My mother was the third of four children and growing up her mother was the trifecta- a poor cook, a traditionalist, and a crazy person. My grandmother had a meal assigned to each day, meatloaf on Mondays, tuna casserole on Tuesdays, and so on. She didn’t too much care about her kids preference, they all ate what she liked and what her limited culinary skills allowed her to produce. You had to finish your meal and if you were still hungry- here’s a piece of bread. They grew up snacking on white bread and graham crackers if they were hungry except my aunt, who always chose a small piece of fruit instead. My aunt was always naturally thin. Granted she ate very little, but she also just wanted to eat very little. One day, as a teenager, my aunt asked my grandmother to make her an egg for breakfast. My aunt sat down with the egg, ate a few bites, and pronounced herself stuffed. My grandmother who always struggled with her weight (to the point of taking Mother’s Little Helper-the 1950’s name for doctor prescribed speed- to control it) went berserk and chased my aunt around the house screaming like a madwoman and physically harassing my aunt out of a likely combination of weight related frustration on temporary insanity brought on by jealousy. Despite my aunts problems with my grandmother, she did go on to grow up, get married, and have kids- kids she swore to raise healthily and certainly not overweight. She fed them healthy foods and organic foods and never kept junk in the house. But instead of being thin and perfect my cousins sought out unhealthy snacks at friends’ houses and outside of their home environment. My aunt even allegedly held a birthday party and didn’t let my eldest cousin have a piece of her own birthday cake. In the end my cousins were both consistently overweight throughout their lives and my mother tried to take lessons from this.
As I entered middle school I noticed the difference between other girls and myself more often. I was in a class of very intelligent and pretty girls and I stuck out like a sore thumb. It felt as if I missed a class on how to be thin and pretty. The other girls had delicate features- thin wrists, elegant necks, tiny waists, and I was a chubby goofball who weighed 100 pounds in seventh grade and despised the rule commanding that we tuck in our shirts because that only made my protruding belly more obvious to the world. I was of course friends with the prettiest girl in the class, blonde haired, blue eyed, and athletic. I had my first stab at being the cock-blocking fat friend of the pretty girl as we went through middle school together. I got a front row seat to the male attention I was missing out on and it wasn’t fun, especially since she began dating the boy I’d liked for over a year. But who could blame her, she was pretty and he was just learning how to properly judge girls worthiness based on their outward appearance. In the end, they broke up in a big scandal and middle school ended eventually, but that wouldn’t be the first time I felt that I was passed over for something based my looks.
During middle school I became more aware that I wanted to eat more than the other girls. I went to a small parochial school and my class contained thirteen future prodigies while the other classes were of comparable size. It was easy to notice who ate what, but in a school brimming with wasps and eagle-eyed teachers, little teasing went on. My best friend would always eat half a tuna sandwich delicately, picking it apart bit by bit then popping it in her mouth. After discarding the extra half she would maybe eat a carrot stick or two and perhaps pick at the desert. For me, I was starving by lunch time and devoured my sandwich. Sometimes seconds were offered and I’d wait a few minutes then go in with the line of boys to grab some extra food. By then there were also girls who had started just eating a salad with lunch or the one girl who always looked a bit angry who would buy lunch, sit there for twenty minutes, then throw it away without touching it.
All throughout middle school I was very involved in sports and martial arts. I began taking Tae Kwon Do lessons at six years old because I had too much energy and was a bit too rambunctious. In middle school I did basketball in the Fall and soccer in the spring. Warming the bench was my main function during games but in practices I got a lot of exercise and had a lot of fun. I was always the slowest runner and always managed to eat so much throughout the day that I never became a svelte athlete even with an hour or more of exercise a day.
During this time I also took dance classes because my sister loved them but hated spending an hour in front of a mirror looking at myself bounce and jiggle around the room. These girls were even smaller than the girls in my school and worse than that, they were older and beginning to develop a sense of style. They were cute and full of makeup and confidence, something that made trying to dance next to them even more difficult because I spent the whole time comparing myself to their slender selves and finding myself wanting. One year I almost died of shame when one of my teachers thought it would be perfect to put us in yellow fishnet shirts with only a black bra on top to hide things that need to be hidden. I still can’t believe that I actually danced in front of several hundred people, in a group or otherwise, with my stomach exposed.
Around this time I also took gymnastics, which I loved. But these girls were not just small they were compact. They were 80-100 pounds of pure unadulterated muscle, not only were they thin and pretty but they were impressive athletes. I enjoyed my little class with basic tricks like back handsprings on the trampoline or back walkovers but my weight held me back. I was 150 at the end of middle school and beginning of high school so while the other girls wore cute skintight camis or just leotards and spandex shorts I wore a leotard with loser shorts and t-shirt, to make sure nothing embarrassing because exposed, heaven forbid my stomach become exposed during class. I remember one girl who was older than me said she needed to watch her weight because she was 115 but then she giggled and said that ten pounds were accounted for because of her massive chest and bounded off. Girls that age had a tendency to do that, randomly bring up weight or body image issues, mainly to be reassured that no they weren’t fat, they were just crazy for thinking so. I never publically mentioned my weight because by then I understood that I was larger than normal and that simply would not do. When speaking with another girl that was on the chubby side before my freshman year of high school we started talking about weight and I disclosed my number, 146. I expected her to say “oh yea me too” or “I’m pretty close to that, it’s ok”. Instead her reply was “Oh, I know someone that’s that big”, like I was a scientific case study that was so outrageous that she couldn’t relate, but she knew someone similar in these gargantuan proportions, perhaps I should visit the Guinness Book of World Records?
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