I am a fat per­son. There. I’ve said it. Did it shock you?

I’m fat. I’m also tall, fair-​​skinned, and green-​​eyed. At the moment, my hair is mostly brown, with red high­lights and more and more sil­ver around my face and spread­ing through­out. I have a strong, pleas­ant voice, ter­ri­ble eye­sight, straight teeth, long fin­gers, and high cheek­bones. Why is it that none of that mat­ters as much or is as mem­o­rable as the fact that I’m fat?

Many peo­ple seem to think fat is a dirty word. They’ll dance around it, try to avoid the sub­ject, get embar­rassed and even argue when a fat per­son refers to her­self as fat. I don’t really under­stand why, but I think it’s tied in with our society’s dys­func­tional atti­tudes about bod­ies, espe­cially women’s bod­ies, in general.

Fat isn’t a moral issue. The word in and of itself isn’t an insult. It’s a descrip­tion. Humans come in lots of vari­eties — tall, short, brown, pink, slen­der — and fat — and they’re all equally wonderful.

I didn’t chose to be fat. I have cho­sen to get off the diet­ing merry-​​go-​​round for most of the last decade and more, because both per­sonal expe­ri­ence and a mul­ti­tude of med­ical stud­ies have shown that diet­ing sim­ply does not work and is not healthy.

I wasn’t always fat. I only weighed about 120 pounds (a size ⁶⁄₈ for me) when when I was 18, but I remem­ber­ing think­ing that I looked like a cow, and couldn’t be attrac­tive until I got rid of those hor­ri­ble hip and rib bones. (I’ve had peo­ple refuse to believe that I was ever that weight&the photo is posted as proof. It was not a healthy weight for me, but the pic­tures look good.) It took a seri­ous eat­ing dis­or­der to get to and main­tain that weight. I was ane­mic and con­stantly light-​​headed. I passed out with embar­rass­ing fre­quency. Because I know how much I was able to hide from my friends and fam­ily, I don’t find it too sur­pris­ing that addicts and oth­ers with big secrets can also hide so much.

I’m much hap­pier with myself and my body now than then, and I know I’m health­ier.¹

No, I haven’t man­aged to fully over­come the anti-​​fat pro­gram­ming that’s all around me. I still have things to work on. There are days when I don’t like my body, when I’m tempted to try again to lose weight. Sizist remarks still get to me at times — but those times are becom­ing more and more rare.

I’ve been blessed with incred­i­bly won­der­ful part­ner in my life who thinks I’m beau­ti­ful. He hap­pens to be a tall, sexy bear man, too, so he can relate to some my frus­tra­tions regard­ing the way large women are treated in our soci­ety — but not all of them, because hon­estly, men just don’t expe­ri­ence size dis­crim­i­na­tion to the same extent. (Not at his size, in any case — I under­stand that some super­sized men do have more prob­lems than he does as a rel­a­tively mid-​​sized BBM/​BHM.)

I hope more and more peo­ple start under­stand­ing that real beauty is far more than some­thing you can weigh and mea­sure, and I know that it is impor­tant to work on bring­ing that mes­sage to every­one. Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s career over­lapped that of tiny Audrey Hep­burn. While both women were beau­ti­ful, Mon­roe con­tin­ues to be the object of fan­tasies, decades after her death. I’ve never known any man who is attracted to women who fan­ta­sizes about Hep­burn. But if you com­pared those women’s mea­sure­ments to what most of today’s mod­els strive for, Hepburn’s would be closer to the run­way stan­dard then Monroe’s.

The aver­age size woman in the U.S. is get­ting taller and larger, accord­ing to every sta­tis­tic I’ve read. Instead of a size six (what dress­mak­ers once claimed was “aver­age”), the true aver­age is more a ¹⁴⁄₁₆ now. Yet the “aver­age” actress gets smaller and smaller, with women like Courteney Cox and Teri Hatcher sup­pos­edly wear­ing size 2 dresses and some even wear­ing size 0!

So why do most women who are a size 16 believe them­selves to be hor­ri­bly big now? Because today’s press shoves images of women like Hatcher and Cox at us as if they were nor­mal — and they’re not. They never have been. They never will be.

There’s a per­fectly good rea­son that my for­mer mother-​​in-​​law, who has always worn a size 2, has always had a ter­ri­ble time find­ing adult clothes in her size. Such tiny peo­ple sim­ply aren’t aver­age. They are uncommon.

It’s unhealthy for the great major­ity of us, whose bod­ies were never intended to be that small, to attempt to achieve such sizes. The expec­ta­tion is unre­al­is­tic, and the pres­sure of try­ing attain the unat­tain­able is killing too many girls.

There’s some­thing ter­ri­bly wrong when eighty per­cent of the ten-​​year-​​old girls in our coun­try have already been on a diet. Eat­ing dis­or­ders are so com­mon in young women that bulimia isn’t even some­thing to be ashamed of in many mid­dle and high school cliques. The Octo­ber 1997 issue of Par­ent­ing mag­a­zine fea­tured an arti­cle enti­tled “Why Even Six-​​Year-​​Olds Are Diet­ing,” It cited stud­ies show­ing that most girls were “becom­ing anx­ious about food and their physiques long before ado­les­cence — as young as age 5 or 6. Their behav­ior may fall short of clin­i­cal anorexia or bulimia, but it shows clear hall­marks of dis­rupted eat­ing – chronic diet­ing, obsess­ing about food and weight, neg­a­tive body image.” It went on to men­tion a Uni­ver­sity of Florida study that found that 42% of the six and seven year old girls they stud­ied wanted to be thinner.

Ellyn Sat­ter, R.D., author of How to Get Your Kid to Eat…But Not Too Much, sees a direct con­nec­tion between the increas­ing inci­dence of diet­ing in pread­o­les­cents and obe­sity in chil­dren. She says, “There is a sta­tis­ti­cal cor­re­la­tion between diet­ing and fat­ness. Once you start restrict­ing kids’ intake, they may get fright­ened and food-​​preoccupied, and pos­si­bly become com­pul­sive eaters, stuff­ing them­selves as if they’re starved.”

Does all this mean that I don’t think any­body should diet or lose weight, or that I have some­thing against peo­ple who nat­u­rally thin­ner than I am? No, of course now. If some­one wants to lose weight, that’s his or her busi­ness. I do think it’s more effec­tive for peo­ple to try to improve their health in gen­eral, and some­times mak­ing changes like increas­ing activ­ity lev­els and mak­ing health­ier food choices will result in a weight loss — but it doesn’t result in a weight loss, big or small, for every­one, due to meta­bolic dif­fer­ences. I don’t go around encour­ag­ing peo­ple to gain or lose weight — that’s per­sonal. I have noth­ing against any­one with regard to their looks, no mat­ter how much they may dif­fer from or resem­ble me in size, height, col­or­ing, etc. I don’t want my chil­dren try­ing to diet their hip bones away, or starv­ing them­selves until their metab­o­lism is all screwed up try­ing to achieve skele­tal pro­files. I want to encour­age greater accep­tance of diver­sity in sizes, just as we’ve started see­ing more accep­tance of eth­nic diver­sity. Even bet­ter, I’d like to see more accep­tance of the idea that who you are is more impor­tant than what you look like — to achieve a bal­ance that val­ues bod­ies, minds and souls together, and hon­ors differences.

For­tu­nately, there is grow­ing aware­ness of this prob­lem and a grow­ing size accep­tance move­ment in the U.S. Groups like NAAFA have been around for years, but main­stream jour­nal­ists have really paid lit­tle atten­tion to these prob­lems until now. Even Peo­ple Mag­a­zine has done an arti­cle about eat­ing dis­or­ders and how much of the prob­lem is caused by the unre­al­is­ti­cally thin mod­els and actresses most often fea­tured on tele­vi­sion and in other mass media forums. In fact, they did a sec­ond cover arti­cle, this one on promi­nent celebri­ties who are larger than the norm for Hol­ly­wood, like Rosie O’Donnell and Delta Burke. Women’s Wire also did an arti­cle about fat-​​bashing.

I hap­pen to think Cam­ryn Man­heim is one of the sex­i­est pub­lic fig­ures around. If a genie appeared and gave me a choice of look­ing like Man­heim or Cal­ista Flock­heart, I wouldn’t even have to con­sider it — I’d pick Cam­ryn. I read Wake Up! I’m Fat! right after it was released, and it was very enjoy­able. I’ve read sev­eral arti­cles about Cam­ryn recently — my favorite was in Girl­friends—the photo here is from their cover (hint to mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers: yes, if you put Cam­ryn on the cover of just about any­thing, I’ll buy it). She’s won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her role on The Prac­tice, as well as appear­ing in sev­eral movies and stage shows. If you want more of her, Joe Sher­lock has gath­ered just about every­thing related to Cam­ryn on his web site (and also has info about other BBWs in media).

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