In Which the Indignities Pile Up, part 1

I’ve been fat for most of my life, at least since the third grade.  For the same amount of time, I would avoid that word: fat.  It felt pejorative and mean.  Knowing how society feels about fat people, I steered clear of it.  Chubby, curvy, chunky….I could live with those words.  But fat - and any discussion of weight or words like overweight and obese - were off-limits. My aversion started in the 5th grade, when the pediatrician explained to me that I was “too pretty to be fat.”  At the time, I was just over 5 feet tall and 110 pounds - taller and more solid than most of my classmates - and I was already horribly aware of how my bigger body was received in the world.  I was a quirky kid who l loved to read and swim and ride her bike.  I struggled to make school friends….girls in fifth and sixth grade did not like the same things I did and so I was an outsider.  I liked food and probably ate too much of it.  I can say with confidence that school lunches were not helpful; neither was my time spent as a latch key kid.  My mother had some weird food limitations habits - she was forever dieting - and that didn’t help my sense of self worth or teach me to eat only when I was hungry.  In  my family, food was restricted in all sorts of ways and so those arbitrary rules governed eating for as long as I can remember.  But it was the way my body was received by others that was most alarming and from 5th grade onward I quietly embraced the message that I was fat and therefore deserved the second class status that fatness demanded.  In Junior High and High School, I secretly restricted food.  For a good long time, I was 5’3” and weighed 125 pounds.  I still felt fat, ungainly, and unworthy.  

My inner shame was often stifled by my outer confidence.  I was - and am - well-spoken and confident of my smarts.  I rode that ability into high school Forensics championships and admission to UCLA.  

In college, I learned to embrace myself while cloaking my feelings about my weight.  I did gain some weight and worked mighty hard to get rid of it by throwing up, a trick I learned in 7th grade and really embraced in college.  I was never slender —— that was just not in the cards —— but I did learn to live in my large body and side-step the dysmorphia I experience toward it.  I worked with counselors on and off in college and grad school and I found my coping tools.  I never liked my body and I often cloaked myself in clothing to hide my appearance.  I also made damn sure that *no one* knew how I really felt about myself, adopting a “fake it ’til you make it” approach to fat self-esteem while never, ever using the word fat or acknowledging my feelings about my weight to anyone but myself.  That’s been one of the hardest parts of the challenge with my hip - the fact that I am suffering because I am fat cannot be denied or hidden away.  But that’s a story for another day.