Before the before, and after the after.
Feelings from a fat person before and after weight loss.
Trigger Warnings: Eating disorder, body dissatisfaction.
I’ve been fat since I can possibly remember.
From nursery school where bullying began with Fiona, a fellow chubby kid who enjoyed biting my arm and calling me fatty, to middle school, when Benjamin would poke my belly with a pen “The pen is gone!”, to being outside my favourite nightclub, sitting on the ground outside and hearing a faint snicker “prepare for the earthquake” from a girl nearby, to being in university and my teacher saying I looked too big and that he was “worried”. It’s been a topic of conversation in my life since the dawn of my time. Being sent to Weight Watchers as a teenager and given a tiny calculator to count calories, being refused new clothes for my birthday because I didn’t lose the amount of weight I’d “promised” to lose, being asked to whistle as I walked through the kitchen to my bedroom, to make sure I’d not quickly stuff some leftovers in my mouth on my way upstairs. Those are just some examples of how I was told from a very young age that something was wrong with my body.
In 2010, I started heavily binge eating. I would often eat a family size pizza and three chocolate mousses in one sitting. I’d end the meal feeling utterly disgusted with myself, so unwell and exhausted. I was 20 years old, and making myself feel despicable was something that I had gotten so used to doing. A couple of years later, something or someone managed to chip away at what was left of my self worth and somehow, that turned my overeating into undereating. It might’ve been something that university teacher said in one of the unwarranted conversations we’d have, or my dad’s ex-girlfriend, who had an acupuncture practice and a fever for all things traditional chinese medicine, and who felt the need to constantly overload me with all sorts of unwished-for advice and comments about how I could “do better”.
I can’t pinpoint what or who caused it, but it all changed in what felt like a heartbeat. All of a sudden, I’d made the decision to cut out all sugar and to half all of my portions, most often erasing meals entirely. I was smoking weed at the time, which you would think would counteract the undereating; however, no munchies for me. If there happened to be munchies, I’d go to McDonald’s and ask for a box of the finely chopped iceburg lettuce they put in the burgers. It had a distinct sweet hint to it that gave me the feeling that I was eating a Big Mac, without the dreaded guilt.
It didn’t take me too long to lose 40 kilos, roughly a year and a half, dropping from a size EU 52 to 40 and going from feeling heavy to empty. I didn’t even see the time pass. I was so determined to punish myself, and became progressively so much more miserable, that somehow I had just erased the concept of time, not even seeing the weight shed off me. I wasn’t keeping track of anything either; I was just floating through time, becoming lighter and lighter as the months went by. And then all of a sudden, I was thin. In my mind, it happened so suddenly, and I wasn’t at all prepared for it.
The words thin or skinny had never applied to me. People made sure to remind me of that. “Wow, have you lost weight? Skinny! Everything you ever wanted right?” — “Hoooooly shit! Congratulations on your weight loss, thinner than ever!” — “Skinny minny! You look so gorge!”. Every single comment, in real life or on a social post was about the change in my physical appearance. No one asked how I was doing, how I was feeling, what it felt like to lose all that weight, what it felt like to be in a new, foreign body. I suppose no one in my surroundings had had any hint of what my internal dialogue was like at that time, because I was a master of hide and seek and hadn’t shared much about it all. The stark difference of how my life was “before” and “after” losing so much weight was inconceivable.
A recent health diagnosis has taken me to a similar place in thought. I’m grown up now though, and I feel like I have a more critical stance on how it’s going to unfold. I’m currently making some changes to how I eat and how I move in order to feel stronger in my daily life. Inevitably, this will lead to weight loss and a change in my body, just like back in the day. It has me thinking of this “before and after”.
Before and after pictures have existed for years, mostly starting with photos of famous geographical locations and how they’ve changed throughout the years. Then came home renovation before and after’s (I love those). Then, inevitably, the fitness and diet industry (to name just two of the industries who participate) decided that the best way to promote products, gym memberships and workouts was before and after images of bodies. They started popping up on our screens very fast when social media came into play, with catchy slogans, colourful gym outfits and fancy fonts. Now, there are 14.6 million posts with the hashtag #weightlosstransformation on Instagram.
A little part of me understands this need to show the world what you’ve achieved and to validate yourself. It’s quite a normal human thing to want to share your life changes with others. However, the bigger part of me (no pun intended) also understands the nefarious consequences these pictures can have on the ones who see them. If you get a new job, you’re not necessarily going to post a picture of yourself, hunched over in your old office next to a picture of you in your new office, punching the air in joy, labelling them “before” and “after”, and post it on Linkedin, right?
The fact that one picture is your “before” and the next is your “after” hints at the fact that there is something wrong with one of the pictures. You’re essentially and unwillingly (I hope to think) telling a person who relates to you in any way, shape or form in the before picture that something is wrong with them and that they need to change. This person could be ill, could be suffering from chronic pain, could have a disability. The below quote expresses the sentiment I have:
The format is always the same: In the poorly-lit before photo, there stands a fat body, usually hunched over, with a grim look painted across their face. Then, in the after, suddenly all has changed: bright lights, perfect posture, and a smile so wide you’d think they’d just returned from the dentist. Time and time again, the before photo serves as a caricature of failure, while the after shows a real human who has successfully escaped the “purgatory of fatness”.
While I truly despise the sheer idea of them, I think they offer an interesting beginning to a conversation about how things go in the real world, before and after you’ve lost all the weight, beyond those two pictures that freeze frame your appearance in time. What happens after the after in that picture? What is going on before the before?
Well, for me personally, I can tell you that my before was truly laborious. By laborious, I mean that the world and the people in it made me work so hard to just be alright existing in my own body. Every single day of my life I’d look in the mirror and try my utmost to say nice things to myself. I spent all my energy on how to camouflage my belly, how to wrap an oversized cardigan around my waist and which way to wear it to ensure it would hide the most. I never succeeded in getting to the point of contentment. Then again, I know that for a lot of us humans, regardless of our gender or the body we’re in, self-acceptance is one of the most tiring experiences, especially when dealing with a disability, chronic illness or pain.
The before, for many people, also includes endless bullying, romantic discrimination, less respect and consideration from academic leaders and peers, lower rates in participation of preventative health services, increased mortality in fat people in marginalized communities, unsollicited weight advice, unwarranted diet advice, medical discrimination, being seen as lazy and sloppy (which leads to lack of help, in life in general), spatial discrimination, lack of size inclusivity, and daily microaggressions. This list could unfortunately go on and on.
The after was as strenuous if not more. All of a sudden, finding myself in this thinner and therefore more privileged body, I felt like I’d abandoned myself and had no idea who I was. I was approached differently in my every day interactions. I would get a smile when I ordered a croissant at the bakery next to university instead of the usual smirk. I would get a “it looks like you need it, enjoy!” when I would order food. I would get endless compliments from friends and family on just “how good” I looked. Instead of heartfelt questions, I’d get statements such as “you must feel so much better!”. I also had a new license on style and had no idea what I wanted to look like as I’d spent so many years just buying things that fit and hid, versus things that I actually wanted to wear. I garnered even more unwanted attention from men. I was now more romantically and sexually desirable and was not prepared for the physical attention I was receiving. I was listened to and taken more seriously by doctors. I got more opportunities at school and work. This was all so new and jarring to me and all I could think of was why I wasn’t receiving any of this in my previously bigger body?
An average onlooker would’ve said “well what are you complaining about then? New clothes? People are nicer? You’re no longer being labeled as unhealthy or lazy? Isn’t life good?!”. I felt like a shell of my former self, and progressively realizing just how terribly the world treats fat people made me feel even emptier. From one day to the next, seeing just how hostile the world was to me, how the mere shape of my body interfered with critical areas of my life, from my relationships, to my larger social life, to poor healthcare and fewer opportunities. There was only one conclusion and that conclusion hit me hard: My body was never the problem.
It’s 2023, and since that time and mostly during the pandemic, I’ve taken up my own illustration and writing work on the subject of body acceptance and neutrality, alongside reading countless amounts of books, articles and papers about the human body, the origins of fatphobia, medical discrimination and in general pieces of writing by fat people. As I tread the path of taking better care of myself, and needing to shed some of the self-destructive behaviours created and developed throughout my life in a bigger body, I’ll be working on new ways of existing. This time around, treating myself with much more kindness.
