“You have such perfect skin!” It’s a compliment that still makes my apparently perfect skin crawl. A lot of people my age, who struggle with acne or other skin conditions, would love to hear this. As someone who had eczema when she was younger, it was something I loved to hear at first. Eventually, though, it was something I dreaded.
I tied a lot of worth into my skin, to the point where one pimple made me apprehensive to leave the house. I hated worrying about that on top of everything else I had to think about before going in public. I hated it because it was the only compliment I ever heard.
Even though I didn’t have acne, I was fat.
Fatness is something I have been dealing with my whole life. Though I never heard negative comments about my weight, no one thought to address it. It was as if my body didn’t exist unless it was something to be praised.
In her book What’s Wrong with Fat?, Abigail Saguy explores the social ideas we have around fatness and fat bodies. She discovered that people associate fatness with unhealthiness, and put the blame for their apparent illness on the fat people themselves. This creates a society that demonizes fatness and fat people. In a series of interviews, she found that people in a general population, without exposure to specific ideas of fatness, drew a distinct line at what body shapes could be healthy. When exposed to articles framing fat as unrelated to health or as beautiful, the size at which this line was drawn increased dramatically. The same body that only 57% of the first group thought could possibly be healthy drew support from 82% of people exposed to this new way of thinking.
In reality, as Saguy found, fatness only affects health in very extreme cases, but fat people are far less likely to go to the doctor because they don’t want to hear comments about their weight, either from embarrassment or annoyance, or because their bodies do not fit the equipment.
I have been reminded of this often lately as my mother, who would call herself extremely overweight but is just above the average weight for a woman of her height, is undergoing chemotherapy treatment. She dreads going to her in-person appointments because of the weight she’s gained in the last few months. If the reason for her appointments was anything less than cancer, I know she would use her ideas about her weight to avoid or delay them as she has done in the past.
Interestingly enough, I first found out I was fat from a medical visit. I was very sick as a child, though nothing as a result of my weight. Despite this, I was pretty active with my friends or my older brother, and didn’t personally have any problems with my body. My most severe illness at this point in my life was the nocturnal seizures, and later night terrors, I was facing. At eight years old, I stayed overnight at a hospital to complete my second sleep study. Even as a third grader, this was all very interesting to me, and I snuck a look at the results paperwork when we returned home. I will never forget the way my heart dropped when I read the first sentence, where the patient information section defined me as an “obese 8 y/o female.”
No one ever found out I read even that much of the report. I’m sure it’s still sitting in a plastic file folder in my home office, surrounded by all my other medical documents. Even as young as I was, I knew being fat was embarrassing, and being obese was simply bad. I decided to ignore it as much as possible, and spent more time making sure everyone knew how smart and funny I was. Weight didn’t impact my ability to ace a test or crack a joke, and I used it as a way to keep attention off my body. Regardless, at every sleepover, and every gym class, and every time a picture was taken of me, it became impossible to ignore.
As the younger sister of a triseason varsity athlete and friends with most of the soccer and track teams, I heard discussions of people’s bodies constantly. This is when my skin got complimented the most. It was embarrassing to have the focus shift in that way when people eventually got around to finding me in my group of friends.
The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I saw what I still claim is the worst picture of me that has ever been taken. Even knowing and acknowledging that I was overweight in no way prepared me for the body I saw in that photo. A few months later, in my junior year of high school, my gym teacher introduced us to an app called MyFitnessPal that she used to track the amounts of different nutrients and macros she was eating. In the app, you can track your food and set goals for losing, gaining, or maintaining weight. It recommends the amount of calories, broken down into those nutrient and macro groups, you should eat in a day, accounting for the activity your phone tracks or you can put in manually. I began using this app and saw fast results.
It’s hard to see an app that presents itself this scientifically as unhealthy. Maybe the desire to lose weight wasn’t the healthiest, but I wasn’t eliminating whole food groups from my diet or denying myself any foods at all. I was just watching my portion sizes more closely, which was something I definitely needed to do to combat my bored or emotional eating at the time. I had realistic goals and knew that I was more than capable of reaching them.
I was fortunate enough to avoid the extreme social pressures to lose weight longer than some others. A study done by Erin Lichtenwalner shows that girls have much less self-esteem than boys, and can start “weight-controlling behaviors-” harmful practices such as the use of diet pills, laxatives, or starvation-- as young as the sixth grade. These unhealthy methods often lead to eating disorders and unhealthy relationships with food and people.
In contrast, I lost almost 40 pounds in just over seven months. Going from around 180 pounds to under 145 in a single school year changed the way I was treated drastically. Suddenly, after a lifetime of avoiding discussion around my body, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. Everyone from my gym teacher to a girl who had openly disliked me in my physics class wanted to talk to me about how I was doing and how good I looked now. It was jarring to see people that I had known for years completely change their attitudes and the way they spoke to me.
Even though I was apparently so successful, everyone was careful to avoid talking about the way my body looked before. Even more confusingly, the fact that I was currently losing weight was also avoided. My grandmother gave me a collection of Weight Watchers recipes with a book cover on it so that people wouldn’t know I was putting effort into weight loss.
These reactions perfectly exemplify the way we treat bodies in society. It’s bad to be fat, and good to be skinny. It’s good to lose weight, as long as it doesn’t seem like you’re trying too hard. It’s fine to compliment the “after,” but taboo to even mention the “before.” In reality, I would have liked for people to talk about my body my whole life. The way I was spoken to at my smallest made it terrifying to gain any weight back. My body is still something I struggle with, and something I force myself to accept before I walk out the door every morning. I constantly remind myself that fat is simply an adjective, and that any negativity that accompanies it is a fairly new social construction. It’s okay to be fat, and there are much more important things to talk about than people’s bodies. I hope for my sake that skin also stays off that list.