Happy Fat

There is a scene in the movie Seven where a fat man is used to symbolise gluttony. He is also, surprise surprise, seemingly mentally ill, definitely poor, definitely unhygienic. Four traits that are always mushed together in Hollywood as if they are interchangeable. In another scene, the murderer has disfigured a supermodel and given her a choice: to keep on living, being ‘ugly’ for the rest of her life – or kill herself. Spoiler alert: she kills herself. This is not even that far from the truth. A study conducted by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida in 1991 shows that out of a group of formerly fat people, given the choice between becoming fat again or going completely blind, 89 per cent will choose going blind.3 In another 2006 survey conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, almost half of those asked indicated that they would happily give up a year of their lives if it meant they were not fat.4

I never believed that I could be found attractive. Part of me loathed the boys and girls who liked me, because surely they were either lying or horrible people themselves. Why would they want me, when they could get someone better? Someone thinner?

I remember a desperate boyfriend hissing into my face, ‘If only you could see yourself the way I see you,’ and me rolling my eyes at him saying, ‘You have to say that.’ And I laughed when he eventually cheated on me with a thin woman, because the joy of being proven right was more powerful than the pain of being cheated on.

Another boyfriend joined the military and had to be gone for long periods of time. I was so scared of being alone, of not being validated, that I joined yet another gym and started working out. Within a day, my entire world went back to revolving around weight loss. I started starving myself, counting calories, skipping school, so I could spend upwards of six hours in the gym, weighing myself four times a day and losing weight rapidly. By the time my boyfriend finally came home to see me for a weekend, I was angry at him for interrupting my stride. I blamed him for accepting me as I was, so I stopped feeling the need to exercise. As soon as he came back for a weekend, I started binge-eating again, gaining all the weight back and then some. I blamed him for that. I would not let him in. I would let no one in. I would let no one love me. Because I refused to believe it was a possibility. I was fat.

Looking back, I was in a fairly fortunate position. I was fat, but I was a small-fat. I was just about excluded from being able to buy clothes in straight-sized stores. I was ‘Aw, you’re not that fat’-fat. At the same time I had stumbled into a group of friends who cared about me and who had forced me out of my shell. It’s important to note that a lot of fat teens are pretty secluded and isolated – a consequence of bullying and having internalised the fatphobia they’ve experienced and witnessed. I talk flippantly about my teen years and the dramatic stories of love and sex, but I do so with the knowledge that not all fat people have had this experience. I especially feel this as I have grown older and fatter and my anxiety has risen. Being able to date and fool around is not a given for everybody.

I am not even sure you know how horrible it is being a teenager before you’re an adult. When you are a teenager, your hormones take full control of your every move. When I was a teenager and I fell in love, I loved more than anyone had ever loved before in the history of the world and I would die, simply die a violent death for a person with whom I had never even spoken. It’s truly a matter of swaying between all the extreme versions of every emotion to the sound of a hundred adults asking you to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you are both scared and at the same time, convinced that you definitely know better than these adults. Your teen years are also full of warnings. All the monsters that you thought were under your bed when you were a child are suddenly real – and they are not under your bed where you can see and contain them. They are the reason you are asked to never leave your drink out of sight, the reason you don’t walk home alone, and the reason you have to learn how to say no if there is something you don’t want to do. Yet, fairly often, we are not warned about the monsters that we can see – the people controlling everything that we consume. The people targeting marketing campaigns at teenagers’ fragile self-esteem, confirming their worst fears: that they are not okay, that they should be prettier and thinner and better. Basically shaking the groundwork for the person they are to become. You don’t know who you are or who to be? We will tell you. Be thin and pretty. How? By using our products. Daddy, is there a monster under my bed? Yes, actually, and he is holding a Slimming World brochure.

One day, when I was single and in my late teens, in the first week of my new job, I met a man who openly declared that he liked fat women. It was not directed at me, it was not to get me into bed, so I trusted it, weirdly. He told us, after a shift when we were getting drunk in the pub next to the office, that his father used to say to him: ‘Get yourself a woman with curves. They’re the best ones.’

He told me this with pride. I disregarded the problematic nature of that sentence because suddenly, I wanted to be the woman that he ‘got himself’. Hey, fuck feminism, this guy with sandy blond hair and wide shoulders who smokes a pipe despite being only twenty-one just told me he might fancy my fat stomach. Feminism can wait. Sure, Emily Davison threw herself under a horse to get me the vote, but I was not willing to challenge this man now – because there was the faint shadow of a promise of a kiss within his charming anecdote.

A year later, I found myself wishing that his father had told him, ‘Son, go get yourself a woman who is wilfully obsessed with you and who will write and send you poetry and always be so close to you that you can smell her breath,’ because then maybe, I would have had a chance. Instead he moved to the Danish island furthest away from Denmark. I take no responsibility for that.

Some people have fathers who do positive PR for fat women from an early age. I remember falling in love with him for just this reason. It was hard to believe that other people like that existed. Most people will have parents who tell them to ‘never get fat’, who will pinch their own stomach fat and say ‘eww’ and who will point at fat people in the shops and say words like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘gross’. The negative attitude towards weight is so all-encompassing that the chances are that whoever you meet has been taught to hate fatness, long before they even had a chance to make up their own minds about what it is they like and don’t like.

So I spent all of my teenage years hating myself, hating fatness and hating women and hating thin women, hating people who loved me and hating myself. I wasted so much time. I wasted so much money on attempting to make my body smaller.

When I was seventeen, I applied for part-time jobs. There was a plus-size clothing store selling everything from tent-like ponchos for fat people, to tent-like ponchos for fat people – with tassels. I had circled the shop a few times before I gathered the courage to go inside and apply. A large, older woman with a smile on her face took my application, looked me up and down and led me into her office. After a bit of chit-chat, she told me that she’d love to hire me. I said, as confidently as I could manage, ‘Just so you know, I am going to lose this weight soon.’

The woman’s face burst into a huge grin as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, sure!’

Today, I like her. Back then, I detested her and the shop and I never, ever wanted to work there. I stormed out, furious that she did not believe me because I would lose the weight, I would lose all the weight and I would be thin. The alternative did not even bear thinking of.

Sometimes you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me tell you about Andrea.

Early twenties

I found stand-up comedy a few years after I finished school. Comedy was an amazing way of turning the self-hatred into a strength. I would stand on stage and tell the fat jokes that I had heard my whole life, but suddenly, I was controlling the laughter. It was liberating, standing on stage, saying: Hey! I am so fat and so lazy! And I am aware of it!

And hearing people laugh.

There is an annual comedy gala party in Denmark. All the comedians get drunk, horrifically drunk, and lose their already virtually non-existent inhibitions. A comic once got so upset that he lost an award that he threw his shoes into the harbour. And someone once gave a blowjob to another comedian who stopped her halfway through and said, ‘Let’s just be colleagues.’

That was me. Hello.

That evening, I was wearing a beautiful gala dress. I had come from a television set, so I was wearing television make-up – which is like normal make-up but with extra layers and done by a person tutting over the state of your skin. (Or like that one make-up artist who tried to wrap me in a giant scarf because my chest was ‘so ugly’.)

So I fell asleep with the grim taste of ‘just a colleague’ in my mouth, in full gala dress, fake eyelashes draped down my cheek, next to a mediocre comedian. I woke up and realised that I had forgotten to set my alarm. I had twenty minutes before I had to get to Copenhagen University for the first day of what was going to be three years of Russian Studies. I was about to miss first day of uni. I jumped out of bed, half-heartedly brushed my teeth, pulled the fake eyelashes all the way off and got up on my bike. I became aware that I was still drunk when I was sitting amongst the rest of the new students in my gala dress, reeking of alcohol, realising that I had not locked my bike outside. The other students were dressed, well, the way you should be dressed when attending university on the first day. They had showered and everything. I was wearing one earring and torn tights. Eyeliner was everywhere apart from along my eyelids. I am not sure if I looked like someone who took university too seriously or not seriously enough. Then I saw Andrea.

Meeting Andrea changed everything. She had unapologetically hairy armpits, a mullet and an obvious disdain for the entire system. If anyone was to ever ‘stick it to the man’, it was Andrea, and she was going to stick it to him hard. I am not sure if she saw me before she smelled me, but either way, we got talking.

Это дома. That’s all the Russian I picked up from my year at University of Copenhagen. It means ‘he is home’. Or ‘they are home’. Maybe it means ‘someone is home’ or ‘is someone home?’. Either way, I can almost pronounce it perfectly.

I failed the first exam because I put a question mark after each answer. What was the main import in the thirteenth century? Um … Corn? Potatoes?

The professor looked at me sternly and said, ‘It’s not a quiz,’ and I said, ‘Rocks?’

I love the Russian language. I think I convinced myself that it was a legitimate possibility to study it for three years and graduate. I did believe that I could do both comedy and get a degree in Russian. But I was doing comedy at the same time and always prioritised that. It fulfils me in a way that vodka and babushka dolls never could. So I very rarely went to class.

And when I did, I spent most of the lessons speaking to Andrea. I spoke about the various diets I was on, how I was going to lose the weight. She saw me perform comedy and heard me tell self-deprecating jokes about my fat body on stage. But Andrea also saw something else in me. She called me a Baby Fat – a potential future self-loving fatty. At first, it felt like a set-up.

‘You’re allowed to like your body,’ she would say. I would blink a few times. It made less sense than Russian. The words would get stuck in my brain on a loop throughout the week. It had never been an option; it had never been presented as an option.

‘If you trace it back,’ Andrea would tell me, ‘every self-hating thought, every fat-hating feeling – it stems from somewhere. An advert, a character on a TV show, a fashion magazine, a weight-loss product. It’s not something you read in The Great Book Full of Facts. It always stems from an individual or a system. And often from an individual with a product to sell. You can see it happen – the worse you feel about yourself, the more money you throw at the problem. The more people doing this, the richer these companies will get. So they keep spreading the idea that you are not allowed to be fat, that fat is the worst thing you can be – so that you will throw even more money at them.’

I had always considered my negative view of fatness as a truth, and suddenly it became subjective. In my head, it had been simple: the Earth is round. The sun is hot. Fat is bad. ✓

Now my world view was shaken. Every single notion that had ever been flung at me – telling me that my fatness made me unattractive, lazy and unworthy – had come from someone’s subjective opinion. Or – from a company with a product to sell. What Andrea explained to me was essentially capitalism. I felt like I had understood what capitalism was – in theory – but never had it applied this strongly to my very own life. Fat does not have to be a negative.

Wow.

Andrea introduced me to the possibility of loving fat. With the gentle sound of our Russian Studies professor in the background, I took in these ideas that seemed much more valuable to me than anything to do with Tolstoy. I was immediately both puzzled and intrigued.

Andrea would be writing the Russian alphabet in her notebook and I would lean in and whisper in her ear, ‘So basically, we have all just been taught to hate our bodies when really … We don’t have to?’

She would nod and continue writing. I would write down an oddly shaped B which I think was meant to be pronounced as an S. I would then lean in again and whisper, ‘So it’s all lies?’

Andrea would whisper, ‘Yes.’

I would draw a little 8 on my paper, drawing circles in the same place repeatedly till the paper evaporated and the pen started drawing 8s on the underlying piece of paper. I leaned in, ‘So I can just … be fat?’

Andrea smiled, ‘Yes.’

I would see Andrea exist, unapologetically, and she would show me fat people that did the same. I remember the first photo I saw of a fat woman being sexy. She was wearing nothing but knickers and a big, oversized, dark-red knitted jumper which was draped over one shoulder and both of her hands and part of her left thigh. She was leaning up against a high stool, her hair brown and thick, her lips slightly parted in a sexy and sultry look. And she was fat. Fat and sexy. That was just the first of many.

The internet turned out to be full of people like her. Fat people photographed from all different angles, no regard given to double chins or floppy upper arms, fat people in crop tops, fat people laughing, fat people eating. Fat people actually loving themselves.

The change wasn’t gradual. It happened overnight. I woke up and looked in the mirror and what I saw was different. On my bike ride to uni, everything was different. The billboards attempting to sell diet plans through before-and-after photos were suddenly not preaching facts, they were preaching a harmful body image. They were using my body to sell a product.

She showed me this door to a whole community where being different – or queerfn8 – was not frowned upon, but celebrated: a door which had always been concealed from me. And through which, a whole new world existed, where the rules are not rules, merely guidelines.

I loved the movie The Truman Show when I was growing up. If you are younger than me, this may be complete news to you, so I will quickly explain. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, has a normal life – so he thinks. He gets up, kisses his wife on the cheek, goes to work, gets the newspaper, goes back home, falls asleep. What he doesn’t know is that when he was born, he became part of a reality TV show. He was placed in a fake world, an enormous bubble, and now everything in his life is filmed twenty-four hours a day and broadcast to the real world. Everyone in his life, including his wife, is an actor. He is given a fear of water, meaning that he can never leave his town – not cross the bridge, not get on a boat. He is stuck in this fake world, without knowing that millions of people watch his every move.

When Truman realises what is going on, he is forced to challenge his fears and get in a boat to try and get away. He doesn’t truly believe that this can be real; that his entire world, his entire life is a lie. Until his boat bumps into a wall. A blue piece of wood painted as the sky. There is a beautiful moment where Truman touches the wall. And realises that it’s true. That everything was fake. The voice of God – the producer – roars through the speakers, at Truman, that he should turn around and go back to his life. For at least he knows what that is. That he can stay happy if he gives in to the dream. If he just accepts this. And Truman is standing in front of a door, which was hidden before – it is painted blue like the fake sky – and he has a choice. He can turn around, get back in the boat, go back to his life which is a lie. Or he can walk out the door, not knowing anything about the outside world. He turns to the camera and smiles and walks through the door.

That is how it felt meeting Andrea. The same stages of denial: surely, this can’t all be fake?

If this is all true, then I have lived a lie. Then every single self-loathing thought I have ever had, every opportunity missed, every failed relationship or friendship, every harsh word said to myself, every bruise, every cut, every moment I have either starved myself or felt numb, it will all have been … due to either an individual, an industry or a system telling me to do it. If this is all true, then that means that I have said the meanest and most cruel things to myself, to my body, for no reason. It means that my body was never the enemy, my fat was never the enemy. Perhaps I was deserving of love all along. Perhaps I was worthy all along.

If it’s all true – that the beauty industry, the diet industry, the weight-loss industry and the fashion industry, all of them have created this ‘perfect body image’ and a world in which that is ‘just the way it is’ – then it is not an objective truth. It is fake. A world in which everyone is an actor and the sky is made of wood. In which case, there must be a door.

You will have to cross an ocean, petrified of water. You will have to give up this belief you had that what you see in the media is true and reflects reality. Then you have to row. And there is a storm and you feel like you might, at any second, drown. But you don’t. You reach the blue wooden wall, you touch it and feel the splinters in your fingertips. Then you see the door. And you can choose to walk out.

The reason why we empathise with Truman’s difficult choice is that in his fake world, at least, he was the star. He had a decent life. It was safe. So if he had got back into his boat and sailed back to his fake life, we would partly have understood his choice.

The fake world in which fat people live is not nice. It is not safe and we are not the stars. Instead we believe that we are not worthy, that we are not attractive, that we are lesser humans. That that is just how it is. The world is not even safe for thinner people, because it always looms over them as possible threat. What if you get fat one day? If you are a size 8, you should be a size 6. If you are a size 6, you should be a size 4. If you are a size 0, you need a bigger gap between your thighs or clear clavicles or a flatter, more toned stomach. And you need to still be able to eat burgers because you don’t want to be one of those boring girls ordering a salad for dinner.

I fully lived in that world for twenty-three years of my life and every single person in my life did as well. Like we were all part of a cult where the main mantra was ‘fat people should be ashamed’ and we all hummed in agreement whenever it was being insinuated or said.

What it took was for someone to say to me, ‘What if it’s all a lie?’

Throughout writing about my childhood, my teens and all of the self-loathing that surrounded it, I have had to take brief pauses where I held my stomach in my hands and said to myself, ‘I love you, stomach. I love you, child-me. We are good, we are safe,’ because the past is overwhelming. Maybe this is time for you to do the same. Place your hands on your body, the bits that you’ve struggled with the most and say, ‘We are good, we are safe.’

The biggest misunderstanding in the body-positivity movement that we see on social media is that you have to be ‘confident’ and ‘brave’. I have spoken to fat women who dismissed the entire idea of self-love by saying, ‘I am just not that confident.’

I am not a confident person. I always feel like I should be working harder or managing adult life better. But I can honestly say that most days, when I look in the mirror, I smile. I stare admiringly at my big thighs and I turn sideways to look at my butt and my stomach and I think, ‘Hello hot stuff!’ I am sometimes absolutely overwhelmed with how cute and beautiful my body is. But then sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and think, ‘Ew.’ I still receive compliments from people and smile and say ‘thank you’ but on the inside scoff and think ‘what’s wrong with you?’ I still sometimes instinctively take positions that make me look thinner for photographs and I would hesitate before doing jumping jacks naked in front of a person I was about to have sex with. I don’t always love my body. I love it more, way more, light years more, than I did a decade ago. When I go up a size in clothing, I don’t cheer. My first feeling is, ‘Oh …’ and my second feeling is, ‘Oh well.’ I have to repeat to myself, ‘I was a beautiful child,’ moving the emphasis from word to word in each repetition, because I need to remind myself. That I am attractive, worthy, deserving to be alive, is never something that comes easy. It is not something I just instinctively believe. It is hard work, telling myself that I am good enough every single day.

When I write down every memory related to my weight from my childhood, it is not to figure out the source of why I became fat. People are fat for a variety of reasons. It can be biological, psychological, socioeconomic, genetic or a choice. Some people just have those bodies. When I talk about the reasons for my own fatness, I am not apologising for it and nor am I explaining it to you so that you feel more comfortable with it. Usually, when the reasons for a person’s fatness are looked into, it is in order to find a solution to a problem. But being fat is not a problem. The reason I share my childhood with you is to remind myself that I was not brought up loving my body. I was not brought up confident. Every little thread of confidence was crushed under the heavy foot of societal pressure to be thin. Every sense of autonomy evaporated in the presence of my abusive grandfather. Bullying shattered my sense of self-worth, sadistic teachers confirmed that I was lesser. I did not start this journey as a confident person. If I had to go back and look at who I was before I started loving my body, I would say that there seemed to be nothing left to salvage.