This Is What Life Is Really Like When You Weigh Over 400 Pounds
I am an ‘infinifat’ person. I prefer this term than the medically meaningless, and offensive, ‘morbidly obese’ most would use to describe my body. At almost 44, I have spent nearly three decades weighing over 300lbs. My lowest adult weight was 325lbs in June of 2000. It took extreme food restriction, plus a lot of walking (I lived in New York City) to get me to that number (from a starting point of 380lbs roughly 18 months earlier). There was also a lot of weight cycling (aka yo-yo dieting) during that time.
My behaviours were far from healthy, despite my weight loss being lauded (by the people who even noticed it) as evidence that I was working to be healthier. Ha! Not so much. I was working to be thin, and if you don’t think there’s a difference, you are deeply mistaken. Thinness at any cost will not make a person healthy, but that’s exactly what society wants from fat people.
In the nine months that followed that one-off sighting of 325 on my scale, I gained 75lbs back. I am currently at 445lbs.
That was just one example of my many years of dieting “successes.” I will never be thin, and I am so done with being asked stupid, insulting, ridiculous, invasive questions about life in a fat body, as though I am an object of lurid fascination.
In an attempt to ‘shame’ me into a smaller body, I’ve been told that I’ll drop dead from a heart attack any moment now (I’ve been hearing that one since I was 15). Bodies that look like mine are apparently a bigger threat than even terrorism! Do they think we’ll all explode? I say this with a certain amount of laughter mixed with derision, but it’s also incredibly alarming to know that a surgeon general of the United States would make such a statement.
I’ve been directly told to just kill myself in order to spare the taxpayers the cost of caring for me and to spare my loved ones – assuming anyone could love me, har har! That insult happened in the comments on a YouTube video I was in. And...
