by Dan Savage
There isn’t a single statement in the above paragraph that NAAFA would sign off on. Telling people to reduce their caloric intake presumes that obese people overeat, which NAAFA disputes; health care providers shouldn’t pester their obese patients to lose weight, since being fat isn’t bad for you, according to NAAFA; fat people have a right to eat the foods they enjoy and thin employers and friends shouldn’t be wavin’ apples under their noses; telling people they can lose weight by getting out of their cars or “restoring physical activity to [their] daily routines,” presumes that fat people aren’t already active, and fat people are just as active as thin people, NAAFA argues. Just look at all the fat women at the convention today—here it wasn’t even ten o’clock and they’d already raised their arms up over their heads! Three times!
Most of the stories in the speaker’s book were about fat women who found love, and soon the ballroom was filled with awws instead of hisses. One woman profiled in her book actually met her soul mate while filling her shopping cart with half-price Marshmallow Peeps the day after Easter. It turned out that they both shared a passion for those mushy Easter candies, which come in toxic pink and a shade of yellow very similar to the color of the speaker’s dress. The story was a popular one, apparently, as most of the women in the room seemed familiar with its details. Indeed, there were boxes of Peeps for sale in the lobby, the candies having been transformed into a kind of love talisman by the women of NAAFA.
“Flirt!” the speaker implored us as she wrapped up her speech. “Flirting is such a good thing to do! Don’t assume rejection! The message fat women hear all the time is, ‘Get thin, find love.’ The message I want you to take away from our talk this morning is, ‘Get confident, find love.’ Live your life now, as you are, and live bountifully. Flirt!”
There I was, sitting in a ballroom full of fat women, a presumed FA, and the speaker was whipping the women of NAAFA into a flirting frenzy. Feeling like I had a bull’s-eye on my ass, I thought it might be prudent to get a head start, so I slipped out of the ballroom when the thin board member came back up to the podium to thank the speaker for her inspired remarks.
On my way out of the ballroom, I snagged a Danish from the buffet table. There were dozens left. No one seemed to be eating.
I ate my Danish as I walked through the trade show in an adjacent ballroom, checking out the super-plus-size T-shirts, jeans, lingerie, and swimsuits. At one table I picked up some fat-activist political pamphlets: “Fat people are not unhealthy!” “Fat people do not eat too much!” “Fat is not unattractive!” Based on the condition of the buffet table after breakfast, I had to concede that fat people didn’t seem to eat too much—not in public, at any rate. But the first two propositions—fat wasn’t unhealthy, fat was attractive—still struck me as dubious. If you’re fat and happy, then you should be willing to accept the increased health risks and live your life. Pleasurable pursuits often carry some risk. Downhill skiing carries some risk, drinking and drugs can be dangerous, sleeping around is emotionally and physically risky. An adult who pursues happiness in booze, drugs, sex, or food has to accept the higher risks; indeed, most sinners will tell you that the happiness they derive is worth assuming whatever risks come along with their pleasures, and reasonable sinners take steps to minimize their risks. But there are always risks, and there are sometimes consequences. Sinners can’t really ask the Surgeon General to protect us from reality, and it’s not bigotry to point out the increased health risks of being heavy or drunk or high or promiscuous.
I was lost in thought in the trade show when Teresa tapped me on the shoulder. I was happy to see her because I wanted to ask her about something she said at breakfast. What did she mean by not fat enough for NAAFA anymore? Teresa told me we would have to leave the hotel if I wanted to talk about being too thin for NAAFA. Whatever it was she had to tell me, it wasn’t something she wanted other NAAFA members to overhear her discussing. We made plans to have lunch, outside the hotel.
“People in NAAFA were used to seeing me when I weighed four hundred pounds,” Teresa explained over sushi in a Japanese restaurant a mile or so from the Westin. “Women who get too skinny are looked down on at NAAFA. And God help you if you go from four hundred pounds to a normal weight. They treat you like a traitor.”
Born and raised in San Francisco, Teresa has two siblings, both heavy. While she had been fat since age five, her brother and sister didn’t get fat until middle age. Intelligent and quick-witted, Teresa never went to college because she feared not being able to fit into chairs with attached desktops common in classrooms and lecture halls. Teresa went to work as a bank teller after high school; she still works at the same bank, but now she’s a supervisor for the tele-banking department. She joined NAAFA in 1991 primarily to meet men who were attracted to fat women. Teresa was already something of a BBW celeb at that point—she’d had been spotted by a producer for the Donahue daytime talk show dancing in a night-club in New York City called Goddesses that caters to BBWs and FAs, and appeared on the talk show with her then-boyfriend. In the mid-1990s, Teresa met a fat admirer at a NAAFA event, fell in love, got married, and let her NAAFA membership lapse. She weighed about three hundred pounds at that point.
“My husband was a big-time FA,” Teresa said. “So he loved it when I started gaining weight.” Her husband wasn’t a “feeder,” Teresa made clear. Feeders are men who get off on stuffing their wives or girlfriends with food, with the goal of making them as fat as possible. The wives and girlfriends of feeders are called gainers.
“So it wasn’t a feeder-gainer thing. I was just naturally getting bigger, but he loved it.”
Like a lot of FAs, Teresa’s husband encouraged her to wear leggings and shirts that showed off her rolls of fat. During her marriage, Teresa grew from 300 pounds to 450 pounds. Teresa is five feet four inches tall. As she gained weight, Teresa began to have nightmares about immobility. Teresa watched some friends get so big (whether on their own or because they’re married to feeders) that they gradually became disabled—some couldn’t get out of bed anymore. She met a woman at a NAAFA event in 1991 who had been disowned by her family—her father was a film producer—because of her size. Through NAAFA, Teresa’s friend met and married a feeder. Her friend weighed four hundred pounds at that point. The last time Teresa saw her friend at a chocolate-themed NAAFA party, she was so big that she couldn’t get off the couch.
“Her husband had to do everything for her,” said Teresa. “She could barely move.” Teresa thinks her friend weighed about six hundred pounds at the time of the chocolate party. Recently, Teresa’s gainer friend and her feeder husband made a videotape to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The tape documents her friend’s growth over the years, and Teresa estimates that her friend now weighs more than eight hundred pounds.
“The tape is all over the Web. It’s a turn-on for feeders,” said Teresa. “She gets out of bed only two times a day to go to the toilet. She’s enormous, and her skin has these huge bubbles all over it, pockets on pockets of fat. He’s feeding her doughnuts, fried food, pizza.” Teresa shakes her head. “I call it her death tape. Watching it was liking watching my friend being murdered before my eyes.”
Teresa’s marriage began to fall apart when her husband started putting on weight. “You want to know one of the dirty little secrets of NAAFA?” Teresa said. “There’s a lot of talk about accepting people of different sizes and how beautiful fat is and fat people are. Well, most BBWs aren’t attracted to fat men. I know I’m not. Most of us want nice, good-looking men. Thin men.” Why? “For all the usual looks reasons. When I was really big, I would look at my body and feel disgusted. I don’t want to feel that way when I look at my husband’s body.”
Over her husband’s objections, Teresa went on the diet drug combination fen-phen in 1996. She lost 182 pounds in eight months. (Luckily, Teresa wasn’t harmed by the drug combination, which was pulled from the market when it was discovered to have life-threatening side effects.) Teresa’s husban
d told her he wasn’t attracted to her anymore, and they agreed to divorce. Teresa wasn’t upset. She wasn’t attracted to her husband anymore either, as a result of his weight gain. A year after the divorce and off the fen-phen, Teresa was back up to four hundred pounds.
Shortly after her divorce, some of Teresa’s oldest friends from NAAFA began dying. A thirty-one-year-old woman who weighed seven hundred pounds sat up in bed one day, took a breath, and slumped over dead. She couldn’t be cremated in Sacramento because no funeral home had an oven that was big enough to accommodate her body. Another friend who weighed six hundred pounds slipped and fell in her apartment and broke her hip. It took eight firemen to pick her up and put her in an ambulance. Her heart stopped while she was on an X-ray table. Another six-hundred-pound friend died of a stroke.
“I was almost five hundred pounds at this point,” Teresa said. “I knew it was going to happen to me. There was not a question in my head: I was so fat that I was going to die.”
This was the point in her life when Teresa began to contemplate something that would forever brand her a traitor in the eyes of her friends from NAAFA.
“I underwent WLS. Better WLS and some small risk of dying from complications than knowing I would for sure drop dead from being fat.”
WLS? Flipping through the NAAFA convention’s schedule in my hotel room the night I arrived, I noticed a listing for a seminar titled, “Help! My Friend Is Getting WLS!” I couldn’t figure out what WLS stood for. All the other seminar titles were upbeat and self-explanatory—“Fat Friendly Healthcare,” “Combating Workplace Discrimination,” “How to Get What You Want: Sexual Communication”—which made this mysterious WLS seminar all that much more intriguing. It would have to be something pretty awful if you needed help when your friends started getting it. Was it some sort of weight-related disease or syndrome? After all, people don’t “get” good things; we “get” audited, we “get” cancer, we “get” cable. Whatever this WLS stuff is, I thought, it must be pretty awful.
Like a lot of fat people, Teresa has gone through life reading disapproval on people’s faces. Over the course of her fat life, as she called it, she got pretty good at spotting people who were going to give her grief about her weight—people on airplanes who would see her coming down the aisle and make the face, people in grocery stores or restaurants who would make comments to her about the food in her cart or on her plate. Adept as she was at reading faces, Teresa could tell that I was lost.
“WLS stands for weight loss surgery,” she explained, leaning across the table and whispering. “It’s the reason I didn’t eat very much at breakfast. My stomach is about as big as your thumb.”
Teresa wasn’t planning to attend the WLS seminar; she was afraid she would be attacked for having undergone the surgery. Shawn felt the same way—she wasn’t going to spend two hours of her Memorial Day weekend holiday being attacked. For many NAAFA members, Shawn’s decision to undergo WLS was a bigger betrayal than Teresa’s. In the mid-1990s, Shawn had operated two of the first Web sites devoted to BBWs and FAs. But by November of 2000, the five-three, thirty-four-year-old computer programmer had grown to four hundred pounds, couldn’t do her own laundry or clean her own apartment anymore, and had just broken up with her boyfriend, an FA who was encouraging her to get bigger. Worst of all, Shawn was a roller-coaster fanatic who couldn’t ride roller coasters anymore due to her size.
“I was fine and active at three hundred and fifty pounds,” said Shawn. “But your body can only take so much. When I got up to four hundred pounds, I was just existing. I wasn’t living, and I was going to die in ten years. I decided I would rather live for ten years at a normal size and have some fun than sit in my apartment in misery for the same ten years and then die.”
Seven months after undergoing WLS, Shawn was down to 275 pounds. Her goal is 200 to 225 pounds.
“That’s still fat for someone my height,” Shawn said. “I will always be big. I like being big. And I’ll always be a part of the fat acceptance movement. But I don’t think I can be part of NAAFA anymore.”
Sitting on a couch in the lobby, Shawn told me she weighed just 250 pounds when she attended her first NAAFA event.
“People told me I wasn’t big enough,” Shawn remembered. “ ‘Oh, you’re not a real BBW,’ they’d say. Can you believe it? You’re told all your life that you’re too big, and then you join this club and all these people are telling you you’re too small. So you start to eat and eat and pretty soon you’re up to four hundred pounds. That’s how I got so big. All my friends were in NAAFA, and you see all your friends getting bigger, and so you get bigger.”
Shawn got hundreds of e-mails after she went public about having WLS. While some were from women and men curious about the surgery, most were negative, and the most vicious e-mails came from NAAFA members she thought of as friends.
“They said, ‘You did it because you don’t love yourself.’ ‘You butchered your body because you hate who you are.’ I didn’t do this because I hate myself. I did it because I love myself. I wanted a better life. I don’t want to wind up in a wheelchair. I wanted to go skydiving. I wanted to bungee jump.”
Shawn was sure I would hear only the negative about WLS at the seminar. “Don’t let those women lie to you,” Shawn warned me. “They’re going to say you can be any weight you want and be happy and healthy. That’s bullshit. When I would ask, ‘What’s too big?’ they would say, ‘You can’t be too big. It’s sizeist to talk about being “too big,” ’ I would say, ‘What if you’re so big you can’t walk?’ And they would say, ‘You can use a wheelchair.’ I thought to myself, This is ridiculous! I don’t want to be a part of this crowd anymore!”
Shawn and Teresa both felt that many NAAFA members were threatened by WLS; some fat members didn’t want their fat friends to have the option of being skinny. As for FAs, “It’s their worst nightmare,” Shawn said, laughing. “What are they going to do if we all get skinny?”
There are, however, some NAAFA members who remember earlier versions of WLS in the seventies and eighties—much riskier surgeries that wound up killing their friends. WLS today is vastly safer, and thousands of people have had the surgery, most famously the singer Carny Wilson.
“They’re old school,” said Shawn. “They’ve been in NAAFA since the beginning, and they remember when people had the intestinal bypass surgery and died. They don’t want to admit that there’s this new procedure and that it actually works.”
Both Shawn and Teresa were quick to admit that WLS has side effects. Shawn doesn’t absorb enough protein, and her muscle mass is low; Teresa has to get shots for vitamin B12 deficiency, and she takes supplements for other vitamins.
“You can’t have WLS and walk away from it,” said Shawn. “You have to constantly monitor your health and food intake.”
But couldn’t Shawn and Teresa have avoided becoming hugely fat if they’d simply monitored their health and food intake all along? Neither woman would have grown to more than four hundred pounds if they had paid as much attention to their diets before undergoing the surgery as they’ve been forced to after undergoing it.
“Oh, I love the people who say, ‘Just stop eating,’ ” said Shawn, rolling her eyes at me and looking to Teresa for support. “I tried to do that for thirty-four years. I’d been on diets since I was ten. I was addicted to food. I admit it. I had a food addiction; I couldn’t stop eating. WLS forced me to stop.”
Three women were on the WLS panel: the moderator and two sisters, one who had the surgery and one who wouldn’t have the surgery if you put an icing gun to her head. The sister who had had WLS was a nurse. The nurse was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, very little makeup, and her hair was reddish brown. She looked pretty nervous and was sitting close to the door. The sister who hadn’t had the surgery designs jewelry for big women. She had bright, blond hair, and wore a flowing, vividly colored dress, tinted glasses, and a few pieces of her own jewelry. I’d checked out some of her jewelry earlier in the da
y at the trade show. Apparently, designing jewelry for fat women, as opposed to thin women, mostly involves considerations of scale. A necklace that would look fun and chunky on a woman who weighed 125 pounds would get lost on a woman who weighs 400 pounds. The pieces the jewelry designer makes for her clients are lovely, but only big women could wear her stuff. On a four-hundred-pound woman, her pieces look fun and chunky; a woman who weighs 125 pounds, on the other hands, would look like she was wearing a solid gold manhole cover on an anchor chain.
There were about twenty-five people at the WLS seminar, and everyone was silent before the moderator began to speak. The moderator was a fashionably dressed woman with a therapist’s calming voice and demeanor who implored us all to keep our minds open. Then she handed out a fact sheet she had prepared that ripped apart WLS. It was clear that the moderator—who was big but not too heavy—had a closed mind when it came to WLS. You could sense the tension when she invited the nurse, the sister who had the surgery, to share her story. The nurse told us she had the surgery after watching several patients undergo it, and witnessing their improvement. Her side effects were minor, and her feelings about her decision were positive. The surgery had changed her life, she said. The only negative? She lost some of her “eating friends,” much like a reformed alcoholic might lose his drinking buddies.