My Story (with love)

I came across a great website the other day. It's called "I was a fat kid...and this is my story". It's basically a repository for people who were fat kids to share what they went through, whether it was problems with their families, problems with other kids, etc. What's awesome about it is that I was a fat kid and it's so easy to think that you're the only one who has ever had these experiences and to feel really alone because of it. Reading some of these stories reminded me that I'm not alone in my experiences and that others have been through some of the same things. Reading their stories also inspired me to write mine. It took me a few days to get it all out on paper. I started out from a place of anger and frustration because of the argument B and I were having in the comments a few entries ago, but as I wrote the story out it was like a moment of great release, of finally being able to let go of hurt and regret and anger over things that happened when I was a kid. Writing it allowed me to look at history more objectively and think about what might have prompted situations to play out a certain way.

Part of me feels almost like it is a betrayal to post my story here, like my fat kid story is a big family secret that no one should ever know. But there's nothing wrong with my story. It's a shame that anyone would have to experience the tension, conflict, and unhappiness that my family and I did, but it is what it is and I am who I am today because of it. So, with great love to all involved, I present my fat kid story:

I was seven years old when my parents enrolled me in my first
weight-loss program. It was called The Body Shop and meetings were held weekly
in a baptist church in the city, one of the few times in my life I have ever
been inside a church. I was the youngest person there. The next oldest was a
girl in her late teens and then the rest of the people were much older, maybe in
their thirties and forties. The thing I remember most about the program was my
unbridled joy and hope on the first day, when I fully believed that this program
would fix what was wrong with me and I would then be happy. I don’t remember
anymore how effective the program was at the time, but I do know that I didn’t
live happily ever after. Either I lost weight and then put it back on, or I
didn’t lose enough so it was ultimately judged unsuccessful by my parents and
eventually we tried another approach.

I was always a big, sturdy kid. My mom has commented many times over the
years that she had expected to have a dainty little girl that she could dress up
in pink frilly things and instead she got me, the polar opposite. I was loud, I
was obstinate, I didn’t ever quite fit the traditional girl role. I was just
bigger in a lot of ways than the other girls my age. This inherent difference
was highlighted by my parents’ continual efforts to get me to lose weight. My
body became the big issue between my parents and me. It was the main source of
conflict, the main struggle, the main reason for discussion.

I may be fuzzy on the timeline, but the next official thing I remember my
parents trying was the (first) nutritionist. Her big thing was the food diary. I
think I was eight at this point, and what eight year old doesn’t love writing
down everything she eats? The thing I remember most about the nutritionist was
that she gave me a recipe for something called a coffee ring using something
called Sugar Twin. I vaguely remember eating it and let me just say, sugar is to
Sugar Twin like Arnold Schwarzenegger is to Danny DeVito. The other thing I
remember about the nutritionist is having to go to her office right after my
basketball team won the league championship. I’m pretty sure I had to miss going
out for pizza with the team, so that must have sucked. It’s likely that during
this time I wouldn’t have been allowed to enjoy pizza anyway though, so maybe it
doesn’t matter. Multiple experts and programs followed this one, but they all
tend to run together in my head.

I should mention that while I was attending the official program or
expert of the moment, things at home were fraught with tension and conflict over
my weight. My parents went with the legal approach. Every new effort began with
a meeting of the two parties (my parents and me) around our kitchen table.
Looking back, I realize I probably should have had representation. My mom would
always have a typed-up contract with the ways in which I was expected to change
(rarely this was about specific habits like exercise or food but usually it was
about quantifiable weight loss) and sometimes, the reward I would receive for
it. Dad would do most of the talking, explaining what their side requested of me
and what they were prepared to do to get it. Mom would usually sit quietly until
it was contract-signing time, then she’d whip it out and we’d all sign our
names, each of us desperately hoping that this time would be the one that would
work.

Food was a huge huge huge source of tension for my parents and me.
Everything I would eat in front of them was heavily scrutinized, so I got very
good at hiding and sneaking food. Probably as an attempt to control this
behavior, there was a period of time where all of the food in my house was
locked up. My father put a locking doorknob on the pantry door and threaded
chains with padlocks around the refrigerator and the freezer. This didn’t stop
me for very long, as at this point I was dealing with a raging eating disorder
and, like a junkie looking for a fix, I would do just about anything to get at
my self-medication supplies. I searched the house methodically until I found the
keys to the pantry door and the padlocks and I used them to sneak food out and
hide it in my room. It’s not like there were boxes of twinkies or bags of
cheetos locked up in there either. My parents had always been a little nuts
about healthy food and our struggles made it even more of a goal for them to not
buy anything that was really appealing, food-wise. It didn’t matter. I remember
in one extreme example the only thing I could find that was worth eating was a
container of powdered sugar. I didn’t enjoy it very much but it temporarily
filled the deep hole of despair inside me.

Exercise was another big struggle. We lived on a circle, meaning the
street looped all the way around and was perfect for taking a walk. I remember
many many times one or both of my parents asking or pleading or telling or
insisting that I get out there and walk around the circle. I did not want to
walk around the circle. For one thing, it was boring to just walk around by
myself. For another, there were kids who lived in the neighborhood who went to
school with me, and I really didn’t want to encounter them while walking for
exercise because I was a big fat freak. My parents tried other things though. We
joined the local YMCA, so then there were struggles about whether I was going to
go to the Y and whether I was doing enough to exercise when I was at the Y. They
bought an exercise bike and a treadmill for the house, so then there were
struggles about whether I was going to use the bike or the treadmill and whether
I had biked or treaded for long enough. Again, I got very good at hiding the
truth. I would turn on the treadmill and go sit down on the sofa and watch TV,
then when I heard someone coming I would jump on the belt and pretend to be out
of breath. I had been active in sports when I was younger but as this struggle
went on, exercise became more and more of something to avoid, something to get
out of.

When I was twelve my parents sent away for a stack of brochures for
various fat camps around the country. I liked the idea of fat camp, at least the
ones that were actually like camp, with the campfires and canoes instead of the
college campuses. I had been to summer camp before and found it to be a lot of
fun, so I had high hopes for Camp Kingsmont, the one my parents and I chose for
me to go to. It was set in Massachussetts and the session was seven weeks long,
so I was excited to try something so far outside of my usual life. I suppose
part of me thought that this might be the magic answer to fix what was wrong
with me so I could then be happy.

So I went to fat camp. It was pretty awesome, actually. I was thirteen and
had recently developed an interest in the opposite sex, so it was nice to be in
a place where the playing field was leveled somewhat. I had my first boyfriend
at fat camp and my first experience of being dumped rather spectacularly in
public, but that is a very different story. My days at fat camp consisted of
exercising all day (usually sports of some kind but sometimes non-fun exercises
like aerobics or walking) and dealing with the usual social drama one finds when
you get a coed group of teenagers together. The food was specifically
calorie-controlled but not too bad.

I don’t remember how much weight I lost that first summer, but it was pretty
significant. I came home to the expected accolades and excitement about what I
had accomplished but things quickly got back to normal. Since I was no longer
exercising all day and eating a specifically controlled diet, the weight crept
back on. By the next summer, I weighed even more than when I had gone to fat
camp the first time. I had begged my parents to send me back to camp again and
they agreed (though there may have been a weight loss contract involved). My
second and third summers were similarly successful and had similar results when
I returned home. By this time I was fifteen years old and it was decided that
fat camp was too expensive and didn’t produce the lasting results we were after,
so I didn’t go back.

My teen years were marked with continuing conflicts over food and
exercise. As my eating disorder got worse with time, there were more and more
incidents that were alarming to my parents. Specifically I remember an incident
where I ate an entire box of banana popsicles the night my mom brought it home
from the store. As my weight continued to rise in the wake of diet after diet,
so too grew my unhappiness. I had spent a lifetime struggling against my body
and feeling that there was something inexorably wrong with me.

I began to heal my eating disorder through a therapist I saw in my late
teens. She gave me the book When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies by Jane R.
Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter. This was a revolutionary idea for me, that
changing my body didn’t have to be the goal, that changing my attitude and my
habits was more important. The authors advocated a radical approach called
demand feeding which included such techniques as overstocking your pantry with
more than you could ever want of anything you could ever think of wanting. The
point was to legalize and equalize all foods so you could break the connection
between the food and the emotional response. I was living at home at this point,
so I enlisted my mother’s help in trying this out. She was skeptical but still
let me buy the groceries I needed on her dime and tried to understand what I was
trying to do. I wasn’t entirely successful in my efforts the first time around,
but over the next several years I tried again and was eventually able to
minimize the impact food had on my emotions. My food issues haven’t been
entirely eradicated and there are definitely times where I have food-related
anxiety or feel the need to eat to deal with my feelings, but most of the time I
am on a pretty even keel when it comes to food. This is something I worked
really hard for and am very proud of.

As an extension of my work with my own food issues and that therapist, I
came upon the fat acceptance movement. It took me many years of emotional work
to realize that I have worth no matter how fat I am and that I can let go of the
idea that I have to be thin before I can live my life. Even now those are ideas
I struggle with every so often.

I absolutely love my parents. I know that whatever trials I went through
as a child came from their desire to make my life easier, to help me fit in with
my peers. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing that things had been handled
differently. I have often looked back on my childhood and wished that one or
both of my parents had had the wherewithal to just love me as I was and teach me
to love myself. If I ever have children of my own, I only hope that I can teach
them that they are strong and beautiful no matter what.