On October 22, 2019, I had a sleeve gastrectomy. I went into this process knowing that this would forever change my relationship to food and my body. This is part of a series of posts covering my history with food, weight loss, and my body. All opinions expressed in these posts are my own, and reflect my own lived experience. Nothing said here should be generalized, or taken as a suggestion for others. If you’re considering weight loss surgery, your first step is to reach out to your doctor.

Did I start out fat?

I have a brother and two sisters. All of us, at one time or another, went through a period of weighing more than we should, and when I reach back into my childhood memories, the thing that’s really clear is that weighing more than you should made you a Bad Person.

My mother has always been stocky, and has been on a diet for the entirety of my life. Rather than recount it all, I invite you to read this article I wrote about food and how it has affected my relationship with my mother. My older brother is built more like my mother – on the short side, and stocky. In fact, even though he’s an ultra-marathoner who runs like a million miles a week, he still has kind of a dad bod. My two sisters favored my father more – dad was a string bean as a kid, and as an adult, was the sort of person who, whenever he thought he was putting on weight, he’d skip lunch and it would be gone.

Sadly, both my mother’s constant dieting and my father’s utter disdain for fat had the same effect: to make me hate myself. I’ve seen pictures of myself as a child, and I don’t look particularly fat. I know that in first grade I weighed 40 pounds (the average weight for a first grader is 46 pounds). And I don’t recall being mocked for being fat in school – like, not ever. Whatever I looked like out in the world was just fine with everyone. It was only at home that I was unforgivable.

I was on my first diet at 9 or 10, my second big diet at 13, all through high school I took over the counter diet pills and would exist for weeks at a time on the pickles off my friends’ hamburgers and diet Coke while swimming for hours every day. In college, my father paid for me to go on one of those medically supervised diets where you drink shakes that add up to (and this is no exaggeration) 400 calories a day. After I had my first daughter, I joined OA and for years followed their very restrictive Gray Sheet diet.

When I was dieting, my family would praise me for making “good” choices, even when those choices were horribly unhealthy – the medically supervised diet made my blood pressure so low that I would faint and my vision would black out. But how I felt wasn’t important. When I lost weight, everyone was quick to tell me how attractive I was, but when I was heavier, I wasn’t unattractive. I was invisible.

It’s Not Just the Food

What compounded the issue was the fact that I am an extreme introvert. I love being around people, but I burn out quickly, and once I’m burnt out, being around other people is a nightmare. My father comes from a family of 7 kids, and all of them had a bunch of kids of their own, and all of those kids went on to marry and have more kids. That side of my family numbers in the hundreds at this point. And I would always rather stay home and read a book than go on family outings (which invariably included some kind of athletic activity). For a long time, both of my extrovert parents took my reluctance to leave the house personally. As though I were purposely trying to spoil their good time. And they decided that I wanted to stay home, not because leaving the house felt horrible, but because I was just too lazy to get my shit together to go out.

It meant that the reason I was fat was because I am lazy. To this day, my entire personality is built around proving to the entire world that I am not lazy. It’s the reason why I feel inadequate if I’m not doing as much as all my friends. I don’t mean doing as much as any one of my individual friends – I mean doing as much as all of them put together. Saying it out loud sounds crazy, but in my head, it’s the only logic I hear sometimes.

Both my parents, whether they admit it or not, equate excess weight with personal failure. I would go so far as to speculate that my mother’s weight was a factor in their splitting up when I was a toddler. My mother longingly recounts times in her life when she was thin the way other people might recount being briefly famous or wildly rich. Those were the highlights of her life, and the memories she falls back on when she feels inadequate. My father isn’t shy about making fun of fat people, despite the fact that much of his family is overweight. He thinks it’s hilarious, like we’re performing monkeys. And it doesn’t matter if those performing monkeys have feelings, or lives, or accomplishments of which they are justly proud – nobody cares what the monkey thinks.

What Happens When You’re Only Important If You’re Thin

The fallout of growing up with this kind of self-hatred was the inescapable idea that I’m not worthy. I don’t deserve happiness, or pleasure, or success because I haven’t “earned” it by being attractive. When my siblings were given things I was denied (which happened more than most of my family will admit), I couldn’t complain, because after all, I didn’t really deserve them. When I experienced successes out in the world and looked to my parents for validation, I was more often compared to other people who were more successful, as though my own personal success wasn’t meaningful. Because it really doesn’t matter what you do when you’re fat. It doesn’t count.

Next time, I’ll talk about the impact of being fat on my dating life.