40
chin. I’d even gone under general anesthesia for liposuction. And
that list is not complete.
I am fat, at least by the standards of coastal America, where I
have spent my whole life. At my heaviest of the 50 or so pounds that
I yo-yo diet on and off, I wear a size 16. My body feels tragic to me,
but by the standards of non–SoulCycle America, it is in fact quite
ordinary: For women over the age of 20, a size 16 is dead average.THE ROLE I TAKE ON AS A WRITER IS THAT of an Everywoman.
I can ask famous women how much they currently weigh, or if they
have been mistaken for being pregnant, because that has happened
to me. It would be much harder for a thin woman to ask those kinds
of questions. I know that I am so far from competing with them on
a beauty scale that insecurity doesn’t even factor into these environ-
ments. Instead, I find talking to beautiful women sort of soothing.
It’s time away from my normal feelings of not
measuring up, but I’m also in control, being the
one there to ask questions, to be smart. Know-
ing I am not one of them and not trying to com-
pete is its own kind of power trip.
I have sat for meals with the numerous mod-
els I have profiled—Karlie Kloss, Helena Chris-
tensen, Joan Smalls, Stella Maxwell, Imaan
Hammam—and they almost always explain to
me that they are keto, or paleo, or gluten free,
or quit sugar for their health. (I don’t believe
most models when they tell me it’s all about bal-
ance, with the exception of Christie Brinkley,
whom I interviewed while she ate an entire
pizza. It was a personal size, but I was still
impressed.) I’m always wondering what these women think of my
body—if they are jealous because they think I’ve given myself
license to eat with abandon, or if they’d rather be dead than be my
size. Sometimes I think that it’s easier for the most beautiful and
famous women to relax and open up to someone they don’t perceive
as a threat. Instead, they pick at their quinoa salads as they bare
their insecurities to me. This is probably my competitive advantage
as a journalist, that the very presence of my large body can be com-
forting to them. As someone who is bigger and softer and some-
times a few years older than they are, I can be their mom or favorite
teacher or sidekick. That has turned me into a kind of anthropolo-
gist of ectomorphs. I know firsthand that food and weight are
things that take over a significant portion of their lives, too. The
actress Zosia Mamet once told me over a breakfast interview (I had
a bagel and lox; she had a soy cappuccino), “It’s an endless roller
coaster of that tiny voice, and it’s always present.”
The beautiful people I so often encounter in my job go to
extreme lengths to maintain their bodies. But I do, too. I have
begun to see people who obsess about their weight as part of
their lifestyle as a class of their own. There’s the class we are borninto and the class we strive to belong to. To what lengths will we
go to earn our position? How much do we fear falling from it?
But the problem with this professional advantage—the best
friend in movies is often not as cute as the star, so it’s a trope I
know I’m filling—is that you can’t turn it off. Every time I turn
over my phone, it’s there. Instagram allows me to follow attrac-
tive women who are larger than me in some token effort to reset
my eye to a different standard of beauty. But this doesn’t shield
me from the rest of the app. In unflattering photos of myself I’m
tagged in, instead of seeing how much I was enjoying a party,
I see jowls and a short neck. Or the beautiful girls (who knew
there were so many beautiful girls?) posing in bikinis or high-
waisted denim jeans with no stretch encouraging all of us, no
matter our weight, to embrace our curves, to shun diets, to just
love our bodies—and, by extension, ourselves—already.
Even the fat women have enviable bone
structure and proportionate bodies and boy-
friends with cute haircuts who worship them.
And everywhere, women are talking about
how important it is to love yourself and the
body you’re in. There is a well-known plus-size
body activist I follow on social media. She’d lost
a lot of weight in recent months but hadn’t
commented on it publicly. In an interview, she
told me she was doing boot-camp classes twice
daily because she just loved it so much. It’s pos-
sible that was the truth, but it’s also highly
unlikely. I wonder what it would look like if she
could be totally honest with her hundreds of
thousands of boosters about whether she
wanted to lose 20 pounds and what her real struggles were.
How do you live online as a person unhappy with your weight?
In our cultural moment, fatness can be a surface that denies inte-
riority, and fat acceptance a further denial of this interiority—a
way of brushing off the painful truth of living in a bigger body, and
also a way of compelling a happy performance of virtuousness.
You’ve seen her: a woman who wears a size 14 with an Instagram
grid full of photos showing off her small waist and vaguely artistic,
silver-fox husband. Instead of making me feel seen, she sends
me—with my apple-shaped body and poor romantic history—
into fits of rage and sorrow about not quite measuring up. I can’t
stop comparing myself to these kinds of polished yet attainable
women who are so similar to me that they’re supposed to inspire,
even influence me. Instead, they manage to bring out my insecuri-
ties more than any model or actor ever has in real life.
Or maybe it’s a warped kind of narcissism. I can resent my body
all I want, but I still want to be the only Everywoman in the room.
Adapted fromThis Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers
Changed the World and Me,by Marisa Meltzer. Copyright
© 2020 by Marisa Meltzer. Published by Little, Brown and Company.FEEDIllustration byLAUREN TAMAKIHow do youlive onlineas a personunhappywith yourweight?how fortunate we are to coexist with so many remarkable
life-forms: cave salamanders that refuse to move for years. Marsupials that
die after marathon mating sessions. And a bird so alluring I will spend
the rest of my life in awe of her beauty. Writer Jordan Blok blessed my Twitter
timeline with three images of the sexiest bird I’ve ever seen. “Thinking about
~her~,” they tweeted. I can’t stress this enough:
Everything about this bird is sensual as hell. Her
name: secretary bird (hot). Her scientific name:Sag-
ittarius serpentarius (incredibly voluptuous). Her
lashes are long. Her legs go on for miles. And she has
this look on her face that says, I’m going to peck your
eyes out. Render me blind, you stunning queen. If
you’re the last thing I see, I would count myself lucky.TINY HOT TAKELook atThisIncrediblySexy BirdBy Amanda Arnold(^) To get the best of
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