I first discovered I was fat the day I no longer fit beneath the bed. I was playing hide-and-seek, and this was my go-to spot, mostly because it was dark and quiet and I could pick at the fuzzies that dangled from the bottom of the box spring. But this day, I couldn’t quite squeeze my stomach beneath the metal frame. To be fair, my family had very thick carpeting and very short bed frames, so the space between bed and floor was very difficult to squeeze into to begin with. But still. One day I fit, and the next day I didn’t.
It’s a harsh way for a kid to discover he’s fat, especially when there’s a kid in the next room counting down from ten, which is a really short amount of time to both process your newfound fatness and also find another equally sufficient hiding spot. There should really be a hide-and-seek rule for a scenario like this. Like “The hiding countdown may be extended from ten seconds to twenty-five years in the event of an existential crisis of the body. Adjust accordingly and may God have mercy on your portly soul.” But let’s face it, the rules of hide-and-seek were never that solid to begin with.
In my parents’ eyes, I was never fat, I was just a “growing boy” with a healthy appetite who needed to eat whatever he wanted in order to grow big and strong. Never mind that I went up three pant sizes each year, or that I could barely run across the backyard without suffering severe stomach cramps, or that I was developing my own petite little boy breasts. This is what happened to all little boys. We’d grow into it, the logic went. For now, eat your burgers and fries (read: protein and vegetables), because little boys need all the nutrients they can get.
You can pinpoint the year I got fat by looking at my school pictures. You can clearly see the year my metabolism realized it was in for a lifetime of grueling hard work and gave the fuck up. In first grade, I had discernible cheekbones and the hint of a jawline; by second grade, puffy red cheeks and the beginnings of a double chin.
The thing is, I’ve always loved to eat. I mean, yes, technically, everybody likes to eat. We’re sort of biologically engineered to like it or we die. I just happened to like eating beyond the point where eating was necessary for survival and into the point where you’re only stuffing your face with cold mac and cheese because there’s nothing better to do at three in the morning on a Tuesday. It didn’t help that I was also generally averse to any and all types of physical activity, and preferred watching reruns of Three’s Company with a bag of potato chips indoors over running around with the neighborhood kids outside.
My family never had an unhealthy relationship with food, but we weren’t exactly the picturesque vision of American vigor. We’re midwesterners, which means we liked food and we ate it more than we did anything else. Sure, we never had the best diets, but never for lack of trying. We ate our vegetables, if “eat your vegetables” meant “eat your gravy-covered mashed potatoes and broccoli casserole.” We ate healthy snacks, if healthy snacks included a heaping bowl of sugary breakfast cereal as a midnight treat before bedtime. And we sustained consistent, stable diets, if consistency included being regulars at the local Dairy Queen. Seriously, we could walk into that place and leave with extra-large Brownie Blizzards without having to say a single word. Plus, our diets were economical. Whenever Oreos were on sale at the grocery store, my mom stocked up like we were preparing for the zombie apocalypse and the only means of survival was hidden between layers of cookies and cream.
We also weren’t a particularly active family, and the activities we did participate in usually revolved around food. The year McDonald’s released those Beanie Baby Happy Meal toys, my mom drove us to every McDonald’s franchise in the greater Chicago area, until we tracked down every last piece-of-garbage Beanie Baby in the set. (Maybe we didn’t have problems with food. But we did have problems with Beanie Babies.) And yes, obviously, we ordered Happy Meals at every stop, but only because you had to order the meal in order to get the toys. Still, we ended up with enough burgers to last for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three years.
Meanwhile, I was aware I was growing larger and I felt inferior because of it. My brother, chastised for the litany of insults and taunts he frequently lobbed my way, resorted instead to calling me “big guy,” which was, technically speaking, not actually an insult like “fatso” or “tubby,” but a fairly benign (and accurate) description of my growing frame. “Nice one, big guy,” he’d say whenever he wanted to see me angry. “Having a snack there, big guy?” And I’d stomp my chubby feet and blow air through my nose and demand that my mom make him call me something less insulting, like “four eyes” or “baby Hitler.”
It didn’t help, though, that he was right. I was big, and getting bigger. In the winter of 1999, my brother and I went sledding on the hill across the street from our house. I squeezed into the pair of overall snow pants I’d worn the year before, except this year, it felt like a corset. I could barely fasten the zipper along my bust and stomach. I could feel my lungs straining against my gallbladder. I managed to cover myself securely enough, but the second we got outside, I bent over to position my sled, and those snow pants ripped open right along the butt with a deafening tear. The white stuffing from inside the pants gushed out like I was shitting dust. “Good going, big guy,” my brother yelled as I ran back to the house, covering my gaping ass in humiliation.
It wasn’t until high school that I began to feel serious shame for my weight, beyond the boyish taunts of childhood. By that time, I’d started to succumb to all the usual changes that plague young high school boys. Things were reshaping, hair was growing, limbs were extending. And high school was when I joined the rest of adult America and started taking antidepressants, which made my fleshy man boobs even fleshier. (Which is a legitimate and cruel side effect of antidepressants. Oh, you’re feeling sad because you’re growing up all chubby? Here, take some meds that’ll make you need a man bra.) Until then, of course, I could hide my girth beneath a heavy T-shirt or a jacket. The only people who had seen my bare stomach or thighs were my family, and even then, I’d kept my weight as concealed as I could. But high school locker rooms are where insecurities go to be exposed. It was the first time I could see the raw evidence of my body compared to other boys, how my stomach, which hung just slightly over the seam of my underwear, was nowhere near as flat or as toned as everyone else’s, that my muscles (or whatever there was of them) were hidden beneath a doughy layer of padding, that my thighs jiggled slightly more, and that I needed a thicker T-shirt.
It’s also the first time I started noticing men’s bodies as more than just bodies, but as objects of desire. Young gay kids are plagued with the dual struggle of wanting to be with the bodies that haunt us and wanting to be like them, those desires often irrevocably tangled up in one another. I didn’t know if I was watching the other shirtless boys because I wanted to look like them, or because I liked the way they looked, or both. I didn’t know if the shame I felt was about my own body or my own desires. And the confusion made it all not worth thinking about at all. And so, I ignored my own body. I ignored its growing size. I ignored that the food I was eating was related to the rate my body was expanding.
And so, I brought my weight and its baggage to college, where I discovered dining hall waffles and new depths of stress and caffeine and alcohol and more mature, cut bodies and eating burgers at midnight and ramen noodles and boys with cute, muscled thighs and brownies from the dessert station and chugging cheap beer. I gained the freshman fifteen for four students all on my own, because there was too much to worry about besides my weight. And my body escaped me.
Meanwhile, I came out as gay (but not as fat) in 2011 and started learning how much gay culture favors the thin and the fit and the muscled. It’s the first time I went to a gay club and saw people who were gay like me, which was at once liberating and suppressive. It was the first time I saw how important it was for gay people to look like some unattainable ideal. “Look at all these thin people being thin together” was my most searing thought, and part of the reason why I never seriously tried dating after that night. Dating felt too much like putting myself on sale at a deli counter, to be picked alongside finer, shinier pieces of beef. I felt too much like a wedge of ham surrounded by beautiful cuts of prime rib.
That summer, I decided to try to take control and joined the gym across the street from our house. And if you’re thinking, “The gym was just across the street this whole time and you didn’t go before then?”—yes, that’s exactly where it was, but any gym that was not directly beneath my body at any given moment might as well have been in another country. But, motivated by the insecurity of my newfound gayness, I walked over to the gym one morning, paid the necessary seven-million-dollar membership fee, signed my name in blood, and committed myself to looking like Matthew McConaughey by the end of the summer.
Of course, that dream lasted for about forty-five minutes, which remain some of the worst minutes of my entire life, for about a thousand reasons.
I mean, going to the gym isn’t a particularly pleasant experience to begin with, because all gyms are terrible, even the good ones. They smell like hot milk and old rags and garbage bags full of sweaty rubber. There’s always a grown man in the corner grunting wildly at his own reflection, a teenager running dangerously fast on the treadmill so that you’re scared to go anywhere near him, and an old woman who insists on making flirtatious eye contact with you during the entirety of your workout, and you know it’s flirtatious because she’s constantly licking her lips. Plus, none of the machines come with instructions, so you may very well spend an entire hour pulling on what you think is part of a machine that trains your shoulders but is actually just a piece of duct tape attached to a laundry machine that nobody told you not to touch. Gyms, generally speaking, are designed to humiliate and terrify you into emotional vulnerability so that gym employees can get you to buy things you don’t actually want or need.
Already emotionally distressed, I was an easy target for their hunt. Gym employees, like prowling lionesses, can detect weakness, and they smelled my fragility from miles away. They pounced the second I limped through the front door.
“Welcome,” a man with dazzling white teeth and a tight T-shirt shouted when I walked up to the front desk. “Would you like to start off your membership with a free personal training session?” This is the gym predator’s trademark maneuver.
Determined as I was for McConaughey-like results in less than ten weeks, and inclined as I am to accept any free thing that is offered to me, I accepted.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Let’s set you up with a trainer.” And he whistled over a man he introduced as Tim, who led me deep in the gym, far enough away so that I could no longer see the front doors or the light that poured in from outside.
Tim, like most gym trainers, had too many muscles, which doesn’t seem like it would be a problem in theory, but in the real world, it’s like looking at a snake swallow a bag of onions. An approximate foot shorter than I was, Tim seemed to compensate for his height by adding thirty pounds of muscle for every inch he felt he lacked, which made him almost as wide as he was tall. Unprompted, he demonstrated the thickness of his chest by raising his fists in front of his face and struggling to make his forearms touch. This display was apparently meant to impress me, but all I could wonder was whether he could comfortably reach his own penis. I can only conclude, based on his abundance of unspent testosterone, that he could not.
Wasting no further time on verbal introductions, Tim immediately launched into barking orders, which I was expected to wordlessly obey: jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, with no break in between, one after the other, all while Tim screamed what he believed to be encouragements in my face.
“Push harder,” he yelled through spittle. “We haven’t even gotten started yet!” And yet my muscles were already sending every distress signal they could muster to my brain, shaking wildly and burning hot.
Sensing my waning energy, Tim continued bleating.
“Who’s the hottest girl in your class?” he shouted. And my brain, at least the parts of it that weren’t preoccupied with keeping the rest of my body from shutting down entirely, began to whir.
In normal circumstances, I would’ve had the time and patience to address this question properly. Perhaps I would have mustered the energy to explain to Tim that sometimes boys like putting their penises inside other boys’ penises. Perhaps I could’ve explained that I couldn’t name the hottest girl in my class if you’d paid me a thousand dollars, but I could rank the hottest fifty boys by ten different criteria, including arms, abs, butts, calves, bulges, pecs, hair, jawlines, smiles, and thighs (the top of which in each category respectively, I could’ve easily told him, was Pat, Tom, Pat, Ryan, Steven K., Steven R., Jeremy, Kevin, Pat, and Bradley, Pat being the clear and obvious winner).
In my distress, however, my brain could muster none of these explanations, and in a panic, between jumping jacks, my lungs straining hard enough to breathe and speak at the same time, I shouted, “Amanda!”
Tim gave an approving grunt, as if to say, “Ugh, she sounds hot,” based solely on the name that I’d shouted under duress.
“What’s your favorite part about her?” he continued while I whimpered further.
“Her butt, I guess,” I said without even thinking about it, my lungs nearly collapsed at this point.
“Ugh,” Tim grunted again, as if I were describing a juicy steak. “Is it big? Do you like her big, fat ass?”
“Yes,” I was shouting back at him between jumping jacks. “I love it . . . I love her big, fat ass.”
He laughed knowingly, as if to say, “I knew it! This is what all guys come in here for. To do jumping jacks for some girl named Amanda and her big fat ass.”
And content with discovering my secret, Tim let me stop.
At the end of our session, Tim gave me a pat on the back. “A few more of these sessions, and we’ll have Amanda noticing you in no time.”
I smiled feebly, and when he walked away, I limped as fast as I could to the door, and never went to that place again.
• • •
That summer, despite my heterosexual fiasco with Tim, I still lost thirty pounds. I counted calories. I went down two waist sizes. And yet, I felt no different. I went back to college and gained it all back.
Then I moved to New York, where something changed. I still ate too much. I still drank too much. After all, New York is a city where you can easily order a slice of chocolate cake at three in the morning (and I have, and I’ll do it again), where you can have groceries delivered directly to your apartment and nobody has to see you putting five packages of chocolate chip cookies into a shopping cart that’s already full of breads and sugar and fat. Indeed, the entire culture of New York City is built upon meeting people for dinner, for drinks, for appetizers. Bodegas are open all night in case the desire for a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream strikes at midnight.
But New York is also where I learned that being fat does not equal being ashamed. It’s a thin city, that much is true. But it’s also a diverse city that celebrates its differences more than it’s willing to admit. And there I learned that being fat is not a moral judgment. That carrying extra weight does not mean carrying extra baggage. That being fat is not always a choice. That it’s important to acknowledge that men face the pressures of body image just as acutely as women, and that we suffer from the harmful perpetuation of a single stereotype of the perfect, hairless, ab-riddled body with no discernible fat and those V-lines that haunt me in my sleep. It’s where I learned that it’s OK to lust after that stereotype as long as it doesn’t rest in your mind as the only desirable version of manhood. That fat bodies are desirable, too. That chubby Chris Pratt is just as fuckable as ripped Chris Pratt, and probably more so.
I still have accepting to do. But I can finally say I’m happy being fat. Do I still ogle muscled men? Yes. Do I still have pictures of them pasted to my apartment walls? Yes. Do I know now that a desire for those bodies is not exclusive of my own desirability? Of course. And do I wish I could still fit under the bed? Well, sure. But only because I’m pretty sure I dropped a Twix down there, and I’d really like to find it.