I’ve Been Fat and I’ve Been Thin. Thin is Better.
If I hadn’t been born too early for the Fat Acceptance Movement, I’d now be dead.
Memory: my mother, preparing for a bridge party, has made something called a Stained Glass Cake. It consists of multiple Jell-O flavors, heaped together to create an abstract stained-glass pattern in cherry red, lemon yellow, and lime green, interlaced with whipped cream, on a graham-cracker crust. It was set out on a table, all by its glorious self.
I got a spoon, knelt on a chair, had a little taste, and then demolished most of it before my mother caught me. It was the first time I ever felt bad about eating too much. There would be many more.
I did not start out as a fat kid. I started out taller and stronger looking than most kids, very healthy and definitely plump. This kid body type, which I have seen on other little girls, did not play well, given the expectations that prevailed when I was a little girl who could never properly be called little.
The first time I felt bad about being fat was at the age of five, when some obnoxious little boy in my kindergarten started calling me an elephant. I wasn’t elephantine. I was plain large, and probably could have pummeled him, had I been so inclined.
The problem continued through grade school. Except, to me, it wasn’t a problem, because I was a child. I had no concept of what I looked like and really didn’t care. This is right and proper for a child.
I ran through the woods, rode a bike a lot, swam in summer and skated in the winter. When we organized hockey games, back in the frozen swamp behind the house, they made me the goalie, and I didn’t mind at all.
Puberty hit. I got taller but started to widen as well, especially in the hips.
In the midst of a hormone-fueled growth spurt, I ate like there was no tomorrow. I still didn’t care how I looked. I didn’t care when weird stuff started happening between my legs. I didn’t care when other girls started fussing with their hair and reading teen magazines.
I started to care one day when, in eighth grade, in the depths of winter, a group of boys — it was always boys who were mean — told me that I was too fat and ugly to be seen in public, that I should just stay home and hide.
I walked home from school that day. I went through a mental process I will never forget. I realized several things: That many people are snakes. That people who were cruel to me were probably cruel to anyone who looked different. That I could not change them.
The year was 1969. Controversy swirled around me. I was aware of the Civil Rights movement, and it was easy for me to connect discrimination against fat people to hatred based on skin tone. My haters were just prejudiced.
But behind my misery, another theme emerged: Whether or not I liked it, this was reality. This was the way the world was, and this was the way the world would treat me for the rest of my life if something did not change.
I realized that unlike someone who, in the eyes of those boys, was the wrong skin tone, or a person born with a condition that made them look different, I was being treated this way because of a situation that I had caused. These evil, stupid, mean people were doing this to me because I had brought it on myself. Without my fat, they would simply leave me alone and find other victims.
And then I realized that there was only one thing I could change, and that was me.
I did not identify with my body. It seemed separate from me, just an oversized, awkward vehicle I had been given to live life in. In fact, much about my Catholic upbringing made me see the body as distinct from the soul, from the inner me. This easily translated as indifference to the body, or the feeling that giving it too much attention was, perhaps, sinful.
But I also realized that as trivial as it seemed at the time, the body I had was the cause of my troubles, not the result of a genetic problem or an accident of birth.
I was born to be tall, born to be strong, but I wasn’t born to be fat. I was fat because I ate too much.
I realized that my body was the direct result of my own actions, of shoving too much ice cream, too many thick cheese sandwiches, too many potato chips and too much dip down my throat.
Then came another stunning realization: Since I had created this situation, I could turn it around.
That was the sensible part. But somewhere, in the back of my not-so-innocent brain, I mused, “Maybe I can get even. Maybe I can make myself look really good, in their evil, stupid, mean little eyes, and maybe I can make them eat their hearts out.”
I was not sure I could do it. I thought it would be hard, and now I was afraid to fail. So, like a good Catholic girl, I tried to purify my thoughts and put aside plans to enact vengeance upon my enemies.
I said my prayers, asking for the assistance and blessing of God the Father; Jesus; his mother Mary, my guardian angel, and St. Jude, the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases. As a Catholic, I had a lot of heavenly resources.
I went home to my mother. I told her about the decision I had made. I said, “I am going on a diet. Now, how do you do that?”
My mother, it turned out, was overjoyed. She hadn’t said a word, but she had been extremely worried about my weight. The doctor had informed my parents shortly before this epiphany that I was borderline obese. As a child, she had nearly starved during the Depression, and she did not know how to tell her own child to stop eating.
Now that she didn’t have to convince me that I had a problem, my mother — who was a nurse before she got married — knew exactly what to do. She said, “You’re going to eat three healthy meals a day. Protein, carbohydrate, less fat, no sugar, and no snacks.”
“What if I need a snack when I get home from school?” I asked.
“You eat an apple,” she said, “Or, if you’re really hungry, an apple and some cottage cheese.”
“I like apples,” I said. The deal was sealed.
That night, while the rest of the family ate spaghetti, I had a broiled chicken breast, some sort of overcooked green vegetable, a baked potato with no butter, and an iceberg-lettuce salad with a little French dressing.
In the morning, and every morning for months after that, I opened my eyes and swore that I would stick to The Plan.
I started walking to and from school each day, a mile each way, a total of ten miles a week. I ate my light snack and then my light dinner. I did my homework, giving it more attention, and when I was finished, did calisthenic exercises in my room. My grades, concentration, and mood improved.
The boys were still mean. They rode the school bus past me while I walked. The meanest of the little snakes leaned out the window and screamed “Fatso!”
Obviously, in their eyes, I was walking because I was fat, which was true. They could not know that I had also begun to love the feeling of using my muscles to speed faster and faster down the sidewalk, enjoying the sight of crocuses now appearing in the melting snow. They did not know that I could already feel the power that was developing in my leg muscles.
I learned that vegetables taste great with nothing added except salt and pepper, if you slow down and experience the flavor. I learned that I could have a sweet once in awhile, if I consumed it early in the day, so I occasionally added a small Danish to my healthy breakfast, and ate it slowly with my eyes closed.
I began to realize that I wasn’t on a diet; I was teaching myself how to eat.
As winter turned to spring, the kids became less mean. They looked at me, slightly puzzled, a lot quieter. My school uniform had to be taken in at the waist. Then the vest became too large and the whole thing was scrapped for a new one, though it was only two months before 8th-grade graduation. Seeing results, I started walking on the weekends.
I reached my 14th birthday weighing . . . I don’t know, because I never weighed myself. But I was now taller. I would guess 5'8". Whatever my height was, I was the tallest girl in my graduating class. I know, because, in the nuns’ infinite wisdom, it was decided that we had to line up by height, shortest to tallest, to march down the aisle and accept our diplomas. I brought up the rear.
That didn’t bother me much.
I joked, “I’m glad to be tall. I can eat more than the petite girls.” I had a feeling that my continuing weight loss was connected to the strength in my legs, that they were helping me burn calories. I was probably right.
I was now size 13, the teen version of a woman’s size 14, well within the range of what was considered healthy for my height. My mother brought me a dress for the graduation dance off the racks of clothes made for pretty young ladies, instead of a sad corner of our local department store, the dark place called “Chubettes.”
When I’ve tried to tell this story, I’ve been informed that my success was due to class privilege.
I’ve been informed that I had an educated, full-time mom and a professional man for a father, that the food I ate could be instantly tailored to suit my nutritional needs by a mother who could just head back to a well-stocked suburban supermarket for chicken breasts and iceberg lettuce.
This is all true. I don’t deny it.
I am not writing this to make you feel bad if you can’t lose weight. You may be dealing with a number of physiological, cultural, and economic factors that make it impossible, or much more difficult than it was for me. I’m not criticizing you if weight loss just isn’t high on your list of priorities, or if you are wise and strong enough to know that you are beautiful as you are.
I am also aware of the dark side of all this: that I learned early on that what mattered most about me, in the eyes of the world, was the way I looked.
However, I never came to fully believe that. I saw losing weight and long-term maintenance as the pathway to a better life, not the goal of my existence, not then and not now. I just realized that most people would have trouble seeing what a damned fine person I am if I didn’t change the packaging.
I put quite a bit of weight back on for a short time in my twenties, and a longer time in my thirties. But I knew how to battle it back. Cut the sugar and empty carbs, up the exercise game. As I got older and could feel my metabolism slowing, I added gym workouts and strength training.
In the 1990s, I revised the way I ate in light of new information, sticking mainly to lean, unprocessed meat and fish, fresh fruits and vegetables, olive oil, and whole grains, the eating plan recommended by the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association.
I’ve had a good life, picked up a decent education. I’ve done interesting work. I’ve traveled. In Europe, in my forties, I walked twelve miles a day and climbed Mount Vesuvius. In my fifties, I did hard labor on a house and a yard, biked, walked 4-mile stretches every day, and was often mistaken for being about 35.
When I use the word, “thin” in the title of this article, I am using it relatively. At age 69, weighing 150, ten pounds less than I usually weighed in my 20s, I looked O.K. Healthy and medium-sized. But last fall, after sitting around a lot during the pandemic, I felt I was losing a lot of strength and flexibility, so I started hitting the YMCA three times a week.
After a lifetime of generally sane eating and exercise habits I have no diseases or chronic health problems, and, while I feel a little guilty about saying this, I have my original knees and hips and I have no chronic pain.
I ask myself now, when I am walking in the park, moving faster than many 30-year-olds, what would have happened if I had been 13 years old today instead of in 1969?
Yes, people are snakes. They were then. They are now. But this is not just a matter of how others see you. It’s a matter of the way you decide to treat the only real possession you have — your body.
It’s not about beauty. It’s about health.
It’s about the toxins that pour into your arteries from excess belly fat, about high blood pressure, high HDL levels, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, and a host of other serious, expensive medical problems that most healthy people can avoid or correct, over time, with a good, balanced diet and regular, vigorous exercise.
I could have stayed on the path I was on. I could have gone into denial. I could have weighed 300 by the time I was 20 and I could have been dead long ago.
If I had been 13 years old today, would my parents have met with school administrators to file a complaint against the bullies? Would my mother have sat me down with images of obese models gracing the covers of fashion magazines and told me to be proud and not ashamed?
My mother, my teachers, an army of counselors, and large segments of the media could have given me the message, “You’re not the problem. They are.”
