Fatty in Every Language

Here's a fact: Fat people know they are fat. We live it every unmarried moment of every day. Photo: Getty Images

I am fat. That'southward probably the get-go thing you'd think when you lot see me. Yous might get past that after you get to know me.

I of my earliest memories is my grandmother, who would produce hundreds of homemade flour tortillas, and dozens of enchiladas pond in cheesy, red chile sauce out of a kitchen the size of the walk-in cupboard of my last house in America. She used to phone call me Juanita Gordita, which means (because of the -ita diminutive in Spanish) "Picayune Fat Jona." I besides remember my uncle telling me that but fat people had dimples (not truthful, by the way, but he was a Catholic priest and I was predisposed to consider his pronouncements as pretty authoritative). I tried to make full in the dimples of my cheeks with Play-Doh but it kept falling off. Really, I was a pretty normal-size kid. I didn't get really heavy until after my female parent died, but I grew up thinking I was fat, and knowing it was a failure of grapheme.

When you lot learn a foreign language you begin with the vocabulary of a child, able to describe the world and yourself in but the simplest of terms. When I learned French I was able to announce to the course, "Je suis courte" (I am curt); "J'ai les cheveux bruns" (I have brownish hair); "Je suis americaine" (I am a female American); "Je suis grosse" — ugh (I am a fatty lady). And fat is a continuing condition, non like having a cold (j'ai un rhume), which will pass, merely WHO I AM — a condition as unchangeable as where I was built-in or the color of my eyes (mes yeux sont noisettes).

And French, I have to tell you lot, is correct. No thing where I live (I've moved a lot) or what language I speak (I speak iii), Fat is who I am: to people who haven't met me ("the bathroom is over there, next to that fat lady"), to people who know me ("yous looked and then good when you lost that weight"); even to myself.

As an adult woman I accept weighed between 140 pounds (and you tin bet that's the number that I put on my commuter's licence) to 267 pounds. At my lowest weight I was hired by Weight Watchers to band up purchases and weigh women each week. On my name tag information technology said my proper noun and the number of pounds I had lost: "Jona — 112lbs."

I was a "Success Story™" for them and they wanted me to stand up there every bit a buoy of hope to other women. Information technology took me ii years to lose that weight. At an boilerplate monthly cost of $41, plus nutrient products (chalky-tasting caramel cookies were my favorite) and branded water bottles and special measuring cups — telephone call it an easy $100/month, which is $1,200/year without counting grocery-store microwave meals, cookbooks, sweatshirts, and drink stir-ins to brand my eight spectacles of water per day more festive.

The leader of my grouping used to call herself a "three-fourth dimension loser," significant she'd come to Weight Watchers 3 times before she kept the weight off. I would laugh along with everyone else just being a "3-time loser" isn't funny. It's their concern model — a woman has some success at weight loss, and enjoys the support of other women at meetings. Then she "slips upwards" and returns to her onetime weight, or possibly a flake more, gets disgusted with herself (she'south "gross," remember?), and goes back. Paying that $100, $500, $1,000, or $2,000 again and again.

And in the concurrently she still feels fat. At that place'south a lot of positive reassurance from social club as she eats less and loses the weight. Just there is very little back up for maintaining the weight, and the praise for each pound she has lost dries up and she realizes she is starving, working out five, half-dozen times a week, and cipher replaces the satisfaction of the praise or the enjoyment of the eating. No wonder the weight gradually comes back. And it's fifty-fifty worse when something catastrophic happens, which it always does — it's life subsequently all.

For me the catastrophe was my begetter'southward decease, estrangement in my family, and my best friend moving across the country. In that location was something within me that was open and desperate, and I filled it upward with some irish potato fries. And so idea I should probably go to a Weight Watchers coming together to put on the brakes. But the truth was, later 2 full years of weekly meetings, I knew everything they were going to say about portion control, and keeping a piece of fruit in my handbag, and always existence prepared — every bit if somehow had I measured out my four ounces of brown rice in a better mode my life wouldn't have fallen apart. I knew from experience that no one there would or could or should help me with the emotional issues I was having. Food was only a relieve. So, fat again, I parted ways with Weight Watchers for adept.

Being fat in America ways you are a problem to be solved and a rich market place to reap. Corporations, which make everything from supplements to weights to diet foods to clothing to the simulated "Enorme" perfume for plus-size women that Tina Fey satirized in her tv set show thirty Stone, fill women with hate and cocky-loathing so they tin brand more and more coin off of them losing and gaining the same pounds over and over. Beingness fatty abroad is something else entirely.

Not long later on quitting Weight Watchers, my hubby was offered a task at a European company based in Holland. Nosotros decided to take a run a risk and move to Amsterdam with our son, who was then 15. I had gained weight from my days of being a before-and-after photo shoot for a magazine (reader, I was!) merely didn't weigh as much as at my superlative weight. In Amsterdam, everything most me was out of identify. My attempts at practicing my Dutch were met with scorn and an immediate switch to English. Fifty-fifty my raincoat — a brilliant yellowish — blared out my presence confronting the sea of black coats and gray sky.

But nothing made me stand out more my size. Every sidewalk, tram automobile, and eating place chair made it clear that in the land of the very tall and very slim I was a sphere, like Violet Beauregarde in yellow, rolling effectually and taking up more my share of infinite. Which is not doe normaal (Dutch for "just be normal, do similar everyone else"). Worse yet, struggling and homesick, I was, to the people who saw me, living proof of their worst American stereotypes. Suddenly I wasn't merely me, an overweight woman who was singled out every bit fat in her own country, simply the manifestation of the fat, lazy, loud, insincere, stupid Americans that they ever knew existed.

One twenty-four hours, nearly 12 weeks after bravado upwards my whole life and moving my family unit to what seemed like a very hostile environment, my son and I decided we would go to the cinema and see The Cracking Gatsby to cheer ourselves up and feel less homesick. We did what we sometimes did at home — skipped dinner to have popcorn for dinner instead. Already flummoxed by having to preorder our tickets for assigned seats on a Dutch website (none of these were cinema-hurdles back dwelling house where you'd just walk up and buy a ticket), we arrived at the cinema. We bought the largest popcorn (which is in fact a production they sold — nosotros didn't bring our ain trash butt and ask to have it filled) and settled in to bask our treat. I felt a tap on my shoulder, which was strange since I knew a total of iii people in the entire land. I spun around, startled, and the Dutch human being sitting behind me said, "Are yous going to eat all of that? I run into why you are then fat."

I hadn't spoken to him, bumped against him, or ever seen him earlier in my life. His words left me shaking, unable to enjoy the flick, unable to impact the food. Why did he experience the need to say that to me? The Dutch frankness they are so well-known for often touched me in this manner. People telling me that I was ordering too much food at the grocery store, or if there was a final piece of nutrient on a communal plate proverb, "You will be the one to consume that, I suppose."

Here's a fact: Fat people know they are fat. We live it every single moment of every solar day. Whether it has a physical cause like a prescription drug that saves your life, but makes you lot gain weight; or an emotional or psychological one; or is fifty-fifty but a deliberate option, we know we are fat. And if we ever forget it for a moment, there is a whole globe to remind united states. And you tin can say it aside, or in your own language — "dikke vrouw" (big fat lady) — or just call up it while looking at u.s.a. in disgust, but we always know that y'all know information technology, too.

I've been in Scotland for two years, where people are mostly a little heavier (and they get plenty of knocks for information technology in the media, especially the English media, who like to poke fun at which vegetables people swallow or don't eat, and who reduce Scottish cuisine to a deep-fried Mars bar. Just really the people here are individuals: alpine and short and thin and fatty and foreign and local and … individual). On our starting time bus ride, the photo of the family advertising using the bus for an outing featured a heavier-set man. My hubby leaned over to me and said, "Hey, expect, we are allowed here!"

Scotland is a chilly place, but people hither will always make a cup of tea for you and will never fail to offer you a slice of cake to go with it. Cake, in fact, is part of the national pastime. Lovely, jammy cake; or lavander and lemon; or pasty chocolatey cake, all meant to be picked upward with your hands. (My son e'er says of Scotland, "They eat pizza similar cake and cake like pizza.") It's hard to navigate hospitality versus healthfulness. And I felt that I actually needed to learn to make a good Victoria Sponge to fit in. Which involves eating more a few subpar ones.

I wanted to get off on a expert human foot with our new landlords when we moved here (of class we didn't, really. Pro tip: Never live in the flat beneath your posh landlords — information technology volition confirm for them, physically, that you lot are beneath them). When I was making a trip domicile to usa, I bought a special toy ane of the children wanted — a xanthous New York taxicab. I delivered it to them with friendly American charm and as I walked abroad I heard the child say, to her non-model-thin mother, "Why is our new neighbour such a fat lady?" Her mother said, "She is a fatty lady, simply don't say information technology." And so, today I'k fat. And American. And in Scotland. One or more of those things might change (like my address) but what really has to change is how many fucks I give about all of this. Here are more than fun facts: I have friends. I am loved by an excellent partner (who besides finds me sexy). I have a terrific kid. My cats similar that I am cozy to sit down on. I cannot define my ain value by the amount of space I take up at a given moment. I cannot speak to myself in that language anymore.

This essay appears in the upcoming volume, Nasty Women, available on March 8 from 404 Ink.

Fatty in Every Language