The first time someone told me they thought I was fat, I was seven years old. A year later, I was on my first diet: Weight Watcher's. The older I get the more appalled I am by the audacity of those who deem it acceptable to tell anyone else that their weight is offensive.
You don't have to stuff it into last year's winter clothes. You don't have to lug it up the hill to the mailbox or from the parking lot to work. You don't have to touch it. You really don't even have to look at it so I am not sure why it is your business.
I stepped out of the womb on the chunky side. At over eight pounds and almost 22 inches long, I was a beast of a child for a woman who stood only five feet and two inches tall. According to my birth records, she only weighed 115 when she got pregnant with me so she was petite. I don't know how much weight she gained but I do know that for typically smaller people, even a few pounds makes a difference in how they feel and the clothes they can wear.
When you are larger, however, you can lose two, three, four, five pounds in a day. It would take some people a week to lose that weight. Not me. 14 years ago, I went on a drastic diet. Consuming only 1200 calories a day, cutting out all caffeine and alcohol and taking two pills a day to speed up my metabolism and make me forget that I was hungry. I lost 18 pounds in the first 10 days. But when you weigh 250 pounds, 18 is just a drop in the bucket. It is not life changing. What was almost life-changing was the 70 pounds I lost in just 16 weeks. Still 33 pounds away from my goal weight, I started to get sick and had to stop the diet. It only took a couple of years to begin gaining the weight back. And the diet cycle continued.
"You have to make a lifestyle change!" they say. Did you hear me when I told you that I was born big? With the shoulders of a linebacker, standing 5'10" and wearing a size ten shoe by the time I was 14, I was never a small girl. But even as a teenager, what made me feel bad about my size was the comments of others. I remember being taunted as a teenager and being called fat. I remember my grandma who was under five feet tall and 90 pounds telling me I was fat. I was 5'10" and weighed 154. I was perfect. PERFECT. Even by the standards set by God knows who that tell us how much we should weigh for our height and bone structure. I was PERFECT and they told me I was not. And I believed them.
I struggle today. Some of my volleyball players tell me that I'm "thick," I am not fat. I appreciate a community of people who can appreciate the parts of me that others label imperfect. But I wonder now if it is the sight of myself I cannot stand or if it is the way others look at me because they can't stand fat people that causes me to think of myself as less than.
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