Two Whole Cakes: How to Stop Dieting and Learn to Love Your Body by Lesley Kinzel

Author:Lesley Kinzel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781558617940
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2012-04-10T07:00:00+00:00

There was a boy in middle school whose name escaped my memory long ago, though I can still see his face in my mind’s eye and I can recall his voice with absolute clarity. He wasn’t an unattractive boy, but he was the kind of boy that girls of that age don’t much look at—tall and gangly with a notable lack of charm and self-assurance. Sometimes I try to imagine him today, twenty-something years on. Does he have a family, possibly a child rapidly approaching the age we were then? Did his life turn out the way he’d hoped? Is he happy?

We had a few classes together: science, math, and my favorite, journalism, which was really just a creative writing credit with a special designation. He must have known my name. The middle school I attended was not small, with over eight hundred kids in my graduating class, but we always knew the names of our most immediate peers. Nonetheless, at some point in our shared middle school lives he took to calling me “Obese.”

I don’t mean he called me obese as in, “Wow, girl, you are obese!” I’d heard that many times, before and after this boy’s appearance in my world. I had been called obese and fat and the names of blubbery members of the animal kingdom as well. I’d also been called ugly, scary, stupid, disgusting, and many others of children’s favorite adjectives for those who stand apart—by accident or by design—in some way.

But that’s not what I mean when I say he called me obese. I mean he called me Obese, as though it was my name. He did it loudly, too, with a cheery, booming cadence that emphasized the second syllable: Oh-bese! Like a carnival barker, like a town crier. Oh-bese! Come gawk at the fattest girl in the class, the fattest girl in the whole world, larger than you can imagine!

“Fat” was not a word I used in those days. It was a word I avoided, a word I feared. I was not fat; I was dieting. I believed the popular lie that my weight was but a casing for my real inner self, which was thin. One day I would cast off my fatness like an overcoat and become my true thin body. Calling oneself fat was akin to admitting one was doomed forever. There is a finality to it, a sound of settling earth, an abandonment of hope, a giving up on the successful transformation, a decisive sadness, a sacrifice of the dream. My size was purely temporary, an accident, I told myself, of my parents’ divorce when I was six.

Something had happened to derail my natural thin development. I once overheard my father, in whose custody I remained following my parents’ divorce, say he thought perhaps my size was his fault, that in the absence of a governing influence, he fed me too much, without my mother around to mete out appropriate portions. I clung to the story for years because it gave me a reason.

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