Now That I’m Fat…

10/02/2013 by Remittance Girl

I actually hate the abundance of cute little words to describe overweightness: plump, rounded, curvy, roly-poly, rubenesque, generous, BBW, padded, comfortable, chunky…adipose-enhanced? I despise them all. Having too many words for something is always a good clue that it’s a socially uncomfortable reality we don’t want to deal with.

And by ‘deal’ with, I don’t mean get thinner. I have no intention of getting any thinner.  I figure staying fat is one of the few revolutionary acts I can get away with anymore.  It’s the one concrete way I can respond to a monstrous and immensely profitable economic structure which is hell bent on making me feel bad about my body. Admittedly, I am not morbidly obese. I’m not in any danger of developing diabetes, or over-taxing my heart. I can sprint up stairs when I need to, and run for the bus (albeit with a bit more jiggle than before – and I figure the jiggle happens with age anyway.)

Me at 25, thin and off my fucking rocker.

When I was young, I was thin and insane. Literally. I was skin and bones and bipolar as fuck. At the age of 28, I was prescribed Tegretol, which contributed enormously to stabilizing my moods, but had the unfortunate side-effect of slowing my metabolism to a crawl. After my regimen of meds, it didn’t seem to matter whether I consumed 800 or 2000 cals a day, or whether I worked out 4 times a week in a gym or not. The slowly accumulated weight won’t shift.

Concurrently, western society has become more and more obsessed with thinness. After years away from the west, I cannot begin to explain how shocked I was to find that, in the US, there is a dress-size called ‘0’ – and millions of women yearn to claim it as their own.

I admit, I didn’t take to being fat very well for a while. To begin with, if you’ve spent almost 30 years of your life being thin, you’re stuck with this indelible body-image of a thin little thing that has woken up, like poor Gregor in Metamorphosis, in this strange carapace that fundamentally feels like it doesn’t belong to you.

me now, sane.

People assume that fat girls just love eating. This isn’t strictly true. Although I like the taste of food, I’ve never been a big eater. I’ve never crept down to my fridge at 3 am to eat a whole chocolate cake or even a slice of it. I have never cared enough about food to bother getting out of bed for it. I can go for a day without eating and just not notice. It’s not that I don’t like it. Other things excite me more.

People also assume that fat girls have no self-discipline. This isn’t true either. I’m a fascist – and I don’t use that word lightly. I have insane amounts of self control.  With two notable exceptions – expensive underwear and cigarettes. But considering the myriad addictions I might have as a weak-willed tubby, according to urban legend, that is the totality of my indulgences.

It took me about ten years to stop bumping my hips against chairs and tables and giving myself horrible bruises. I think this is because, for at least half of my existence as a fat girl, I thought I was thin. Inside, I still had a mental image of a sylph-like boyish creature navigating through the world of immovable objects.

See these tits? They ‘bob’ in a full bath

I spent a number of years miserable and confused that my inner reality did not accord with my external one. It wasn’t until I went in for a bra fitting that reality truly struck me. I had jumped 3 cup sizes, from an A to a D. I stood there in the changing room with the blue-rinsed, older changing-room attendant thinking: wow, fuck me! I have TITS. And I do. I have truly magnificent breasts. If I fill the bathtub up enough, they actually bob in the water. All plump and creamy and fecund. Like the most immaculately made Chinese steamed buns.

The other thing I noticed was a distinct lack of wrinkles. Now that I’m 50, I’m expecting the crows feet and the laugh lines, and the turkey neck, but they’re astoundingly absent. And I know if I were the 85lbs I used to be, they’d be there in force.  Finally, there’s the skin. It’s very, very soft. I had rougher skin when I was young and thin. Perhaps it’s because I’m being constantly oiled from the inside out? Who knows.

Just about the time I started to actually, physically KNOW that I was fat and began to think it wasn’t such a bad thing after all – between the tits and the smooth skin (not to mention that my ass has stopped going to sleep on the back of a motorcycle) – I also began to notice how much effort society was putting in to make me hate it.

See these thighs? They work fine.

Moreover, I began to notice all the ways I could spend my money in a desperate effort to be thin. I could get liposuction, a personal trainer, go to health-spas where they feed you nothing but wheatgerm at $900 per day. There’s a whole line in women’s clothing to suck you in, and redistribute all the adipose tissue into a more pleasing form. Support hose, tummy-flattening underwear, t-shirts with build in bras. Not to mention the toning machines, the stretch mark cream, the cellulite serums.

There’s a huge industry out there dedicated to making me feel terrible about myself so I will buy something they’re selling. It is in their interest to ensure I don’t lapse into a sinful state of plump self-satisfaction. Every magazine, every ad, every in-store standee, every celebrity tabloid, every porn film.

“This,” they all shout, “is what you should aspire to, and we can help you achieve your goal (the one we’ve set for you) for just $9.99 for a limited time only *conditions apply.”

I’m not going to even begin to numerate the ‘medicalized’ side of this whole effort. It’s obscene.

The reality is I have come to like the body I’m in. It is warm and comfortable. It is soft and tactile. It’s generous and takes a good firm spanking with no fear of internal damage. I’m still immensely flexible. I can still race you up the escalator. My orgasms feel just as good as they did when I was thin, and they happen a good deal faster and with more frequency (although that is probably just due to dedicated practice).

And I’m perfectly capable of getting laid if I want to. That’s the other myth. The one not only perpetuated by the media ad nauseum, but repeated over and over by fat girls to each other. That fat girls don’t get sex.

Most fat girls don’t get sex because they believe no one wants to fuck them. So they don’t boldly saunter up to someone and say: “Wanna fuck?” Admittedly, if you are a fat girl, you might have to lower your sights below the Adonis level, but I’ve noticed that most Adonises are so obsessed with themselves in bed, they’re lousy fucks. And anyway, did you want a nice oil portrait, or a couple of hours of mutual pleasure? And if there is a tad more audible smacking of flesh going on, well, personally, I’ve always found that hot. The point is… fat girls don’t get laid because they don’t ask. And the whole ‘thin-world-order’ depends on the fact that you won’t; their banking on it, literally. Because if you got laid fairly regularly, you’d probably start to reassess whether you are all that imperfect at all. And that would mean a huge plunge in sales for them.

I recognize that it is not healthy to be massive. It makes you more susceptible to certain grave physical illnesses. And I do think that eating less processed food is better for you. It tastes better, it makes you feel better. If most of your diet consists of sugar, fat and processed carbs, you need to think about changing that. Not to get thinner, but to get healthier. That being said, 70 years of happy life is a shitload more valuable than 90 years of misery.

There are a lot of things to make us miserable in the world. There is ignorance and poverty and prejudice and violence and corruption. There is greed and hatred and a lot of downright nastiness.  Your weight… is just not that important. Don’t let a global industry aimed at making you feel inferior persuade you that it is.

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