Why am I fat?

Why am I fat?

We all have our own story. It will have a unique combination of elements from the complex obesity system. This is the Government’s own 2012 attempt to map the system: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/296290/obesity-map-full-hi-res.pdf

Here’s my story, in so far as I can make sense of it.

Number 1. I faced a lot of trauma from an early age with no support to find healthy ways to process it. Things filling my mouth soothed me. Sugar rush relaxed me. Fatty food made me feel comforted and full.

Number 2. I was treated with oral steroids for eczema as a child as a hospital inpatient for a month. I went in slightly overweight. I came out morbidly obese and still covered with infected eczema.

Number 3. My first diet (under GP supervision) was at age 7. It solely consisted of restriction. It was enforced rigidly and harshly (they did it ‘for my own good’, and didn’t see the harm). I began stealing food.

Number 4. I was ridiculed and bullied for my size and physical lack of coordination and learned to hate PE and hate my body. I stopped doing anything active. I was 8.

Number 5. I was fed the message by media and family that I was unloveable unless I was slim. That didn’t help me feel loved or repair other trauma.

Number 6. I was offered diets in teenage girl magazines. My slimmer-than-me friends were always on diets. Females in my family were always on diets. A female relative died young - because she was fat because she wouldn’t go on a diet. So I tried every diet. I failed. I binged. I starved. My self-loathing grew.

Number 7. I believed the myth that failing to lose weight was my personal fault and I was just too weak and pathetic to stick to a diet. Because it was simple science. All that was required was: calories in must be lower than calories used.

Number 8. Social life revolves around food. To choose to restrict meant to watch others eat freely or to stay at home. Or go, eat everything I could, then hate myself.

Number 9. Foods became ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Eating ‘bad’ foods became an act of rebellion - against what, I’m no longer sure. But it was definitely a feminist issue.

Number 10. Rape meant I felt safer with a thick physical barrier of fat between me and other people. I could hide inside it. They couldn’t touch ‘the real me’. So I self-sabotaged. Once I’d lost enough weight for people to comment how nice I looked, I’d panic and eat as fast as I could to stop attracting attention.

Number 11. When skint, I couldn’t afford lean protein or lovely herbs and spices. Fat is cheaper. And tastier.

Number 12. (And I’m still learning to forgive myself for this) After a few years of successfully improving my relationship with my body and with eating, I panicked about making a weight category for a sporting competition, and after making weight I couldn’t stop over eating. The patterns of over 40 years of disordered eating can reappear when you least expect :(

And if you look at one of the complexity maps about obesity, my 12 reasons hardly scratch the surface of the complexity that creates and sustains someone’s obesity.

All fat people have their own story to tell about why they are fat.

So don’t tell me that it is as simple as move more, eat less, or change advertising, or use willpower.

*My story has a happy ending and I have an increasingly healthy life. My happy ending is because the reasons I am fat have been addressed. Other people’s happy endings will come when their reasons are addressed. No one gets a happy ending from being blamed for being fat.