Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(17)

Like most fat people who’ve been lectured about diet and exercise since childhood, I actually know an inordinate amount about nutrition and fitness. The number of nutrition classes and hospital-sponsored weight loss programs and individual dietician consultations and tear-filled therapy sessions I’ve poured money into over the years makes me grind my teeth. (Do you know how many Jet Skis I could have bought with that money? One Jet Skis!!!) I can rattle off how many calories are in a banana or an egg or six almonds or a Lean Cuisine Santa Fe–Style Rice and Beans. I know the difference between spelt bread and Ezekiel bread, and I know that lemon juice makes a great “sauce”! I could teach you the proper form for squats and lunges and kettle bell swings, if you want. I can diagnose your shin splints. I can correct your jump shot.

I never did manage to lose weight, though—not significantly—and my minor “successes” weren’t through any eating patterns that could be considered “normal.” The level of restriction that I was told, by professionals, was necessary for me to “fix” my body essentially precluded any semblance of joyous, fulfilling human life.

It was about learning to live with hunger—with feeling “light,” I remember my nutritionist calling it—or filling your body with chia seeds and this miracle supplement that expanded into a bulky viscous gel in your stomach. If you absolutely had to have food in between breakfast at seven a.m. and lunch at one p.m., try six almonds,* and if you’ve already had your daily almond allotment, try an apple. So crisp. So filling. Then everyone in nutrition class would nod about how fresh and satisfying it is to just eat an apple.

One day, during the Apple Appreciation Circle-Jerk Jamboree, the only other fat person in the class (literally everyone else was an affluent suburban mom trying to lose her last four pounds of baby weight) raised his hand and mentioned, sheepishly, that he sometimes felt nauseated after eating an apple, a weird phenomenon I was struggling with as well. What was that all about? Was there any way to fix it? The nutritionist told us she’d recently read a study about how some enzyme in apples caused nausea in people with some other elevated enzyme that became elevated when a person was fat for a long time. So, basically, if we fatties wanted to be able to eat apples again, nausea-free, then we’d really need to double down on the only-eating-apples diet. The only real cure for fatness was to go back in time and not get fat in the first place. I started to cry and then I started to laugh. What the fuck kind of a life was this?

Around that time, just when I needed it, Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project came to me like a gift. The photographs are in black and white, and they feature a group of fat, naked women laughing, smiling, embracing, gazing fearlessly into the camera. In one, they sway indolently like the Three Graces; in another they re-create Herb Ritts’s iconic pile of supermodels. It was the first time I’d ever seen fat women presented without scorn.

I clicked, I skimmed, I shrugged, I clicked away.

I clicked back.

I was ragingly uncomfortable. Don’t they know those things are supposed to stay hidden? I haven’t been having basement sex with the lights off all these years so you could go show what our belly buttons look like!

At the same time, I felt something start to unclench deep inside me. What if my body didn’t have to be a secret? What if I was wrong all along—what if this was all a magic trick, and I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true? Why, instead, had I left that decision in the hands of strangers who hated me? Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet. What if you could opt out of the game altogether? I paused and considered. When the nutrition teacher e-mailed, I didn’t sign up for the next session of Almond Gulag.

I couldn’t stop looking. It was literally the first time in my life that I’d seen bodies like mine honored instead of lampooned, presented with dignity instead of scorn, displayed as objects of beauty instead of as punch lines. It was such a simple maneuver, but so profound. Nimoy said, of his models, “I asked them to be proud.” For the first time it struck me that it was possible to be proud of my body, not just in spite of it. Not only that, but my bigness is powerful.

I hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don’t. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate.

I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical—meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron—heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it’s more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.

Maybe you are thin. You hiked that trail and you are fit and beautiful and wanted and I am so proud of you, I am so in awe of your wiry brightness; and I’m miles behind you, my breathing ragged. But you didn’t carry this up the mountain. You only carried yourself. How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me? You couldn’t. But I can.