I had some really difficult stuff I wanted to talk about, like war and death, and how when I was a kid, I wanted to, like countless other boys, join the military and just kill kill kill in a sociopathic orgy of suffering, and how that horrifying perspective that I had as a child eventually led me to go totally the opposite and become devoted to non-violence, de-escalation and turning swords into plowshares.
But instead, I figured I’d talk about something less intense: fat shaming. I feel like I need like 3 or 4 hours to really get all my emotions out when it comes to military, Bill Hicks, the time I was taken hostage by a psycho US Marine, or how so many of my military supporting acquaintances over the years have openly admitted to me that they really just love death and suffering, shooting and explosions.
Okay, this is bad, a stupid, disjointed way to start this entry, but it’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about war but I’m gonna talk about fat shaming and just force my brain to shift gears. Could have just left this first part out but oh well, this is supposed to be a real and (mostly) unfiltered look into my mind.
Okay, so this one time, I fat shamed someone… and I don’t regret doing it.
So I had been seeing this girl that I met on OkCupid for a few weeks and at first we hit it off and got along well. We had sex a couple times but then came the discussion of monogamy. I was seeing someone else at the time in a polyamorous capacity but I still did not have the confidence necessary to fully commit to polyamory because poly people are just such a small percentage of the population I didn’t want to cut off all my chances, but at the same time, I didn’t want to break it off with my poly girlfriend who was wonderful and very supportive of me seeing other people. I would have ended it with her for the right girl.
But this girl from OkCupid, well, she was overweight and like so many other times, it bothered me, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Like, I wasn’t attracted to overweight people but I felt like a shitty person for feeling that way. It should be about what’s inside that counts, right? I do really believe that, but then your sexual desires seem to be a separate part of yourself that you just can’t control, no matter how much your ethics scream at you. And I was a hypocrite, since most of my life I had been overweight myself, though just a few months earlier I had gotten a personal trainer and was making good progress.
But one night we were texting about our relationship and she was talking about how she wanted to move into something monogamous and I didn’t and she suddenly just asked me straight up, “is it because I’m chubby?”, and it was like something changed in me, and this feeling I’d been ashamed of most of my life, just came up and I had to be honest, and so I basically just said “Yeah, I guess that’s why.” Something like that.
It was like I hadn’t really realized it myself until she asked that question so directly. I’d been in such denial, like no, Kalin’s not that shallow. I see the beauty inside people, but no, I just couldn’t lie about my true sexual desires, at least not in that particular moment.
Well, she didn’t take my honesty very well. She called me a shallow asshole, fuck you, how could you just say something so cold. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”
And bam, she was gone.
I was kind of mad, but I understood–I understood why she didn’t want to see me anymore, but it was like, I was mad about how she’d called me an asshole when all I did was just try to be as honest as I could to a direct question, I was mad that our society demands that we lie about who we really are to make our relationships work.
And I was also mad at my own obesity, and my childhood, and how no one ever told me that my health was an issue. I was brutally bullied as a kid, but no one ever made fun of my weight. Never ever. So I was easily able to live in this world of denial. I thought nutrition was a lie, that I could lead just as good a life eating whatever I want and never exercising and I was able to live in that delusion for my young life because just no one told me otherwise. The fat acceptance people insist that people like me are constantly mocked for our weight and that was not in any way the case for me. People were so ludicrously polite to me about my weight that I just never found out the truth about it until I was in my twenties, and never started doing anything about it until my thirties.
I wish I had been bullied about my weight when I was a kid. Just a little anyway, so that I’d known it was an issue. (No, that’s not true. Bullying certainly isn’t the answer. Frank, honest discussions without casting condemnation or mockery is the answer.)
But this woman was perpetuating this demand that we keep quiet, that we never criticize people like that and just let them keep making poor life choices, enabling them.
After a couple months I had somewhat forgotten about her, when she texted me out of the blue.
One of the most perspective-altering series of texts I’ve ever received.
She said something like this (It wasn’t all one long paragraph of course, I basically consolidated the conversation), “I just wanted to say that I do still hate you, what you said to me was disgusting and I still think you’re kind of a shitty person for it. However, you did change me. No one has ever been that blunt and direct. The day after we had that conversation I got a gym membership and since then I’ve been going six days a week. I’ve lost twenty pounds and gained muscle and I realized that I now feel better physically than I ever have before. And it’s my hatred of you that’s keeping me motivated. Then last week I walked to work, which I’ve never done before because I didn’t want to get all sweaty and gross. Well now I can walk all the way to work and I don’t break a sweat. I’ve started walking every day. I’m no longer a slave to the bus. In a way, you liberated me. Fitness is about the freedom to do the things you want to do, not about how you look. I never realized that til now. I mean, I still hate you, and if you ever try to contact me, I’m going to block you, but at the same time, I felt that you deserved to know that what you said actually did have a major, positive effect on my life.”
So after she messaged me, I wasn’t mad anymore, and even though she was telling me straight up that she hated me, it didn’t feel like hate, it felt like some sort of spiritual teamwork.
And I think about this whenever I see hatred, about how this person who hates me, is still connected to me through this event, that we are still on the same team ultimately, both a part of the same larger consciousness. I think about this when I wonder how I can see someone who hates me as being on the same team.
It’s like, if I sense hatred from someone, I want to try to remember this and remember that everyone has a whole lot of complicated things going on, and that their hatred is most likely very surface level, or may in fact have little or nothing to do with me. That’s the conclusion I want to be jumping to in hateful situations because that’s how you de-escalate and keep yourself safe.
The reason I was thinking about all this was I listened to an Audible Original called The Thin Line by Scaachi Koul, about, I think it was Ozempic, some weight-loss drug that is all the rage right now that is supposedly really helping some people but at the same time has some raging side effects and it just made me think about how insanely deep humans have gone down the wrong path, so far away from what’s healthy, that it’s virtually impossible for normal humans to treat their bodies correctly without using mind altering drugs with really awful side effects.
I ate at Bob Evans the other day with a couple friends after the model train show and I ate fried eggs, bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, french toast and a biscuit–basically all things our bodies shouldn’t really be consuming. There was a couple salads on the menu and everything else was basically poison. And that’s how all restaurants are these days just about. Eating nothing but poison has become the norm in our society. To be healthy and feel good about yourself, you must just absolutely reject society, go hard-core against the grain, do things totally differently, get mocked for it–
you know, and that brings me to another point: I have faced far more mockery and condescending comments for eating healthy than I ever did for being fat. People make gross noises, call it “rabbit food”, ask me why the hell I’m doing things differently instead of just eating what everyone else is. Why are people never called out for shaming healthy people? I could argue that does even more damage. I mean, think about how much mockery vegans have to take for their choices. Mocking people for being vegan should not be any more acceptable than mocking people for being fat, but for some reason it very much is.
Bill Hicks would shit on healthy people in his comedy. I ate that stuff up when I was younger.
but you know, on the other hand, when I make healthy dishes, people do eat it. I make huge vegetable trays and pots of vegan chili for parties and people actually eat it and appreciate it, often times more than the sweets and breads.
Because deep down their body craves it 🙂
It’s like, eating is such a social thing. You go along with what everyone else is doing and with what is convenient. That seems hopeful to me. All we need to do is subtly change the culture around food to something healthier and people will fall into it. The transition won’t be as hard as people think.