Today in Borders I was reading The Fat Girl's Guide to Life. It struck close to home, because a lot of the experiences and thoughts she had were similar to mine, and it's always good to have your experiences validated. You feel like less of a freak.
But more importantly--it just made me even more pissed off about the way society treats fat people. Fat people are the last group it's OK to hate, because society has decided that we want to be fat--or at the very least, we don't want to be thin. And if it's our fault, then we're just lazy and irresponsible and it's OK to look down on us. It's bullshit. First of all, if it were so damn easy to lose weight, diets would work. Go look up some statistics on diet success: they aren't pretty.
"It's for your health!" everyone screams. Well, yes and no. Extreme obesity is undoubtedly bad for you. But you can be thin and unhealthy and overweight and healthy. The tone of many news stories on obesity makes me want to tear my hair out.
But regardless of whether I or anyone else should be fat, there is no excuse for how society and culture treat us. Overweight people face discrimination at work, get paid less, and are viewed as lazy. Magazines show size-0 models (fashion models have actually gotten thinner over the last 20 years). Fashion designers simply don't want to know there are fat people, even though 68% of American women are size 12 and over (and half are size 16 and over). But it's OK when designers say "I only design for thin people". (This is a particular hatred of mine. You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I like clothes. I'd love to buy nice ones, stylish ones, things that made me feel fabulous. But the stores still mostly think that if you're fat, you're either trailer trash or over 40. They don't imagine that you might be in your 20s with money to spend.)
And you know what, I'm sick of it. I'm tired of having to spend twice as much money and twice as much time to get clothes that are half as nice. I'm sick of the years I wasted with crappy self-esteem because I kept hearing how fat girls aren't pretty. I'm sick of being judged by my size, or at the very least, spending all my time thinking people are only seeing me as a fat person.
I want to feel good about myself no matter what I weigh, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life struggling against a culture that tells me I can't. So that's what I'm going to try to do. I'm not going to join one of those fat acceptance clubs. I might even still try to lose weight (I'm certainly going to keep making an effort to eat sensibly and so on). But I'm not going to waste my 30s the way I wasted my 20s.
And if my mother starts in on me again I'm simply going to tell her "Ma, I'm never going to be thin. You can nag me from today till the day I die, and it won't take off one pound. So get used to it."
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