The GirlAlive Blog

I'm fat.  People who know me are aware of this.  I thought it was time for me to say a little bit about what it is to be a fat woman.

First of all, about half of you reading this naturally assume that because I'm fat, I must be stupid and lazy.  You believe that weight gain is the result only of eating junk food and never exercising.  So I must be too stupid to know what foods are good for me, and I'm lazy and never exercise.  Fat people are fat because they've never seen a salad and they eat all the time.  All of that is a complete load of sh!t.

When I was a kid, I was skinny.  I was a gymnast.  I played soccer.  Half my time was spent riding my bike around the neighborhood and the other half was spent roller skating in my basement.  I have an older brother who is and always has been skinny.  Throughout childhood, we ate basically the same foods.  If anything, I was more active than he was.  Around age 12 I got fat and he stayed skinny.

I'm not going to claim that my lifestyle when I was 12 was perfect.  I hated gym class because I was clumsy and constantly bullied.  The other reason I started to hate exercise is that I started to feel the effects of hypermobility syndrome around age 12.  I have a genetic collagen defect which makes my joints too loose.  So I am prone to back and joint pain and I dislocate joints a lot.  If I turned just wrong running the bases in baseball, my knee would dislocate.  I developed arthritis in both knees from repeated dislocation at the age of 13.  I was in pain all the time, but no one would believe me.  I was labeled a hypochondriac.

At age 14 I started developing symptoms of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, and I didn't tell anyone.  My mom has it, and I figured, "Why mention it?  There's nothing that can be done anyway."  So I didn't recieve any treatment for it until I was 19.  And I couldn't take the medication they prescribed for more than about 2 years before it started making me sick.

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome causes weight gain because it is associated with insulin resistance.  And the more weight you gain, the worse the insulin resistance becomes.  So I could eat the same food as a skinny person, and I would still put on weight.  

So I was getting fatter and my joints were in pain, so the doctors always told me that my joints would get better if I just lost weight.  And how am I supposed to do that when I'm in too much pain to exercise?  No doctor would ever address that problem.  They just assumed I was not really in pain and that I was just making excuses to not exercise.

I eventually developed a severe mental illness, rooted in the fact that no one would believe that I was in pain.  I was diagnosed as bipolar and put on medication that is known to make PCOS worse, and known to cause weight gain.  I eventually told my psychiatrist where to stick his anticonvulsives and went on antidepressants.  Eventually, I pretty much stopped cutting myself and managed to pass for sane.

Now I'm 30 years old and I've given up on losing weight.  I can't even walk for exercise because the joints in my feet dislocate when I walk.  I don't eat a lot.  I'm on Metformin to treat PCOS.  Despite the fact that it has given me chronic diarrhea, I'm still putting on weight.  I could try a fad diet, but any strict diet is likely to trigger food obsession and bulemia.  I am looking for ways to get more exercise, but it continues to be painful and difficult.

Now, a lot of you are saying, "Don't give up!  There's surgery, etc."  I'm not interested.  Being fat is not a sin.  Fat people are not the monsters the media portrays them to be.  Fat people may or may not be unhealthy.  You can't tell by looking at them.  Fat people are not stupider or lazier than anyone else.  Most fat people feel better when they lose weight, not because they're healthier, but because they finally stop getting harassed and tormented about their weight.

Look at it this way: if someone told you that they were depressed because they faced terrible descrimination because they were a Muslim, would you tell them, "Maybe you should change religions"?  No.  You'd probably find the idea abhorrent.  Or if a black person faces descrimination, do you tell them to try bleaching their skin?  Yet you would tell a fat person who is suicidal because they are the target of hate and discrimination that they should just lose some weight.

The problem does not lie with me and the extra pounds I am carrying.  The problem lies with the people who would stereotype me and discriminate against me.  The media and scientists of the 19th century used to say that black people were naturally lazy, stupid and inferior to whites.  They were wrong.  Now the same people who will acknowledge that racism and racial profiling is wrong want to take rights away from fat people because they claim that fat people are stupid, lazy and inferior to skinny people.  

"What about how unhealthy it is to be fat?"  Most of the assumption of unhealthiness is based on bad science.  Even if it wasn't, why do you have a right to dictate healthiness?  Go bother some smokers or alcoholics or drug addicts.  Those things kill far more people than my obesity ever will.  No one has ever died from secondhand obesity.  

Before you condemn me for being fat, ask yourself why you hate fat people.  Why does my size offend you so much?  What right do you have to hate me just based on the way I look?

Alana

(Let's watch the ignorant and hate-filled comments flood in...) 

(EDIT: 9 Oct 2007- Comments disabled because this post is becoming a spam magnet.)