Yahoo News 'Becoming Thin Made Me Fatphobic'
*Warning - some of the topics discussed in this first person account may feel triggering, relating to issues of body image*
I used to be overweight by about three stone. I wasn’t obese. I was, by my own standards, ‘uncomfortable’ in summer: strappy tops didn’t feel good; my thighs chafed and stuck together. In my group of friends all through my teens and early twenties I was the ‘funny’ one who held the coats.
I was nicknamed ‘Nigella’ because I cooked for everyone - and then I ate it all. When guests had gone, I ate the leftovers standing over the sink. I ate when I was happy and sad and bored and lonely - and I was filled with guilt and shame when I did it. When people gave me compliments, it was always that I had a pretty face. I wore opaque tights and batwing cardigans. I preferred sex with the lights off.
And then one day, aged 25, I finally cottoned on to calories. I realised I had been eating a solid 1000 over the daily recommendation. I know that if you are secretly messed up about your own weight you will want to know how I lost weight. The answer is always the same. I took up exercise, calorie counted a bit and skipped breakfast here and there. In 7 months, I was ‘thin’.
I was not remotely prepared for what would happen when I got to this point. At first, I didn’t weigh myself, but I could tell something had drastically changed about me because everyone started acting strangely. Some hot skinny girls from university absolutely lost their minds. They were so used to me being the yardstick by which they were thin that they became catty. I had the overwhelming sense for the first time that other women were jealous of me.
The thinner I got, the more jealous they became, and I felt drunk on the feeling. Ex boyfriends started crawling out of the woodwork, my skinny Mum seemed prouder of me. It felt absurd to me, that all I had to do was eat a banana for breakfast and extremely good-looking men would slide into my DMs. Conventionally hot people invited me to parties. I felt powerful, I took selfies, I didn’t have to be funny anymore.
The problem was that it brought out a competitive streak in me that has never really left since. The more I gained control over my ability to restrain myself at the buffet table, the more I became disgusted by others' inability to do the same. When I looked at ‘before’ photos of myself (there’s one of me cradling a ham like a baby that now fills me with horror), I felt repulsed by the lack of respect I had shown my body. Becoming thin made me fatphobic, and that’s not something I feel able to openly admit.
I don’t like to be around fat people; I don’t have any fat friends. I am constantly judgemental of them. Since I gained relative control of my eating habits, I find it really hard to watch anyone overeating. When overweight colleagues have a big lunch or bring donuts into the office, I get a strange thrill from mentally totting up how many calories they are eating in one sitting. I could pretend it’s motivated by charitable concern for their health, but it isn’t. I see it as moral failure, an inability - as I believed about myself - to control what they eat. I know this is because I have shame related to my own eating habits, and the fact I never want to go back, but I can’t suppress my disgust.
I also can’t share it with anyone else. The body positivity movement, which has been commandeered by brands and rears its head daily on my social media feeds, makes me feel conflicted. I pretend to support it. I am careful never to express distaste for my body around my friends who are all very woke. Some of them are larger than me so it just seems mean. An acquaintance of mine is even a body positive influencer on Instagram. I like all her posts so I won’t be detected as a body hater.
I’ve tried to retrain my brain to admire bigger bodies. I’ve stared at body positive underwear accounts on social media trying to find the beauty, but the truth is I don’t find those bodies empowering, I find them repulsive because I will always be an overweight person. I’ll never be as skinny as I truly want to be.
I am sure there are plenty of people who just like eating food, like their bodies and don’t care what anyone thinks but I am not entirely convinced it is as binary as that. I think lots of people really don’t like the secret and shameful relationship they have with food but don’t have anyone to tell. I think they do what I do. I type ‘Adele weight loss’ and ‘Jessica Simpson fat’ into Google regularly. Or I compare Facebook body photos of school friends with babies and linger in the sidebar of shame. When I do, I get the same little rush of relief that I haven’t let myself go as much as those other women have.
It’s not behaviour I am proud of and I am also aware it’s not particularly practical to live with the voice of a Weight Watchers’ coach constantly in my head. My weight is hard to maintain so I know it’s precarious. I know I am probably about 6 months of overeating away from being a person who truly loathes their body. The process of getting thin taught me to fear putting on weight again.
I weigh nine and a half stone now (the diet wasn’t sustainable) and I still hate my body. It’s very likely when I have children, I will detest my ‘post baby body’ and that makes me feel quite sad. But I also know it’s not necessarily my fault I feel this way. In as much as I lived in relative ignorance before I lost weight, I now live with the knowledge that society finds me ‘better’ as a thin person. I will always struggle to let go of that feeling.
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