A Much Needed Word on Weight...

Post New Years, post Christmas, post turkey and bacon and a whole hell of a lot of candy, I will say this: I'm feeling pretty damn good about my body right now.  Not what you'd expect a woman to say after the gluttonous hedonism of the holiday season, but it's the truth.  The reason is that I've decided that I'm just not going to care anymore.  Not to say that I'm going to forgo showers and tumble down the street with my hair a frazzled greasy puff.  I've just decided I'm going to give myself a break.  I'm going to stop beating on myself over my weight.
     It's the most horribly tired cliche, that of the woman ever obsessing over her size, and it is something that is, and probably always has been, a serious social problem.  Girls don't just wake up one day and decide that they are fat.  They don't look in the mirror one morning and come to the conclusion that their arms are a little too loose, or that their stomach is too wide, their thighs to bumpy, arse to big, whatever, etc, and on and on.  No, they don't decide they are big overnight: they are not hardwired to suddenly start crying in the bathroom at the age of fourteen.  Genetics don't cause them to fear people watching them eat nor do they create the notion that a girl's body is simply not good enough.  Girl's don't come to this idea on their own.  Someone has to tell them.  And oh, how we tell them in so very many ways.
     For a girl, it's over before she even gets to the age of five.  Her dolls are slim, her heroines are slim, the women on the covers of the magazines she witnesses as she waits for her mother in the hair salon, are sickeningly thin.  Though she cannot yet read, she can see the way that 'fat' is singled out every time in the articles.  She cannot not see it.  Excess 'fat' on celebrities is all too often circled in red and blown up in bold.  She doesn't question her own body, not yet, but already she has an expectation of what her body should grow up to look like.  How can she not break down when she draws near puberty and realises that she is striving to grow into an impossible ideal?  The duckling fails to grow into a swan, and being less than swan is unsatisfying for we have been programmed since childhood to believe that anything less than swan is 'ugly'.  Her torment is encoded from the first doll gifted to her; symmetric of face, with an impossibly tiny waist.

When I grow up... note the disproportionate waist of the doll on the right.

     

 

The worst part is that we cannot blame our parents, or the magazines, or the dolls, or our classmates, or our teachers, or any of the other of the million and one ways that our girls are exposed to the lie that they are intrinsically ugly if they can in any way be determined to be 'fat'.  The message is everywhere and the message says that if you do not look like this then there is something wrong with you.
     I remember the first time I ever came to the realisation that I was 'fat'.  I was at school and it was lunchtime and I was chomping away at some kind of cracker and dip boxed snack, and it was unusually quiet on my side of the playground.  The girls I normally talked to were sitting down the other end of the bench.  It was a long bench, one of those endless metal benches, eternally hot in summer and cold in winter that seem to frequent Australian school playgrounds.  I could see there was some kind of commotion at the other end, so I gathered up my lunchbox and slid down to where my friends were sitting.
     There was a new girl in one of the other classes, half Thai and very exotic, who had taken her place in the middle of my group of friends.  I was curious but not overly fussed by the idea of talking to her because she was breaking into the regular discussions that I had been so accustomed to dominating.  I hovered, on the edge of the circle, waiting to determine what part this new girl would play in our games.  As I listened, I caught the end of what another of my friends was saying:
     "You are officially the prettiest one here."
     I was taken aback.  It seemed such an absurd thing to say, and I couldn't understand when it was that the appearance of our friends had become so important.  I don't know why, but I also remember being deeply offended.  Having grown up with the ugly duckling/princess fantasy, I had always assumed that I would be the prettiest at the fair.  As a child it had honestly never occurred to me that other people would rank me as more or less beautiful.  My childhood friend had just made a declaration that shook all of my confidence.  Me being me, I spoke up.
     "Who says she is the prettiest?  Why aren't one of us the prettiest?  That's not a fair way to work it out, I think we should have a vote!"
     That didn't go down well.  Keeping in mind that I had never before spoken to this girl, I looked like one hell of a bitch.  My friends tore me down for it too.  It was declared rather publicly, that the new girl was the prettiest because she was the skinniest.  It was then declared that our prettiness would be ranked according to the size of our thighs.  We were made to line up along the bench and the boss of this new and rather cruel game would re-arrange our position along the bench according to the width of our thighs.  It was then that I noticed how incredibly thin the new girl's legs were.  Unlike the rest of us, whose thighs had a fairly normal amount of flesh to them, the new girl's legs were narrow and the skin was much tighter to the bone.  I had not know then, that her body shape was pre-determined by her genetics and that her very healthy diet (she ate more than me) was not in direct correlation with the shape of her thighs.  I had not known then, that my own height to weight ratio had placed me in the category of almost dangerously underweight and that I was very small for my age.  I had known only that my thighs were bigger than another girl's, and that somehow being skinnier made a person prettier, and that my friends, who would later tease me mercilessly before finally ditching me at the age of twelve, had decided to rank me low on the 'pretty scale'.

Knowing the feeling far too well... The Simpsons captures the problem in "Sleeping with the Enemy"

     I went home that day and I cried and cried, secretly into my pillow after the lights went out, and after the tears had dried and my body was racked with sobs, I resolved that I needed to be thinner.  I had come to the conclusion in my mind that I would be happier, prettier and more popular if I became a skinnier girl.  My friends would like me again, as soon as I was skinny.  From memory, I was no more than nine years old.
     Of course, I don't blame my friend, or the new girl, or even the game for a lifetime of waistline paranoia.  These girls had come to their own conclusions about the primacy of skinniness in the person-value ratio from their own mess of influences, filtered down from the media, from adult insecurity, from older brothers and older sisters that had been programmed to feel the same way.  And what can we do to stop it?  Surely it cannot be stopped, for this machine is too big.  This story, my story, like so many others like it is just one more voice in a discourse of weight obsession, just one more chattering whisper in a great hulking and tired, over cliched conversation about poor self image and what fruitless ways we may try and stop it.
     And yet, I feel that adding my experience to the great tale, giving a spin on it from my voice, validating my experience is a way that I might be able to chip away at the foundations of the weight obsession that is destroying men and women around the world.  I have suffered at the hands of our size obsessed society.  I have chosen not to eat because I was afraid of the extra kilos.  I have cried in front of the mirror.  I have poked and picked at myself for far many more hours than I can count.  I have thought myself unworthy of good jobs, good university courses, good men and good friends, because I have thought myself too 'fat' to ever be considered as worthy.  When I have been blessed with good fortune, good fortune that I have worked very hard for, I have thought myself a fraud because 'fat girls' like me do not get to go to good universities, or have loving friends, or have attractive boyfriends.  I let the myth that I was big eat into every part of my successes, so much so that I felt as though my peers judged me when skinnier girls were good at the same things as me.
     I am only now coming to terms with the notion that I have earned the good things I have done and that my successes are fully deserved, regardless of whatever it might have said on the scale.  And lets keep in mind that I was never actually big.  Growing up, I weighed myself regularly, cross-checking my weight with the growth chart my parents had kept when my brother was born.  It was one of those height to weight charts, that mapped 'obese,' 'overweight', 'underweight' and 'very underweight' in little grey fields across the page, each coloured lighter or darker depending on the range.  The category 'normal' did not have a range.  It was tracked as a single line that divided 'overweight' and 'underweight' such that the difference between being normal, too fat or too skinny, was determined by a matter of grams.  This chart, printed in 1988, told growing children that if they weren't skinny, they were fat, because being exactly normal, sitting on that tiny line that ran up the page, was nearly impossible.
     Until the age of sixteen, I had stayed well under the line.  Each time I weighed myself I took great pleasure in seeing how low my weight was compared to 'normal'.  I delighted even more when I swooped towards the 'very underweight' category.  At the age of sixteen, I caught up, as normal, and started to fill out into a more womanly shape.  I caught up to the line.  I crossed it, though barely.  I would spend years trying to lose the two kilos necessary to take me back to what was apparently 'normal'.  The problem would later be exacerbated by my then boyfriend, who I am certain was and likely still is, suffering from an eating disorder.
     You see, when we met, when he had known me, I was very small.  We had gone to school together, he had seen me as a waifish nerd around the school yard for years and so he had built up the expectancy that I was and would remain, an underdeveloped schoolgirl.  We got together when I was seventeen, at the time I had weighed 58kgs.  Through the first year, my body finally caught up with me, and I started to put on the weight that my body had been holding back all those years before.  He had commented during that year that my jeans were tight and I needed to try a bigger size, and me being mortified by the thought, had begun to believe that I was bigger than I really was.  I ate very little while I was at school, but after that comment, I didn't eat at school at all.  I'd get up at 6 in the morning, arrive at school at 8, and avoid eating until I got home at 3:30.  I wouldn't eat for the first nine and a half hours of the day because I didn't want to get fat.  But I never believed it was a problem because I ate when I got home.
     Bad eating patterns have stayed with me, despite the fact that I no longer deliberately choose not to eat.  I still skip meals often, I ignore my hunger, I hold off meals until I feel as though I will fall over, but I rarely ever do it on purpose.  What is truly sad about this situation is that I never put on that much weight to begin with.  The difference between my weight at seventeen and my weight at eighteen was only two kilos.  At the beginning of 2003, I weighed 58kgs, at the end I was 60kg.  During the years my ex and I were together, I fluctuated between the two, peaking at 61kgs.  This means that there was at any one time, 2-3kgs difference in my weight, which in hindsight is negligible. 
     What disturbs me to this day, is the extent to which the man not only noticed a difference of one or two measly kilos, but felt the need to comment on it.  I was paranoid, on edge, and feeling ugly most of the time, and it was because I believed I was horribly overweight.  He'd tell me my clothes were tight and would buy me clothes that were a size too big for me.  He would criticize my friends, our friends, and say nasty things about their weight behind their backs.  He would keep me on my toes by singling out people he thought had "chubbed up a bit" and comparing me with them.  At my peak, he had told me point blank that I needed to lay off the chips because I had become less attractive to him.  Never mind that I was flying through university and had switched to a job I actually liked, or that my size had increased no more than three kilos.  All of my achievements were shadowed by the fact that I could be skinnier.  To him, it seemed as though a person's merits were determined solely on their weight.  I remember meeting up with a girl who had graduated university and was making quick leaps in her career.  She had done incredibly well for herself and had much to be proud of, but when my ex and I later debriefed, the only positive change he registered was that she had lost a little bit of weight.
     And let's take a moment to review.  I managed to maintain a constant average over five years, fluctuating slowly within a range of four kilograms.  I stand at a 165cm tall.  According to the BMI index, the ideal healthy weight for a person my age and height, is 58kg.  The normal healthy weight range however, ranges between 55kg and68kg.  Seeing as I never exceeded 61kg, it is impossible for me to ever have been classed as overweight at all.  And considering that half of the time I sat at 58kg, my weight was positively ideal.  And yet, when I looked in the mirror, I felt disgusting.

 Me at my smallest, 58kg, on my 21st birthday

 Me at 61kg.  See if you can spot the difference.  I can't.

     Still, I don't blame my ex for my poor self image because to say it was his fault would be unfair.  I stated before that my poor self image was ingrained and growing from an early age.  His treatment of me certainly didn't help matters, but it does highlight much of the problem running like a rip tide throughout society.  He, like myself, did not come to the conclusion that fat was bad on his own.  I mentioned before that I believe he had an eating disorder, and I am certain that this, along with his own multi-variant influences growing-up, taught him to come to the belief that a person's weight could actually tell you the value of that person's spirit.
     I never got to the stage of a full blown eating disorder, but I teetered pretty damn close.  Whether or not I was actually a sufferer is irrelevant, my story points to what we already know: society needs a serious attitude change.  According to The Butterfly Foundation, 5 in 100 Australians suffer from bulimia and anorexia nervosa is the third most chronic illness in girls between the age of 15-25, and the number is growing.  It's time for us to take a stand, a truly genuine stand against the bullshit that keeps us obsessing over our weight.  We need to stop dieting and start trying to be healthy.  We need to stop making health a cosmetic and body issue, and start actually practicing what we preach.  It takes a lot to get up and say my body is healthy, my body is normal and I am not going to care about weight pressure anymore, but it almost feels like it isn't enough.  I've come to this realisation after a good thirteen or so years of self abuse.  It is something that I may still struggle with for the rest of my life.  It is my hope that people everywhere will some day reach the point where they realise that they are okay, that it gets better, that they are perfect just the way they are.  The dream though, is that they never feel the need to doubt themselves at all.
     We have such a very very long way to go, but for every person that stands up and says, "I am not fat", I believe we have hope.  So at the end of this article, I shall leave you with this...

This is not fat, and I feel truly sorry for anyone who thinks otherwise.