I was a beautiful child. I tell myself that often. Depending on what mood I am in, I put the emphasis on different words. I was a beautiful child. I was a beautiful child. When I look at photos of myself as a little eight-year-old with hazel-brown hair and eyes and a big smile on my little fat face, wearing a Superman outfit, a tightened fist raised towards the sky, with little chubby cheeks and sparkly eyes, I also think of the nurse who told my mum that I needed to lose weight because ‘it was dangerous’. Based on nothing but how I looked; having done no medical exams or tests. Knowing nothing about my diet or life. I can tell you now, it was not dangerous. I was a child. I was a beautiful child. My body was fine. It was still developing. More importantly, I was not feeling shame yet. She introduced that into my life.
My mother is a single mother of two children. When she told me that my dad was leaving us, I started crying. Through the tears and the snot, I said, ‘Is he going to take my toys with him?’ and, surprised, she said, ‘No. Of course not.’ And like that, I stopped crying. My mum told me that anecdote. I don’t remember it. This happened when I was five years old – the second time he left us. He left after my mum had given birth to me. He came back five years later, made my sister and left again. An unwanted boomerang of a man.
Food control very quickly became a thing I had to get acquainted with. My real difficulties with food started when I was five years old. My sister’s birth was complicated and she ended up in an incubator for three weeks, being fed through a tube. From the beginning, she was ever so tiny and so thin. For the first ten years of her life, doctors kept telling my mother to feed her loads of full-fat foods, because she was too thin. My sister hated eating and just wanted to jump around and play. My mother was then told by other doctors that I had to stop eating junk food and I needed to start jumping around and play. I just wanted to eat.
I had to become incredibly aware of my own body and weight – the fact that I was wrong and too big. So I felt bad; and those bad feelings, I found, could be crushed by eating a lot. I would eat so much I felt numb.
Once my dad left the second time, my mum was alone with two children – one too small and one too big. She had no knowledge of, or interest in, food, no money, energy or time to study it, and a lot of pressure on her shoulders to be a ‘perfect single mother’. She could not figure out what to do. She tried her best: served fatty foods for my sister and salads for me. If she looked away for even a second, my sister would be running away from the table towards her toys, and I would be shovelling her fatty food into my mouth.
I always found ways of getting food. I would go to my grandparents’ house and they would give me as much sugar as I wanted. I remember hearing my mother talking to them on the phone, begging them to please stick to the diet the school nurse had prescribed me. My grandmother had said to her, ‘But I can’t say no to her, she’s my grandchild,’ and from then on my mom knew she did not have a lot over control over what they gave me.
My grandparents consist of my mother’s mother and my step-grandfather. Seeing as I barely knew my dad, I had little to no contact with his side of the family either. When my mother became a single mother, she moved to Søndersø – a tiny town. As I remember, there is one road, a few houses and a school. And a factory which makes crisps.
A lot of my memories from Søndersø have to do with food. The bakery sold incredibly soft sandwiches with cheese, ham and a thick layer of mayonnaise. There was a service station at the outskirts of town that sold pick ’n’ mix, and their red raspberry wine gums tasted like summer. I can still hear my mother scold me, when she found out that I had been buying and eating them even though I was on a diet. At school, they sold bagels that were so soft on the inside that it felt like eating a marshmallow. I think of the food I ate when I was a child in Søndersø more fondly than might be normal – because I am not remembering the taste, I am remembering how sweet it felt to momentarily escape my own feelings by eating myself into numbness.
And a lot of my memories of my grandparents are to do with food as well. They lived only a few miles from Søndersø – in a place called Skamby.fn1 Skamby has a population of about four hundred people. And if you live in Skamby, you know the names, occupations and relations of every single one of those people. My grandfather’s favourite hobby was to sit by the window and look out onto the road. (I mean ‘the road’. The road in Skamby. There is one road in Skamby.) He would sit and look out the window and, if anyone walked past, he would comment. Oh, is that the butcher’s daughter? I thought her shift didn’t end till 4 p.m. Oh, I see Gretha now. Of course. It’s Tuesday. She’s been at the knitting club. He managed to do all of this without at any point catching a glimpse of his own reflection and saying: My God, I am boring. Is this really my life?
The emotional currency in my grandparents’ house was food. They would eat six times a day. Breakfast, late-morning dessert, lunch, afternoon coffee and cake, dinner and a late-night TV snack. My grandmother would bake every day. The softest butter-buns,fn2 cinnamon pastries, cookies and bread. I would often help her and throw myself into the bowls of leftover gooey dough and lick it all off, adding another meal to my day. Food quickly became feelings and feelings became food. Delicious food. Butter in and around and on top of everything. Juicy meat with enough salt to make you dehydrated for the rest of your life. Potatoes, so many potatoes. Vegetables only if you could caramelise them. Gravy which was basically just brown cream with more butter. We had to empty our plates completely and if my grandfather said, ‘Come on, have some more, your grandmother worked so hard on this food,’ then you had to eat more. There was an abundance of food and you could never eat enough.
Food was how you expressed love and how you were punished, and I stopped listening to my own instincts. My grandfather would buy me pastries, sweets, cakes and ice cream and somehow make it into a declaration of love. I remember him buying me a big cake that I didn’t want to eat. His face fell and he almost whimpered, ‘I bought it for you because I love you.’ And so I had to eat the cake. I must have been around five years old (which is an early age to start learning to ignore your appetite and disregarding your own boundaries).
We had a ritual where my grandfather would let me go with him into the basement and stand by their deep freezer and choose which ice cream I wanted. The opening of the lid was often accompanied by the sound of angels playing the harp in my head. As I remember it now, the vapour that escaped the freezer had gold specks in it. And there was so much ice cream. Cone-shaped cones, boat-shaped cones, ice lollies, big tubs full of ice cream with different flavours, mint, chocolate, vanilla, fudge, strawberry, caramel, pistachio, biscuits and all of the chocolate bars in ice cream form. I would stand on my toes and pull myself up by placing my little chubby hands on the edge of the freezer and look into this haven of ice cream.
But for my grandfather, it was not about the ice cream. It was about the fact that he was holding the lid, he had taken me into this basement and he was allowing me to pick and choose. I was incredibly aware, in the most childlike of ways, that I had to be very, very grateful. Even if I didn’t want to eat ice cream that day, the chances of me knowing that were slim. I knew that if I said no to ice cream, my grandfather would punish me by looking at me with big, sad eyes. He would then dramatically walk into another room, where he would sit on a chair in the darkness and sigh, looking out of the window. He would not say a word for hours. My grandmother would frantically rub her hands on her apron and tell me to ‘please go and speak to him and apologise’ in a desperate attempt to not have this sort of drama in her husband’s house. I would then have to push down the guilt of being the five-year-old who had made her grandfather sad, and apologise. And beg for the ice cream I didn’t want. Until he finally smiled again and gave me the ice cream. My grandmother and I would exhale deeply out of pure relief. Disaster averted, but only slightly. The guilt would battle my appetite and win. I learned that I could not be in contact with my body and listen to its signals, and avoid harming the emotions of my grandfather.
I would then return home and my mother would interrogate me about the food I had just eaten. She was still just trying to follow the doctor’s orders and put me on a strict diet, but she could see gravy stains on my T-shirt and butter all over my face. She was a tired single mother who probably felt like she had no authority over her own daughter. So she desperately tried to motivate me to lose the weight, to eat less, to defy my grandparents – who would retaliate by telling me that they only fed me because they loved me, insinuating that if I didn’t eat any of it, I must not love them back. There were a lot of strong negative emotions at play and, fortunately, food continued to be perfect for numbing them.
At some point, food became a need. I needed food. I needed to eat so much so that I felt nothing. I was eight. I was a beautiful child.
At school, I found out how to borrow money from older students so I could buy cake in the cafeteria. Seeing as my mother did not want me to end up indebted as an eight-year-old, she had to give me money to give to the kids. Which I would then spend on more sweets.
My mother would buy VHS tapes called Buns of Steel in which a thin, white lady would do aerobics to the camera, making encouraging statements. My mother and I would move all the furniture to the side and copy her movements on the living room floor. I hated it. I hated my body and now I somehow had to collaborate with it. I just wanted it gone. I wanted to not acknowledge it. Moving it about made me very aware of its existence and how much I loathed it. The self-hatred, I killed with more eating. My mother was falling apart.
I hated hate PE. I dissociated from my body. My body was too big, too much, too gross. And now you want to put me in shorts and a T-shirt and I am meant to feel it move? No. No, thank you, sir. I wanted to use my words and my intelligence and basically, anything but my body, which had now become my enemy. The reason I was constantly stressed (hello, I was eight years old) and sad. I tried to get out of PE every week.fn3 Every single week. My PE teacher was a gruesome woman.
She refused to believe my excuses. She refused to believe I had hurt my ankle. Once, when I said I had got my period (nice work, eight-year-old me), she got me to repeat this out loud in front of the entire class. She then pulled my trousers and pants down in front of everyone and said, ‘See?’
I hated showering with the other pupils. So I said I had a stiff neck. Which led her to shout at me in front of a whole dressing room full of my classmates who, at this point, had already showered and got dressed. They were all eager to leave and go to lunch break but the teacher would not allow anyone to leave until I had showered. I remember how she tore my clothes off of me in front of everyone and shoved me into the shower.
My childhood memories of PE are mostly repressed due to experiences like these. I remember little glimpses. I remember running. I remember running because I was being chased by three boys with a baseball bat. I finally gave in and crouched over, covering my head with my hands, trying not to cry, as they beat me and mocked me. I remember looking up, seeing my PE teacher laugh.
I still have fantasies about finding out where she lives and going to her house. I want to look her in the eyes and speak to her as an adult with a much more advanced vocabulary and understanding of what is right and wrong. I want to stand in front of her in the body she hated and speak on behalf of myself as a child and tell her that she was a rotten person. I would say to her, ‘I was a beautiful child. I was a beautiful child. I was a beautiful child.’
Self-loathing is such a strong feeling. Hating your entire self – both your body and your own inability to change your body – leaves you with very little. Existence is suddenly quite difficult. Being able to pinpoint one of the causes for those negative feelings is almost freeing. It leads you to fantasise about going to old ladies’ houses and screaming obscenities at them because of something that happened over twenty years ago. From a more objective and empathetic viewpoint, my old PE teacher seems to have had issues of her own. Fatphobia is prevalent in society and she was taught to hate fatness as much as my doctors, my bullies and my mother. Fatphobia is ingrained in us from the moment we are old enough to understand what happens around us. And we will continue to pass it on if it isn’t challenged.
Research from Common Sense Media showed that half of girls and one third of boys as young as six to eight years old, feel that their ideal body is thinner than they are. Children as young as five are unhappy with their bodies. Five- to eight-year olds who think their mothers are dissatisfied with their bodies are more likely to feel dissatisfied with their own bodies.1 An article in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in 2000 stated that body size stigmatism was clearly present in three-year-olds and that ‘the cultural stereotype that “fat is bad” was pervasive across gender, regardless of the child’s own body build.’2
My relationship with my body only became more distorted throughout my teen years. It became a routine. I would start a new diet on a Monday and the adrenaline of thinking, Finally, I will lose weight, carried me through the hunger and desperation to eat for a couple of days – maybe even weeks, until I had to give up and binge-eat till I crushed the disappointment in myself. I would then wait till next Monday and start again on a new diet. With each failed diet, I would blame myself, I truly believed that my incapability of following a diet was a sign of absolute weakness, laziness and stupidity. Also, I was still fat. Which I believed to be the worst thing a person could be.
Finding a new diet was a rush. I remember finding out that Dr Phil’s son Jay McGraw had a diet book on the market and punching the air. I tried the Atkins Diet, the Atkinson Diet, SlimFast (a disgusting brown powder you mixed into a drink in place of every meal), the Thinking Diet (‘you will lose weight if only you THINK differently’), 5-2 Diet (‘binge then starve yourself’), Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the ‘just don’t eat after 5 p.m.’ diet, the ‘only eat fruit till 2 p.m.’ diet, the ‘no carbs’ diet and so, so many more. I found thirty-two diet books in my mother’s basement recently, like a creepy shrine to thin ‘health gurus’ with teeth that are too white. I tried karate, swimming lessons, running, spinning, tennis, badminton, dance classes, power walking, Pilates, aerobics … I have owned exercise bikes, Pilates balls, step-benches and every single exercise VHS ever made. When I was sixteen, exhausted from always being either starving or numbingly full, I tried throwing up after I ate. I purposely tried to trigger bulimia, knowing full well that this was a terribly dangerous illness. I reached that point. Where, even though I knew full well that eating disorders can have awful consequences, often resulting in bodies that will never be able to have children, which will always struggle with health issues and food, and which sometimes just die – all of this seemed like a better option than staying fat.
I started going to the gym four times a week. I got up at 4 a.m. to be at the gym at 6 a.m., exercise for an hour and then go to school at 8 a.m. On the way there, I would feel so faint from my breakfast apple that I went by the bakery and bought myself a huge cinnamon bun and a chocolate milk. I would spend the rest of the day sleeping through maths class dreaming about the pizza that I would definitely have to binge afterwards.
The irony of me attempting to get an eating disorder is not lost on me. When I was eighteen, I learned about binge eating disorder. The reason that no one knew about it was that it was not officially registered as an eating disorder in Denmark at this point. I was mostly just relieved. There was a word for it. There was a word for me stuffing my face with carbs and sugar on a daily basis. Knowing the word didn’t stop me though. It just made me feel less guilty. I continued bingeing and I continued dieting.
Throughout my teens, I was angry but my anger was misplaced. I hated beautiful people. The self-hatred, the hatred of my body and how it existed in the world had turned so strong that I needed to project it elsewhere, or I would suffocate. So I turned my anger towards thin and conventionally beautiful people. I could just about forgive someone for being thin and beautiful – but not unless they were really ashamed of this. Ideally, every thin person at my school should have to walk up to me every morning and apologise for being handed better cards than me. They could at least pity me and acknowledge that I was trying really hard to look like them.
When I was seventeen, for Danish class, we had to analyse Sleeping Beauty. I unleashed all of my fury onto this fairy tale. I wrote about Sleeping Beauty and how she – and all other thin, beauty-privileged, empty skin-vessels – could just go suck on a massive ham and shut up. I wrote something along the lines of, ‘Beautiful people can apparently just be sleeping and still get more attention than ugly people – what have we got to do, learn to juggle?fn4 The end.’
Their pain was nothing, nothing, I tell you. I was punished with an extra assignment to write an essay. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I nearly spat in the teacher’s face when she assigned it.
I was furious. I stomped my feet when I left the classroom. Slammed the door. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I was prepared to write the word ‘NON-EXISTENT’ three thousand times on a piece of paper and hand it in. But if there was anything I hated more than beautiful women, it was getting a poor grade.
I sat down and opened MSN Messenger.fn5 I messaged all the beautiful people I knew. Sandy, who was a model. She was my age and once told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. I had laughed in her face. Great joke, Sandy. Have you not seen how I look next to you? She would be the first of quite a few models I would reject because I felt unworthy of their genitals touching mine.fn6 fn7 I messaged someone I knew from an internet forum. A guy with sturdy cheekbones. A few more.
‘What is the disadvantage of being beautiful?’ I asked all of them. And waited. They were surprisingly reluctant to reply, but none of them claimed not to be beautiful.
‘The worst thing,’ one of the beautiful people on my MSN Messenger chat list wrote to me, ‘is that women never become my friends just to be my friends. They always end up falling in love with me. And then I have to hurt them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s really painful. I just love these women but not like that. And that hurts them.’
I wanted to object, but he had answered with such vulnerability and sincerity that I couldn’t help sympathising with him. Had he burst through my front door with a sign that said ‘pity me’ and had told me the same story, I probably would have wanted to push him out of a window. But I had begged him to share his feelings on the topic. These were not thoughts he ever shared with anyone. He knew how it sounded.
‘People always assume I am unintelligent. I am not taken seriously,’ someone else said.
‘I am never more than my looks.’ Another message popped up on my desktop.
‘I can never make real friends. If I laugh at someone’s boyfriend’s joke, they immediately accuse me of trying to steal him away from them. If I am polite, I am being fake. If I am mean, I am stuck-up. People tell me to my face that they hate me. They feel like they can, like I owe them something. I never chose to look like this,’ wrote another girl.
I assembled it all into an essay which I guiltily handed in the following day. I was left with a feeling of hollowness. I had a whole handful of resentment and nowhere to put it. Surely, someone was to blame for the way I felt. At this point, the best thing that could have happened was being forced by a teacher to write an additional essay on capitalism and beauty standards. But no one opened my eyes to that till years later. And it was hard to shake, this completely irrational and unfair hatred of beautiful people.
Jealousy of beautiful people is understandable. Privilege comes with what society perceives to be beautiful.
Beauty is a tricky one – because you can’t blame someone for being beautiful, but you can blame the culture that created the idea of ‘ideal beauty’. It has been decided that beauty is having a symmetrical face, straight, white teeth and white skin. Your eyes can be too far apart or too far into your head. Your ears can be the wrong angle. This is the Western idea of ‘beauty’. Of course, you must also be thin and nondisabled and definitely feminine if you are perceived to be a woman, and masculine if you are perceived to be a man. There are definitely icky racist, ableist, sexist, queerphobic and fatphobic connotations connected to ideas of what beauty is and what it is not. Class plays a role too: beauty can often be bought. Plastic surgery, teeth whitening, braces, contact lenses, and just a general ability to at least make your life look beautiful on social media. That fancy cup of coffee in that fancy coffee place with just the right filter.
Beauty is so subjective. It is laughable that we have somehow been tricked into thinking we all should find the same thing pretty. But we are frail and easily influenced. So we can’t deny that the lie that says beauty is objective means that some people who do not live up to those standards will be discriminated against. (Maybe this is why we, as a society, tend to love it when beautiful people struggle. We like to laugh at models falling on catwalks or the ‘dumb blonde’ trope in Hollywood films.)
Funnily, very beautiful people and fat people have something in common. Such as people being surprised when we accomplish things. It will stem from very different assumptions. If I ran a marathon, people would look at me with raised eyebrows and open mouths. Wow. For a fatty, she sure can run. I would be praised. If a really beautiful person gets a degree in law, they make movies about it. Wow. But why can she think? She doesn’t need to.
The idea that there is an objective beauty is soul-destroying, and it begins to feel like currency.
There is a scene in the movie Seven where a fat man is used to symbolise gluttony. He is also, surprise surprise, seemingly mentally ill, definitely poor, definitely unhygienic. Four traits that are always mushed together in Hollywood as if they are interchangeable. In another scene, the murderer has disfigured a supermodel and given her a choice: to keep on living, being ‘ugly’ for the rest of her life – or kill herself. Spoiler alert: she kills herself. This is not even that far from the truth. A study conducted by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida in 1991 shows that out of a group of formerly fat people, given the choice between becoming fat again or going completely blind, 89 per cent will choose going blind.3 In another 2006 survey conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, almost half of those asked indicated that they would happily give up a year of their lives if it meant they were not fat.4
I never believed that I could be found attractive. Part of me loathed the boys and girls who liked me, because surely they were either lying or horrible people themselves. Why would they want me, when they could get someone better? Someone thinner?
I remember a desperate boyfriend hissing into my face, ‘If only you could see yourself the way I see you,’ and me rolling my eyes at him saying, ‘You have to say that.’ And I laughed when he eventually cheated on me with a thin woman, because the joy of being proven right was more powerful than the pain of being cheated on.
Another boyfriend joined the military and had to be gone for long periods of time. I was so scared of being alone, of not being validated, that I joined yet another gym and started working out. Within a day, my entire world went back to revolving around weight loss. I started starving myself, counting calories, skipping school, so I could spend upwards of six hours in the gym, weighing myself four times a day and losing weight rapidly. By the time my boyfriend finally came home to see me for a weekend, I was angry at him for interrupting my stride. I blamed him for accepting me as I was, so I stopped feeling the need to exercise. As soon as he came back for a weekend, I started binge-eating again, gaining all the weight back and then some. I blamed him for that. I would not let him in. I would let no one in. I would let no one love me. Because I refused to believe it was a possibility. I was fat.
Looking back, I was in a fairly fortunate position. I was fat, but I was a small-fat. I was just about excluded from being able to buy clothes in straight-sized stores. I was ‘Aw, you’re not that fat’-fat. At the same time I had stumbled into a group of friends who cared about me and who had forced me out of my shell. It’s important to note that a lot of fat teens are pretty secluded and isolated – a consequence of bullying and having internalised the fatphobia they’ve experienced and witnessed. I talk flippantly about my teen years and the dramatic stories of love and sex, but I do so with the knowledge that not all fat people have had this experience. I especially feel this as I have grown older and fatter and my anxiety has risen. Being able to date and fool around is not a given for everybody.
I am not even sure you know how horrible it is being a teenager before you’re an adult. When you are a teenager, your hormones take full control of your every move. When I was a teenager and I fell in love, I loved more than anyone had ever loved before in the history of the world and I would die, simply die a violent death for a person with whom I had never even spoken. It’s truly a matter of swaying between all the extreme versions of every emotion to the sound of a hundred adults asking you to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you are both scared and at the same time, convinced that you definitely know better than these adults. Your teen years are also full of warnings. All the monsters that you thought were under your bed when you were a child are suddenly real – and they are not under your bed where you can see and contain them. They are the reason you are asked to never leave your drink out of sight, the reason you don’t walk home alone, and the reason you have to learn how to say no if there is something you don’t want to do. Yet, fairly often, we are not warned about the monsters that we can see – the people controlling everything that we consume. The people targeting marketing campaigns at teenagers’ fragile self-esteem, confirming their worst fears: that they are not okay, that they should be prettier and thinner and better. Basically shaking the groundwork for the person they are to become. You don’t know who you are or who to be? We will tell you. Be thin and pretty. How? By using our products. Daddy, is there a monster under my bed? Yes, actually, and he is holding a Slimming World brochure.
One day, when I was single and in my late teens, in the first week of my new job, I met a man who openly declared that he liked fat women. It was not directed at me, it was not to get me into bed, so I trusted it, weirdly. He told us, after a shift when we were getting drunk in the pub next to the office, that his father used to say to him: ‘Get yourself a woman with curves. They’re the best ones.’
He told me this with pride. I disregarded the problematic nature of that sentence because suddenly, I wanted to be the woman that he ‘got himself’. Hey, fuck feminism, this guy with sandy blond hair and wide shoulders who smokes a pipe despite being only twenty-one just told me he might fancy my fat stomach. Feminism can wait. Sure, Emily Davison threw herself under a horse to get me the vote, but I was not willing to challenge this man now – because there was the faint shadow of a promise of a kiss within his charming anecdote.
A year later, I found myself wishing that his father had told him, ‘Son, go get yourself a woman who is wilfully obsessed with you and who will write and send you poetry and always be so close to you that you can smell her breath,’ because then maybe, I would have had a chance. Instead he moved to the Danish island furthest away from Denmark. I take no responsibility for that.
Some people have fathers who do positive PR for fat women from an early age. I remember falling in love with him for just this reason. It was hard to believe that other people like that existed. Most people will have parents who tell them to ‘never get fat’, who will pinch their own stomach fat and say ‘eww’ and who will point at fat people in the shops and say words like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘gross’. The negative attitude towards weight is so all-encompassing that the chances are that whoever you meet has been taught to hate fatness, long before they even had a chance to make up their own minds about what it is they like and don’t like.
So I spent all of my teenage years hating myself, hating fatness and hating women and hating thin women, hating people who loved me and hating myself. I wasted so much time. I wasted so much money on attempting to make my body smaller.
When I was seventeen, I applied for part-time jobs. There was a plus-size clothing store selling everything from tent-like ponchos for fat people, to tent-like ponchos for fat people – with tassels. I had circled the shop a few times before I gathered the courage to go inside and apply. A large, older woman with a smile on her face took my application, looked me up and down and led me into her office. After a bit of chit-chat, she told me that she’d love to hire me. I said, as confidently as I could manage, ‘Just so you know, I am going to lose this weight soon.’
The woman’s face burst into a huge grin as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, sure!’
Today, I like her. Back then, I detested her and the shop and I never, ever wanted to work there. I stormed out, furious that she did not believe me because I would lose the weight, I would lose all the weight and I would be thin. The alternative did not even bear thinking of.
Sometimes you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me tell you about Andrea.
I found stand-up comedy a few years after I finished school. Comedy was an amazing way of turning the self-hatred into a strength. I would stand on stage and tell the fat jokes that I had heard my whole life, but suddenly, I was controlling the laughter. It was liberating, standing on stage, saying: Hey! I am so fat and so lazy! And I am aware of it!
And hearing people laugh.
There is an annual comedy gala party in Denmark. All the comedians get drunk, horrifically drunk, and lose their already virtually non-existent inhibitions. A comic once got so upset that he lost an award that he threw his shoes into the harbour. And someone once gave a blowjob to another comedian who stopped her halfway through and said, ‘Let’s just be colleagues.’
That was me. Hello.
That evening, I was wearing a beautiful gala dress. I had come from a television set, so I was wearing television make-up – which is like normal make-up but with extra layers and done by a person tutting over the state of your skin. (Or like that one make-up artist who tried to wrap me in a giant scarf because my chest was ‘so ugly’.)
So I fell asleep with the grim taste of ‘just a colleague’ in my mouth, in full gala dress, fake eyelashes draped down my cheek, next to a mediocre comedian. I woke up and realised that I had forgotten to set my alarm. I had twenty minutes before I had to get to Copenhagen University for the first day of what was going to be three years of Russian Studies. I was about to miss first day of uni. I jumped out of bed, half-heartedly brushed my teeth, pulled the fake eyelashes all the way off and got up on my bike. I became aware that I was still drunk when I was sitting amongst the rest of the new students in my gala dress, reeking of alcohol, realising that I had not locked my bike outside. The other students were dressed, well, the way you should be dressed when attending university on the first day. They had showered and everything. I was wearing one earring and torn tights. Eyeliner was everywhere apart from along my eyelids. I am not sure if I looked like someone who took university too seriously or not seriously enough. Then I saw Andrea.
Meeting Andrea changed everything. She had unapologetically hairy armpits, a mullet and an obvious disdain for the entire system. If anyone was to ever ‘stick it to the man’, it was Andrea, and she was going to stick it to him hard. I am not sure if she saw me before she smelled me, but either way, we got talking.
Это дома. That’s all the Russian I picked up from my year at University of Copenhagen. It means ‘he is home’. Or ‘they are home’. Maybe it means ‘someone is home’ or ‘is someone home?’. Either way, I can almost pronounce it perfectly.
I failed the first exam because I put a question mark after each answer. What was the main import in the thirteenth century? Um … Corn? Potatoes?
The professor looked at me sternly and said, ‘It’s not a quiz,’ and I said, ‘Rocks?’
I love the Russian language. I think I convinced myself that it was a legitimate possibility to study it for three years and graduate. I did believe that I could do both comedy and get a degree in Russian. But I was doing comedy at the same time and always prioritised that. It fulfils me in a way that vodka and babushka dolls never could. So I very rarely went to class.
And when I did, I spent most of the lessons speaking to Andrea. I spoke about the various diets I was on, how I was going to lose the weight. She saw me perform comedy and heard me tell self-deprecating jokes about my fat body on stage. But Andrea also saw something else in me. She called me a Baby Fat – a potential future self-loving fatty. At first, it felt like a set-up.
‘You’re allowed to like your body,’ she would say. I would blink a few times. It made less sense than Russian. The words would get stuck in my brain on a loop throughout the week. It had never been an option; it had never been presented as an option.
‘If you trace it back,’ Andrea would tell me, ‘every self-hating thought, every fat-hating feeling – it stems from somewhere. An advert, a character on a TV show, a fashion magazine, a weight-loss product. It’s not something you read in The Great Book Full of Facts. It always stems from an individual or a system. And often from an individual with a product to sell. You can see it happen – the worse you feel about yourself, the more money you throw at the problem. The more people doing this, the richer these companies will get. So they keep spreading the idea that you are not allowed to be fat, that fat is the worst thing you can be – so that you will throw even more money at them.’
I had always considered my negative view of fatness as a truth, and suddenly it became subjective. In my head, it had been simple: the Earth is round. The sun is hot. Fat is bad. ✓
Now my world view was shaken. Every single notion that had ever been flung at me – telling me that my fatness made me unattractive, lazy and unworthy – had come from someone’s subjective opinion. Or – from a company with a product to sell. What Andrea explained to me was essentially capitalism. I felt like I had understood what capitalism was – in theory – but never had it applied this strongly to my very own life. Fat does not have to be a negative.
Wow.
Andrea introduced me to the possibility of loving fat. With the gentle sound of our Russian Studies professor in the background, I took in these ideas that seemed much more valuable to me than anything to do with Tolstoy. I was immediately both puzzled and intrigued.
Andrea would be writing the Russian alphabet in her notebook and I would lean in and whisper in her ear, ‘So basically, we have all just been taught to hate our bodies when really … We don’t have to?’
She would nod and continue writing. I would write down an oddly shaped B which I think was meant to be pronounced as an S. I would then lean in again and whisper, ‘So it’s all lies?’
Andrea would whisper, ‘Yes.’
I would draw a little 8 on my paper, drawing circles in the same place repeatedly till the paper evaporated and the pen started drawing 8s on the underlying piece of paper. I leaned in, ‘So I can just … be fat?’
Andrea smiled, ‘Yes.’
I would see Andrea exist, unapologetically, and she would show me fat people that did the same. I remember the first photo I saw of a fat woman being sexy. She was wearing nothing but knickers and a big, oversized, dark-red knitted jumper which was draped over one shoulder and both of her hands and part of her left thigh. She was leaning up against a high stool, her hair brown and thick, her lips slightly parted in a sexy and sultry look. And she was fat. Fat and sexy. That was just the first of many.
The internet turned out to be full of people like her. Fat people photographed from all different angles, no regard given to double chins or floppy upper arms, fat people in crop tops, fat people laughing, fat people eating. Fat people actually loving themselves.
The change wasn’t gradual. It happened overnight. I woke up and looked in the mirror and what I saw was different. On my bike ride to uni, everything was different. The billboards attempting to sell diet plans through before-and-after photos were suddenly not preaching facts, they were preaching a harmful body image. They were using my body to sell a product.
She showed me this door to a whole community where being different – or queerfn8 – was not frowned upon, but celebrated: a door which had always been concealed from me. And through which, a whole new world existed, where the rules are not rules, merely guidelines.
I loved the movie The Truman Show when I was growing up. If you are younger than me, this may be complete news to you, so I will quickly explain. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, has a normal life – so he thinks. He gets up, kisses his wife on the cheek, goes to work, gets the newspaper, goes back home, falls asleep. What he doesn’t know is that when he was born, he became part of a reality TV show. He was placed in a fake world, an enormous bubble, and now everything in his life is filmed twenty-four hours a day and broadcast to the real world. Everyone in his life, including his wife, is an actor. He is given a fear of water, meaning that he can never leave his town – not cross the bridge, not get on a boat. He is stuck in this fake world, without knowing that millions of people watch his every move.
When Truman realises what is going on, he is forced to challenge his fears and get in a boat to try and get away. He doesn’t truly believe that this can be real; that his entire world, his entire life is a lie. Until his boat bumps into a wall. A blue piece of wood painted as the sky. There is a beautiful moment where Truman touches the wall. And realises that it’s true. That everything was fake. The voice of God – the producer – roars through the speakers, at Truman, that he should turn around and go back to his life. For at least he knows what that is. That he can stay happy if he gives in to the dream. If he just accepts this. And Truman is standing in front of a door, which was hidden before – it is painted blue like the fake sky – and he has a choice. He can turn around, get back in the boat, go back to his life which is a lie. Or he can walk out the door, not knowing anything about the outside world. He turns to the camera and smiles and walks through the door.
That is how it felt meeting Andrea. The same stages of denial: surely, this can’t all be fake?
If this is all true, then I have lived a lie. Then every single self-loathing thought I have ever had, every opportunity missed, every failed relationship or friendship, every harsh word said to myself, every bruise, every cut, every moment I have either starved myself or felt numb, it will all have been … due to either an individual, an industry or a system telling me to do it. If this is all true, then that means that I have said the meanest and most cruel things to myself, to my body, for no reason. It means that my body was never the enemy, my fat was never the enemy. Perhaps I was deserving of love all along. Perhaps I was worthy all along.
If it’s all true – that the beauty industry, the diet industry, the weight-loss industry and the fashion industry, all of them have created this ‘perfect body image’ and a world in which that is ‘just the way it is’ – then it is not an objective truth. It is fake. A world in which everyone is an actor and the sky is made of wood. In which case, there must be a door.
You will have to cross an ocean, petrified of water. You will have to give up this belief you had that what you see in the media is true and reflects reality. Then you have to row. And there is a storm and you feel like you might, at any second, drown. But you don’t. You reach the blue wooden wall, you touch it and feel the splinters in your fingertips. Then you see the door. And you can choose to walk out.
The reason why we empathise with Truman’s difficult choice is that in his fake world, at least, he was the star. He had a decent life. It was safe. So if he had got back into his boat and sailed back to his fake life, we would partly have understood his choice.
The fake world in which fat people live is not nice. It is not safe and we are not the stars. Instead we believe that we are not worthy, that we are not attractive, that we are lesser humans. That that is just how it is. The world is not even safe for thinner people, because it always looms over them as possible threat. What if you get fat one day? If you are a size 8, you should be a size 6. If you are a size 6, you should be a size 4. If you are a size 0, you need a bigger gap between your thighs or clear clavicles or a flatter, more toned stomach. And you need to still be able to eat burgers because you don’t want to be one of those boring girls ordering a salad for dinner.
I fully lived in that world for twenty-three years of my life and every single person in my life did as well. Like we were all part of a cult where the main mantra was ‘fat people should be ashamed’ and we all hummed in agreement whenever it was being insinuated or said.
What it took was for someone to say to me, ‘What if it’s all a lie?’
Throughout writing about my childhood, my teens and all of the self-loathing that surrounded it, I have had to take brief pauses where I held my stomach in my hands and said to myself, ‘I love you, stomach. I love you, child-me. We are good, we are safe,’ because the past is overwhelming. Maybe this is time for you to do the same. Place your hands on your body, the bits that you’ve struggled with the most and say, ‘We are good, we are safe.’
The biggest misunderstanding in the body-positivity movement that we see on social media is that you have to be ‘confident’ and ‘brave’. I have spoken to fat women who dismissed the entire idea of self-love by saying, ‘I am just not that confident.’
I am not a confident person. I always feel like I should be working harder or managing adult life better. But I can honestly say that most days, when I look in the mirror, I smile. I stare admiringly at my big thighs and I turn sideways to look at my butt and my stomach and I think, ‘Hello hot stuff!’ I am sometimes absolutely overwhelmed with how cute and beautiful my body is. But then sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and think, ‘Ew.’ I still receive compliments from people and smile and say ‘thank you’ but on the inside scoff and think ‘what’s wrong with you?’ I still sometimes instinctively take positions that make me look thinner for photographs and I would hesitate before doing jumping jacks naked in front of a person I was about to have sex with. I don’t always love my body. I love it more, way more, light years more, than I did a decade ago. When I go up a size in clothing, I don’t cheer. My first feeling is, ‘Oh …’ and my second feeling is, ‘Oh well.’ I have to repeat to myself, ‘I was a beautiful child,’ moving the emphasis from word to word in each repetition, because I need to remind myself. That I am attractive, worthy, deserving to be alive, is never something that comes easy. It is not something I just instinctively believe. It is hard work, telling myself that I am good enough every single day.
When I write down every memory related to my weight from my childhood, it is not to figure out the source of why I became fat. People are fat for a variety of reasons. It can be biological, psychological, socioeconomic, genetic or a choice. Some people just have those bodies. When I talk about the reasons for my own fatness, I am not apologising for it and nor am I explaining it to you so that you feel more comfortable with it. Usually, when the reasons for a person’s fatness are looked into, it is in order to find a solution to a problem. But being fat is not a problem. The reason I share my childhood with you is to remind myself that I was not brought up loving my body. I was not brought up confident. Every little thread of confidence was crushed under the heavy foot of societal pressure to be thin. Every sense of autonomy evaporated in the presence of my abusive grandfather. Bullying shattered my sense of self-worth, sadistic teachers confirmed that I was lesser. I did not start this journey as a confident person. If I had to go back and look at who I was before I started loving my body, I would say that there seemed to be nothing left to salvage.
The only thing that had never been touched – the only thing that they forget to destroy – is our sense of logic. Our intelligence. Our minds. If anything, our minds are strengthened because we spend most of our lives inside of our heads, as we are trying to escape our bodies. This means that we have an out. I believe we can use this sense of logic to our advantage. If we can grasp – deep down inside – that all the things we have been taught about how our bodies are wrong, are lies – then we can beat it. All we need to do is unlearn.
But now, even when I have a self-hating day, I still fundamentally believe that fat bodies are worthy. Even when I wear large shirts to cover my stomach, I know in my heart that I am allowed to take up space. It sometimes feels contradictory, sure, that at the same time as I have words like ‘ugly’ and ‘gross’ in my head I can think, ‘I am as deserving of being here as everyone else,’ and, ‘Fat bodies are as beautiful as other bodies because beauty is subjective and there are no rules.’fn9
But to me, that was the way in. Talking with Andrea allowed me to sidestep my feelings about myself and reach the centre of my brain where I understood that systematic oppression and discrimination can make a person internalise a lot of hatred.
When fat people say to me, ‘Oh, I could never love myself, I don’t have that confidence,’ I tell them this. ‘You don’t have to have confidence, you just have to be able to understand the basic principle of maths. The more we hate our bodies, the richer these companies get. Ergo, they make us feel bad, in order to make money. Ergo, you do not hate your body because your body is wrong. You hate your body because someone lied to you.’
We believe that the objective truth is that it is a bad thing to be fat. When you realise that it is not an objective truth, but rather, someone’s capitalist and very subjective stance, you can begin to let go of the self-hatred.
Your confidence grows from believing this and creating your own subjectivity. If you truly believe that your body is not the enemy, then you can begin to treat it with the love it deserves. I have bad days where I am without confidence. But the good days are incredible – where I look at my stomach and feel nothing but genuine awe. Where I observe my thighs in the mirror and feel absolutely blessed and lucky to have such sexy, plump thighs. Where I think I look amazing in every single photo I take of myself, regardless of the angles. Where I strut down the street in a crop top and tiny shorts with no make-up and enough self-esteem to blow the roof off a straight-sized clothing store.fn10 Where I actually live the life that Instagram claims I do.
I started from the lowest point possible. The confidence came with time – and it all started when I realised that fat people are worthy. Fat people are deserving of happiness and entitled to take up space. Fat people are not lesser humans.
You can be happy and fat, you deserve to be happy and fat, being happy and fat is an option.
All you need to do is believe that and then we can begin.