Body Fat
April 25, 2022
By: Andal Paul
TW: ED, Body Dysmorphia, Fatphobia
This is an essay about a girl that hates her body.
She couldn’t have possibly always hated her body, because she knows she wasn’t born with an intrinsic desire to pull herself out of her skin or chisel away the parts of her that hang. And it doesn’t consume all of her time, this feeling, but it’s rather something that made home in the dark corner of her bedroom, unmoving and unchanging even when her parents finally let her color the walls in her room turquoise and graduate to a double bed. It followed her, silent next to her in the backseat when she drove to college for the first time, the seatbelt pressing too tightly on her lower stomach, thighs chafing when she walked up the stone steps to her dorm. Each time the girl moves to a new home, she thinks this is the time she’ll leave it behind.
She’s tied it down to the chair next to her bed, hands locked by zip ties and mouth clamped down on a stuffed animal. Bolstered by thoughts of ‘I’ll be moving a lot from class to class,’ and ‘the dining hall will make me eat healthy,’ the girl thinks it’s an old environment that has festered the thing. She drinks and dances and she eats and she laughs and the thing sticks to the back wall of her college apartment and spreads until it’s over the ceiling, leering and pressing on her stomach as she struggles into her black skinny jeans and turns to her roommates and says, “I don’t look fat in this, right?”
The girl wants nothing more than to be small, because that’s what she thinks she needs to love herself.
She downloads an app to keep track of her calories, and deletes it after a week. Her therapist tells her to try a different app because this one tracks points instead. She hides her scale in places just slightly more inconvenient than the floor, and convinces herself she’s running for 30 days to build discipline or stamina. She begins to think a protein bar is dessert. Then the compliments start, and she curates herself for more, bringing up her weight loss in small talk conversations. This is small talk for her, this is identity for her, this is living like she has never imagined except it is not. The day revolves around food or exercise, or watching people do either of these things so she doesn’t cheat. She is so scared of herself from yesterday.
And when she gains back the weight and then some she must have failed herself. Because she had it, she was small, and it should’ve been easy to stay that way. Other people tell the girl that she didn’t think she was small, that her appetite was insatiable, that she whispered take, take, take, into the seams of her lulu leggings. It doesn’t matter what they say, says the girl in front of the mirror, because they can’t be in her head and so they don’t know how she cheated herself.
And so she compares herself to everyone. She refuses to take family photos. She weighs herself before and after she goes to the bathroom. On social media she tells her followers that it’s normal to gain weight, and she tells herself even if she doesn’t believe it now, she’ll grow to accept it later. She’s a big fat liar.
The girl wants nothing more than to be small, because that’s what she thinks it means to love herself.
Sometimes, in the very early mornings before work, she’ll wake up and lug on her work pants and her button down shirt and tuck in the bottom and slip into her flats and climb into her car and suffocate. She pulls hard and fast on the waistband of her pants and when it doesn’t give and she feels the itchiness of the fabric against her neck and her stomach as it strains against her pants and spills over onto her lap she suffocates. Everything feels wrong and it’s too early for this feeling and she must drive to work before she’s late.
This suffocation creeps up on her at the worst times: at dinner with her family, in bed with her boyfriend, in the middle of a party or a nap or a breath. It’s hot and stuffy and sticky and slimy and it makes her want to scream and scream but instead she snaps at her family and her friends until she can turn out the lights and shed her skin under the sheets of her bed.
This is an essay about a girl that wants to be free.
How tragic she forgets that her body is movement – it takes her up mountains and through grass and it holds onto the things and people she cares about. This is the body that hugs her mother. This is the body that gives her agency, that lets her swim in oceans and visit museums and dance. This body breathes for her, beats for her, sings and sobs and grieves for her. It lets her express her anger and gives her privacy and allows her to read stupid fiction and write gooey poetry and drive and—this body doesn’t understand words like “fat” and “skinny” and why one has to be better than the other. This body wakes her up every morning and gives her gentle reminders on the things she needs to stay healthy, and at night, this body tucks her into loving darkness and promises to do it all over again.
This body woke up 24 years ago and has worked every day of its life and has asked for hardly anything in return and yet I hate it! I hate it, and I don’t want to anymore.
This is an essay about a fat girl that will try harder this time.
