Sofie Hagen - Happy Fat

Self-loathing is such a strong feeling. Hating your entire self – both your body and your own inability to change your body – leaves you with very little. Existence is suddenly quite difficult. Being able to pinpoint one of the causes for those negative feelings is almost freeing. It leads you to fantasise about going to old ladies’ houses and screaming obscenities at them because of something that happened over twenty years ago. From a more objective and empathetic viewpoint, my old PE teacher seems to have had issues of her own. Fatphobia is prevalent in society and she was taught to hate fatness as much as my doctors, my bullies and my mother. Fatphobia is ingrained in us from the moment we are old enough to understand what happens around us. And we will continue to pass it on if it isn’t challenged.

Research from Common Sense Media showed that half of girls and one third of boys as young as six to eight years old, feel that their ideal body is thinner than they are. Children as young as five are unhappy with their bodies. Five- to eight-year olds who think their mothers are dissatisfied with their bodies are more likely to feel dissatisfied with their own bodies. 1An article in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in 2000 stated that body size stigmatism was clearly present in three-year-olds and that ‘the cultural stereotype that “fat is bad” was pervasive across gender, regardless of the child’s own body build . ’ 2

My relationship with my body only became more distorted throughout my teen years. It became a routine. I would start a new diet on a Monday and the adrenaline of thinking, Finally, I will lose weight , carried me through the hunger and desperation to eat for a couple of days – maybe even weeks, until I had to give up and binge-eat till I crushed the disappointment in myself. I would then wait till next Monday and start again on a new diet. With each failed diet, I would blame myself, I truly believed that my incapability of following a diet was a sign of absolute weakness, laziness and stupidity. Also, I was still fat. Which I believed to be the worst thing a person could be.

Finding a new diet was a rush. I remember finding out that Dr Phil’s son Jay McGraw had a diet book on the market and punching the air. I tried the Atkins Diet, the Atkinson Diet, SlimFast (a disgusting brown powder you mixed into a drink in place of every meal), the Thinking Diet (‘you will lose weight if only you THINK differently’), 5-2 Diet (‘binge then starve yourself’), Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the ‘just don’t eat after 5 p.m.’ diet, the ‘only eat fruit till 2 p.m.’ diet, the ‘no carbs’ diet and so, so many more. I found thirty-two diet books in my mother’s basement recently, like a creepy shrine to thin ‘health gurus’ with teeth that are too white. I tried karate, swimming lessons, running, spinning, tennis, badminton, dance classes, power walking, Pilates, aerobics … I have owned exercise bikes, Pilates balls, step-benches and every single exercise VHS ever made. When I was sixteen, exhausted from always being either starving or numbingly full, I tried throwing up after I ate. I purposely tried to trigger bulimia, knowing full well that this was a terribly dangerous illness. I reached that point . Where, even though I knew full well that eating disorders can have awful consequences, often resulting in bodies that will never be able to have children, which will always struggle with health issues and food, and which sometimes just die – all of this seemed like a better option than staying fat.

I started going to the gym four times a week. I got up at 4 a.m. to be at the gym at 6 a.m., exercise for an hour and then go to school at 8 a.m. On the way there, I would feel so faint from my breakfast apple that I went by the bakery and bought myself a huge cinnamon bun and a chocolate milk. I would spend the rest of the day sleeping through maths class dreaming about the pizza that I would definitely have to binge afterwards.

The irony of me attempting to get an eating disorder is not lost on me. When I was eighteen, I learned about binge eating disorder. The reason that no one knew about it was that it was not officially registered as an eating disorder in Denmark at this point. I was mostly just relieved. There was a word for it. There was a word for me stuffing my face with carbs and sugar on a daily basis. Knowing the word didn’t stop me though. It just made me feel less guilty. I continued bingeing and I continued dieting.

Throughout my teens, I was angry but my anger was misplaced. I hated beautiful people. The self-hatred, the hatred of my body and how it existed in the world had turned so strong that I needed to project it elsewhere, or I would suffocate. So I turned my anger towards thin and conventionally beautiful people. I could just about forgive someone for being thin and beautiful – but not unless they were really ashamed of this. Ideally, every thin person at my school should have to walk up to me every morning and apologise for being handed better cards than me. They could at least pity me and acknowledge that I was trying really hard to look like them.

When I was seventeen, for Danish class, we had to analyse Sleeping Beauty . I unleashed all of my fury onto this fairy tale. I wrote about Sleeping Beauty and how she – and all other thin, beauty-privileged, empty skin-vessels – could just go suck on a massive ham and shut up. I wrote something along the lines of, ‘Beautiful people can apparently just be sleeping and still get more attention than ugly people – what have we got to do, learn to juggle? fn4The end.’

Their pain was nothing, nothing, I tell you. I was punished with an extra assignment to write an essay. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I nearly spat in the teacher’s face when she assigned it.

I was furious. I stomped my feet when I left the classroom. Slammed the door. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I was prepared to write the word ‘NON-EXISTENT’ three thousand times on a piece of paper and hand it in. But if there was anything I hated more than beautiful women, it was getting a poor grade.

I sat down and opened MSN Messenger. fn5I messaged all the beautiful people I knew. Sandy, who was a model. She was my age and once told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. I had laughed in her face. Great joke, Sandy. Have you not seen how I look next to you? She would be the first of quite a few models I would reject because I felt unworthy of their genitals touching mine. fn6 fn7I messaged someone I knew from an internet forum. A guy with sturdy cheekbones. A few more.

‘What is the disadvantage of being beautiful?’ I asked all of them. And waited. They were surprisingly reluctant to reply, but none of them claimed not to be beautiful.

‘The worst thing,’ one of the beautiful people on my MSN Messenger chat list wrote to me, ‘is that women never become my friends just to be my friends. They always end up falling in love with me. And then I have to hurt them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s really painful. I just love these women but not like that. And that hurts them.’

I wanted to object, but he had answered with such vulnerability and sincerity that I couldn’t help sympathising with him. Had he burst through my front door with a sign that said ‘pity me’ and had told me the same story, I probably would have wanted to push him out of a window. But I had begged him to share his feelings on the topic. These were not thoughts he ever shared with anyone. He knew how it sounded.

‘People always assume I am unintelligent. I am not taken seriously,’ someone else said.