“You’re so skinny! Do you, like, puke or something?”
A seventh-grade classmate caught me by surprise outside of the band room one day. She was one of the popular girls, and I was not, so it was thrilling to have her attention out of the blue. Until that weird question came out of her mouth.
It was too harsh and rude and specific. But it wasn’t unusual.
I laughed awkwardly and truthfully told her, no, I didn’t “puke or something,” and ducked into my next class to escape her scrutiny.
This comment stands out in my memory now. But I barely processed its weight at the time, because it was one of such a slew of everyday jokes and jabs from people who felt entitled to comment on the size of my body throughout my entire childhood.
I was a skinny child in the 1990s and 2000s, when skinniness was a particularly potent currency. Around ages 12 and 13, kids and adults frequently told me I looked like the TV character Ally McBeal, despite truly looking nothing like the actress who played her, Collista Flockhart. All we had in common was brown hair and bodies people felt entitled to judge. Classmates referred to me as “anorexic” like it was a synonym for “skinny,” without concern for whether or not I might be struggling with an eating disorder (I wasn’t). People regularly felt the need to tell me to eat something, usually a hamburger. (I did. I ate a lot, like many growing kids! I ate with the abandon of someone who never worried about anti-fat bias.)
I wasn’t a particularly remarkable child. I didn’t fit in a lot of places, but I didn’t stand out, either. I wasn’t strange enough to forge my own path, and I wasn’t extraordinary enough to inspire awe. I wasn’t beautiful or fashionable, but I wasn’t hideous or gaudy. I was forgettable. People didn’t have much to say about me.
But they always had something to say about my body.
They commented on how much I “could” eat at every meal, like it was a superpower. They told me to eat more no matter how much I ate. They commented on my body in a bathing suit. They guessed my pants size. They compared me to adult celebrities. They accused me of having an eating disorder.
These were never compliments. But they weren’t exactly insults? It was clear to me early on that thinness is valued in our culture and that I had the privilege of holding that value. But the comments didn’t make me feel valuable. They made me feel like everyone hated me. Like my thinness made them uncomfortable, so I should “eat a hamburger” to change it. Or my thinness wasn’t fair, so I had to apologize for enjoying food without the shame they attached to it. Or let them believe I was “achieving” thinness because of extreme discipline or disordered eating.
Our culture sugarcoats thin-shaming in a veneer of jealousy, the way we protect ignorance through anti-intellectualism. In both cases, being “against” an elusive ideal is a defense mechanism against not being able to achieve it.
“The reason people are angry at the thin woman is because they hate fat,” said anti-diet, fat positive journalist Virginia Sole-Smith in a 2022 episode of her Burnt Toast podcast. “When those jokes get made, they are actually anti-fat jokes; they’re not anti-thin jokes.”
I’ve always been irritated by thin-shaming jokes, and I should be, because people should just stop talking about my GD body. But the comments also confused me. In a culture that demands thinness, why would everyone fight so hard against mine? It’s clarifying to understand these comments as a symptom of anti-fat bias, where people attribute my thinness to being over-disciplined. Mocking a thin person for caring too much, for being so self-obsessed that they’re that thin, reinforces our cultural belief that people have fat1 bodies because of a lack of self-control.
I’ve never faced the kind of bias, discrimination or lack of access that people in bigger bodies face in our culture. I’ve never worried about airplane seats, the weight-limit of chairs, getting a job, enjoying a meal in public, or wearing the same uniform as teammates or co-workers. I’ve always had hangups about my body size and shape, hated buying clothes, been uncomfortable in photos — all standard fare for girls in our culture. But I know my thinness brings me a great deal of privilege, even with its own weird flavor of scrutiny.
Constant commentary about my thinness throughout my childhood taught me anti-fatness without ever using the word “fat,” and it taught me to internalize all of our culture’s body shaming. Comments about my thinness were an ongoing reminder that:
People are looking at my body.
Being thin makes me remarkable.
The first point isn’t unique. Girls learn early that our bodies are being monitored and evaluated at every turn. That happens no matter your body size or shape — someone will comment about something on your body. Your size, shape, height, skin color, eye color, hair color, hair texture, shoe size, the shape of your hands, the curve of your nose, the width of your mouth, the length of your eyelashes — people are obsessed with children’s bodies. I happened to learn this lesson from people telling me to eat a hamburger when they saw me in a bathing suit.
I didn’t realize I’d internalized the second point until just a few years ago.
Feeling otherwise unremarkable and knowing that the size of my body left an impression on people taught me that being thin was a key part of my identity. Without this quality, I would be completely forgettable.
I didn’t notice this belief for a long time, because my young body was skinny regardless of what I ate or how I moved. But I started to think about it more when my adult body began to respond to inputs.
I started hormonal birth control at 17 but quickly stopped because I was uncomfortable with the weight gain it caused. (I convinced myself I quit because of mood swings.)
When I started earning a living wage for the first time, I indulged in all the rich foods, the restaurant meals, the appetizers and desserts, that I’d restricted when I was broke. Unlike the indulgences that were put to work by my growing body as a kid, my body turned these into extra mass that padded my skinniness. I’d never been trained to “watch my weight,” so I didn’t note that change at first.
Then I got my first Apple Watch in my early 30s. It let me count my steps, and it offered, unsolicited, how many calories my activity was burning. So I started counting calories-in a few months later. Apps didn’t make it easy to count calories without setting a weight goal, so I went ahead and did that for the first time, too — while continuing to tell myself I wasn’t the kind of person who did diets or intentional weight loss.
By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, I had the pieces in place for restriction and discipline, and my body became something I could control in the midst of utter chaos and uncertainty.
I’d always stayed thin as an adult, including through weight fluctuations and the natural adjustments that happen with age. But hitting my mid-30s, I was broaching the new territory of being an invisible old lady. Years into it now, I find it to be a blessing, but it was disorienting at first. After a lifetime of being ogled, it’s weird to suddenly be aging and shapeshifting and seemingly unworthy of attention (creepy as that attention can be).
With this new ability to control levers I’d never thought about before, I could make myself skinny again, like I’d been in my early 20s, as a teenager, as the little girl adults weirdly resented. I could reclaim that thing that made me remarkable — and it felt like a triumph.
Of course, it wasn’t. I skirted way too close to actual anorexic and bulimic behaviors. I felt dizzy and dehydrated all the time. I was never not thinking about the food I’d eaten or what I’d eat next (how fucking boring). I started policing a body people had finally stopped noticing — and all the comments came right back. I’d made myself remarkable again.
And, of course, I still never felt good in my body. I welcomed the comments a little more as an adult than I had as a kid, because I felt like I’d earned them. And because they’d been conspicuously absent during the years I’d simply let my body grow.
This was how I realized thinness had become part of my identity.
When I was remarkably skinny, I was worthy of attention. Controlling my body and forcing it back into skinniness gave me a couple more years of head turns and Instagram likes, just a little bit more of the respect and awe the world allots for the effort it believes we devote to being thin, just a little less of the judgment reserved for those of us who “let ourselves go.”
I’m still thin. This is the body I have. But I’ve been able to stop trying to force it to be remarkable. The weight and the pants sizes fluctuate, the padding around my bones comes and goes, my body parts morph into different shapes, my relationship with gummy bears ebbs and flows, my enjoyment of movement starts and stops.
Our culture never stops expecting women to control our bodies and force them into some elusive ideal shape. But as a 40-year-old woman who’s not a particularly public figure, I can attest that the attention and the expectations do slow down. People sort of expect my body to be uninteresting now, and it’s been nice to let it settle into its uninterestingness.
It’s been much more interesting to work toward being remarkable in other areas. All the things I can do with the resources I used to pour into counting calories!
“Women are starving themselves. They’re spending more time thinking about their calorie intake than how to change the world,” screenwriter and author Vanessa Garcia wrote for The Washington Post in a 2014 essay about her experiences with anorexia and bulimia.
Garcia continued, “What a waste of life. I think about the missed opportunities and the unmet goals I sacrificed because of the time and energy I wasted on cutting my weight. If I could talk to my 25-year-old self, I’d tell her, ‘Your time is precious. Get help. Do it now. You have too many important things to do.’”
Since I stopped hyperfocusing on my body, I published a book. I launched a successful newsletter. I managed a political campaign. I was the treasurer for my county Democrats in 2024. I bought my first house. I started a scholarship for my local high school graduates.
I’ve been plenty remarkable. And no one talking about my book is trying to get me to eat a damn hamburger.
Your turn
This is a tough subject to wade into, so I’ll start by asking you to please be kind! I’d love to hear about the ways our culture has impacted your relationship with your body, and how that’s impacted your experience overall. Please be mindful of how talk about bodies, weight loss, disordered eating and exercise might effect other readers, and avoid details about weight, clothing sizes, diet or weight-loss plans, etc.
I follow the lead of fat-positive writers and use “fat” as a neutral term, and I hope that helps release any stigma it holds for you.