Why I Chose to Become Fat in 2023
One of most interesting things I discovered while being fat is that people assume they know your story. Perhaps that you always were fat — that this is your life and always was your life.
This is not true for me. I made a decision to become fat in 2023. It was not an accident, or stress getting to me. It was a deliberate choice. The truth is I was very skinny for most of my life. I had an eye for putting on muscle since the second half of high school, when I started dating somebody who was in terrific shape, but putting on muscle was always hard for me, though I kept on with that attempt with sports in college. But I was really skinny for most of my life.
Between 2019 and 2022, I had gotten around 10-15 pounds overweight from trying to casually bulk. People noticed and people were not shy about commenting. Some of these people were close to me. A few people unprompted and without a romantic history told me they wanted to marry me, but only if I “lost a little weight.” As if in revolt, after these comments, I ended up gaining 10 more pounds. I lost that weight quickly, gained it back, lost it again quickly, was back to where I started when people started commenting, and then thought fuck it I do not care.
I liked how I looked, did not feel unhealthy, and did not want to be tethered to these people’s opinions. Susan Lieu wrote a wonderful book, The Manicurist’s Daughter, in which she talks about tragedy and grief in her Vietnamese-American family. She also talks about weight, and the harshness surrounding even small amounts of weight gain in families, despite seemingly opposite pressures to eat up, stay healthy, and not leave food on the plate. Cathy O’Neil also wrote a wonderful book, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, which involves analyses of how people talk about weight in ways that project a lot onto people.
I remember walking around the city in 2023, wondering if I had a secret desire to be heavier, and then the answer was a resounding yes. Fuck the system was my thought. I do not want to be complying in this way. I wanted to be free like Aladdin. I went out in ripped sneakers and a bulky raincoat with giant pockets because I wanted people not to look at me too closely and I wanted strangers to be a tiny bit afraid of me. I was not looking to be very publicly active, was very focused on doing things right with a small circle of people, and was not trying to have a magnetic attractor energy. I intentionally wanted to be a bit repellant.
I did not want to be watched. I wanted to be largely invisible and the person doing the watching from my more ignored position. I also did not want to be watching what I ate or making sure I exercise. I wanted to just let my body do whatever it wanted to do. I did not want to be in a pattern of “controlling” it or making it do something that felt strained and unnatural. I wanted to embrace life and embrace freedom, and if that meant comments from people, my plan was not to care about that either.
It helped that with this negative push, there was also a positive pull. There was a mystery in my pole dancing classes, which is that the heavier women often danced the most gracefully — sometimes by two standard deviations. Some of the thinner women could do it too — but not always. I wanted to know what this secret ingredient was. I was really attracted to what they were doing, and I wanted what they had. I wanted to figure out how whatever they were doing worked. I imagined myself having a circumference four times as wide, and then having to move that entire circumference around. How would the movement be different? I came up with hypotheses, such as wondering if being heavier meant that there were small muscles that learned how to be activated, that otherwise would not be activated (this ended up being real).
I was having a lot of fun. I learned that just as there are guys who would make a lot of comments if you were super skinny and gained just a bit of weight, there are also guys who literally do not care, and would not care if then you gained an additional 50 pounds on top of that initial 10. And then I learned that there is a category of guy who really prefers curvy women and is not shy about telling you all about it. I actually got way more meaningful compliments in this time, from people who cared a lot more, and was already blurring out the critics. I would dress up and go out some days, as exceptions from my belligerent Aladdin days.
About a year later I checked my weight and was surprised by how much I had gained, and it was more than I had ever weighed in my entire life, by a lot. But I very much still felt like myself and looked like myself, to myself. I was startled, but it didn’t really change anything for me. I gained 12 more pounds after that, and that was my lifetime max. I still did not care very much, in my heart, though decided that would be my cap. (The “deciding that’s my cap” somehow worked — I did not gain more weight after that.)
Only when something changed in my heart about all of this did I start caring about actually trying to do something about my weight with any earnestness. This involved a series of transformations about wanting to become more visible in the world, playing with fashion a lot more, and wanting to ally with specific certain other women.
Something people don’t talk about enough — I was not happy in some specific way when I was skinny. Whatever ways I was happy — there were also specific ways I was unhappy, that being skinny did not not deliberately target. And so there was no connection between returning to skinniness and “getting a kind of happiness I was missing.” Whatever important itch that was pulling me away from being skinny was still there.
I was young and skinny for most of my life. I had already done that. “Doing that again” was not a good motivation. I knew what that was like. I knew what being told “you should be a model!” by schoolteachers who have no idea how to actually help a girl with personal development or career prospects was like. I knew what being pretty was like, and being hit on, and being hit on by dudes who had power over me. I knew what walking into a store and every single thing fitting me felt like.
But I wasn’t happy. Gaining weight was some attempt to be happier, in some way, though it is complicated. I was not closed to the idea of losing weight — I even had faith that “being skinny again, years later, might do something unpredictable I will only understand later.” There just was no clear arc for me that I would find what I am looking for, that way, that countered the actual real desire to be what I was. There was no motivation to return to something that I was trying to leave. I knew that I would not be motivated to actually lose weight until I had a vision for the future being different from the past.
My first clue of this new future was talking to a woman, and hearing her assumption that not only that I do not currently work out, but that I had never really worked out ever, and have no idea how to do it and have no instincts for it and am an inactive person in my identity.
The way the timing worked out, I had actually started gaining a lot of weight after an injury…falling down the stairs…at the gym…with a particularly aggressive trainer I was lifting with…on leg day…while both texting my friend and syncing my headphones bluetooth at the same time. I fell down face first and smashed my ankle on the metal stairs and hurt it in several places. And then I did not know that you are not supposed to move when you get injured, even though you will get a surge of adrenaline that will make you really want to move to run away from whatever caused that harm, and in the flux of adrenaline I forgot it was a 15 minute walk, not a 5 minute walk, and hobbled all the way home before collapsing because “I’m not a pussy.”
“I’m not a pussy” actually is pretty core to my identity. I had done water polo in college while being a terrible swimmer, and this became relevant when we played against the guys’ team, because they had no idea how bad I was and different guys kept dunking me underwater over and over. I lasted an entire semester like this, and then thought I should switch to something easier, like Krav Maga. I had done track and tennis and swimming and dancing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and whatever random seminar comes by that I can sign up for.
But the injury did not cause my weight gain actually. I went back to that same gym and that same trainer the next week. I spent some time learning to drive better to go to pole dancing classes in an intense way again. I actually ended up re-injuring myself at least two times, doing random things like running up a set of a friend’s stairs, and only then did I chill out and think maybe I should take a break from working out.
I generally have a personality type that is happiest when I am training every day, towards something, or else I get fidgety and angry.
The idea that my entire history is presumed because of my weight annoyed me. And that actually was a motivator for me to do something about it. I had been starting to think much more seriously about being legible, and about having more of a public presence again.
“Proving people wrong about me” didn’t actually end up motivating me that much to lose weight, but it did motivate me to go back to training, to do body recomp, and to leave my “maybe chill out so that I don’t get re-injured” period. If I am annoyed at not being seen as the person I think I am, I should show up as the person I think I am. I am ultimately grateful to that injury, because the way I was approaching my life and my physical boundaries — I was asking for an injury, and it could have been much, much worse. I remember actively playing with the concept of my boundaries — “I know that I usually set up guards in this way to stay safe — but are they actually necessary? What if I push that out just a little?” I predicted that I would hurt one of my ankles two weeks beforehand. This is the first and only major injury I have ever had, and I consider it a sacrifice of sorts to…something important.
I will probably lose a bunch of weight soon. The reason is that my friends are doing it. I would want to join them in this experiment and show what is possible. I have a positive vision, of a happy version of me on the other side of it, and it involves being drunk and wearing something tight and giggling. And that is something I can do now. But because it is something I can do now, it is something I can do then, too. My life won’t get worse, and actually believing that your life won’t get worse is a necessary condition for change that involves self-creation.