Your fat friend doesn’t feel fat.
“I feel fat.”
I struggle to find my breath, and then my voice. Sometimes I don’t bother, because it feels so fruitless to tell you how it feels when you say that you feel fat. You ask me if I know what you mean, and I genuinely don’t. I have never felt fat.
I don’t feel fat. I am fat.
You feel fat for good reason. You lost ten pounds and a dress size — down to an eight! — only to go on a date with a guy who told you he wasn’t attracted to “thick girls.” Your coworker can’t stop talking about Dr. Oz and green coffee extract, cortisol and belly fat. As a child, your grandmother told you that if you just drank mustard, you could make yourself vomit, and you’d never need to put on another pound. You can eat whatever you want! You follow all the rules your mother told you about — no horizontal stripes, only wear black, nothing too tight, no cap sleeves— because “you can always stand to look slimmer.” Sometimes you even buy Woman’s World or Ladies’ Home Journal, with their ridiculous crash diets. They never work, but what if this one does?
The whole world is telling you you’re not thin enough. Get skinnier, but not too skinny. Work out, but don’t show your muscle tone. Whole industries have been built on the wrongness of your body, on the certainty that if you just tried harder, if you just wanted it…
