I’m fat. I have been fat all my life except for the two times I dealt with anorexia (and bulimia to boot one of those times). My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven and has harped on my weight all my life. She is Taiwanese and grew up with very toxic and harmful ideas about girls and weight, and she has never gotten over it. For the first thirty years of my life, she was obsessed with losing those mythical five pounds (and only stopped when she actually did it). She is 5’2″ and was 90 pounds when she moved to the States. She gained a lot of weight because of her love of American ice cream (she told me this frequently as well), and that caused her to be self-conscious about her body.
I’ve documented several times how dying twice and coming back to life has made me do a 180 on my body. I used to hate it with a passion. Taiji helped me calla an uneasy truce with it, but I still did not like it. I hated looking into the mirror, and I refused to let anyone take pictures of me.
I had to explicitly tell my mother by email when I was in my thirties that she was not allowed to mention my weight. I preempted her by telling her that no, she could not do it under the pretense of ‘health’ or being concerned for me because that ship had well-sailed. When I had anorexia for the second time, her only comment was that my waist was smaller than hers, and it was said in a tone of jealousy. She never mentioned either time that I was dangerously thin (which was most definitely bad for my health!) and all her comments were focused on how fat I was and how it marred my looks (“Your face would be beautiful if you weren’t so fat.” Actual thing she said to me when I was a kid.) So, yeah, no. Suddenly switching to concerns about my health was not going to fool me. She meant I was a big fat cow and she was disgusted by it. I know she saw it as a reflection on her and she was horrified to have a disgusting blob for a daughter. Because she never went after my brother about his weight. She never told him he could lose a few pounds (that I can recall). He was never as big as I was, but he certainly could have been called chunky as a kid. He was a boy, though, so it wasn’t as important than he be skinny to get a man and. Seriously. That was the whole undercurrent of what my mother was pushing: You need to be skinny so you can snag a man and have children.
Yes, it’s horrible outdated and outmoded, but that mentality still exists, sadly. And, even without the ‘so you can attract a man’ part being explicitly said, the mentality of a woman is always better if she is smaller is definitely still prevalent. No ‘but the health though’ glow-up can hide the fact that it’s not about health. Before my medical crisis, I had low blood pressure and was the only one in my family not on high blood pressure meds. I had no indications that my weight was a negative on my health. What happened to me last year was not weight-related at all.