Can a Tigress Change Her Stripes?

Fierce, Freethinking Fatties is participating in the monthly Blog Carnival hosted by Voices in Recover (ViR) to raise awareness of the Binge Eating Disorder Association’s (BEDA) first annual Stigma Awareness Week from September 26 through 30. Today’s post is in response to the Blog Carnival’s question for August: How does weight stigma increase body dissatisfaction?

I found out I was fat in fourth grade when my neighbor’s uncle told me that I had “legs like a man.” That was also the year everyone was wearing Danskins^®. Some of you may remember those leotard sets with tight-fitting shorts, pants and tops that came in horizontal stripes or solids. They were super-stretchy and perfect for climbing trees, playing kickball and riding bikes. (Was it only just the year before that those were my favorite things to do?) I’d throw on my clothes, without a thought as to how I looked, and tear out of the house to play.

Fourth grade shouldn’t have been any different except we moved to a new neighborhood, and around the corner were two girls about my age. Heidi and Jan also wore Danskins. But they had the horizontal striped sets while my mom always bought me the solids. I didn’t know why at the time, but in retrospect it was because the stripes would make me look (heaven forbid) wider and fatter. That, of course, was unacceptable.

Heidi and Jan were skinny. I was not. I started to feel that I was ALL wrong and they were clearly ALL right. It wasn’t their fault. They were really sweet girls. When I cried to them about my evil uncle’s comment, they tried to soothe me. They assured me with all of the knowledge and confidence that comes from being in fourth grade that it was just baby fat and I’d grow out of it. We continued to read comics and go bowling together, but somehow I knew they were better than I was because they were thin.

But why? It was inexplicable to me! I ate less and exercised as much as they did, yet as summer approached, I was still carting around my “baby fat” and buying my clothes in the dreaded husky department. I was a failure. And now I could see that my uncle wasn’t the only one who knew that. The movies told me that, the teen magazines showed me that, and my family wouldn’t let me forget it.

I was constantly compared to Heidi and Jan and the thinner-than-thin girls in Seventeen Magazine, and I always came up short. This was another problem! Not only was it wrong to be fat but to be short and fat… EVEN MORE WRONG! I didn’t know it at the time, but at ten years old it was the first of many lifelong lessons in genetics.

I was a loser in the gene game. My gene pool was a cesspool. It just wasn’t fair. Heidi and Jan ate massive amounts of Downyflake^® frozen french toast dripping with butter and syrup. They ate double Carvel^® ice cream cones dipped in chocolate. They had junk food in their house with no limits on when or how much they could or should eat. It was a virtual gold mine of Yodels^® and Ring Dings^® and donuts, oh my!

They ate and ate and ate, and they were still skinny. As they were getting taller and taller, my self-esteem and confidence were getting smaller and smaller. I hated my body, which meant I hated myself. I started dieting, and by the end of junior high I was not only fatter, but had transformed into someone who saw food as the enemy yet, paradoxically, used it as a soother.

Over the years I have done an enormous amount of work on my body dissatisfaction and disordered eating: I have identified the emotional reasons for using food, given myself permission to enjoy food, and adopted a more mindful and conscious approach to eating. The internal chatter in my brain about food is practically a thing of the past and I am a healthier person psychologically.

But as the years passed, I realized that while I was making progress with the food “addiction,” the thin “addiction” was still running the show. What began years ago as constantly comparing myself to H&J blossomed into decades of scrutinizing the bodies of other women in order to measure my own self-worth and beauty.

As my involvement in Size Acceptance grew, my personal definition of beauty widened as well, but that too came in stages. It was easy to look at other big, beautiful women and see them as gorgeous and sexy, but the standard I held for myself seemed to be different. It would be years before I exorcised my uncle’s voice, and learned to accept and love my body type. It took hard work to opt out of the self-destructive “If I Looked Like Her I’d be Happy” game, and arrive at the place where I didn’t look at my legs and see limbs of shame.

Today, when I look at pictures of me in 4^th grade, I see an athletic girl. Short? Yes. Stocky? Yes. Skinny? No. Self-loathing? You betcha.

It saddens me that I spent so many years living in self-hatred because the focus was on my weight and not my health and abilities. I am certain that had I been given more positive messages about my body early on from my family, television, magazines, and health care professionals, I would have been spared years of suffering.

It gives me hope, though, that someone reading this will do what I did and call a “DO OVER!” No, it didn’t give me back those years of shameful hiding and all of the experiences I missed because I felt too fat to show up. But I’ve had, and still have, many years to enjoy my life as I am.

And if those Danskinleotard sets ever come back into style… I may just buy the stripes if I want to! Sorry Mom.