Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (15 page)

It wasn’t a logical choice and I needed to go shopping, at the very least to get nonathletic wear to have on hand for funerals and church. What better way to show my daughter and myself that I was comfortable in my skin than to spend money dressing it in clothing that actually fit, just as I was, right in that very moment. Not after losing twenty pounds, not in the size I wished I was, but my actual real size. This was terrifying because I’d bought size 22 jeans once after having Wyatt, and I was so embarrassed by the size, I’d asked the girl at the register for a gift receipt so she wouldn’t think they were mine.

I had to let go of the sizing issue, not only because there was no consistent standard, but because it wasn’t an accurate representation of my body. I may have fooled myself into feeling proud I could button size 16 jeans, but I felt comfortable and beautiful in size 18, and I didn’t have to unzip them once I got into my car.

Here is a secret: people can’t tell what size you wear by looking
at you, but they can tell what size you don’t when your clothes are too tight. Let go of the number. In some stores I wear a size 14, in others a size 20. That insanity is on them, not my body; all I care about is having clothes that flatter me and don’t leave indentations across my flesh. Once I learned that, for the first time in my life fashion became fun. I no longer left the dressing room defeated. I spent the time learning my proportions and shape, so that I was trying on clothing more likely to fit, as opposed to grabbing items based on what models who in no way shared my body type were wearing.

Fashion seems like a very superficial component of self-esteem, but for me it was the foundation. As a plus-size girl, trendy clothes and styles were often not on the table for me, so putting together pretty outfits was a whole new experience. Plus-size clothes were always less about style and more about comfort and utility. Stretchy jeans with elastic waists are really amazing, but just because we’re chubby, it doesn’t mean we don’t have the hand-eye coordination to button pants. Making my way through the brands and racks, searching for pieces that fit well and were affordable, was tedious and laced with disappointment.

And that is where the confidence came in. I was taking the time to wear clothes I felt beautiful and empowered in, even though it was hard and time-consuming and I’m not the target demographic for many fashion designers. I was being fashionable and gorgeous in my body, not in spite of it.

Shut up

A few months ago I was naked in the closet looking for clothes and Gigi came up to me, put her arms around my waist, and told me my stomach was big. Immediately I recoiled in horror and covered myself with the towel from my hair.

“Gigi, you can’t tell people their stomach is big,” I scolded her.

“Why not?” she asked, confused.

“Because it’s mean.”

“Why is that mean? I think being big is good.”

And then it occurred to me that she had no idea that big meant fat, and that fat was a bad thing. As far as she is concerned, I’m just mom-shaped and perfect for hugs. I put a moratorium on the supply of negative body words I was thoughtlessly supplying. I banned the use of
fat
as a slur hurled toward myself and strangers. I’m not saying I don’t see fat; saying that is akin to the people who make grand statements about “not seeing color.” Seeing color doesn’t mean you’re a racist. It means your eyes work, but that you are hopefully able to see color not for a discrepancy in normal, but as a beautiful component of diversity. That’s how I see bodies. They are diverse; some are skinny and some are fat. We can’t all be Gisele Bundchen, but good heavens, can you imagine if more of you were? Think of all the XXLs that would be left behind for me at Target!

I stopped glorifying women as beautiful only if they were also thin. In fact, beautiful was the very last thing I decided I would tell Gigi she was each day, after brilliant, hilarious, curious, creative, and daring. There are so many important things to be in this world, it’s unfair to devote so much of what describes us to our body size.

Get a sponsor

My knowledge of sponsors and AA does not extend outside of
Nurse Jackie,
but I assume the basic premise is that when you think about drinking or you already have broken your sobriety, you call your sponsor for backup. I needed that exact scenario applied to my body image journey. Someone I could call when it was way easier to mentally beat the shit
out of myself than to like what I was seeing in the mirror. I’m not talking about telling me I look pretty when I post a selfie on Instagram; I’m talking about the person I call at 3
A.M
. when I’ve eaten everything there is to eat and everything inside me still feels empty and ugly, or when I don’t feel like I’m even worth being seen with.

I’m here today because of my best friend, Shauna Glenn. I met Shauna while on a media tour in Boston and New York in 2009. Shauna was short and blond and looked like Britney Spears. I was tall, six months postpartum, and nursing a horrible bobbed haircut and an infant in a carrier across my chest. Our crude humor and sarcasm made us fast friends, and we stayed up late each night laughing as she bounced baby Gigi on her knee while I pumped cross-legged on the floor of her room. Later that trip she would also use a plastic knife to cut me out of a pair of Spanx in the hotel ballroom’s bathroom after I couldn’t get them off in time and peed my pants. Only real friends do that.

So, it was Shauna I called from my knees on the bathroom floor two years ago, the taste of blood still lining the inside of my mouth. She had always been the person I could text a fitting room photo to ask “Should I buy this?” or “Be honest, is this trashy sexy or trashy noooo?”

But she was also the person I called when throwing up every meal didn’t take away all the horrible things people said about my looks and personality online or the way their words would seep from the screen into my head.

“Come to Texas,” she insisted. “Let me take care of you.”

She stood outside her white Jeep at the arrival gate of Dallas–Fort Worth airport with her arms open waiting to hug me. We spent the week under piles of duvets on her bed, watching funny movies and eating Mexican food. When we left the house it was to
drive to Dallas to see indie films in empty theaters. There is healing in feeling wanted and liked, and Shauna makes me feel both. She welcomes me into her home, lets me feel all my feelings, and then wakes me up the next morning with a tray of breakfast burritos and Bloody Marys and tells me I look strong. I never fancied myself a Texas girl, what with my glaring liberalism and distaste for guns and secession, but Fort Worth has become my sanctuary, and Shauna my body sponsor.

Take off your clothes

There are many things in life you cannot do naked. Like cook bacon or renew your driver’s license. But when you are home, taking off your clothes and remembering what your skin looks like isn’t an unreasonable request. I remember getting out of the shower shortly after having our first son, catching my reflection in the mirror, and then screaming, convinced my mother was standing in the bathroom. It was me. I just had no idea what I looked like naked anymore.

I understand that if you have kids in the house, this can get creepy really quick, and it’s hard to not want to cover your body around them before you’re stuck answering questions about pubic hair and giant areolas. But if you can stand it, realize that it’s important that your kids see your body the way it really is because it’s helping build the normality of the way they see their own. Destroying the image that women are genetically born with well-groomed landing strips and airbrushed skin makes it that much easier for us all to stop seeing ourselves as failures. All of us shave our toes and have that weird hair in our asses, and if you say you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lying.

Walking around after a shower naked is still not something
I feel comfortable doing, but I do it to help put the standard bar for myself and my kids back at normal. You’re welcome, future girlfriends of my sons with two different-sized boobs.

When I get on an airplane, I always listen to the safety instructions the flight attendants recite before takeoff, mostly because I’m terrified to fly and I feel like if I listen carefully to the entire speech, whisper the Lord’s Prayer, and stay awake the entire flight, I’ll be able to keep the plane in the air. What I’m saying is, you are alive because of me, fellow passengers. My point is, once they point to all the exits and explain flotation devices, they get to this part about oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling should the cabin change pressure.

If you are traveling with children, or are seated next to someone who needs assistance, place the mask on yourself first, then offer assistance.

Even in a life-or-death situation, we are told to first secure ourselves in order to better help others. It makes sense. I mean, I can’t put a mask on a baby if I’m passed out, and I certainly can’t tell anyone to stop hating themselves while I binge and purge my feelings until my knuckles bleed. Remind yourself of all the ways you are beautiful, stop the negative talk, get a body sponsor, and do what it takes to get comfortable in your skin. All of these were essential to help my daughter love the body I created for her. I just had to get my own oxygen mask on first.

“NOTHING TASTES AS
good as skinny feels.”

Kate Moss has clearly never eaten at a Sonic.

I haven’t talked a lot about dieting in this book, but I feel like maybe I should address it, because I’m sure you are wondering. A round girl like me . . . surely somewhere along the line it would have occurred to me that losing weight would be the sensible thing to do, so let’s just deal with the literal elephant in the room so you can get back to the rest of the book without wondering why I didn’t just strap on a lap band and get on with it.

As my curvy sisters know, it’s predictably easy for society to make assumptions about fat girls based on glossy magazines and romantic comedies. The poor Melissa McCarthys and Rebel Wilsons of the world are forced to forgo Oscar-inviting leads simply to dedicate a
good portion of their screen time to laying the groundwork for the average life of a fat girl.

         
1    Spend one to two hours a day loathing yourself.

         
2    Explore binge eating.

         
3    Cut out pictures of thin models from couture ads and decoupage them onto your skinny-girl hope chest.

         
4    Fill hope chest with bikinis and midriffs.

         
5    Google fad diets.

         
6    Come up with zany plots to get a man to fall in love with you before actually seeing you in person, for example, online dating or the plot of a Dermot Mulroney movie.

The reality is that we’re not all miserable unfulfilled losers, and we don’t all have to be skinny. You can stay up until 3
A.M
. to watch self-proclaimed doctors and experts preach to close-up camera shots of sad, impressionable fat people about the “metaphorical” sense of fullness eating your feelings provides, but those experts are liars. The fullness is not metaphorical, it’s tangible. I can eat joy or sorrow until my belly button pops out like a turkey timer. I can stand naked in front of a mirror with my hands on my stomach and feel something where before there was nothing, and sometimes feeling full of something is exactly what you need, be it wisdom, shit, dicks, or eggrolls.

I hit the gym circuit pretty hard my freshman year of college. My roommate and I would set our alarms for 5
A.M
. and pull ourselves out of bed to go to the fitness center across the street from our dorm. I’d wander unmotivated from machine to machine, completing the required actions and suggested repetitions. I’d look at myself in the wall mirrors spanning the length of the gym, dripping with sweat, and instead of feeling strong or
accomplished, I felt exhausted and fake. I was just going through the motions of fitness alongside people who consumed it like communion at church. I feel more at peace eating a bag of licorice in my car in the parking lot of Target, which only goes to prove that you don’t pick your moments of spiritual clarity and fortitude. You don’t go looking for Jesus’s face in a slice of toast, guys; it just happens to you.

Also, I’m choosing to save you my speech about how I think the government uses iPods to track fat people, and just say yes, I get it, we’re all supposed to want to be thinner.

Being overweight isn’t always a fun life choice. It’s not enjoyable to go to the Gap with your friends and only be able to buy scarves. It wasn’t delightful to spend summers at the quarry faking sickness or my period to get out of taking off my men’s oversize crewneck to swim. It’s not empowering to walk into a restaurant worried that you might not fit comfortably into the booth. Those aren’t fun activities. I spent two decades wanting desperately to be skinny; the desire was always there. Telling a twenty-something girl she looks gaunt or like she might have cancer may just be the best compliment ever. Potato famine was the new black, and I would have traded my soul for a thigh gap, though if I had a thigh gap, I’d probably only use it to hold more snacks or not have to pay for a carry-on while flying Spirit Airlines.

Dieting was a trick I picked up from friends in college and it never went well for me. Wait, I take that back, I was an excellent dieter at 12
A.M
. when I lay in bed upset at the marks my underwear was leaving on my skin. I fell asleep promising myself I would give up carbs for three months until I looked like Nicole Richie with giant boobs. But then I woke up, ate cold leftover pizza, and decided I would easily fix the whole problem by just not wearing underwear anymore.

Last Cake Ever

The day before I would begin a rigorous new diet regime, I would allow myself one final hurrah before hopping off the fatty train. I’d spend one last day devouring all the sweets and carbs in my house, for two very important reasons. First, they obviously wouldn’t be around to tempt me anymore; second, it’d satisfy my cravings for all the food I shouldn’t technically ever eat again. I’d take one final dance will all my unhealthy vices, gorging to the point where I’d collapse into bed sweaty and swollen, eyes dilated and mouth glistening, like I’d just returned from a heathen solstice celebration, and I’d never want to eat junk food ever again. I call this practice “Last Cake Ever,” and I’d do it every time I woke up feeling fat in my pants. Sometimes I’d have three Last Cake Ever days in a row . . . I was way better at procrastinating than dieting.

Prescription diet pills

This was one of my more death-defying stunts. My sophomore year of college I collapsed in the kitchen of my apartment, assuming I was having a stroke. I couldn’t breathe or feel my lips or move my hands. I had trouble even remembering to swallow. My boyfriend rushed me to the ER, where it was determined that I was not having a stroke, but rather, a reaction to the Adipex and Diet Coke I’d been living on for over a month. I sat on the bed in a half-open hospital gown as a gentle nurse peeled the tape from the EKGs off my skin, and I swore I would never take diet pills again. That promise lasted exactly three days, until I
justified cutting them in half just to lose enough weight to fit into a skimpy dress for my boyfriend’s fraternity formal. Predictably, I gained back all the weight after the prescription ran out, but not even a health scare or hospital copay could deter me away from being skinny just long enough to retake my Myspace profile picture.

Tapeworms

I remember reading an article once about this Australian cyclist who discovered he had a massive tapeworm when he went to the bathroom and found a four-foot segment of it hanging out of his anus. To the average person, this is horrifying, but to a dieter, this sounds like a fun possibility. Is it gross to let a giant parasite hang out in your intestines so you can drink and eat all you want with little to no weight gain? I don’t know, I lived with a girl half a semester in college because her dad owned a Taco Bell franchise and got us free burritos, so I wouldn’t put it past me. Unfortunately, tapeworms have been surprisingly difficult for me to get, no matter how much questionable sushi I eat.

Cleanse

I am from the school of thought that you shouldn’t drink your food, unless you were just in some sort of horrific accident that left you in a full-body cast with your mouth wired shut—in that case then yes, blend up that meat loaf. Otherwise, detoxing your body by living on juice and monitoring your bowel movements is no kind of life; three days in and I passed out in a Kroger next to where they make the rotisserie chickens.

Weight Watchers

The Weight Watchers program felt like the most youthful of the mom-diet trifecta, Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem being the equivalent of packaged MSG astronaut food. I don’t want to say Weight Watchers is a cult, because that sounds like a bad thing and frankly, the members are so ride-or-die that they terrify me. It’s more like a really dedicated sisterhood that likes to put food on scales and tricks you into feeling like a millennial with all their hip spokespeople and mobile apps. Whenever I talk to someone who’s done Weight Watchers they always tell me about how it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle change. Collecting points like mahjong was fun at first, but there’s something unnatural about low-fat cheese product and skim milk. And they taste horrible.

No wheat/dairy/carbs/meat/gluten

Giving up literally every food is the worst idea ever. My mind just can’t forget that these things exist. As much as we may wish it to be true, “close enough” does not a potato or piece of bacon make. I’ve been loyally eating Special K for breakfast since Cher Horowitz in
Clueless,
and she was able to wear thigh-highs without having them roll down like exploded sausage casings. And now, all of a sudden, cereal and milk is bad? As if, America. As if.

The gym

There is no greater motivation to join a gym than to see a photo of yourself taken from the back wearing an outfit you were sure you looked really good in. No matter how the commercials try to sell it, gyms have never felt like a comfortable and welcoming place for me. No one high-fived me or offered to spot me or explained the rules
about what towels we can bring into the steam rooms. If I’m looking for a friendly place, I’ll go to Chipotle. All of the workers smile when I walk in and say hi, and when I’m building my burrito, they treat me like an innovative genius, like the Steve Jobs of tortilla stuffing. Chipotle is like Cheers for chubby people; gyms are not. And I just want to add, you know, to put it out there, that people are allowed to not like the gym. It doesn’t mean that I’m inactive or unhealthy; I just genuinely don’t enjoy it. In the same way I prefer not to watch Tyler Perry movies.

Become an Asian competitive eater, motherfucker

Aside from not being Asian, I really didn’t see how this plan could fail. You just dip the hot dog in the water and put it in your mouth. I’ve watched many a thirteen-pound Asian girl out-eat ten men three times her size and still shop at Limited Too.

Just kidding; my hands would stink like hot dogs all day. That smell never washes off. Like gasoline, cat pee, or Shalimar in the rugs of the apartment you rented after that old lady died.

My fitness and body aspirations at thirty are different from my aspirations at twenty. At twenty, I just assumed I’d work out until I was so tiny, people became concerned for my health and I’d roll my eyes at them from my Victoria’s Secret bras and Abercrombie jeans. Now I just want to maintain my current weight so I don’t need to buy new clothes. When you look at weight loss, it’s often clothing driven. Weddings, vacations, and high school reunions, all things you are supposed to be thin for. But what if you have
a gorgeous wedding dress in your current size, loads of flattering bathing suits, and a killer pair of jeans? Starving myself has suddenly become a moot point. I have options; I’m no longer a fashion pariah. So where does that leave my weight? Well, unless I’m sitting atop you, what I weigh is really none of your business.

I like to put good food in my mouth, and while I am aware of the calories I ingest, instead of cutting them I make them count. I have a full-on love affair with food, appreciating the different cultures and processes within it. In fact, I take entire vacations around eating. It’s how I remember where I’ve been; I’ve either eaten, thrown up, or started my period without the proper supplies there.

Beignets with my best friend in New Orleans. Too much rum on the beaches of Playa del Carmen on our second honeymoon. Orlando, Florida, the city of emergency men’s tube sock maxi-pads.

You see, these flabby parts aren’t problem areas; they’re parts of a scrapbook.