How I look is not how I feel.

When I was twenty-three my relationship with my body changed dramatically. I grew up wanting what any young women are taught to want, I wanted to be beautiful. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that it did not mean me and that much was reinforced by my social environment.  I was fat and fat is not beautiful. For years I thought I was so extremely fat that I went to clothing stores and asked not for clothes in my size, but the biggest clothes they had. My mother used to do this when I was growing up, especially with my shoes, she would take me to buy shoes and ask them for their biggest shoes, telling the salespeople that I had freakishly large feet. I believed I had freakishly large feet, it never even occured to me to question why my shoes were always so loose, and even today, I get a little muddled when salespeople ask for my shoe-size. I still hate buying shoes. Funnily enough, I looked back at pictures of myself from when I was younger, and I was not half as fat as I thought, I am fatter now, and I don't feel half as fat as I did then. Dysmorphia is a wild ride, not just in that it makes you *see* a version of yourself that isn't there, but also in that it may permanently distort your scale of measurement. I am not an accurate assessor of my size.

In some ways, that does not matter to me anymore. In some ways. The problem is that when you're fat, people in your life don't want to tell you that you are ugly, so they tell you that they are concerned for your health. Over time, my parents said this to me so many times, I became convinced there must be something wrong with me. It's not that I never tried to lose weight, my entire life (until I got out of my parents house) was about losing weight. It was the only aspect of me my parents were interested in. For an entire year, they put me on meal replacement so instead of breakfast and dinner, I got a chalky shake. Then there was the year of the diet pills, prescribed mind you, to a fourteen-year old, by the most eminent endocrinologist in town. I threw up all the time that year, the pills were later banned. There was the year that I had to go to all kinds of "spas" where they pasted wires to your body and vibrated things with the guarantee that you would be five whole kilograms lighter in a week. There were the three years when I wasn't allowed to ask for carbs in our house, so I was just hungry all the time, but I became scared of asking for food, so I learnt I had to hide food to eat. There was a painful cycle of abuse perpetuated in the name of health. It culminated in a deeply traumatic incident where my mother tried to cut fat off my body, she didn't stab me very hard, but that sentence is ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that she thinks it was *just a joke*.

The one thing my parents hated that I do for weight loss, though? Exercise. They hated exercise because exercise meant I would get hungry. I've been swimming since I was five, my mother hates it to this day because it makes me hungry.  I played sports my entire childhood, they hated it. I joined a gym when I was sixteen, they told the trainer to ensure I didn't come back hungry. He was baffled and I think he felt sorry for me. I took dance classes, *my entire life*, and I hate dancing in public because it reminds me that I have to do it because its only goal is to sweat and not get hungry. From all of this, I gathered that hunger was the enemy. Hunger was the disease I had. From the ages of eighteen to twenty-three, I tried to live on a meal every two days and infinite cups of coffee or green tea. Ultimately, that's what made me sick. My abuse of my body by treating its needs like a disease, made it sick. In this period I had completely divorced my physical image from my desirability. I never felt like I had low self-esteem because of how I looked, I just knew that how I looked didn't matter to whether people desired me. This was the accidental good that came out of this, I became a confident fat woman, but even within this good, my inability to acknowledge my physical image was because of a fear of it. I avoided mirrors not because they didn't matter but because I was afraid of not recognising the person I saw. Ditto, cameras.

The divorce of desirability and physical image was not an amicable one, but it may also have been the wrong one. The thing I needed to do, that I was only able to do when I was twenty-three and by adopting a physical discipline and a lifestyle that was good for my body, was divorce health and physical image. Let me say this very clearly, not all fat people are unhealthy or sick, but some of us, could be, and we may not be dealing with it because of fear. Fear that if we try to get healthier, we may signify to the ones who demonized us for how we look that we agree that we cannot be fat and beautiful, and so we are trying to conform. Fear that the image of a fat person working on their physical health is looked-down upon, I cannot tell you how many times this has happened to me at the gym, the pool, in the hills or on the field, they think it is a compliment to tell me that when they look at me they could not have imagined I would be strong, have stamina, be active, be flexible, be nimble. The problem is that fat is a single-frame image, and health is a multi-factorial report. Conflating the two, confused me into believing fat must be both unhealthy and ugly.

I see now how it is neither.

Fat *can be* unhealthy. Just like thin *can be* unhealthy. There are diseases associated with obesity, there is also medical bias associated with diagnosing the obese with things other than obesity, some of which may be real conditions that actually have little to do with their weight. However lifestyle diseases have a lot to do with *lifestyle* and fat is not a lifestyle. It's a single factor. It is not a moral failing. There are only two options we are given as fat people — either we must be constantly aspiring to lose weight or we must express absolute disdain for the concept —and the truth is, I would like to lose some weight, but I don't want my physical image to be used as proof of a moral failing. Or anything else. At twenty-three, I learnt to commit to my health, I care deeply about my body. That doesn't mean I don't fail at things. For instance, I was doing great until the pandemic and when we were all stuck at home I realised I had spent my entire life fearing rest and cheese for no reason at all. I was able to do just as much work waking up at 7 AM instead of 5 AM and I didn't die when I ate a little cheese, but I ate more cheese than a person should in a year. I want to be able to say that without feeling like I am letting down my principles or my people. That is not an admission of disdain for my body or my image.

Because, actually, the real thing I realised, is that fat is not ugly. I know I should have learnt that there is beauty in all shapes but instead, I learnt that it does not matter. I did not find the beauty in me, it became a non-issue. I care very much about how my body feels, and I genuinely care very little about how it looks. I have resisted this idea my entire life. I have hoped for a time in the indistinct future when I will be pretty, when I will wear this or that, when I will like myself in pictures, but I learnt an important lesson when looking back on pictures of me through the years, you are never as ugly to yourself as you are in the present. I see nothing wrong with pictures of myself in the past. Do I see pretty? That's the thing, I didn't even try to look for it, instead I just tried to remember what was happening when the picture was taken, where I was, who the people with me were. It didn't matter at all how I looked.

It doesn't matter.

I don't even really look at myself for the most part. Other people see you way more. I used to think that if I put on lipstick or wear nice clothes, I would be more desirable to those that look, maybe the loud clothing choices would hide the fat and ugly, but that made me feel like shit about myself. That matters so much more. I care a lot when I feel like shit, not so much when I look it.