Right. So I have always been chubby. ALWAYS. From when I can remember, I have had pudgy fingers, wobbly arms and a tummy. It might have something to do with the fact that I inherit my body structure (right down to the stubby toes) from my paternal grandmother who is round, as was her mother, as was her mother and so on (you get the flow?). My great-grandmother lived to be over ninety, with her critical faculties all in place. My grandmother is still puffing on, and she's nearly eighty. My mother, however, insists that if I "don't get rid of that fat" I will "waste my education" because I will "die early". Apart from the fact that this seems statistically unlikely in my family, I frankly don't care enough about living for very long anyway. My maternal grandmother thinks out aloud, sometimes, that I look 'quite nice' and as long as I do not put on any more weight, I'm sure to be find someone who wants to marry me. I do not know whom she is reassuring, the idea of marriage really frightens me, especially to someone who needs me to fit a certain weight bracket.
Family expectation related woes aside, some things have changed in the time that has passed between my being a chubby baby and a 'fat' adult. When my parents would tell the family doctor that their daughter was overweight, half a decade ago, he'd pooh-pooh them into silence and say that I'll lose the 'puppy fat' soon enough. Now doctors are falling over themselves, during routine medical tests, to tell my parents that their daughter is overweight, and detailing grotesque consequences unless I lose weight at the earliest. Maybe they mean well, I most certainly do need a lot more exercise, but I wonder if the collective paranoia (inherited, I feel, from a weight-loss infatuated white West) puts me off exercise more than it lets me do the things I like.
For a fat person, exercise is a 'weight-loss' thing to do; you walk into a gym and they bloody tell you how much weight you need to lose and how. As a child, I would play cricket; I enrolled myself in tennis classes; I enjoyed throwball; I sucked at kho-kho but played it nonetheless. As a child I loved dance class; I loved theatre. Somehow, in one way or the other, society found it necessary to inform me that fat people don't do these things; that fat actresses can't be 'heroines', that I should stick to recitation for Teachers' Day celebrations (dancing isn't my thing; despite the fairly awesome scores I got in my practical dance examination and all that) and that sports are for winning and fat people aren't fast enough or good enough to win, so bye-bye. And as a child, I didn't know better than to believe those who told me these things were out of my reach - my slim peers, my teachers (yeah, one used me as an example of 'something you'd weigh in tonnes'). Now I look back and feel stupid about letting myself be defined by selfish, oppressive gits, but it is hard to unlearn things you've spent a good part of your life internalising. I was told I could not possibly be sexually attractive; years after these comments, I still can't be physically intimate with anyone because I'm fucking scared they will find me repulsive, and leave.
So, one by one, I stopped doing all of the physical exercise I enjoyed doing. As a rebellious adolescent, I let myself go--ate all the fatty food I could lay my hands on, dressed in baggy clothes, stopped exercising--in order to stick a finger up at society. Then the same god-damned society came back to me and said, "Sorry bro, you're fat, you need to exercise." Well, yeah, that is what I was doing, isn't it? Instead, now, I must 'work out' because it will make me 'feel good' in gyms or in my house watching youtube videos, with the sole objective oflosing weight being healthy. There are some who go at it with maniacal persistence. I do not have that sort of tenacity, because I do not care as much. But what I find really saddening is that I was exercising, I was healthy, and I was doing things I enjoyed. And now I am struggling with myself, in order to get my lazy butt up to go for walks and do a crunch or two. I wonder at the hypocrisy of it all.
PS: For those who write back, if anybody writes back, saying "but you can play tennis, dance blah blah blah again" yes, I am aware; just being able to do it despite years of conditioning telling you otherwise isn't really cake-walk. It is doubting myself, all the time; it is feeling like a repulsive being because of the tyres and the stretch marks; it's wondering whether it's worth it, just to hear those comments again. This isn't to make myself out to be some sort of victim or anything, it's merely to point out that the 'self-help' rhetoric sounds like synchronised farting sometimes.
PPS: I don't know whether people ordinarily face up with this, so maybe the use of the term 'society' is unfair. Possibly I was stuck with an especially despicable sample.
PPPS: It's all a capitalist conspiracy, really; make no clothes that fit the fat folk (or call it the Plus size and charge them double the price), shame them into going to the gym (guaranteed weight loss) and laugh all the way to the bank.
Family expectation related woes aside, some things have changed in the time that has passed between my being a chubby baby and a 'fat' adult. When my parents would tell the family doctor that their daughter was overweight, half a decade ago, he'd pooh-pooh them into silence and say that I'll lose the 'puppy fat' soon enough. Now doctors are falling over themselves, during routine medical tests, to tell my parents that their daughter is overweight, and detailing grotesque consequences unless I lose weight at the earliest. Maybe they mean well, I most certainly do need a lot more exercise, but I wonder if the collective paranoia (inherited, I feel, from a weight-loss infatuated white West) puts me off exercise more than it lets me do the things I like.
For a fat person, exercise is a 'weight-loss' thing to do; you walk into a gym and they bloody tell you how much weight you need to lose and how. As a child, I would play cricket; I enrolled myself in tennis classes; I enjoyed throwball; I sucked at kho-kho but played it nonetheless. As a child I loved dance class; I loved theatre. Somehow, in one way or the other, society found it necessary to inform me that fat people don't do these things; that fat actresses can't be 'heroines', that I should stick to recitation for Teachers' Day celebrations (dancing isn't my thing; despite the fairly awesome scores I got in my practical dance examination and all that) and that sports are for winning and fat people aren't fast enough or good enough to win, so bye-bye. And as a child, I didn't know better than to believe those who told me these things were out of my reach - my slim peers, my teachers (yeah, one used me as an example of 'something you'd weigh in tonnes'). Now I look back and feel stupid about letting myself be defined by selfish, oppressive gits, but it is hard to unlearn things you've spent a good part of your life internalising. I was told I could not possibly be sexually attractive; years after these comments, I still can't be physically intimate with anyone because I'm fucking scared they will find me repulsive, and leave.
So, one by one, I stopped doing all of the physical exercise I enjoyed doing. As a rebellious adolescent, I let myself go--ate all the fatty food I could lay my hands on, dressed in baggy clothes, stopped exercising--in order to stick a finger up at society. Then the same god-damned society came back to me and said, "Sorry bro, you're fat, you need to exercise." Well, yeah, that is what I was doing, isn't it? Instead, now, I must 'work out' because it will make me 'feel good' in gyms or in my house watching youtube videos, with the sole objective of
PS: For those who write back, if anybody writes back, saying "but you can play tennis, dance blah blah blah again" yes, I am aware; just being able to do it despite years of conditioning telling you otherwise isn't really cake-walk. It is doubting myself, all the time; it is feeling like a repulsive being because of the tyres and the stretch marks; it's wondering whether it's worth it, just to hear those comments again. This isn't to make myself out to be some sort of victim or anything, it's merely to point out that the 'self-help' rhetoric sounds like synchronised farting sometimes.
PPS: I don't know whether people ordinarily face up with this, so maybe the use of the term 'society' is unfair. Possibly I was stuck with an especially despicable sample.
PPPS: It's all a capitalist conspiracy, really; make no clothes that fit the fat folk (or call it the Plus size and charge them double the price), shame them into going to the gym (guaranteed weight loss) and laugh all the way to the bank.
