When I was 21 I would rather have died than get fat
I am with my friends Caroline and Roisin and we are standing at the magazine rack, flicking through copies of Heat and Now that we have no intention of buying.
Roisin points at a photo of a celebrity and says that she wants to get her hair cut in a similar style.
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” she asks me and I shake my head.
“She’s disgusting,” I reply.
“I would kill myself if I ever got that fat.”
An argument follows.
Roisin is, rightly, incensed, insisting sharply that the celebrity is not fat and even if she was, that was an appalling thing to say. But I am adamant, repeating over and over again, “I would kill myself.”
In the following months, I put that theory to the test, watching in satisfaction as the number decreases on the weighing scales, my fingers splaying over knife-edge ribs cutting through paper thin flesh.
They tell me I might die, that my body is under too much pressure, that I am at risk of a heart attack.
There are signs they are right.
I am dizzy every time I stand up, my hair is falling out in clumps in the shower, I am constantly shivering.
I cannot sit on our kitchen stools (which we have had since I was four years old) anymore because the edges hurt too much.
The strap of my favourite handbag leaves my shoulder bruised and bleeding because there is no flesh to protect it.
My father and I go for a walk and I have to lean on him after two minutes, breathless and unsteady on my feet, unable to go any further.
“She’s going to die,” he tells my mother later that night, his head in his hands.
“She’s 21 and we are going to have to watch her die.”
And I can tell you now, with all honesty, that I didn’t care if I did. I would rather have died than get fat.
And I’m not alone.
Jes Baker, the American ‘body-positive’ activist, outlined in her 2014 TED talk how 81% of ten-year-old girls are afraid of getting fat; more afraid of gaining weight than they are of the cancer, losing their parents, or nuclear war.
A 2011 survey found that one in six women would prefer to be blind than obese, with others saying they would rather have alcoholism or depression than to be overweight.
There will be some people reading this article who will roll their eyes at this, seeing it as yet more evidence of female superficiality.
It may seem absurd that people would choose to have an often incurable affliction rather than gain a few pounds but one has to consider the difference in the social cost.
People who have cancer are not judged in the way that fat people are, they are not deemed as ‘disgusting’ or ‘weak willed’.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Americanah, the protagonist describes her education around the word fat when she leaves Nigeria to live in the US, saying “... one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that ‘fat’ in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like ‘stupid’ or ‘bastard,’ and not a mere description like ‘short’ or ‘tall’.”
Two books I read recently really highlighted to me how prevalent and widely acceptable the phenomenon of ‘fat-shaming’ has become.
The first was Fat Chance, Louise McSharry’s autobiography (out in June) and the other was a collection of essays by one of my personal heroes, Lindy West, called Shrill.
The manner in which both books explore what it means to be a fat woman in a world that is inherently inhospitable to them is both incredibly vivid and disturbing.
The street harassment, the comments about their bodies freely given, the constant judgment — I felt exhausted just reading about it.
Maybe people are just trying to help, thinking that by doing so they could encourage fat women to lose weight.
And something has to be done because being fat is dangerously unhealthy and is a huge strain on our health services, right? Not necessarily.
A new study in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine found that underweight people have a higher death rate than obese people, with only people who are termed ‘severely obese’ being at a higher mortality risk.
Someone’s weight is an unreliable gauge for how much exercise they take or the quality of the food they eat.
We can’t tell how healthy someone is or is not just by looking at them. And even if we could, it’s none of our business anyway.
If we’re so concerned with the health of our peers, why doesn’t it extend to other behaviour that might be considered damaging?
Are we going to start hanging around smoking areas to inform smokers they are damaging their lungs?
Scream at men and women who are clearly making a walk of shame the morning after the night before that casual sex is the work of the devil?
Tut at someone with a hangover because they’re risking liver damage? Of course not.
We don’t attempt to fat-shame people because we truly care about their health.
We do it because we are taught, from a very young age, that to be fat is somehow repulsive.
This is especially true for women, whose value is so often directly correlated to their physical appearance.
The jokes and the snide comments about fat women are not only cruel and dehumanising, but they are contributing to a culture where the female body is public property and free to be objectified; a culture where the margins of what an ‘acceptable’ body looks like are becoming more and more restrictive.
There are young girls listening, as I did, who internalise the message that to be fat is to be unlovable, to be ‘wrong’ in some way, and who will go to drastic, damaging measures to ensure that they avoid such a fate.
As JK Rowling said, “‘Fat’ is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her. I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me.”
It’s not to me, either. Not anymore.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
