It’s My Fault I’m Fat
by sylvia
So I think I have pretty well established that I am a big girl.
I have heard this phrase “my, aren’t you a big girl!” more times in my life than I care to remember (mostly from little ol’ ladies – thanks, Grandma).
Only recently, as in the last year or two, have I been comfortable admitting it.
I guess I always felt that me being fat was like having herpes – had I just been more careful, it wouldn’t have happened.
Of course, that kind of regret doesn’t really get you far in life, and only makes you miserable.
Yes, had I been more careful, I wouldn’t be fat.
And thus, the vicious cycle of self-hate had begun.
I mentioned here that I believe that the reason I got fat was because one summer I ate a lot of bad foods and wasn’t really active. Someone commented on that, saying that other kids could have done the same thing, and not have gained the weight, implying that my weight gain wasn’t my fault.
But I disagreed. In my head, anyway; I didn’t respond to the comment. How could my fatness not be my fault? I eat too much (even if it is good, healthy food) and I don’t exercise. To me, that is an equation that = weight gain.
Also, I am the only fat person in my family. My father’s family is full of short, flat -chested ladies, and my mom’s family is of German stock, so they’re not fat, they are tall and big-boneded (literally). I obviously take after my mom’s side of the family, and even though moms has gained weight in the last 10 years or so, she also has lots of medical problems that contribute to it.
So I’m thinking it’s not genetic. My dad basically eats a stick of butter and a pound of salt with every meal, and he’s still a little guy.
I’ve blamed so many things on my fat over the years, which resulted in my severe low self-esteem and self-hate. As much as I scorned the people who judged me for the way I looked, I hated myself so much more for being that way.
But what if it wasn’t my fault? What if something really did happen to me when I was 9 years old, with my physiology, that made me gain the weight? And changed my metabolism forever?
Bianca and I talked about this at lunch. At first, I was resistant to even accept that I wasn’t fat because I ate too much.
But what if?
I will have to do some serious thinking about this one.
~ by Sylvia on July 15, 2009.
Posted in Exercise, Food, Motherhood
Tags: accepting the fat, Being a Kid Again, Fat, Fat Acceptance, fatty, Food, genetics, herpes, metabolism, moms, neurotic, Obese, parenting, plus size, self-esteem, The Fat Girl Club, truth, weight, WTF, zaftig
My dad basically eats a stick of butter and a pound of salt with every meal, and he’s still a little guy.
But if you eat a lot of bread for a summer, you’re fat forever and it’s all your fault? I’m surprised that doesn’t engender some cognitive dissonance.
Your dad sounds to me like an argument FOR the idea that people have set ranges for their natural weight.
Denial plays a big part in all of this. As a skinny kid that suddenly got fat, I got a lot of crap thrown at me when I went back to school and never knew how to deal with it. My confidence in who I was wasn’t as strong as it needed to be. And my parents were no help on that end. So I stayed in denial, hoping that it would all just go away.
It didn’t, but it all just clouded my view of things, until recently.
My one concern with the Fatosphere, which I love quite intensely, is how easy it is to blur the line between supportive talk and wishful thinking. I follow every link to scientific studies about weight and my favouritist site is Junkfood Science, even though she doesn’t think universal health care is a good idea.
I think that there is clear scientific consensus that it is not possible except in freakish situations for people to lose large amounts of veight on a permanent basis. I am also convinced that fatness in itself does not result in a shorter life expectancy. But I really haven’t seen scientific backing for the idea that fat is purely genetic, and that all people have some set limited weight range. Maybe some do, or maybe there is a genetic minimum normal weight for each person. But I haven’t seen anything that says we can all eat whatever we want and never exercise and it won’t lead to weight gain.
But there are factors other than just genetic metabolism levels at work. There are genetic differences in energy level, for example. Go to a nursery school or even a baby drop-in place and that will be obvious. There are genetic differences in tendency toward addictive or compulsive behaviour. There are genetic differences in sensitivity to anger and rejection. Free Will — Not So Free Akshully.
It seems highly unlikely that your actions over an individual summer made any difference in your weight in the long run. And even if it did, every moment of that was you doing what felt like the right thing to do at that moment. Sounds like you are angry at your younger self for failing to magically foresee every possible consequence of her actions and overcome any internal and external pressures to prevent those consequences. Hell of a burden for a kid.
Besides, she can just turn around and say “I made you fabulous! What the HELL are you complaining about?”
Trabb’s Boy – THANK YOU so much! I seriously teared up after reading your comment. It can be so hard to keep the perspective of “I’m fabulous now because of that”, but thank you for reminding me!
time to exorcise those demons!!!!
You might want to get your fat ass to the gym then.
My demons are exercised, they look damn good in those purple lame leggings!
Shoot, girl….i need me a priest up in this mofo to exorcise those janks, cuz that gym membership be cancelled
You really just need some bacon dipped in ranch dressing.
My dad is just like yours. He weighs the same as (possibly less than) I do and is a good 10 inches taller. My mom, when she was in college, had a 24 inch waist. Her heaviest weight is about the same as my lightest (30 lbs less than I currently weigh). I am built nothing like either of my parents, nor my brother, who looks just like dad.
And it used to bother me. But you know what? I love my body. I love what it does for me every day. It allows me to walk anywhere I need to go without getting tired. It allows me to run a mile in under 11 minutes (I’m working towards 10!). It can lift boxes that my smaller friends can’t.
I think it’s worth exercising – not because it burns calories, but because I always feel good after. I feel relaxed and happy and it just makes the rest of my day go better.
But even if you don’t exercise, even if you eat more than you think you should, you are still a human being who deserves respect and kindness. Especially from yourself.
I forgot to add:
Until I hit puberty, everyone thought I was build just like my tall skinny dad. Either through some recessive genetics or the fact that depression + puberty + a death in the family = 50 lbs in 2 years, I’m clearly not built like him.
It’s really easy to look at the what ifs. Like, what if my parents had noticed I was depressed and taken me to a therapist? What if I had never gotten depressed in the first place? Well, I don’t know what might have been different, but I do know that it happened the way it happened and I can’t change that 15 years later. So I might as well learn to be (more than) ok with who I am and what I look like now.
I’m glad that you took my post as encouragement to look at some preconceptions that may not make sense when examined, not as scolding!
So if I can take that one step further:
“Bianca and I talked about this at lunch. At first, I was resistant to even accept that I wasn’t fat because I ate too much.”
Seriously, there’s no “too much” in the equation, especially when you’re 9. Being fat is how your individual body responds to the quantity of food you eat, and I doubt that you eat “too much” or even ate “too much” the summer when you were 9.
And the idea that “it must be because I ate too much” because you’re the only fat person in your nuclear family isn’t good science, or good sense. If body size and metabolism has a genetic component, that’s going to be a complicated genetic equation with a lot of alleles involved.
It may be something like having green eyes or having red hair, both of which sometimes crop up in families sporadically and after lapses of generations–I know someone with flaming red hair and green eyes who has brown-haired, brown-eyed kids, but her brown-haired, brown-eyed brother has a daughter who looks just like her aunt at the same age.
Or it may be environmental. But it’s not caused by one childhood summer of emotional eating–that doesn’t make any sense when you look at it scientifically.
But I really do understand why it made sense to you emotionally.
But I really haven’t seen scientific backing for the idea that fat is purely genetic, and that all people have some set limited weight range. Maybe some do, or maybe there is a genetic minimum normal weight for each person. But I haven’t seen anything that says we can all eat whatever we want and never exercise and it won’t lead to weight gain.
In the Minnesota Starvation study (which is covered at Junkfood science) they took guys of average weight and put them on a low-calorie diet. After the experiment was over, the men had to “overfeed” in order to get back to their original weight, but then they could maintain their original weight with no effort.
Another study reversed the process – they “overfed” prisoners in order to get them to gain weight. Getting them to gain weight was quite difficult in some cases – some of the guys had to hike their calories to 10,000 a day in order to accomplish it, and by no means did they gain on a “calories in/calories out” basis. “They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay at their obese weight, but just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.”
Also, “As for the fat cells of the newly obese prisoners, it turned out that they had simply grown larger, much larger, but their number remained constant. The men were fat, but they got that way by stuffing the cells they already had with globules of fat, not by growing more fat cells. So, because they always had fewer fat cells than people who were naturally fat, they were fundamentally different from naturally fat people.”
Quotes from “Rethinking Thin”, by Gina Kolata.
Personally, I think some people can “reset” their “set point” (upwards) through dieting, by convincing their body they are in a famine-prone environment, and there may be other influences we haven’t tracked down, but overall, the evidence that most people have a “natural” weight that’s right for them seems pretty solid. A person who has always been at their so-called ideal weight, and someone of the same weight who has dieted down to it, are very different on a metabolic level. The formally-fat person has the metabolism of a starving person. OTOH, healthy fat people and healthy ideal weight people have similar metabolisms.
My whole family, both sides, are German stock, and they are fat as fat can be. So German does not equal skinny.
I myself was skeletal until puberty, and I absorbed all of the propaganda and thus was deeply ashamed of my fat fat parents. So it was pretty horrifying when, without changing my eating habits at all, I started to gain. In spite of multiple crazy diets and crazier exercise programs, here I am the same weight as my dad was at my age. I recently used one of those online calculators that purports to tell one how many calories one burns every day. It claimed that a person of my size and activity level would burn 5,000 calories every day. Which is odd, since I never eat more than 3,000. Apparently I am some sort of perpetual motion device that produces more energy than I take in!
Or more likely my metabolism has slowed the 40% necessary to maintain my “morbid” weight level. When I have cut back in the past it just slowed that much more. I am trying to stop hating myself and blaming myself, but it’s a long journey, isn’t it?
I wish you good luck.
As much as I scorned the people who judged me for the way I looked, I hated myself so much more for being that way.
Holy crap! This may have nothing to do with what you are talking about, but I have to say that where my headspace has been lately, this line alone has spoken volumes to me. Sometimes I wonder what holds me back from doing things, I mean other fat people do everything that non-fat people do, people just live there lives and don’t apologize. But me, no no, I have a huge block that sucks my motivation away and it isn’t because of someone, not because of past hurt, not always, I work on these things…the biggest block is ME!!! May seem like an obvious conclusion given that even if I don’t decide what is given to me I do decide what to do with it in the end. But HOLY CRAP!! This is an epiphany, just the way you said it. We blame ourselves. I have hated myself for so long it’s my default. So having given yourself things to think about to do with questioning if there is anything to blame at all, you have also done that for me. In a different way. I love the fatosphere. Rant complete.
It is so liberating and cleansing to put your thoughts out there, all your neuroses, and have people say “I feel the same way!!!” – Thank You!!!
We are all different. Eat what you like. Don’t worry be happy Bobby Gee http://bobbygee.wordpress.com/
[...] = BS? Yesterday, Sylvia wrote a very honest post, about how she’s always thought it was her fault that she is fat. Thanks everyone for their [...]
What if something really did happen to me when I was 9 years old, with my physiology, that made me gain the weight?
I think this sort of sums up how I feel. It’s not about what you did when you were 9 years old, it’s that your body made an adjustment and part of that was in your eating. Not the other way around.
That’s what people can’t seem to get, we all eat the same way, we respond to our hunger. Responding to your hunger is not making yourself anything.
You are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met and one of the most down to earth (and bravest–guess who this is!). So what you’ve got more curves than some women? Are you healthy? Are you happy? You are most definitely loved, if that makes any difference!
Your brave sister-in-law,
TheWireMonkey
Yay for theWireMonkey! Thank you for visiting! and thank you for the kind words!
And yes, I am very happy and healthy!
aren’t I brave?
;p
Why does it matter? I’ve read your post and I’ve read all the comments, and they’re all very interesting, but I feel like I’m missing something. Why does it matter how you got fat?
Who cares if it’s genetics or if you brought it on yourself? How will pinpointing the root of your fatness change anything?
I mean, you’re alive and you’re gorgeous and you’re happy. Why do you have to analyse this?
That’s the thing – I’m realizing now that it doesn’t matter. It’s like I had an epiphany while at lunch with Bianca – sometimes I have to be hit over the head a million times to get something, and then all of sudden, it just clicks.
Attempting to pinpoint it just made me come to terms with the fact that it’s all goooood.
and thanks for the compliments, BTW!
It might have been the breadstick I threw at your head.