I grew up on the Jersey shore. Spending summers on the beach down the block from dad’s store was the only way to keep cool in a world without air conditioning. When I was in 8th grade, I was down the beach with friends. A boy I’d been in school with since kindergarten made an unflattering comparison of me in a bathing suit to a large boat. I went home, took my bathing suit off and essentially never put one on again. I announced that I was allergic to the sun and sand and just didn’t want to go there anymore.
My mother first started me on diet pills when I was about ten years old. In those days, it was apparently considered appropriate to treat childhood weight problems with uppers during the day and downers at night. While I may never have managed to successfully keep the weight off that I kept losing and re-losing, I did quickly discover that if I faked taking the nighttime pill, I never got sleepy. That was the origin of the voracious reading habit I have maintained even now in the twilight years of my middle age. In fact, my greatest athletic feat as a child was to read Gone With The Wind in one sitting. You gotta love those uppers!
Aside from that achievement, very little positive results came of my mother marching me from one doctor to the next looking for the magic cure for my obesity. I grew extremely self-conscious about my body and developed a bizarre relationship with food that continues even now. I never exercised because it was too hard and I felt like everyone was laughing at the fat girl who couldn’t catch her breath. In grade school, my mother shopped for me at a lovely store called Chubettes. In high school, I graduated to Lane Bryant before they discovered that even fat people want to look stylish.
My weight problem caused tension between my mother and me that was never successfully resolved. It stayed between us like the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. We talked around it, above it, below it and sidewise to it but we never really confronted it and what it did to both of us. I think back on it now and can understand that my mother didn’t know what to do with a fat kid. She weighed 99 pounds when she was married and took enormous pride in being beautiful, which she was, and dressing well. She always looked like she could have stepped out of a fashion magazine. I didn’t because no matter what I had on, it had been designed for a fat person and in those days that precluded style.
Unfortunately, my childhood weight problem ultimately led to all the health issues that we are now warned will result unless we do something about it early on. Hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol…I have the triumvirate and then some. So when I read articles about how doctors need to be more honest with parents about their child’s weight problem; when I read articles that say when an obviously obese child is standing in your office you need to call that child obese when talking with the parents and not try to sugar coat it by saying the child is at risk for obesity; when I read these things I cringe at the memory of childhood humiliations that still affect how I view myself.
Childhood obesity is an epidemic in America today. Dealing with this problem is something that needs to be done and needs to be done immediately. I just hope that as parents try to address it, they don’t swing the pendulum from total denial to brutal acknowledgement. Because for all the bad things obesity can do for your body, it’s nothing compared to what it can do to your soul when people treat you like a problem instead of a person. Study after study shows that along with health problems, being overweight can also cause significant social problems from a dearth of dates to a dearth of promotions at work.
My schoolmate on the beach that day probably didn’t have the faintest idea of how cruel his words really were. He was about 13, full of testosterone and showing off for the pretty thin girls sitting next to me. But words can cut deeper than the sharpest scalpel. And there isn’t an overweight kid out there who doesn’t know he or she is overweight and therefore viewed more negatively than his or her peers. Mental health, social well being, career advancement, marriages…all are at risk for unhappy results if you are a fat person in a world that has determined a size 3 is a tad too big.
Being overweight can lead to a lifetime of scars. Sometimes it’s the invisible ones on the soul that are the most damaging.