the fatness report

something in the italian family culture makes the older members talk about who is fat, who used to be fat, who is getting fat.

my siblings and i stand out as “the fattest”. “even the ones who used to be skinny are fat!”

much more sensitive about this when i was young, i observe it as a social scientist now.  it helped to hear the nicknames the older generation used to call eachother (in affection) “she was the bean pole, i was the snitch. we called him loud mouth. and of course your dad was “fats””

body size was always a focus growing up. it was like a matter of control and honor for the whole family. it was difficult too, because attractiveness wasn’t always safe in my teenage years. being fat was one way to rebel against ideas of femininity that didn’t fit for me.

and i’m a natural schlub. i pick my clothing based on how it feels to me, not on how appealing it might be to others. i was never much of a makeup and hair kind of girl. more interested in what was inside my head then how i adorned it.

the body size of my siblings and i was contributed to in a lot of ways, good and bad. food was definitely a source of comfort, indulgence and love my parents didn’t always know how to show in words and appropriate affection. my mom had a hungry childhood and she never wanted us to experience that. my italian grandma always had a little something in the pot on the stove, or in the fridge to take home.

and i think, being gentle souls, we learned to eat our harder emotions into oblivion (easy to do, with so much delicious food around)

and i think we won the genetic lottery. on both sides of the family, there are some good “resource storers”

i rarely think about my size these days, in terms of how it reflects on my own worth. i don’t have a scale at home. i don’t care how pleasing my look is to others. (although i do notice my own preference, for soft and curvy looking people)

i think about how i enjoy feeling in my clothes. that exercise feels like self care instead of something i’m doing to atone for my selfish fatness. i eat healthy because it tastes good and i want to do good things for my body. i eat pie sometimes because it tastes good and i want to enjoy the pleasure of that (especially having months at a time where nothing tastes good)

i’ve met, for years, with a group of others who understand struggles with food and overeating and emotions to gently untangle this lifelong puzzle. progress not perfection.

i work toward carrying a little less weight because i anticipate a time when i might not be able to move my body around so easily by myself, and i don’t want others to strain their backs.

i know i can afford to let go of the thirty or forty pounds that leave with difficult courses of chemo (no worries about wasting away for a long while).

but most important to me is that i can often now look on my own body with love and reverence, for all it contains, for all it has been through, for all the experiences it affords me.

and when i look at others, i’m much more interested in their energy, their story, their hopes and dreams, than their size. i’ve known many incredible people who are tiny, many incredible people who are large.