Sofie Hagen - Happy Fat

Before you start the book, I want you to do something that I often have had to do throughout writing it. Put your hands on your stomach – or your thighs, your upper arms, your double chin or whatever area on your body that you have struggled with the most – and close your eyes. Give yourself a nice little cuddle. Whisper, ‘We are going to be okay. I love you.’ Because chances are, you will have said a lot of crap to your body in your life and we are about to dig into some of that. I’d love for your body to come with you. If this is all too cutesy-wootsy and wishy-washy and it makes you roll your eyes at me, fine. I can all-too-well respect that. I am making myself a little bit sick by writing it. But just consider trying it a few times throughout the book, and maybe wonder why the very basic action of physically showing yourself and your body affection makes us cringe. We have a long way to go.

So let’s go.

Welcome to my book. I hope you like it here. We are going to be okay.

I was a beautiful child. I tell myself that often. Depending on what mood I am in, I put the emphasis on different words. I was a beautiful child. I was a beautiful child. When I look at photos of myself as a little eight-year-old with hazel-brown hair and eyes and a big smile on my little fat face, wearing a Superman outfit, a tightened fist raised towards the sky, with little chubby cheeks and sparkly eyes, I also think of the nurse who told my mum that I needed to lose weight because ‘it was dangerous’. Based on nothing but how I looked; having done no medical exams or tests. Knowing nothing about my diet or life. I can tell you now, it was not dangerous . I was a child. I was a beautiful child . My body was fine. It was still developing. More importantly, I was not feeling shame yet. She introduced that into my life.

My mother is a single mother of two children. When she told me that my dad was leaving us, I started crying. Through the tears and the snot, I said, ‘Is he going to take my toys with him?’ and, surprised, she said, ‘No. Of course not.’ And like that, I stopped crying. My mum told me that anecdote. I don’t remember it. This happened when I was five years old – the second time he left us. He left after my mum had given birth to me. He came back five years later, made my sister and left again. An unwanted boomerang of a man.

Food control very quickly became a thing I had to get acquainted with. My real difficulties with food started when I was five years old. My sister’s birth was complicated and she ended up in an incubator for three weeks, being fed through a tube. From the beginning, she was ever so tiny and so thin. For the first ten years of her life, doctors kept telling my mother to feed her loads of full-fat foods, because she was too thin. My sister hated eating and just wanted to jump around and play. My mother was then told by other doctors that I had to stop eating junk food and I needed to start jumping around and play. I just wanted to eat.

I had to become incredibly aware of my own body and weight – the fact that I was wrong and too big. So I felt bad; and those bad feelings, I found, could be crushed by eating a lot. I would eat so much I felt numb.

Once my dad left the second time, my mum was alone with two children – one too small and one too big. She had no knowledge of, or interest in, food, no money, energy or time to study it, and a lot of pressure on her shoulders to be a ‘perfect single mother’. She could not figure out what to do. She tried her best: served fatty foods for my sister and salads for me. If she looked away for even a second, my sister would be running away from the table towards her toys, and I would be shovelling her fatty food into my mouth.

I always found ways of getting food. I would go to my grandparents’ house and they would give me as much sugar as I wanted. I remember hearing my mother talking to them on the phone, begging them to please stick to the diet the school nurse had prescribed me. My grandmother had said to her, ‘But I can’t say no to her, she’s my grandchild,’ and from then on my mom knew she did not have a lot of control over what they gave me.

My grandparents consist of my mother’s mother and my step-grandfather. Seeing as I barely knew my dad, I had little to no contact with his side of the family either. When my mother became a single mother, she moved to Søndersø – a tiny town. As I remember, there is one road, a few houses and a school. And a factory which makes crisps.

A lot of my memories from Søndersø have to do with food. The bakery sold incredibly soft sandwiches with cheese, ham and a thick layer of mayonnaise. There was a service station at the outskirts of town that sold pick ’n’ mix, and their red raspberry wine gums tasted like summer. I can still hear my mother scold me, when she found out that I had been buying and eating them even though I was on a diet. At school, they sold bagels that were so soft on the inside that it felt like eating a marshmallow. I think of the food I ate when I was a child in Søndersø more fondly than might be normal – because I am not remembering the taste, I am remembering how sweet it felt to momentarily escape my own feelings by eating myself into numbness.