The uncontrollable anger I felt after loosing 80lbs.
By: Mattie Apple
Tags: Fatphobia, Body Politics, Weight Loss, Weight, Body Image

If there was one thing I didn't expect after loosing almost 80lbs (precisely 77lbs/35kg), it was a sense of deep-rootted upset and anger towards the world. Growing up as a heavily over-weight teenage girl, you are taught that finally loosing the ‘puppy fat’ and gaining access to the elusive society of ‘thin’ people would result in all kinds of social wonders. As a kid, I truthfully never really believed that to be the case and brushed it off mostly as another bullshit aspect of ‘diet-motivation’ forced upon me by well-meaning but misguided older relatives. However, when I did manage to achieve the ‘impossible’ and shrink my body into almost half of what it was before, I realised that it was awfully, awfully true.

The sheer ease in which I was able to walk through the world as a conventially slim person was astonoshing. It seemed as if I’d gotten so used to the snide comments, cruel jokes and hurtful glances that came with moving through the world as not just an overweight person, but specifically as an overweight teenage girl … that they had blended into my every-day fabric of expected social existence. It was only now that they were absent that I realised the full-extent of the fat-phobia I had experienced for the past decade.

Nothing had changed about me other than my weight, yet that was apparently enough for people to view me completely differently … and that made me furious. Was that all people had seen of me before the weight-loss ? Was that all they had deemed important about my character ? If it was a question of health or fitness, which people love to use as a be-all and end-all indicator of respect, it is painfully clear that the Fallowfield student lifestyle does not keep me (nor my fellow university cohort) in the pinnacle of health. I am just as sloppy and unmotivated as I was a year ago (before my weight loss) and as I’m sure I would be the exact same if I’d never been overweight to begin with. Besides, while underweight people do face judgment and cruelty from society, they simply do not carry that same stigma of being ‘lazy’ as overweight individuals do, despite also being medically unhealthy.

What other reason therefore, could this apparent ‘levelling up’ in social success be owed to other than, sadly, pure aesthetics ? Unfair, uncompromising aesthetics.

I think it’s probably because of these shared crises of identity and experience of living in ‘two-worlds’ of body type that make me feel such kinship towards people like me; people who grew up / were formally overweight and who then lost lots of weight (particularly those who lost it very quickly or through unhealthy means, which I can admit I did do). We straddle two worlds, we understand both what it means to be labelled ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ within societies venn-diagram. We can’t help but be angry at what we’ve seen and experienced. We can’t help but grieve for our former selves and the unfair treatment we received based on the number on a scale or the size of our jeans. Or at-least I do.

If you’ve had a similar experience, reach out to me. I’d love to here anything … from understandings to objections.

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