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...

The author, age 15, and her grandmother Mo _______________________ After my grandmother Mo died, I inherited her diaries, sporadic histories of her life, varying from when she was a teenager to her golden years. What I discovered surprised me: even in her late 70’s and early 80’s, Mo was obsessed with her weight. She weighed herself daily and recorded the number, typically around 140, perhaps slightly chunky for her 5-foot height. If she lost weight or remained the same, she had a good day, but if she gained, her day was shot – and she was miserable and complained bitterly in her diary and planned starvation strategies for that day to shed it. Sound familiar? At first, I was surprised because I never thought of Mo as being fat or even fat-obsessive – it seemed to me that her weight never varied. Sure, when she was younger, she was slimmer than when I knew her, but wasn’t that the natural order of the world? After all, she bore and raised four children and was raising...