were above a certain BMI, i.e. me. The reason given was always “possible complications”, but nothing else, and with no clinical evidence to back it up. I almost considered getting weight loss surgery first, before top surgery. However, in the end, I prioritized my happiness (and dysphoria) and went to the most expensive surgeon in my network, who didn’t have any BMI requirements.

This is just a sample of experiences I’ve had in my life about my fatness. While my real-life bullies have long gone away, the inner bully in my head has not. Going to the gym has often felt like a death sentence — “these people are so skinny and I’m so big. Can’t trip and fall, or use the machines the wrong way, or stay less than thirty minutes because then they’ll label me as ‘the fat person’ and laugh at me.” Grocery store trips involve a lot of debate — “No, I shouldn’t get that because last grocery trip, I bought X snack. That was my indulgence. I need to fit in my clothes.” Snack time is an intricate process — “okay, the serving size says this many calories for this many crackers. But I had about that much yesterday, too. I’ll hold off for now.” And when I first started experiencing panic attacks and didn’t know what they were, my mind almost immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was having a heart attack because I was fat. Of course, every single time, the tests in the emergency room showed nothing.

I experience stuff like this every day. It’s not painful like it used to be, but it certainly takes up a lot of brain space. Don’t get me wrong. I am fully aware that there are things that I can change, and trust me, I have attempted almost everything under the sun. As I have blossomed into my independence, I have tried to be brave and try new foods that are likely to help me. I am far more mindful about eating and intake than I’ve ever been, and my palette has since expanded to enjoying food beyond Cap’n Crunch and Doritos. I’m not asking for pity, or dieting advice, or exercise advice, or blaming everything on anyone or anything else. I’m not trying to tell you that being obese is completely fine and bears no health consequences whatsoever. And I realize that one person’s definition of fat could be another person’s definition of thin.

What I am trying to say is…when you say something about getting fat, feeling fat, etc — think about who’s in the virtual or IRL room with you first. We all want to live longer, feel better, and not spend retirement dealing with diseases and disorders, I get it. But even though your intentions aren’t laced with malice, subconsciously, the message being sent is, “I’m afraid of looking like a person your size.”