There was a time when every conversation included some kind of question about my weight. My parents, and my father in particular, make inquiries as to whether I am dieting, exercising, and/or losing weight as if all I am is my big fat body. But they love me. This is what I remind myself so I can forgive them.
My father is the more passionate one in this crusade. Over the years, he has gifted me weight-loss programs and books on weight loss, particularly those endorsed by Oprah. One year, it was Richard Simmons’s Deal-a-Meal. He has sent me brochures. He has told me to take time off from school because “all those degrees you’re getting aren’t going to do you any good, because no one is going to hire you at your size.” He has told me, “I am only telling you what no one else will,” but of course, he is telling me what the world is always telling me, everywhere I go. When he hears of a new weight-loss drug or program on the radio, on TV, at the airport, anywhere, he is quick to call me and ask me if I have heard of what he hopes is the silver bullet solution to the problem of my body. He has so much hope for what I could be if only I could overcome my body. His hope breaks my heart.
My mother is subtler and she frames her worry primarily around my health. She often discusses the health risks of obesity with me—diabetes, heart attack, stroke. She worries that my caretaking will fall to her if I do succumb to a terrible illness, and that she won’t be up to the task.
My brothers care too, and I know they also worry, but they are my brothers so they don’t pressure me about weight loss. They are my defenders and also my tormentors. They have a song, the “humongous” song. My middle brother loves to serenade me with it. “When I say humongous, humong la laaaaa,” he will screech, and then everyone will laugh because it is oh so funny. It wasn’t funny when I was a teenager and it isn’t funny now, but the song persists. I often become irate when they sing this song. My body is not a joke or fodder for amusement, but, I suppose, to many people, it is.
My family’s constant pressure to lose weight made me stubborn, even though the only person I was really hurting was myself. The constant pressure made me refuse to lose weight to punish these people who claimed to love me but wouldn’t accept me as I was. It became easier to drown out that chorus of concern, to tolerate the horrible ways people treated me, to ignore that I could no longer buy clothes in the mall, or at Lane Bryant, and sometimes not even at Catherines. I became resentful that the only thing anyone ever wanted to focus on was my body, always unruly and disappointing. I shut down completely. I went through the motions. I learned how to tune out my parents, my brothers, people on the street. I learned how to live in my head, where I could ignore the world that refused to accept me, where I could block out the memories of the boys I couldn’t forget, no matter how much time and distance yawned between me and them.
For years at a time, there was me, and the woman I saw myself as while living in my head, and the woman who had to carry around my overweight body. They were not the same person. They couldn’t be, or I wouldn’t have survived any of it.
31
When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be.
Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes. You may become very adept at playing the role of wallflower. You may learn how to be the life of the party so that people are too busy laughing at or with you to focus on the elephant in the room. You may do whatever you have to do to survive a world that has little patience or compassion for a body like yours.
Regardless of what you do, your body is the subject of public discourse with family, friends, and strangers alike. Your body is subject to commentary when you gain weight, lose weight, or maintain your unacceptable weight. People are quick to offer you statistics and information about the dangers of obesity, as if you are not only fat but also incredibly stupid, unaware, delusional about the realities of your body and a world that is vigorously inhospitable to that body. This commentary is often couched as concern, as people only having your best interests at heart. They forget that you are a person. You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.
32
An epidemic is the spread of a contagion. It is the unstoppable march of an infectious disease across humanity. Throughout history, there have been many epidemics—measles, influenza, smallpox, the bubonic plague, yellow fever, malaria, cholera—but none is so deadly and pervasive, according to countless news reports, as the obesity epidemic. Instead of fever, leaking pustules, swollen glands, or lesions, your symptoms are girth and sheer mass. The obese body is the expression of excess, decadence, and weakness. The obese body is a site of massive infection. It is a losing battleground in a war between willpower and food and metabolism in which you are the ultimate loser.
Rarely does a day go by, particularly in the United States, without some new article discussing the obesity epidemic, the crisis. These articles are often harsh, alarmist, and filled with false concern for people afflicted by this epidemic and a profoundly genuine concern for life as we know it. Oh, the burdens on the health-care system, these articles lament. Obesity, these articles ultimately say, is killing us all and costing us an unacceptable fortune.
There is, certainly, a very small grain of truth in these articles, in this frenzied panic. And also, there is fear, because no one wants to be infected by obesity, largely because people know how they see and treat and think about fat people and don’t want such a fate to befall them.
33
As a fat woman, I often see my existence reduced to statistics, as if with cold, hard numbers, our culture might make sense of what hunger can become. According to government statistics, the obesity epidemic costs between $147 and $210 billion a year, though there is little clear information as to how researchers arrive at that overwhelming number. What exactly are the costs associated with obesity? The methodology is irrelevant. What matters is that fat is expensive and therefore a grave problem. Fat people are a drain on resources, what with needing health care and medication for their all too human bodies.
Many people act like fat people are reaching directly into their wallets, the fat of other people a burden on their personal bottom line.
Statistics also reveal that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and 68.6 percent of Americans are obese or overweight. The definitions of “overweight” and “obese” are often vague and obscured by arbitrary measures like BMI or various other indexes.