I stumbled across this while researching old feminist publications. I can’t really explain why I liked it so much.
I don’t agree with the author’s perspective, but it’s a point of view I’d never heard before, and she writes beautifully, with wit and humor and pain.
I used to joke with people that I was my mother’s before picture, in the ubiquitous and devastating tradition of photos taken to reveal dramatic weight loss, the punchline for every ad that sells weight loss to women.
the brutality of this sentence …
The fat people who become obsessed with counting calories and steps, the ones who try to vacate their bodies a little at a time . . . I don’t worry about them. They’ll never make it. Sooner or later they all come back.
jfc, as someone who is counting calories and fasting to lose weight (and have already lost 40+ lbs), this is so disturbing to read 💀
I mean, she’s right - most people do regain the weight, but I have to believe I can be an exception and form healthier long term behaviors, otherwise there is no point in trying (and I wouldn’t have lost all the weight I have already lost by trying - even if I have still more to lose).
Honestly, this essay functioned as a kind of advertisement for weight loss surgery, I never seriously considered surgery before but now she has me looking into it, lol
Compared to the other surgeries, it looks like gastric banding is fairly reasonable tbh
anyway - yes, what a great writer, “cautionary whale” is just pure gold
This woman comes across as a bitter crab in a bucket, making the struggles of others all about herself. Who passive-aggressively eats an entire bag of Halloween candy just because their friend is talking about the “evils” of white rice?
Honestly I hate to be rude but this woman sounds unbearable.
Did you read the concluding paragraph about how she learned perspective and stopped thinking about herself?
I did read it, but I don’t really buy it. She pays lip service to perspective but then says:
She’s doing the thing that everyone but me will understand.
which just brings it back to herself again. Plus, her concluding lines in which she considers sending her post-bypass friend a dozen donuts but then decides not to are weirdly snarky and self-congratulatory. I don’t believe that she’s really achieved perspective and empathy.
Different strokes for different folks - and thank you for sharing this! - but in my personal opinion, this essay is full of super toxic, overly dramatic HAES rhetoric that can be really harmful.
Really? I found the conclusion pretty brilliant. She’s saying she understands her friends decisions aren’t about her, but she still doesn’t believe in it.
The part about the dozen donuts I took to be the antithesis of her earlier selfishness. In the first half she describes eating candy in front of her friends while they’re dieting, only supporting her mom for the free clothes, taking everything personally.
At the end she says “There are worse things a person can be than fat,” which has two meanings here. The first, that weight gets a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other issues. The second, unlike her friends who experienced a weight loss journey, her change came from within. Basically “Being an asshole is worse than being fat, so I’m gonna try not to be an asshole.”*
I definitely took it that she realized being an asshole is worse than being fat - I loved this article, thank you for sharing!
