Being overweight doesn’t impede me in anything

I can’t speak for millions of overweight people, so this chapter is exclusively about my own fat logic.

For a long time, I convinced myself that being overweight didn’t impact particularly negatively on my life. I’d suppress the panting as I climbed the stairs, so I could tell myself that I had no problem walking up three floors. Once at the top, I would sometimes pretend to cough or laugh to hide the fact that I was out of breath.

I recently watched a video on YouTube in which an obese woman climbed 100 steps, and I felt like I’d been transported back to my earlier life. The woman’s gait became more laboured from the 20th step, then she started to laugh, until her wheezing eventually became too obvious to hide, and she joked about how hard it was. The last 40 steps were pure torture, but at the end of her ordeal she was so proud of having shown how physically fit she was.

I realised I didn’t know subjectively whether 100 steps were a lot or a little to climb, so I decided to do an experiment and find out for myself how difficult it was to walk up 100 steps for me, with a body weight of 67 kg and after six months of regular physical exercise (though it was also just a week after I’d undergone abdominal surgery). The result: it didn’t even make me out of breath. So I kept climbing. I gave up from boredom after 600 steps.

Our society makes it very easy for us, unfortunately. People who exercise regularly are seen as ‘fitness freaks’, ‘sports fanatics’, or similar, while ‘normal’ people are the ones who lead physically inactive lives. For adults, at least, it’s seen as abnormal to do a lot of sport. Most people ‘don’t have the time’, or they admit openly that they just can’t be bothered. And that’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of — at least, that used to be my opinion. When I was still very fat, many normal-sized or less fat people (I didn’t actually know anyone who was fatter than me, so they were all less fat, to be honest) supported my sedentary lifestyle by pointing out how unfit they were, too. When I started exercising, most of them made comments like, ‘I couldn’t do that.’

Two years ago, the Mayo Clinic published a study (Archer et al., 2013b) that caused quite a furore because it showed that the average obese person does very little physical exercise. Obese women were found to do an average of only one hour’s intensive exercise per year; obese men did under four hours a year. What media reports about the study usually failed to point out, however, was that women of normal weight were found, on average, to do only around 11 hours of intensive exercise per year (although ‘intensive’ exercise included only very strenuous activities that caused a considerable increase in heartrate, so, for example, a gentle bike ride through the countryside wasn’t counted).

Considering that even ‘normal people’ are pretty unsporty, there will always be someone to compare yourself to so as to persuade yourself that you aren’t actually that unfit.

Now that I can compare the abilities of my well-trained body (and I’m absolutely not athletic or super-fit) to my abilities before, I’ve come to realise how far below optimum my fitness level really was, and how ordinary the things I used to be proud of are. For example, I considered myself to be relatively strong. I was proud of my ability to carry 30 kg rocks, and I thought it was definitely thanks to my ‘stout build’. Now, after weight training, I can carry the 45 kg kerbstones at our home (which I didn’t even used to be able to pick up) with ease, even though I’m now a lot less ‘stoutly built’. The fact that fatty tissue doesn’t give you any strength, and, on the contrary, actually hinders movement, took a while to sink in. It would never have occurred to me that a fit woman weighing 50 kg could be stronger than me, weighing in at 150 kg. For me, a large body mass meant strength. In view of the fact that, according to Pellegrinelli et al. (2015), fatty tissue can even atrophy muscle mass, this was, of course, doubly wrong.

Although I had fewer illusions when it came to my stamina and general fitness, I was still very wrong about myself. One day, when my car refused to start after work, I decided to walk. Arriving home after the 45-minute walk, my feet were hurting, and I was so exhausted that I had to lie down on the couch and rest before I could do anything else. The sad thing is that I didn’t even see it as a warning sign. In fact, I was proud of my achievement. I thought it wasn’t half bad that I’d managed to cover that distance ‘easily’.

The other day, on a Sunday when most shops are closed, I really wanted something sweet, so I spontaneously walked the 12-kilometre round trip to the nearest petrol station and bought some chocolate. For me, this is pushing my limits in a pleasant way. A real athlete might laugh at my 19 per cent body fat, but on normal charts I’m somewhere between ‘athletic’ and, more usually, ‘below average’ for women of my age group.

I expect most readers will fall somewhere between being fit and weighing 150 kg, and so it could be tempting for you to say, ‘Everything might be awful when you weigh one hundred fifty kilos, but I’m a long way from weighing that much.’ Of course, that’s true. A BMI of 50 is extreme and can’t be compared to a slightly obese BMI of, say, 32. But even if many of the problems that come with weighing 150 kg are not as bad for someone who weighs 100 kg, there’s no doubt that the beginnings of those problems will definitely be there.

In retrospect, with the comparison between before and after now available to me, I can see there were many symptoms that I didn’t recognise at the time, or that I considered to be normal. My many years of obesity had robbed me of the ability to imagine what a normal body might be capable of, and what it would feel like to live in a healthy body.

One change that surprised me has to do with sleep. Ever since I’d first met my husband, I’d always needed one to two more hours of sleep than him. I slept about nine hours a night and saw myself as a late riser and definitely not a morning person — I was someone who needed time to get going in the morning. I now sleep for about seven hours a night and am fresh and bright in the mornings. I’ve turned into one of the people I used to find so strange, who got up at 6.00 a.m. of their own free will. I’d thought of it as something to do with personality or character, and I never made the connection with body weight. I assume that my lower sleep requirement is thanks to the fact that my sleep is now more restful and restorative because I no longer snore and can breathe more easily.

Another change is that nowadays I truly enjoy physical exercise. Whenever someone used to say that they found active sports fun, I would dismiss it as twaddle because it was such an inconceivable idea for me. As it happens, one reason why it’s easier to be thin than to get thin is that a fat body is significantly less energy efficient. Although it burns more calories at rest and during exercise than a thin body, it’s much more difficult as a fat person to do the same amount of exercise as someone who’s slim. When I weighed 150 kg, a ten-minute warm-up on the exercise bike was like torture to me. And I was frustrated by the fact that it only burned 60 kcal. I now pedal faster and with more power, and I can burn about 120 kcal in the same time. An hour on the cross-trainer feels like relaxed movement and, on the setting I prefer, burns 600 kcal.

As I’ve already stressed, I’m talking about myself here. I’m not saying that there aren’t any overweight people who do a lot of exercise. But I can imagine that lots of people fall prey to a similar kind of distorted thinking as I did when I used to consider even relatively normal things to be great sporting achievements. A short walk with a weight of 150 kg was harder than an hour of endurance training with a body weight of 65 kg. But although I’d pant and sweat more, the number of calories I’d consumed was much smaller.

The same applies to the achievement that one of the US leaders of the fat acceptance movement, Ragen Chastain, claims makes her an ‘elite athlete’ — with a morbidly obese BMI. In 2013, she ran a marathon and published an article about it with the title ‘My Big, Fat, Finished Marathon’. The essence of the article was that after five months of training, she covered just over 40 km in 12 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I’m not saying that it’s not an achievement for a severely obese person to walk the entire length of a marathon in one go. But her average speed of less than 3.5 km per hour is much slower than normal walking speed. The marathon had officially ended hours before she finished it, the stands all removed, the organising team gone, leaving just a few poor souls who had to wait for the final participant to finish before they could finally go home. The last participant to complete the race, several hours before Ragen crossed the finishing line, was a woman who was over 70 years of age. Here are more figures for comparison: the women’s record for running the marathon is two hours and 15 minutes, and the average time for women is about five hours. In 2011, a one-hundred-year-old man completed the marathon in eight hours and 25 minutes.

More disturbing than Chastain’s false evaluation of her own athleticism, in my opinion, is the fact that she complains in her article that one of the volunteer workers harassed her and treated her in a discriminatory way. All the volunteer had done, once she realised after several hours that Chastain would not be able to finish the marathon within the appointed time, was to ask her to abandon the race — for one thing, because she was simply worried about the health of this overweight woman, and for another, because some of the volunteers were being forced to stay much longer than planned because of Chastain. Ragen refused to quit, however, as the marathon didn’t have an official closing time. She may have been within her rights to refuse, but then to be up in arms because she felt she was treated badly, when she had forced an entire team of volunteers to hang around for four extra hours until she had hauled herself over the finishing line, is a bit rich.

I think Chastain’s example shows very clearly how far people’s grip on reality can slip when they are severely obese for a very long time, and they are in an environment in which it’s seen as normal to be severely overweight.

Please don’t take my statements here as a lack of appreciation for sporting endeavours. But of course, everyone has to start from their own individual fitness level. When I weighed 150 kg and was more or less unable to move for six months, average sporting achievements were as likely for me as breaking Olympic records. In the first few months, I was proud of reaching various milestones, like walking for half an hour without stopping, or spending 20 minutes on a bike for the first time in years. They’re things that an average person would never see as milestones, but that for me, at the time, were great strides. I think it’s good to be proud of your own development and individual progress, even when it might not objectively seem that impressive. After all, for someone who’s never smoked, going a day without lighting up a single cigarette is not much of an achievement, but for a habitual chain-smoker, it would be a great personal success. Doing the weekly shopping at the supermarket is normally no great shakes, but for someone who’d been stuck at home with agoraphobia for years, it would be a massive achievement

Pride in your personal achievements and improvements, however small they may be at first, is a great motivator, so it’s very important. But declaring your own, below-average performance to be an objective record, and therefore to claim that any improvement is unnecessary, will only stop you — and others — from tackling the problem of excess weight and thereby reducing the risks to your health.