05/18/08 Eating Like a 12 Year Old
I was a fat teenager. I was a skinny kid until about 12 years old then , over the course of one summer, I became known as, "Chunky". I don't know how it happened. I ate the same garbage as I had before the gain. Some metabolic component had obviously switched on or off. I was now a kid who had to shop in the hefty section of the department store just as I entered puberty.
I was an outcast in high school. My weight took my self-esteem and as hard as I tried to be part of the high school vibe, I was too fat for cool clothes which was devastating in a microcosm run by 14 year olds. I had a few friends but for half of grade ten, I spent every lunch hour at my aunt's house. I switched from a catholic to a public school in the second term of that same year. I was on the run. I would finish high school in yet another school.
Being a fat kid was an all encompassing emotional head-fuck. There is not another time in ones life that looking good is more important. For all you that are reading this and were popular in high school; Fuck you! There is no way that popular kids can ever know what it was like to be ridiculed in high school. When I was thin and popular I use to make fun of the kids who would eventually become my posse. Ironic? Karmic? I do take some comfort in the equally Karmic turn that those who were the most popular in high school used up all of their glory days' credit early in life.
I'm thinking of my inner fat kid because I recently watched an on-line thread on obesity turn from civil to emotionally super-charged on a dime. There is a still a huge disconnect between the rational and emotional approach to food. To be rational is to sometimes be cold and clinical, a harsh environment for a set of fragile emotions.
I was fat because I ate junk. There were those around me that ate the same but never gained. I thought that this was the absolute nastiest joke perpetrated by a god that I was quickly losing faith in. For a long time, I lived with the conviction that if other kids weren't getting fat and were eating the same things that I was eating, it wasn't my fault and there was nothing that I could do about it. I ate whatever I wanted and a lot of it until, at 15, I had had enough with being an emotionally over wrought socially unaccepted fatty that I began eating laxatives in earnest. I don't know if it was related but my appendix ruptured and I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, one week hooked up to a drip. I lost 60 pounds. I still had breasts but they were much smaller.
I spent the next 25 years fluctuating between 145 and 175 lbs. I was either eating like I always had or I was dieting. It wasn't until I was 40 that I began taking responsibility for what I ate. It took me that long to realize that if I ate garbage I got fat and maybe the best solution would be to just not.
When I was a kid, being fat was the mother of all stigmas. Now it's the new normal. It's probably easier being overweight in high school today. There is strength in numbers and because of this there is little chance that these kids will ever be healthy adults. Having experienced both sides of the weight coin, I have to say that the thin and healthy side is much preferred.
I am at peace with my inner fat kid. It took a long time to be able to tell him that he couldn't have an Orange Crush. He cried and acted out but I remained steadfast and he eventually shut up and I, at 40, stopped eating like a 12 year old.
G
