It’s a thin person’s world. In the west, our beauty standards start with how thin a person is, and women in particular are still generally assessed by their audience according to how many people in that audience want to sleep with her.  It is also a sexist world, but there is progress towards establishing healthy sexuality without it running head on into old-school gender discrimination.  Life is just easier when you’re “normal” sized. (Normal is in quote because normality is always a range rather than a fixed point.)

Back in the eighth grade, I was being harassed by my classmates. I turned to my neighbor for comfort- she was one of those “friends” who is pretty much a jerk only concerned with her own glory, but in that arrogance pretty much tells you the truth as far as the limited way she can see it. She looked me up and down and told me, “Well, it’s one thing to make fun of retarded kids, but with fat people - well, it’s something you can do something about.”

At the time, I took her comment into account. I lost weight - and significant brain power - over the next year. My body size went down, and so did my test scores and ability to concentrate as valuable nutrients were no longer fed to my brain. Interestingly, I got even more comments about being “too fat” because I couldn’t get my body size down below that magic size 14 - apparently, no one was going to be satisfied with my progress until it involved bone loss.

When I gained weight back, it wasn’t because of binging. The binging began when I realized that my weight was going up despite using the same strategies I had always used to control and reduce my weight. While being “normal” certainly didn’t solve my problems, it had given me freedom from additional worries that big people have.

Aside from the difficulty in finding clothing that fits (which is what this blog is all about) there are the additional problems that no one really wants to live with: the embarrassment  of asking for a seat  belt extender on planes combined with self-righteous glares and comments from other passengers and staff, the inability to fit into amusement park rides, and of course rude comments from everyone - strangers, family, friends.

No one chooses to live like this - no one.

When people do make bad eating and exercise choices, there are additional factors involved. The natural impulses of the body tell you to stop eating when you are not hungry, and give you the urges you need to move around. If you move around enough, your body rewards you with endorphins.  A lot of different things happen to have this simple self awareness socialized out, whether it’s using the TV as a babysitter and dinner companion or learning to medicate emotions with food.

Yes, it’s important to exercise enough. Yes, overeating is bad - anything done immoderately ends badly, even eating “well” too much can screw up your body. (A totally fat free diet will do awful things to your intestines, for example.)  The thing is, there are plenty of fat people who actually do the right thing and eat properly, and exercise enough and are still fat. There’s clearly more to it than the “simplicity” of a diet.

I have yet to meet another fat person who has not tried dieting and multiple diet programs. The not sticking is not the result of lack of will and laziness - our entire society is geared towards rewarding thinness with basic comfort in clothing, seating, day to day life. The very nature of the way our world is laid out is certainly motivation enough to stick to a diet, to sleep with a measuring tape, to be forever concerned with input and output. Deciding not to diet, to practice HAES (Health at Every Size), or to say no to the bullying becomes a de facto political act. Every time I step out in public, I’m being political, when really, I just want to get some sunlight and exercise.

Seriously, no one chooses to be obese. Some may choose to accept themselves as they are or not - and that is always a private decision.