At the time, I too believed that I was fat because I hadn’t tried hard enough to be thin. I accepted the myth that I had made some kind of choice to occupy my body. And I hated myself for it. I spent every day tormenting myself for not fitting an unobtainable ideal . In time, I would grow to understand that fatness is not something that we choose, despite what fatphobic society might tell us. It would take patience and a little bit of wisdom before I learned to love myself and the only body I have.
Chapter Nine:
Et Tu, Millie?
Millie and I sneek out to this place on our lunch break. It’s a wonderful little Dominican and Puerto Rican restaurant on St. James Avenue in Springfield called Boriquen y Quisqueya. Millie introduced it to me a few months ago. They have the most delicious Latin food in town and the prices are great. I have the yellow rice with extra beans and roasted pork on the side, plus one of those little fried pizza pockets. That’s what I always get when I come here. Millie gets rice and beans too, plus ribs with extra juice drizzled on top of the whole glorious mound.
My heaping plate comes to $5.50. That’s the best deal in town. I slip the cashier a five and a one, hoping she won’t turn them over.
I like to write on my money, which I think is illegal. Let’s hope I don’t get caught. I’ve been doing it now for about a year, ever since I got a twenty dollar bill with the words “SLAVE OWNER” and “INDIAN KILLER” scrawled over Andrew Jackson’s face. I thought it sent a very powerful message. It stuck with me for a few days, creeping back into my thoughts at odd moments.
It occurred to me that paper currency offers a spectacular medium for making a political statement. Everyone uses money. It exists in every corner of society and it changes hands a half dozen times per week. A simple message written on a dollar bill might be read by hundreds of people over the course of several years. It might circulate across the country or even across the globe. It might even wind up in the hands of someone with a lot of power to affect change. Messages written on bills could really plant the seeds of an idea.
That’s when I started to churn out my own slogan-adorned bills. Nearly every time I make a cash purchase, I slip the cashier one of my bills. I wonder how many of them are in circulation now, and where. I’d say there would have to be hundreds of them and they might be anywhere by now. I just hope the Secret Service doesn’t bust down my door. Fat people are hard to arrest.
I recycle the same slogans over and over, printed neatly on the back side of the bills, along the top or bottom margin. “FAT IS BEAUTIFUL” is one of my favorites. “CHANGE THE WAY YOU SEE, NOT THE WAY YOU LOOK” is another. An assortment of my greatest hits include: “DIETS DON’T WORK”, “LOVE YOUR BODY, NO MATTER THE SHAPE OR SIZE”, “WE COME IN ALL SIZES”, and “YOUR SELF WORTH IS NOT A NUMBER ON THE SCALE”. I always make sure to squeeze that last one tightly together so it all fits on one line. One of my newest ones is “I’D RATHER HAVE A FAT ASS THAN A NARROW MIND”. Ha, ha. I like that one. It’s got zing.
This time I hand the two bills to a pretty Hispanic woman and hope that she doesn’t turn them over. It wouldn’t take a super sleuth to figure out that the fat liberation messages were probably written by the fat lady standing in front of her.
The woman doesn’t even glance at them as she places the money away neatly in the cash register, then hands me two quarters in return. I get a small thrill as I imagine my five dollar bill circulating throughout the country, touching lives, changing attitudes, and breaking down prejudices.
Millie and I sit down with our food together. An older man is sitting at a nearby table, drinking a bottle of Goya pineapple soda. He’s wearing a baseball cap that says “Puerto Rico” on it. He says something to Millie in Spanish. I don’t understand but Millie says “Gracias, gracias”. Okay, I know what that means—thank you.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He said he’s happy to be sitting next to such pretty ladies,” Millie replies.
I blush. I like this old Puerto Rican man. “Really? He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“He has good taste,” I say. I also happen to think that Millie and I are stunning. I’m glad someone else recognizes it. Apparently this guy likes BBW.
We dive into our food, which is spectacular as usual. I’m glad we came here, even if it means we will have to hurry back to work as soon as possible when we’re finished.
“What’s bothering you?” Millie asks between bites.
She reads me like a book. Is it that obvious? I guess I can’t hide anything from her. “Nothing’s the matter,” I say.
“Oh, I thought there was something bothering you,” she says. “You seem a little weird this morning.”
I sigh. “Yeah.” Millie’s my only real friend besides Denny, so I figure I should be able to open up to her about it. “It’s Denny.”
“What about Denny?”
“He told me last night that he has diabetes.”
Millie gasps. A look of horror crosses her puffy Puerto Rican face. “Oh my God.” I’m not sure if her reaction is genuine or if she’s just giving the reaction she thinks she’s supposed to give. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah,” I say, skewering my salty, delicious pork. “It is.”
“What’s he going to do about it?”
“That’s the thing,” I say, looking down. “He’s going on a strict diet.” I spit the last word. “He thinks it’s somehow his fault. That’s the kind of bullshit his doctor told him.”
“I get it,” she says. “So he’s going to try to lose some weight?”
“Yup. I thought he was smarter than that. I guess he doesn’t know that dieting almost always causes weight gain.”
Millie is giving me a strange look. She’s biting her tongue, I can tell. She’s holding herself back from saying something. “Uh huh,” she says.
“He’s just so stubborn. It’s like he’s just going to do whatever he wants and there’s nothing I can do to change his mind.”
“Maybe it’s okay,” Millie replies. She looks into my eyes as if to ask for approval. Apparently she knows that she’s offending my fat liberationist sensibilities so she’s testing the waters first. “You know?”
I nearly drop my fork on the floor. I honestly can’t believe she would say such a thing. Although she’s never been as involved as I am with the fat acceptance movement, I always thought we were on the same wavelength. I know that she sometimes listens to my show because she occasionally discusses it with me at work. I’ve talked to her about issues of fat oppression dozens of times and she always seemed to agree with me. We were fat sisters— hermanas gordas —living, laughing, eating and sharing together. I certainly didn’t think she supported weight loss goals.
“Excuse me?” I say.
Millie shrinks back a little. “I said, maybe it’s okay if he wants to lose some weight.”
Millie, of all people. I struggle to put my anger into words. “I would hope you understand that diets don’t work,” I say. “Their failure rate has been proven to be 95 percent.”
“I know, I know,” she says. “I just think that if the doctor tells him he needs to change what he eats then…he should do it. If that’s what he wants.”
This is outrageous. I’d never heard this kind of talk out of her before. “Diabetes is mostly genetic in nature. It’s inherited.” I’m getting a little heated now. “It can be treated without weight loss.”
Millie looks down at her plate, half clean. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“No!” I protest. “You said what you said. What’s gotten into you?”
“I just think diabetes can kill him. I know lots of people with it. It’s common with Puerto Ricans. When you’re sick, you gotta follow the doctor’s orders if you want to stay alive.”
My mouth scrunches into an angry scowl. “Fat doesn’t kill people,” I say. “Fat hatred does.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, you’re right.”
I can tell that she doe
sn’t mean what she’s saying. She’s simply agreeing with me for the sake of agreement. She’s appeasing me. Her attitude upsets me because I thought she would see things my way. Suddenly, my boyfriend and my best friend have warmed up to the diet industry. In the war on fat people, they’ve chosen to be on the other side of the barricades. If I had to attach a name to this feeling that’s crept over me, it would be betrayal.
Et tu, Millie?
I don’t want to talk to her anymore. Not about this. “Yeah. I am right,” I say with cutting sarcasm. I can’t wait for lunch to be over. I want to get out of this place.
* * *
I was in my early twenties when I started to experiment with dieting. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but men were the main motivation for my desire to lose weight. I wanted to go out on dates just as much as the next gal but none of the fellows were calling. Nobody cared at all what I was doing on Friday night, which was usually watching that Urkel show on TGIF with my parents. I decided I needed a slimmer figure if I was ever going to get any attention from the menfolk.
The unfortunate truth is that fat people on the dating market are not the first to be snatched up. I know, I know—you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” But lots of people delude themselves. They claim they just want to meet someone who’s “funny” and happens to have a “nice personality.”
Take it from a funny fat girl with a nice personality: those people are full of shit about 99 percent of the time. People see first with their eyes. Their initial appraisal almost always includes a judgment about weight. That explains why you usually see skinny people dating skinny people, fat people dating fat people, and in-between people dating in-between people. People date outside of their race more frequently than they date outside of their relative weight class.
One study on the subject asked college students to rank which type of person they’d be least likely to marry. The results were startling. The students revealed that they would prefer to marry a communist, an embezzler, a cocaine user, an ex-mental patient, a sex addict or a blind person than a fat person. Well, I can kind of understand why a person would want to marry a sex addict. I could have some fun with that. But a cocaine user? An ex-mental patien t? That says a lot, I think.
That’s where I was at that point in my life—in my early twenties, hoping against all odds that I would be able to have a normal dating life despite my figure. Apparently, I would have been better off as an embezzling communist with a nasty coke habit than I was as a fat girl. I was desperate to lose weight, so I ran the gamut of weight loss plans from Weight Watchers to Jenny Craig. I picked up all the latest fad diet books.
I even experimented with a diet that allowed only cabbage soup. It gave me gas…I mean, really bad gas. Gross. As if it wasn’t bad enough being the fat girl, I also laid rotten eggs every few minutes. I tried that diet for about two weeks before I started to feel a little pukey every time I smelled cabbage soup. I really learned to hate the stuff. Why can’t they have a diet that requires S’Mores three meals a day? I might have been able to stick with that one.
None of these diets “worked”. When I say that they didn’t “work”, I don’t mean that I didn’t lose weight. To the contrary, I did lose a few pounds on some of them. I think I was on Weight Watchers when I lost fifteen pounds over the course of six weeks. I was thrilled to be fifteen pounds lighter, but I was still fat by any known societal standard. I think I was about 245, the least I have weighed in my adult lifetime.
What I mean when I say that dieting didn’t work is that none of them resulted in permanent weight loss. Within another six weeks of my miraculous fifteen pound success, I had managed to replace those fifteen plus five more. I was heavier than ever. One step forward and two steps back, that’s the dieting way.
My predicament was not unusual. Some experts believe that regular dieters are like dogs chasing their tails. They diet because they’re fat and they’re fat because they diet.
Our bodies tend to regain lost weight at an alarming rate because of a human survival mechanism that has been bred into us over time. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors developed the ability to pack on layers of fat during times of plenty in order to nourish themselves through times of hunger. As a consequence, our bodies tend to react to deprivation by conserving. It’s hardwired in our DNA to resist weight loss. If we slip off of our diet even a little bit, the weight comes back, plus a little extra.
Dieting is an unnatural struggle against an individualized “set point”. The set point is the point at which a person’s weight reaches a natural equilibrium. She’s neither losing nor gaining weight. Lots of people try to resist their set point, but most find that the set point always wins.
There is really only one way to alter the set point: dieting. Unfortunately, the set point is actually moved up, rather than down. That’s the futility of dieting.
When a person deprives herself, her body goes into conservation mode. Each time she tries and fails to achieve permanent weight loss, her body responds by slowing down the metabolism in anticipation for the next period of deprivation. Her body literally can’t tell the difference between a famine and a diet. And when you think about it, a diet is nothing but a self-imposed famine.
The idea that diets actually cause long term weight gain is counterintuitive. Plenty of people find it a bit much to swallow, but it’s true. If you see a fat woman on the street, there’s a good chance that she isn’t fat because she eats more than other people. Research has shown that fat people and thin people eat nearly the same quantity of food. There’s a good chance that this fat woman is fat because she’s spent her entire life trying to lose weight, not despite it. Self-imposed famine after self-imposed famine has left her with a severely diminished metabolism.
And still, people tell her that she should quit being a slob and lose some damned weight. She probably still believes them too, and considers herself a failure for not being able to reach her weight loss goals.
The simple fact that our bodies resist weight loss explains the astronomically high failure rate for diets. Ninety-five percent of dieters will put back on every ounce of weight that they lost within three years. That’s just about everybody. The other five percent, I would argue, obsess with weight to the point of near anorexia.
Even miraculous, life-changing episodes of weight loss—cases of people losing eighty, ninety, or a hundred pounds—are often short lived. Much like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill, only to have it roll back down again, these people will eventually experience the ignominy of gaining all that weight back. You can fight nature, but you won’t win.
The point I’ve tried to make—and that many people find very hard to accept—is that each person’s set point is unique. There’s nothing “wrong” with anyone’s set point, whether it happens to be at ninety-five pounds or 495 pounds. If that’s where nature wants you to be, so be it.
I’ve also heard it compared to sexuality, a comparison that I find valid. In many ways, fat people who are habitually dieting remind me of gay people who are still going through the charade of pretending to be straight. Gay people will always be gay, no matter how hard they wish otherwise. It’s in their genes. So why don’t they just drop the bullshit and get down with their gay selves?
That’s how I see fat people—genetically predetermined from birth to be fat and yet struggling to be someone they cannot be. Fatties don’t need to learn the secret to weight loss. They need to learn the secret to weight acceptance.
Chapter Ten:
Dieting Whiplash
Wednesday night is our night together. Denny doesn’t work on Wednesday nights and I don’t have to go into the radio station. I looked forward to Wednesday night as a time we can share in each other’s company.
I come home at about five thirty and let myself in with a bag of groceries. I just needed a few things so I stopped at Big Y on the way home. I open the refrigerator door to discover that it’s full of silver cans. It’s
Denny’s Diet Coke. I don’t like the sight of diet soda in my refrigerator. It’s taking up a lot of space too.
Ever since he found about his diabetes, he’s taken a liking to Diet Coke. At any given moment, he’s likely to have one of those little cans in his hands, sucking away at aspartame and carbonated water.
It’s a little known fact, but aspartame was only approved for public consumption after Ronald Reagan fired the head of the FDA for not approving it. Studies have found that it causes seizures, lymphoma, and leukemia in lab rats. I feel like passing this tidbit of information on to Denny, but I don’t think he’d listen. He’s been acting pretty obtuse lately. He also leaves the silver cans all over the house, dotting the landscape of our living room and bedroom. I wish he’d knock it off with those damned Diet Cokes.
I’m just about finished putting away my groceries when the front door opens. I hear Nutter’s paws clicking on the wood floor. I need to clip his nails. He shakes his head and I hear the ruckus of his collar and tags. Denny steps into view, holding Nutter at the end of a short leash. He’s drinking a Diet Coke.
“Oh hey, babe,” I say.
He smiles. “Hey. How was work?” I give him the eye and he backs off. “Oh yeah.” It’s a stupid question and he knows it. When you’re in my line of work, there are no good days at the office.
“I see you took Nutter for a walk,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Well thank you. That’s one less thing I have to do. Did he do his business?”
Denny leans over and unsnaps the dog’s leash. “Sure did. It was a work of art, too.” He scratches behind the dog’s floppy ear. “Isn’t that right, Nutter?”
“Gross, Denny. Gross.”
“Sorry.”
I sit down at the kitchen table. “I’m so tired,” I say, hanging my head and swiveling it from left to right. This is Denny’s cue to give me a neck massage. “I’ve been running around all day.”
We Are Fat and We Are Legion Page 7