I’ve always been unhappy with how I’ve looked, thanks to a childhood filled with bullying and racist abuse. But whereas I used to have an issue with being too skinny, I now have an issue with having a fat belly. A fat belly that I appear to be unable to do anything about because of my health and mental health issues.
Recently, I celebrated my friend’s birthday, where I did have a fairly good time, and everything was fine until one of my friends shared a photo of me and my partner waiting for our train. This photo showed just how distended my fat belly had become. I thought I’d been hiding it pretty well with my baggy clothes, but that showed me that wasn’t the case. This shattered the last thread that held my poor body image issues together.
The result of seeing that photo just made me feel deeply sad and unhappy with myself. My increased weight had been making me want to avoid seeing people or going out and socialising for a while, as I don’t want people to see me as the fat belly person that I clearly am. But I can’t lie to myself any longer.
I had spent most of the evening celebrating my friend’s birthday, hoping no one would see just how fat I had become. This experience just reinforced that worry, because it’s true. I am fat, and I can’t hide the fact that I am fat, but I’ll continue to try, nonetheless.
My partner has this thing where they try to get me to say something nice about myself when I say something horrible about my appearance, which is fine some of the time. I know it comes from a good place, but you can’t argue with reality.
My partner did this when they heard my comment about how fat I was in the photo shared with our group chat. Instead of this attempt to refocus on something positive, it just made me feel worse.
I have become fat, quite significantly, so this exercise of asking me to find something good about the way I look doesn’t really help in situations like this, especially as I hate every part of me. My fat belly is a fact, not an opinion.
Before, it was issues with having a fat belly; it was being too skinny. Ironically, I only need to use one coping strategy to cope with both worries: covering up and wearing baggy clothes. At least I’m no longer hating myself for having Black skin as I did for most of the time that I hated being skinny.
It would be nice if I could go a day without worrying about how I look, because I’ve been dealing with issues about the way I look my entire life in one form or another.
My cousin used to mock me by calling me “tin ribs”. They’d also mocked me for the slight gap in my upper two front teeth. No one else in my White family has it, and I don’t remember any of my White peers having it either.
However, since moving to more diverse areas, the gap is tiny compared to a lot of other people who have a gap in their front two teeth. Nevertheless, at that time in my childhood, that had a big effect on me, and that became something that I’d worry about too.
I’ve also been told by someone I thought was a friend that I’m ugly, mainly because I’m Black. Further adding more things to the list that I have to worry about.
When I wasn’t worried about how I looked, then I’d be worried about how I was walking, how I was breathing, and if my nose was whistling when I had my headphones on. My mind has been preoccupied with this kind of shit, right back to my earliest memory. I’ve hated and wanted to change myself for my entire life.
It’s rare for my mood to change at the drop of a hat like it did at seeing that photo shared with our group chat. Normally, when that would happen, it would lead to a suicide attempt, or at the very least, a breakdown. But I wasn’t suicidal this time. Just utterly disappointed in myself and with a sadness I can’t put into words.
For the last hour or so since starting the draft for this article, which was a few months ago, my eyes have been watering, and I would love to be able to cry, but I can’t. I’m so unhappy at the moment, but I can’t make it stop by crying it out. My eyes feel like they want to cry, but it just won’t come.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow to know you’re fat, that you have a fat belly sticking out like a neon sign, especially when you used to be mocked for most of your life for how skinny you were. It also doesn’t help that during my skinny days, when I wanted to put on weight and was never able to. Because, at the same time, I was frequently starving myself and trying to manage hunger pains by drinking lots of water.
There was a time during my 20s, especially my early 20s, when I would just lie about in bed watching TV and drinking water to avoid eating. But all the time I was doing that, I wished I could put weight on. But my actions didn’t line up with my desire, and I couldn’t tell you why that was. I wanted one thing, but my behaviours would guarantee that I wouldn’t get what I wanted.
When I was living on benefits and avoiding spending money on food so I could fund my expensive weekend drinking, this behaviour made sense. But as I said, I was already doing that, even when I wasn’t having money issues, due to selling ecstasy and cannabis. I wasn’t even selling drugs because I wanted the money, as I’d often spend it on others or give it away.
But when I’d given up dealing and was on benefits, I’d be starving myself to save money for the weekend, which does make sense, as I can burn through £100 in a night drinking, and this is 00s and early 10s money. That was almost all the money I had coming in.
The urge to restrict my eating is always there, but I also don’t want to live like that again. I also physically can’t do that anymore without paying a more extreme price. My health issues cause me to experience something that mimics reactive hypoglycaemia, but my blood sugar can be within a normal range when these symptoms manifest.
I also won’t be able to think straight, I’ll feel extremely unwell, I’ll feel dizzier than normal, my balance will get worse, my cognitive abilities will drop dramatically, I can become forgetful, and I can feel like I may pass out. When withdrawing money from a cashpoint in this state, I’ve routinely forgotten to collect the money I withdrew.
These are really extreme symptoms, but symptoms that don’t match my blood sugar level, yet still go away when I eat. This is the main reason I don’t restrict myself like I used to, but I also don’t want to live like that again.
I don’t know how to lose my fat belly and lose weight without it triggering my long and very poor relationship with food. When I tried going keto, which I started about two months before the first COVID lockdown. I had started to lose weight, and people made comments about that weight loss, but I was absolutely miserable with trying to stick to keto.
I became so fixated on not eating any kind of carb that I was struggling to find food to eat, and I was frequently having reactive hypo-like symptoms. When going out for dinner with my partner, I’d just have whatever I could find that had no carbs, which was often just the starter menu items.
Instead of eating carbs, I’d have high-fat food instead, like double cream keto milkshakes with keto protein powders mixed in. The food I was eating at the time was basically meat, which I’m not a fan of on its own, and antipasti, and that with it. What I was eating had become super limited, and further worsened my relationship with food.
Just days before the first COVID lockdown in the UK had started, I had suddenly hit a sweet spot where I didn’t have any hunger cues and didn’t have any hypo-like symptoms either. Because of that, I didn’t eat anything for three days, and it had no bad effects.
I was almost proud of that,t as I hate wasting time on cooking and eating. And I know I’ll do that again if such a sweet spot presents itself. If I could go without eating without any immediate negative consequences, I would, and I know I would.
At the time, I was hoping I could stay in that sweet spot while going keto, but the COVID pandemic meant I suddenly lost access to food. Because of my health and mental health issues, I, my mum, and my partner considered me to be someone at risk.
It didn’t help that I would also frequently have chest infections that lasted for months at the time as well. So I didn’t dare go to the shops, and it was impossible to get food delivered as everyone booked those up for weeks and weeks ahead. But without access to the double cream to make my keto milkshakes, I couldn’t stay in that sweet spot.
Because I had no access to the food I needed, or any food for that matter, I had to start using takeaways to stop myself from starving. After falling out of keto, I couldn’t bring myself to try to hit that sweet spot again. The thought of trying to get to that state again just shut me down, so I was having all the negative effects of not eating again.
Eventually, I considered trying the keto diet again and got so far as to buy a lot of the stuff I ate to get to that sweet spot, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was just so all-encompassing, making me so utterly miserable; I just couldn’t make myself do that to myself again.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have issues with food. I suspect I may have had, and may still have, something close to avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). As a child, I’d like something one year, and then become unable to eat it the next.
I went from walking about at home, eating a 1kg block of cheese like it was chocolate, to my first year at primary school, trying to sell the cheese sandwiches my mum gave me for lunch because I no longer liked cheese. I didn’t eat cheese again until I was in my teens, and that’s when I had my first pizza as well.
But mainly, most foods I didn’t like were because of how they felt and felt in my mouth, rather than it being about taste.
I used to have no issues with fish, but eating fish fingers every single day, year after year, and finding the occasional bone put me off eating fish. Even the smell of fish would make my stomach turn, although I don’t have such a visceral reaction anymore. I still don’t eat fish.
When I was at a camping weekend as part of the Beavers, a Cub Scout thing, we were all given a traditional British breakfast, but there were several items I didn’t like. I tried to swap what I didn’t like for what I did with the other kids. For some reason, that got me in trouble.
Instead of allowing me to get other items from what was left over that I did like, I was held down by one of the Beaver leaders and force-fed the breakfast items I didn’t like, which were bacon and baked beans.
Before this happened, I already didn’t like eating baked beans, but after this happened, even the touch of them on my tongue or skin, or anything similar that felt like that, would make me feel sick. I even struggled to wash up items that had baked beans on them. It really messed me up.
The beans in a chilli con carne had to be blended and added to the dish; otherwise, I couldn’t eat it because they had the same texture as baked beans. I also didn’t eat bacon again after that experience for about a decade.
This wasn’t even the only time I had been force-fed food by an adult who should have been helping and supporting me as a person in authority. In my earlier years at primary school (I can’t remember the exact year, but it was within the first three years of primary school), because I was a picky eater (something my partner keeps teasing me about), I had a dinner lady sit with me until I ate my lunch (I got free school dinners as we were poor). Because that didn’t work as a way to get me to eat my lunch, they decided to force-feed me instead.
As a result of this, even though I was entitled to free dinners, I was given a packed lunch to take to school. Later on, I would be made to go home for lunch, walking home on my own for the last year or two of primary school, because the racism I was experiencing meant it was easier not to have me there during the lunch break. But that’s a whole other dark story.
Through it all, I think my main issue with food at the moment is that everything tastes bland, which makes it hard to give up chocolate and other junk food that has flavour. If I can get over that issue, the rest will be a lot easier to lose my fat belly. Hell, if I just didn’t get sick any time I tried to work out, that’d also help me get rid of my fat belly.
At the same time as I gained my fat belly as I put weight on, where I went from under 11 stones to 17 stones, I also managed to royally fucked up my posture. Not that it was ever great in the first place. But now I’m developing a camel hump. I’m also doing my best to hide that, and my permanent traction alopecia, and it’s just too many things I have to try to hide. It’s too much.