As a person of size, I live a life of humiliation, but would you believe that the most embarrassing, most shameful thing I ever did was get thin for a couple of years?
I know what you’re thinking:How is that even possible?! Surely being an Austin Powers–style fat bastard like you are now would be more embarrassing than having once been thin!?!And you’re right, daring to be a fat person in the world is a never-ending saga of degradation. Like earlier this year when I was shopping for an online grocery order at work and a woman in her seventies, a complete stranger, caught sight of me in front of the ice cream freezer, stopped in her tracks, and wheeled her cart in my direction.
Her eyes narrowed on my body, twinkling with savage purpose. Prepared always for public humiliation, I was ready when she drew up beside me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Now, son, what I’m about to say might offend you.”
“Oh dear.”
“There’s this program on Netflix, it’s calledWalk for Your Life,” she said, or maybeRun for Health. Either way, it wasn’t a real show, not on Netflix; I checked as soon as I got home. “Now, I want you to watch this program andreallywatch it. Because if you don’t turn your life around, you’re gonna die.”
As far as I’m concerned, that’s a death threat.
And yet I’d rather sit beside that woman on a seventeen-hour flight, smashing my arms down over my stomach and sides so as not to encroach on her precious space as she whispers sweetmicroaggressions into my ear, than run into an acquaintance I haven’t seen since I gained the weight back.
Sometimes I can’t avoid it, and I imagine they look at me like one of those trailer park families who win the lottery and blow it all on diamond-encrusted teeth and nickel slots. They look at me and think,You stupid son of a bitch, you had it all and you threw it away. You had the world in the palm of your hand and you ATE IT.
I think of all the friends I made when I was thinner and how disgusted they must be by the “new” me. In my head, every person I’ve ever dated spends hours every day trawling through my Instagram photos saying, “Wow, really dodged a bullet there.”
But I’m not a bullet. I’m more of a cannonball if anything!
The truth is, other than those few short years, I’ve been fat my entire life, even if my adoring mother disagreed. She always said that I might carry fat on my body butIwasn’t fat; it wasn’twho I was. Like the fat was something apart from me, a temporary encumbrance around my inner,thinnerself. The “true me” was somewhere inside, buried under all that flab. To this day I’m still trying to dig him out.
Not unlike many a fat kid, my weight loss journey started young. I was ten when Mom agreed to enroll me in Weight Watchers. They gave me a daily allotment of points and a book detailing the point value of each food. The bad foods were high in points and the best foods zero. I would starve myself good all week and then she’d drive me to the Weight Watchers office at a local strip mall to weigh in, a few doors down from the Hostess Bakery Outlet where she’d previously taken me twice a month to stock up on discount Twinkies and Ding Dongs, complaining that her beloved Devil Dogs were only available back East.
When I lost five pounds, my grandma mailed me five dollars. When I received my ten-pound badge, she sent ten. I’d never been prouder.
I didn’t make it to fifteen.
One won’t hurt, said a voice in my head as I eyed the bowl of tortilla chips my friend’s mom had set out for us to snack on. But one chip turned into two, then twenty. The voice told me,Today’s a write-off—might as well enjoy yourself and get back on tracktomorrow.Then the next day:You’re not gonna lose any weight this week anyway—give yourself a break and start again Monday!
It was the first in an endless string of yo-yo diets—fruitful in only the most literal sense—that kept my weight in a constant state of flux, each loss of ten pounds followed by a gain of twelve or fifteen. Before I reached adulthood, I’d tried them all—Atkins, SlimFast, Nutrisystem, South Beach, juice cleanses, the Zone—the result of which was a net gain of around seventy pounds.
The summer after I graduated college, I finally decided I’d had enough. It was probably no coincidence that I’d just ended my relationship with Sebastian, my first real boyfriend and an asshole of the highest order. A snobby middle-weight finance major from Rancho Santa Fe, Seb had this super-hilarious habit of prancing around the apartment wearing my clothes with pillows stuffed inside them and counting my calories without my permission. “Tacos for dinner? Between lunch and that Starbucks, you’ve already had like twenty-two hundred calories.” He would snort and rub my belly saying, “If you’re not careful you’re gonna get fat!”
That he was forty pounds overweight himself was beside the point. My problem was big enough to make his disappear. I think that’s what he liked about me.
Sowhywere we together for over a year? GREAT QUESTION. It wasn’t like I found Seb super attractive or anything. Hell, I’m not even sure I liked him. I guess I felt like he was all I deserved. In fact, I was lucky to be with someone like him—or so I told myself.
Anywho… I was a free agent now. But I didn’t feel free. My head continued to ring with Seb’s snide jokes and subtle put-downs. My confidence, low to begin with, was subterranean at this point. If I had any hope of finding a new boyfriend, I had some work to do.
That summer Mom got me on the hCG diet. Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, is a hormone found in placenta that helps the female body adjust to support a growing embryo. When extracted and taken as a weight loss supplement, it allegedly helps convert fat to energy while preserving lean tissue, enablingthe user to withstand an extremely low-calorie diet without losing muscle mass.
Mom had lost sixteen pounds on a medically supervised hCG program at a clinic, but the treatments were too expensive, so she started ordering her own cheaper supplements off the internet. It sounded sketchy even for me, but Mom insisted it was fine.
Once a week we drank a few milliliters of dingy liquid from a plastic vial while maintaining a strict diet of five hundred calories per day—yes, you read that right. The list of approved foods was laughably short: plain chicken breast (three ounces), fat-free cottage cheese (half cup), some vegetables (two cups), some fruits (two servings). After the first month, I was allowed starch in the form of two crunchy breadsticks or four pieces of Melba toast per day. The hunger burned inside me like an ulcer. When I really couldn’t stand it, I snacked on cold cucumber slices dipped in yellow mustard. Positively indulgent!!!
Mom eventually bowed out but I stuck with it, taking the supplements she continued to order for me. I couldn’t stop once the weight started coming off. After a month, I’d lost more than thirty pounds. Sure, I felt weak and nauseous pretty much all the time; my skin was cracked and washed out; and even resting, my heart fluttered in uneven bursts, like a stray pigeon trapped inside my chest. But I was dropping weight so fast I didn’t care, each successful weigh-in encouraging me to keep going, push harder, embrace the hunger.Feel the burn.Those words became my mantra, and I lived by them.
By the time I started grad school, I’d lost close to eighty pounds and was the lightest I’d been since seventh grade. I paused the diet but remained obsessive about calorie counting, resenting the big pasta dinners and unhealthy food Mom served nightly, acting offended if I didn’t accept seconds. “You’re losing so much weight, you need to eat,” she said in one breath. Then in another, adoringly: “I’m just so proud.”
As a fat person you’re taught that no one will ever love you because of your size, and perhaps because of this I’d assumed that simply losing the weight would transform my love life overnight. I’d never really fit in with other gay men. I was too big,too self-conscious. Always lurking at the fringes, watching other people find love and sex and community. But I’d make up for all that now. My grad school experience would be like the episodes ofQueer as FolkI streamed covertly in high school when Mom wasn’t home: a nonstop parade of nightclubs, bathhouses, casual sex, and recreational drugs, all the things I’d been too scared of before.
But alas, I was just as hopeless thin as I’d ever been fat. I’d go out with friends in Hillcrest, the local LGBTQ+ district, but despite being almost normal-looking, I found myself clinging to the walls as I nursed my signature Malibu and Diet Coke, too anxious to speak to anyone, wishing I were anywhere else. Though smaller than I’d ever been, somehow I still didn’t fit in.
All right, so “the scene” wasn’t for me—but even as a boring monogamous gay I was hopeless. There was this one guy, Aaron, in my grad school program who wassooooocute, tall and slim with dark shoulder-length hair he wore up in a bun or pulled back in a half pony, which I’m pretty sure is the sluttiest hairstyle a man can wear, according to science . We chatted a few times before class. He was from the East Coast but a total convert to the California lifestyle—flip-flops and shorts every day—though his accent reminded me warmly of my mom’s side of the family. When his eyes were locked on mine, I felt blood chug more rapidly through my veins, an electric current glistening over my skin. In his presence, my heart hungered in a way my stomach never could.
My best friend, Lizette, encouraged me to ask him out, but I wasn’t even sure he liked guys. Still, when one of my classmates organized a house party and I found out Aaron would be there, I went and—you guessed it—stood in the corner and barely spoke to him the entire night!
Finally I decided to call it quits, slunk out, and was surprised to find him on the front porch, smoking joints with a couple others from class. “Leaving already?” he said.
