I’ve been musing today about being fat, about how it makes me and others feel.
Nobody likes it when you refer to yourself as fat. They pull a face, sad or horrified. “You’re not fat,” they say. “You’re curvy/have a classic figure/look lovely. And besides, boobies.”
These are wonderful people, who don’t want me to feel bad about myself. And while we both know exactly how big I am, only one of us can bear the F word. Curvy is sexy, voluptuous, Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. Fat is sad, ugly.
But I am fat. It’s an empirical fact. On the medical scale I’m obese. I don’t disgust people, my friends don’t love me any less, men still find me attractive. I’m fat. It’s okay if I say I am because it’s not shameful. But thank you for caring about my feelings.
I’ve always been fat. This is a fact. I was fat at secondary school, fat at college, had a brief stint of glorious weight loss at uni when I lived on Kelloggs Variety boxes and promotional drinks, then got fat again when I married and more so when I became a mother.
But here’s the thing. I wasn’t. I was never skinny but certainly through a lot of my life, I wasn’t fat. This is me as a “fat” teenager, when I had already accepted myself as fat and hid under massive clothes. I was a size 12.
Fat becomes an issue when you’re not skinny. Anything over a size 10 is, in both the playground and fashion, fat. It’s enough to make a healthy 11 year old feel fat enough that it really doesn’t matter how fat she gets. Once you’re fat, you’re fat, right?
Pink was called fat last week after having a relatively unflattering photo of her. This is the photo.
Anyone can see that’s not fat. But , crucially, it’s not skinny. And anything beyond skinny becomes fat by default.
I am fat. Pink is not. Neither are the millions of size 12 and 14 girls and women accused of it on a daily basis. I look back on my teenagers years and wish I’d appreciated what I had but by then I was labelled, dismissed and frankly didn’t have the will to fight it.
Still, boobies.
thiswasnotwhatiexpected 