That theory could explain a lot of what was going on . . . that is, if it were not complete bullshit.
And yet it has been brought up to me more than a few times by empathic individuals who find it impossible to grasp the possibility that society at large is actually meaner to large people than it is to thin people. I certainly don’t need to point out the way the media perpetuate this arbitrary ideal—anyone with eyes and ears can see that’s true. And I’m also not saying that my experiences of being repeatedly subjugated as a fat person and celebrated as a thin one are the same for everybody.
But, for me, there is simply no denying my repeated experiences. While it may be true that the higher our self-confidence and the better we feel about ourselves, the more enjoyment we will get out of social interactions and the more happiness we will attract, there is another cold, hard truth. And, for me, denying that truth would be perpetuating a dangerous cycle of oppression—possibly oppression that we ourselves are contributing to.
There comes a point, for some of us, when for whatever reason we are invited to the other side of the fence, and we see things from the other point of view. For me, losing nearly a hundred pounds showed me just how readily we brush people aside—or harshly, dangerously judge and treat them as “less than”—just because they are fat. Though I had suspected it before, it wasn’t until I was deemed a “cool kid” (or a thin kid) that I saw this truth for everything it was.
And then, suddenly, I was on the other side of it—looking at others the way I had been looked at my entire life.
—
“There was a new person in my tap dance class today,” I told Mariann. We were sitting at the macrobiotic restaurant Souen, sharing an extra side of steamed squash, each of us slathering on the incredibly delicious tahini dill dressing. At Mariann’s urging, I had started to take an adult tap class a few months prior. It was a hobby that I had begun when I was a starry-eyed teenager, but left behind when I left Philadelphia. Mariann felt that my heavy workload was starting to swallow me—I tend toward workaholism—and, thus, at her encouragement, tap came back into my life with a vengeance that even I didn’t expect.
“Uh-huh,” replied Mariann when I mentioned my new classmate. Though wildly supportive of my hobby, Mariann was not always exactly eager to hear all the many arguably mundane details about it that I wanted so much to share. (In addition to workaholism, I also tend to become monomaniacal, even obsessive, about things that interest me—sometimes to the boredom of others.)
“What’s she like?” Mariann asked, momentarily placating me as she divided the final slice of squash with her fork, chivalrously taking the smaller piece for herself.
“She’s fat,” I said, then promptly dropped my fork on the floor.
It had been a simple question: What’s she like? Yet the way I had casually responded almost made me choke on my tahini.
The waitress rushed over and handed me a new fork. (If only every time you dropped something you needed, someone was there with a brand-new shiny replacement.)
“Dope,” Mariann called me, thanks to my fork incident. She seemingly did not notice my descriptor for the new young woman in my tap class—or perhaps she simply chose to ignore my poor choice of adjective.
“You can have the last piece of squash,” I said quietly, not bothering to grab my new fork from beside me. I didn’t want any more food. Instead, I focused solely and entirely on the bomb I had also just dropped.
I let a moment pass, eyeballing the corner of the restaurant where I had recently seen Andie MacDowell eating a salad.
Focusing back on Mariann, I finally said, “Jesus.”
“What about him?” Mariann replied.
“Did you hear me a second ago?”
“That I could have the squash? Yeah, thanks. I ate it. I hope you don’t want it back.”
“Not that,” I replied. “I said that the new person in my tap class was fat. I said she was fat. You asked me what she was like, and I said, ‘She’s fat.’”
Mariann looked at me, finally fully present in my moment—realizing that I was shaken by this conversation. “Yeah, you did say that. Odd . . .”
“Yeah—why would that be what I noticed?” I said. “Why wouldn’t I have told you that she has curly blond hair, or that she does a really great cramp roll that I’m totally jealous of?”
I didn’t know if I was overreacting. Maybe I had just been reporting a simple fact—she’s fat, yes, she’s fat. But as I continued to sit there—and as the check came, and as I put out some cash, and as we started walking the few blocks toward our apartment—I realized how very aware I was of the fact that this new tap dancer was, indeed, fat. Getting real with myself now, I knew that her size was something I was aware of from the moment she walked into the class, five minutes late because she was lacing up her new shoes. I was aware of it when we were going around the room practicing our double pullbacks, one frustrated dancer at a time. I was aware of it when she and I chatted after class, when we walked out of the building together, when we said our good-byes, and when she was walking away.
I did not for a moment think that I was judging her—yet the question now loomed: Why had I noticed in the first place? Why had her size stuck in my head? Why had “fat” been the very first word I used to describe her to Mariann? Why was this bothering me so tremendously?
Could it be that it was bothering me because of how acutely aware I suddenly was of having jumped the fence? Was I settling a little too comfortably into my newly regarded role, and did that mean I was now inadvertently judging others as they had judged me? Was my choice of descriptor proof positive that I was noticing a sweet woman’s size before I noticed her heart?
Or maybe it wasn’t that deep. Was my intense focus on her size simply a matter of recognizing a reflection of myself in her? Because even though I was almost a hundred pounds thinner now, I still felt that if I tried hard enough, I could see the world through her eyes—the young woman with the sparkling new tap shoes and the golden ringlets, whose smile reminded me of Meg Ryan’s and whose unabashed kindness and forthrightness made me want to change my ways, yet again. Even in my brief interaction with this veritable stranger, who handed me a piece of cinnamon gum and complimented my thumb ring, I realized how open her heart was—and how closed mine had become.
Indeed, she made me want to be a bigger person.
—
When you cleanse, as your body gets rid of certain toxins, it sometimes manifests by temporarily making you sick. That is why we get headaches before our morning coffee, or why facials sometimes leave us with pimples for a few days. The toxins need to come to the surface in order to go away for good. If we feed the toxins back to it—such as the caffeine, the sugar, the meat—we will indeed suppress the immediate discomfort, but we will be making ourselves sicker in the long run.
The signs of my detoxification were much deeper than simply zits or headaches. They were more than just physical. As I lost weight, my worldview began to shift, and my outlook began to change as drastically as my physical appearance. As I got thin, I was surprised—floored, really—by just how deep that went. And as the world started to react more positively to my physical presence, a horrifying thought occurred to me: Was my newfound thinness a way of invalidating the fat person I had been my whole life?
There is this inherent conflict that exists in me regarding being thin now, and yet not wanting to be seen as successful-because-I’m-thin. Can I shun fat-phobia and yet write a book detailing my journey of losing weight? Does it make me a hypocrite to get on my soapbox about how we should be kind, tolerant, accepting and embracing of all individuals—regardless of size or species—and then get off my soapbox just in time to request my tofu please be steamed and not fried? Can a formerly fat person like me hold any weight when it comes to size acceptance?
I was always devastatingly uncomfortable when audience members at my veg
anism or activism workshops commented on my size. Just before I went on my first juice fast, and just as the public speaking component of my career entered full swing, such comments absolutely flattened me. Roughly a year before that first fast, a woman came up to me after one of my animal rights workshops. She was in her midfifties and slightly larger than me. “Thank you for getting up there in front of so many people,” she said. “Not enough fatties like us have the courage to be seen. I admire that. Keep on going.” Then she winked and walked away, leaving me standing there lingering on what she had just called me—a “fatty.” Was it inappropriate to be offended?
It was not entirely uncommon for me to be approached with similar sentiments following public workshops, from women who were grateful to see anyone up on a podium who wasn’t thin and perfect. Our society sends a message to fat people—or to probably anyone who doesn’t conform to people’s image of perfection—saying that we need to leave it up to the skinny bitches to be the ones out front. This is, to say the least, backward.
I began my activist career speaking up for the LGBT community and those affected by the AIDS virus—and then extended my activism to include nonhuman animals. But the bottom line has always been the same for me: that each of us should be treated with dignity and respect, and nobody should have any kind of ownership over another. My worldview therefore absolutely includes people who are “othered” because of how they look or what their size is. And so the idea that we exist in a fat-phobic society—one that I existed in as a fat person, for many years—is suffocating. There is no reason why we should ever feel the need to conform to another’s view of what we should look like.
Fat-phobia and I go way back. Fat-phobia stared me in the face when I was a plump teenager with a subscription to Seventeen magazine—when I’d longingly caress the smooth pages, knowing that I would never have the svelte and flat body of the woman I was told I had to be, the heavily retouched image staring back from the page. Fat-phobia was part of the worldview inherited by the kids on the playground who mocked me, and by the adults in the casting room years later who would cast me off as nothing, because I did not fit into a part or a size four.
My own fat-phobia stared back at me when I looked in the mirror as a young adult, noticing only the ripples in my stomach, the hanging flesh on the sides of my upper arms, the plumpness even around my toes. I saw only those things, ignoring what only years later I began to grasp as my physical attributes: my long fingers, my strong stance, my expressive face. My mother had always called me beautiful—I was the most beautiful—and yet I wanted out of a body that really never felt as if it were mine, this vessel that I was wrongly given to enfold my spirit, this body that was so completely different from Mom’s perfect one. Rather than seeing my good fortune in inhabiting a body with which I could do pretty much anything I wanted, I saw it as an unnecessary and embarrassing waste of too much space. It was always too much and never enough. I was, it seemed, self-phobic.
So now, as a thin person, as a person who rejected fatness, who “overcame” my body, who no longer is a fellow “fatty” standing up for what I believe in, do I lose all cred when I talk about how convoluted and dangerous fat-phobia is? Or does the fact that I have seen it both ways—as a fat person, and as a thin person in a let’s-celebrate-thin-and-hate-fat society—make my point of view more, shall we say, well-rounded?
Fat-positivity is a powerful and important reaction to fat-phobia. Fat-phobia is one symptom of a systemic virus that is plaguing our society—to throw others under the bus the minute they don’t fit our definition of beauty, the minute they don’t assimilate. I am all for body acceptance no matter what our bodies look like, and I think that it’s a travesty how fat people and queer people and people of color and insert-marginalized-people-here have been, over the years, expected to feel “less than” by those who wear the badge of privilege at a particular moment in time.
—
So, if fat-phobia is bad, why did I want to lose weight, and why am I glad I did?
Is losing weight incompatible with being a person who is outspoken about fostering compassion, equality, and body acceptance? I certainly hope not. But for me personally, trying to embrace fat-positivity was just not enough. One reason is that I was physically ill and on my way to having truly serious health problems. Another is that (in case you haven’t figured this out by now) I had a truly negative and addictive relationship with my food. But the fact is that I also just didn’t feel good in my body. It didn’t feel like me, just as my enormous breasts didn’t feel like part of me when I was sixteen. I am, to tell the truth, somewhat conflicted about this. There have been times when I’ve asked myself if my wanting to be thinner was some kind of a character flaw, like a fundamental rejection of my feminism, or a secret longing to join the status quo. If I lost weight, did that mean the bullies would somehow win?
I once fleetingly had a blog called Zaftig Vegan. Zaftig is Yiddish for curvy, Rubenesque, “of a woman.” I enjoyed the perceived oxymoron of the name, but secretly felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. The only way I felt I could blog was to bring attention to my size—to use it as a kitschy and compelling angle. “That’s Jasmin,” I wanted my readers to say. “She’s fat and she’s cool with it . . . how awesome and subversive is that?!”
Yet, in retrospect, I wonder why my size even needed to be a factor. The fact that it was shows me how truly unsettled I was about my body. I was at odds with it; I was against it. I was constantly aware of it. I didn’t take care of it and it rebelled by making me fatigued, achy, and sick. The cycle continued because I reacted to my body’s rebellion by feeding it crap. Given my imbalanced relationship with my body and with food, it’s not surprising that having a blog called Zaftig Vegan was something that made me wince. The name suggested that I was celebrating my size, but I wasn’t. I wanted to be thinner, healthier, and more balanced. I wanted to be rid of a lifetime of disordered, out-of-control eating habits and self-loathing.
Thin does not necessarily equal healthy, and zaftig does not necessarily equal unhealthy. I know plenty of vegans who are excellent athletes, highly energetic, and extremely healthy, regardless of their substantial size. And the truth is, I know plenty of thin people (vegan and otherwise) who struggle with their health and with their destructive eating habits.
On the other hand, obesity can lead to serious medical conditions, and those conditions are plaguing our country. More than a third of adults and more than 17 percent of kids in the United States are obese. Obesity can lead to stroke, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer—all of which can be prevented. So while it is possible to be bigger and be healthy, I am furious that our country is getting fatter and sicker because we are being fed addictive foods that are reliant on manipulating our taste buds and desires. In terms of knowing where our food comes from and what it is doing to our health—we are being kept in the dark. When the light finally switched on for me, I was both relieved and perplexed.
Change is a frightening undertaking. Even switching up what we have for dinner can bring up deep fears and insecurities. I have a friend who literally weeps every time she gets a haircut, because it will mean she will be different—and people are afraid of changing. I can understand why. There is a lot of comfort in what we know.
By causing me to both reassess what I consume and to enhance my self-awareness, juice fasting and whole-foods-based eating set off an earth-shattering and life-altering process. It left me with a new clarity that stung as much as it freed me. I finally had a new body, which was exactly what I wanted all along—from the time I was a child and was absolutely sure that there had been some mix-up and I was given the wrong one. The complications arose when it became clear that my new body was not only what I wanted—the world wanted it, too. And I’d be crazy to give in to that, so, once again, I rebelled.
NINETEEN
a very real piece of me
I don’t know what I look lik
e anymore,” I told Mariann, who had heard this story before. We were in a thrift shop on West Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, and I stared at the sea of clothes in front of me that were more or less divided by size, not having any idea where to begin. Was I a small or a large? A six or a sixteen? Should I go for the oversized sweater or the tight skirt? I welled up with inexplicable tears as I brought several different sizes into the dressing room, hoping that one would fit my new body and new life—both of which were still mysteries to me.
I stripped down to my underwear and bra and, without meaning to, stopped at the image in front of me. In the mirror I saw a woman I didn’t recognize. My hair was asymmetrical and bold, cut short on one side and shaved even shorter on the other, with a long piece in the middle that swept across my forehead, possibly softening the harshness of my do (depending upon who you asked). Gray was beginning to appear at my temples, forcing me to recognize that I was no longer the kid I sometimes felt I was. My collarbones delicately protruded, making a surprising statement I had never before noticed. My breasts were so much smaller than they had ever been, and I briefly recalled when I was a teenager and they were the size of two watermelons, weighing me down. My stomach was misshapen and lumpy—and, unless someday I decide I can afford surgery, it always will be (an annoying side effect of losing so much weight)—and was lined with stretch marks like little highways connecting my past with my present. My legs were sturdy and strong from my running, and my feet were firmly planted beneath me. I felt more alive than I had in a long time, and yet I winced when I noticed the tiredness around my expression, the bags beneath my still heavily eyelinered eyes.
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