Once upon a time, I got seriously sick, was bedridden, and gained a lot of weight due to medications. Thus, my inner fat girl was born.
I got better. I’m still big-ish, but I no longer clock in as medically obese on the BMI scale. Guys now hit on me more. And people generally treat me better than they did when I was sick and unable to maintain a healthy weight.
It’s a classic big-girl-becomes-thin story. I should be happy, right? Well, no, I’m sure as hell not happy.
Though a lot of the pounds may have gone away, the attitude I’ve gained from having been fat hasn’t. Nor, you’ll find, has the experience of being fat.
Even if you were confident when you actually gain weight, you see people in a very different light. Your self-esteem as a fat person shatters because so many people actively (or subconsciously) work to make it shatter.
When I was fat, guys who used to scramble to talk to me now ignored me. They hurled insults at me and seemed to think they had every right to treat me as subhuman. When I was fat, men talked over me and told me I was worthless. Some people even didn’t want to be my friend because I was fat.
When you’re fat, you quickly learn to feel like your opinions don’t matter. You also learn that people care more about your packaging than who you are inside. I call that feeling My Inner Fat Girl.
And boy, does my Inner Fat Girl have a lot to say about people now that I’m thin.
When guys hit on me, my Inner Fat Girl will butt. She’ll say, “Just a reminder: he only wants you for your looks. He can’t like your personality because he’s too shallow to do so. If you were heavier again, he’d probably just talk to you to tell you how ugly you are.”
Even if people are nice to me on a platonic level, Inner Fat Girl will chime in. “Good luck getting people to be nice to you when you were fat,” she’ll say.
Now, guys who passed up on me when I was fat now asking for my attention. And I get slightly sick to my stomach. I also get very uncomfortable or even angry when I see people who snubbed me before hitting me up again.
Why? Because they’re proving my Inner Fat Girl right. It’s obvious they want me for my physique now. And it hurts because they knew me beforehand only to cast me aside.
In a word, I’m resentful. Inner Fat Girl lets me know for sure what would have happened if I was not as thin and conventionally attractive. She’s quick to point out how shallow others are, and how hypocritical people are being for the way they behave around me now.
My Inner Fat Girl has an amazing way of making me angry, distrustful, hateful, entitled, and to a point, smug.
It took hard work to lose the weight and now people think they’re entitled to my time? All of a sudden, now I’m worth even acknowledging in a room?
Now I’m worth talking to, befriending, and getting a basic iota of respect? Now that I’m back in a thinner shape, I’m just supposed to magically forget all the abuse and abandonment from when I was sick, right?
Yeah, no, sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
My Inner Fat Girl, on a daily basis, reminds me of how terrible people were to me when I was bigger. It makes me resent people, even total strangers.
It also makes me wonder what they really want from me. Is it actually my looks? Sex? My money? Surely, it can’t be personality, since I had that to offer in droves. Even other guys who weren’t physically attractive turned up their noses to me when I was heavy. How can I simply forgive them and believe them now?
Whether I like it or not, my Inner Fat Girl makes me hold my heart close to my chest and makes me really, truly unwilling to want a committed relationship. After all, I didn’t get a commitment earlier on, why should I let guys “lock it down” now that I am hot enough to get multiple men?
I used to want a commitment, but I’m now worried that guys would leave me if I became sick and overweight again.
My Inner Fat Girl constantly asks me ‘what’s in it for me’ these days and reminds me that all the love I get is conditional on my waist size and therefore isn’t real. What should keep me, really, from having half a dozen or more men buying me flowers, dinner, and having me crush them the way they did to me?
Because let’s face it, love isn’t blind, and frankly, when I had lots of love, loyalty, and affection to give as a fat girl, no one wanted it. Why should I want it now that it’s being offered to me by the same cruel types that broke me when I was sick?
As bad as it sounds, I love hearing guys lament their girlfriends cheating on them or using them these days. If you know what it’s like to be ignored and abused over your weight, it’s easy to see why I get smug when I hear it.
That’s my Inner Fat Girl coming out, smiling, and wanting to tell them, “Well, maybe if you didn’t go for skinny girls and considered dating a girl without basing your decision on looks, your life wouldn’t suck. Sucks to be you, though, cause girls like me who used to be fat got wise to your shallow behavior. You deserved what you got.” It’s how losing weight hurt my dating life.
My Inner Fat Girl asks me, why shouldn’t I just have guys pay me a “thin tax” for the fact that they treated me like shit when I was bigger? When I was thin before I got sick, I was kind, forgiving, and caring with people. I was the type of girl who would cook you dinner just because, and take you out to spas because I liked you.
I was still that person when I was fat, but no one even tried to be kind to me or date me. They didn’t even thank me half the time, even when I went above and beyond for them.
Knowing how I think, I can’t imagine myself in a healthy relationship with anyone right now. I would most likely become abusive because I have that chip on my shoulder, and because I would probably go out of my way to punish an innocent man for the sins of others.
As such, I have to stay away from the possibility of love as a whole. After all I’ve been through, my Inner Fat Chick has proven herself right too often for me to think it’s worth it anymore anyway.
Originally written by Alex Alexander on YourTango
Photo by Riccardo Mion on Unsplash
