Hätte ich schreiben können: A long-delayed missive on “childhood obesity”, from a onetime obese child.

“The path I ultimately chose was self-acceptance, and cultivating an appreciation of my body no matter how my appearance may (or may not) change. I chose to care for myself and dig myself. It was a long time coming; it didn’t happen in a week or even a year. But with time I came to realize that it wasn’t my fatness that made me hate exercise; it was the social expectations associated with being fat that did so. It wasn’t my fatness that made me feel inferior to and isolated from most people I met; it was the cultural ideology which dictated that fat people are lonely, miserable, and broadly unpleasant.

Nothing that happened to me as a kid, none of the changes I went through, none of the self-loathing I absorbed, none of the teasing I tolerated, none of it would have taken place if I were fat in a vacuum. None of it happened exclusively as a result of my fatness. It happened because of the culture in which I was living, a culture we all share to one degree or another. It happened because I received, processed, assimilated and internalized the negative messages about what fat people can and cannot do, and what fat people are and cannot be. It happened because my peers did the same and acted out those cultural expectations upon me; because my pediatrician believed that putting a nine-year-old child only slightly bigger than average on a diet was a smart and responsible choice; because my parents, trying only to raise me as a happy and healthy kid, thought that I needed help in order to be normal. My fat was never the problem; the problem was living in a world that targeted fat people as defective, unintelligent, ill, repulsive. If I hadn’t felt singled out, if I hadn’t been utterly convinced that no one in the world aside from my parents would like me, let alone love me, until I stopped being fat… my childhood and teenage years probably would have been very different. Indeed, if I hadn’t beaten my metabolism to a pulp through compulsive dieting during my formative years, I may even not be as fat as I am today. I’ll never know.”