Remember that really, really long post I warned you about yesterday? This is the second half. To read the first half, click here.
Confessions of a Fat Kid: Myths of Exercise (Part Two)
I graduated high school and went to college. (I know this is getting long-winded, bear with me) For the first time I met people who knew me only as a thin person, and it occurred to me that I didn't have to disabuse them of that notion. So for the next several years I treated my fat past as some kind of disreputable secret, like I'd been a drug dealer or a child pageant contestant. (Except that I met drug dealers and child pageant queens who were pretty open about their histories, so it's a measure of my feelings that I continued to feel like having once been overweight was such a damn big deal.)
There are probably only a handful of people from my college days whom I confided in. One of them was a very close friend, and I still remember that my decision to tell her felt pivotal to me at the time. Her only remark was "So that's why you're so into exercise."
Then exercise transformed me for the second time. This time, I wasn't even remotely trying to lose weight.
I signed up for a local gym. My college town had deadly winters, and our local gym became my refuge from the tearing winds. Sitting in my apartment, I would leave for the gym when I started to feel the warning tingles of frostbite in my thumbs and toes, and my workout would get my circulation going.
I started running several miles a day on the treadmill. One day, I tried a Pilates class. This brutally difficult series of abdominal exercises soon became my religion; I picked up three hours a week. It didn't hurt that my gym was one of those multi-floor, extremely social places: at any hour of the day or night, I enjoyed ogling various well-off North Shore residents as they also struggled to stay "in shape," whatever that had come to mean. I also began to swim several hours a week because my gym had a pool, and I picked up tennis because my roommate needed a partner.
Around this time, a friend invited me to start running with her as she trained for a marathon.
As a former fat kid, the idea of organized exercise - in the presence of witnesses - would once have sent me for the hills. But this girl was no better a runner than me, she reassured me, and we could take frequent stops.
We started going for runs along the scenic lakeshore. One day we ran all the way into the ethnic neighborhoods downtown, and spent hours browsing Asian fruit stalls in our sports bras and yoga pants. Until then it had never really occurred to me that my legs could be a means of serious locomotion, rather than a makeshift way to get around on those days when I didn't have a car.
Returning from these hours-long runs (the furthest I ever went was 10 miles, but that was pretty damn far) I'd savor the bone-deep aches in my muscles, knees and soles. I felt like I'd triumphed over my body but also, weirdly, over my mind. These runs were followed by bouts of hormonal euphoria, and I became addicted to that high, as well as to being able to feel the blood coursing through every vein in the surface of my skin.
And, predictably, I began to lose weight. I went from being a normal thin person to an extremely thin person. Because I'm short, this quickly became a problem. I was literally too small to shop at Express, Banana Republic, Gap and many other mainstream American stores. I still remember trying on a short skirt at Ann Taylor Loft. It was a size 00P (a size that, by the laws of physics, probably shouldn't even exist) and handing it back to the salesgirl to ask if they had "anything smaller." The look on her face wasn't hatred so much as glee, "You should shop in the children's section!" she chirped.
Yes. As a kid, I'd been forced to shop in the juniors section. As an adult, I was being told to go back to the kids'.
But it still took me a while to realize how much weight I had lost. It wasn't until I was at Forever 21 (As I reread this, I really worry about the places I used to shop) with two sorority sisters that this fact became clear. I needed to try on a pair of capris and one of my sisters - a tiny, tiny Asian girl - handed me hers.
"I'll never fit your pants!" I gasped. I was right; her pants were loose on me.
"You look like the models on the Victoria's Secret website," one of my sorority sisters sighed. (Okay, okay, this last may have been hyperbolic.)
The few men I knew weren't quite so enthusiastic. One of the key facts about exercise-induced weight loss is that not every woman loses weight from what an observer - steeped in fashion images and advertisements, anyway - might consider to be the right places. I was just thin all over. This made me pretty happy, though. My residual anxieties about boys had hung around far longer than was justifiable or cool, and being really thin became another way to hide from a sexual identity that I still didn't feel like I fully owned.
Of course, I graduated from college too, and eventually I moved back to Washington DC. Six months later, I moved to India.
In India, once again, I had the chance to recreate myself. Just like in college, I didn't talk a lot about being a fat kid. But this time, it was because it had been five years. I was finally beginning to realize that I was who I was. Being slim didn't seem like a disguise I'd put on for an evening, being fat didn't seem like a disgraceful fate. In fact, as I started working a full-time job in earnest, other anxieties came to define me. In another ten years, perhaps these anxieties will seem just as remote, or at least I hope so.
It's been eight years since I stopped being a fat kid. I now look roughly like I did when I first started college, except older, and I honestly believe that I am perfect. It's taken me nearly a decade to relearn what I once took for granted: nobody else can tell me how I should look or whom I should be.
But I can't hate on exercise. It can change your shape completely. There was a time, back when I was a lot younger, that I thought being thin would change my internal landscape as well; it would transform me into the beautiful, confident, desirable woman who would frequently appear in my dreams of my future self. I am only now beginning to realize that I can be this woman, but that to become her is a choice, not a set of circumstances. But exercise has offered me a lot of great things anyway: euphoria, power, strength, confidence in my physicality, the illusion of a control that isn't really an illusion, the recognition that the body is more than the sum of its parts, more in fact than the sum of what other people think about its parts. In that sense, it has been transformative for me.
Confessions of a Fat Kid: Myths of Exercise (Part Two)
I graduated high school and went to college. (I know this is getting long-winded, bear with me) For the first time I met people who knew me only as a thin person, and it occurred to me that I didn't have to disabuse them of that notion. So for the next several years I treated my fat past as some kind of disreputable secret, like I'd been a drug dealer or a child pageant contestant. (Except that I met drug dealers and child pageant queens who were pretty open about their histories, so it's a measure of my feelings that I continued to feel like having once been overweight was such a damn big deal.)
There are probably only a handful of people from my college days whom I confided in. One of them was a very close friend, and I still remember that my decision to tell her felt pivotal to me at the time. Her only remark was "So that's why you're so into exercise."
Then exercise transformed me for the second time. This time, I wasn't even remotely trying to lose weight.
I signed up for a local gym. My college town had deadly winters, and our local gym became my refuge from the tearing winds. Sitting in my apartment, I would leave for the gym when I started to feel the warning tingles of frostbite in my thumbs and toes, and my workout would get my circulation going.
I started running several miles a day on the treadmill. One day, I tried a Pilates class. This brutally difficult series of abdominal exercises soon became my religion; I picked up three hours a week. It didn't hurt that my gym was one of those multi-floor, extremely social places: at any hour of the day or night, I enjoyed ogling various well-off North Shore residents as they also struggled to stay "in shape," whatever that had come to mean. I also began to swim several hours a week because my gym had a pool, and I picked up tennis because my roommate needed a partner.
Around this time, a friend invited me to start running with her as she trained for a marathon.
As a former fat kid, the idea of organized exercise - in the presence of witnesses - would once have sent me for the hills. But this girl was no better a runner than me, she reassured me, and we could take frequent stops.
We started going for runs along the scenic lakeshore. One day we ran all the way into the ethnic neighborhoods downtown, and spent hours browsing Asian fruit stalls in our sports bras and yoga pants. Until then it had never really occurred to me that my legs could be a means of serious locomotion, rather than a makeshift way to get around on those days when I didn't have a car.
Returning from these hours-long runs (the furthest I ever went was 10 miles, but that was pretty damn far) I'd savor the bone-deep aches in my muscles, knees and soles. I felt like I'd triumphed over my body but also, weirdly, over my mind. These runs were followed by bouts of hormonal euphoria, and I became addicted to that high, as well as to being able to feel the blood coursing through every vein in the surface of my skin.
And, predictably, I began to lose weight. I went from being a normal thin person to an extremely thin person. Because I'm short, this quickly became a problem. I was literally too small to shop at Express, Banana Republic, Gap and many other mainstream American stores. I still remember trying on a short skirt at Ann Taylor Loft. It was a size 00P (a size that, by the laws of physics, probably shouldn't even exist) and handing it back to the salesgirl to ask if they had "anything smaller." The look on her face wasn't hatred so much as glee, "You should shop in the children's section!" she chirped.
Yes. As a kid, I'd been forced to shop in the juniors section. As an adult, I was being told to go back to the kids'.
But it still took me a while to realize how much weight I had lost. It wasn't until I was at Forever 21 (As I reread this, I really worry about the places I used to shop) with two sorority sisters that this fact became clear. I needed to try on a pair of capris and one of my sisters - a tiny, tiny Asian girl - handed me hers.
"I'll never fit your pants!" I gasped. I was right; her pants were loose on me.
"You look like the models on the Victoria's Secret website," one of my sorority sisters sighed. (Okay, okay, this last may have been hyperbolic.)
The few men I knew weren't quite so enthusiastic. One of the key facts about exercise-induced weight loss is that not every woman loses weight from what an observer - steeped in fashion images and advertisements, anyway - might consider to be the right places. I was just thin all over. This made me pretty happy, though. My residual anxieties about boys had hung around far longer than was justifiable or cool, and being really thin became another way to hide from a sexual identity that I still didn't feel like I fully owned.
Of course, I graduated from college too, and eventually I moved back to Washington DC. Six months later, I moved to India.
In India, once again, I had the chance to recreate myself. Just like in college, I didn't talk a lot about being a fat kid. But this time, it was because it had been five years. I was finally beginning to realize that I was who I was. Being slim didn't seem like a disguise I'd put on for an evening, being fat didn't seem like a disgraceful fate. In fact, as I started working a full-time job in earnest, other anxieties came to define me. In another ten years, perhaps these anxieties will seem just as remote, or at least I hope so.
It's been eight years since I stopped being a fat kid. I now look roughly like I did when I first started college, except older, and I honestly believe that I am perfect. It's taken me nearly a decade to relearn what I once took for granted: nobody else can tell me how I should look or whom I should be.
But I can't hate on exercise. It can change your shape completely. There was a time, back when I was a lot younger, that I thought being thin would change my internal landscape as well; it would transform me into the beautiful, confident, desirable woman who would frequently appear in my dreams of my future self. I am only now beginning to realize that I can be this woman, but that to become her is a choice, not a set of circumstances. But exercise has offered me a lot of great things anyway: euphoria, power, strength, confidence in my physicality, the illusion of a control that isn't really an illusion, the recognition that the body is more than the sum of its parts, more in fact than the sum of what other people think about its parts. In that sense, it has been transformative for me.
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