Obligatory Body Issues Post

Inject the following statement with all the facetiousness you can: I’ve discovered the secret to feeling good about your body.

Let me explain.

I’ve always known I was fat, and I never considered my weight as something that changed. Even when I worked at losing weight as a teenager, setting up exercise routines that involved running up and down the stairs five times every hour, or doing ten crunches during each commercial break, or other such sort of ridiculous things, if I saw the number the scale displayed change I never saw or felt that change in my actual body.

And when I went away to college and gained a significant amount of weight I still didn’t really notice. People told me I’d gained weight, but I didn’t see it, I didn’t feel it. I was fat. I’d always been fat. What else was there? (This tends to be true in my views of other people too. I don’t notice when they’ve gained or lost weight. My mental image of someone is never very solid and shifts easily. I’m always the last person to compliment someone on a new haircut, because I want to make sure their hair has actually changed first and I’m not just getting confused.)

So then, when I graduated and moved back into an environment where I wasn’t eating two al a carte meals at a dining hall, and where I didn’t have $250 in fake money to spend on snacks every semester, and I got a job that involved unloading a truck full of merchandise 2-3 times a week, I started to lose the weight I’d gained over the last four years. And people started to comment on it, and I started to feel pretty good about myself. (And yes, I wish these comments hadn’t made me feel good about myself, and some of them were also infuriating, but it’s hard to resist the way culture’s trained us to respond to comments on our appearance.)

Logically I know that at most (or least, or whatever the right word is when talking about weight loss. Words are tricky around this subject. When else is “loss” considered positive?) I’m just back at the size I was before college, but I don’t feel like I ever got any bigger, so I feel like I’ve gotten smaller than the “fat” I’ve been my whole life.

Usually I’m an entirely accepting and fat-positive person, but it’s hard to stay that way, especially about yourself, in the unrelenting cultural background radiation of our lives, so sometimes I indulge in feeling good about being less fat, even though I’m not, for half a second before I hate myself for it.

It’s funny, I’ve always found fat femmes attractive, because there’s definitely something subversive about owning your fatness as a femme. But, as someone vaguely masculine identified I don’t feel like my fatness is as subversive. I’m a playing into a stereotype, (I didn’t even know that shirt existed, before I googled “fat butch” for an example) not challenging one. Being fat and more masculine identified I’m buying into a culture that allows men to be fat with far less shaming than it does women. But that dichotomy is probably worth an entirely different post.