Fat Woman Walking

I’m probably not the right person to spill secrets about thin people in fat bodies, but here’s my stab at it. I can’t quite comprehend what it would be like to grow up skinny and spend my young adult years as a slender person, only to grow fat in middle or old age. I probably would not know what to do about it; I would have to learn how to diet and at an age when new knowledge doesn’t come easily, like learning a new language, which, in a sense, learning how to diet is. Chronic dieters speak fat fluently, but thin people have no idea where to even begin because speaking thin is much easier than speaking fat, a complicated language of calories, points, scales, nutritional values, psychological traumas associated with fat, weight loss programs, sociological aspects, and the politics of physical space. Life-long thin people don’t worry about the above issues; they eat whatever they want and whenever they want – they feel hungry, they eat. Their mantra: Listen to your body, ...

We’re everywhere. We are the woman in the grocery store, her cart filled with skinny food. We are the man who grinds away at the gym, lifting weights and sweating his six-pack abs body into muscular submission. We are the child who sits in the classroom, her skinny-kid right arm posed with a pencil over a math problem. To look at us you would think we have not a care in the world, that we live perfect normal slender lives – that we can eat whatever we want without consequences. You would be wrong. If you looked closer, you will notice the woman gazing longingly at the snack aisle, waging a personal battle with a bag of Cheetos. On the man’s phone, you would see the man’s “before” photo, depicting his 400-pound body plopped on the sofa and eating a half gallon of ice cream. If you were in the child’s inner circle, you would know that she spent last summer at a fat camp for children, eating nothing but salads, steamed vegetables, and lean meats for a month and being tr...