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On Tuesday I wrote about body image, Ozempic, and the pressure to be thin. I want to continue that conversation today, speaking more about how body image was shaped for me and about general anti-fat biases in society. With that said, content warning: Eating disorders, fatphobic language, in-depth discussion of body image, child neglect, and unhealthy family dynamics.
Also thank you to my friend, Bad Bitch Bookclub’s Mackenzie, for pre-reading and helping me with content warnings.
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First, I want to talk about how I neglected to mention, when discussing Ozempic, that this drug- which has been available since late 2017- is essential and life altering (life saving!) medication for people who need it. My discussion of the drug largely focused on the ‘trend’ of mostly celebrities and urbanites who have no real medical need for semaglutide using it to lose a relatively insignificant amount of weight and/or to maintain a body weight that is unsustainable without the drug. When a commenter pointed this out to me I was embarrassed because that use is so much more important and the scarcity of these medications for people who need them is a problem.
I don’t mean to make excuses- it’s my writing and I should have focused on the real use for the drug as well- but I think it is a sobering reminder. Most of the articles I read and the discussions I’ve seen on social media completely ignore the people who need Ozempic or Wegovy and instead focus on speculating about influencers and celebrities who may be using injectables for vanity weight loss. There is a massive conversation about a drug that largely excludes the people who need it, that’s a problem. I don’t have anything life changing to say about this except that I think the men and women who need these drugs should be included in the conversation about them, I’m considering my biases about fat people (it’s what a lot of this essay is about!), and I’m sorry about the omission.
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When I was growing up, my mother was fat. She had weight loss surgery when I was in my mid-twenties and lost around 150 pounds. But from when I was very young until I was well into adulthood, she could not shop at straight sized stores. She never spoke about her body image but she was painfully insecure. I didn’t, until I went to eating disorder treatment, realize how poorly she was treated by society and how much pain she must have experienced. There were not a lot of large moms at the Montessori school I attended as a child or at my high school. Society wasn’t kind to women who weren’t conventionally beautiful in the 90s and 2000s. It isn't kind to them now.
My grandmother, my mom’s mom, was anorexic from some time in the 70s when she lost a significant amount of weight (she was never a large woman) until she died. She was a physician and she had an expensive doctors scale that she ordered from a medical supplier in her bathroom. She weighed herself every morning and night and ate half an English muffin with one slice each of avocado and deli turkey for breakfast, around 11:30 am after returning from work and the gym. She did excessive amounts of cardio and, despite her medical knowledge, fell for all kinds of weight loss schemes.
My mom’s experiences made her mean. She made cruel comments about women gaining even a small amount of weight, comments about how pregnancies ruined particular women’s bodies, about how old her friends looked, how bad their cosmetic surgeries were. When my friends started puberty she was quick to point out anyone “getting pudgy”. One of my younger cousins was a large child, my mom called her “bossy cow” instead of her name, even to her face. My cousin was six when she started. My grandmother never made unkind comments but she was quick to praise the choice of grapes over a cookie.
I was a child and then a teenager and like most children and teenagers, I was focused on myself, on the things I wanted and didn’t have. On the support I needed and didn’t get. I never considered my mother’s psychology, the cruelties she inevitably endured that made her who she was. I only considered the comments she made- not only about friends but about my sisters, her sisters, my cousins. There was a period of time where every day my mother made me take off my shirt and spin in a circle at the foot of her bed while she sat half watching television and examining my body, telling me whether I was losing or gaining too much weight. We did not eat breakfast when I was a kid. I don’t know if that was about dieting or simply the result of an alcoholic and an untreated manic-depressive raising us. I don’t suppose it matters much, I still don’t eat breakfast.
As an adult, I think my mother’s cruelty came from insecurity and her attempts to control what we ate came from misguided fear. She’d lived 20 years as a plus sized woman, I don’t think she wanted that experience for us. Beyond that, I think some mothers think of their daughters as part of themselves. If we were all thin and pretty and well liked, then she must have been too. All four of us-my sisters and me- have had eating disorders at different points.
For many reasons I do not want to be like my mother. I so don’t want to be her that I have become my dad, which isn’t much better. (But that, my girls, is another essay for another day.) And while there are many qualities that make a person and their physicality is the least important one, my mother’s defining physical quality was, by societies standards, “fat”. I have spent most of my life afraid of gaining weight for all of the normal reasons, because being fat is bad in the sense that fat people are treated poorly, ignored, paid less. But I am also scared to become my mother and maintaining a relatively low BMI is a way to not look like her, to not embody her physicality.
And I am not proud of that, because my mother is one person. She became who she is because of her experiences and I am not her because I don’t treat people the way she does, because I would not call a child “bossy cow” because I generally take responsibility for myself and because I try to understand other people and treat them with empathy. And there are many women, many people, who are smarter and more empathetic and interesting and stylish than I am, who also happen to be fat. There is no moral superiority in a svelte figure. Because a person has a body but a person is a psyche.
Just something I’m reflecting on, I hope someone finds some value in it.
With love,
Hannah
I am so sorry to read what your mom put you through, the examinations, the food control. Ugh. As a fat woman, I often wonder if thin people think about the experience of being fat at all. At least, those who come by it naturally and haven’t known anything else. It’s nice to know you have done this level of introspection and are working on those biases.
Thanks for sharing this. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a home where weight or people's sizes was never discussed. I grew up in the same era. I was always thin, my mother was not. Regardless, food was neutral. There wasn't good or bad-sometimes we had McDonald's. I ate pb and marshmallow sandwiches almost every day in high school. We had homemade dinner most nights. I remember getting to college and my roommate was very overweight. I would often get comments from men basically asking why I wasn't embarrassed to hang out with her. I was shocked.
My weight fluctuated throughout my 20s and 30s-illness, changing hormones, etc. I then went through the self hatred for years. And now? I would give anything just to be healthy. I was looking back at my planner from last year and all the exercise goals I have and I just want to slap myself and say be grateful for being healthy. Now I have a chronic illness that makes it hard to do much.
Existing in bodies society doesn't deem acceptable is rough. I mean I got teased for being skinny and to this day it still sticks with me so I can only imagine how it is for people with bigger bodies. People are cruel.