What I’ve Learned About Size And Body Image By Dating A Fat Man

"Why is it that society seems to have the need to dictate how we should look, the size we should be, etc etc. All this seems to do, is give people low self worth, surely as long as people are healthy and happy isn't it better to let them live with out any attached stigmas".                          - Susan

What I’ve Learned About Size And Body

Image By Dating A Fat Man

I thought I’d dealt with most of my body image issues before I started dating my current boyfriend. But during the three years we’ve been together, he’s taught me a lot about size, fatness and self-care. 

How? By being fat and unapologetic.

My boyfriend weighs over 300 pounds, and one of the things I appreciated right away is that he didn’t hesitate to call himself “fat.” Why would he? For him it’s a description, not an epithet. That alone was startling to me, having dated my share of men and women who were far from accepting of their bodies.

I’d like to say I’ve always shared this level of both candor and comfort with my curves, but that’s not true. I can get so hung up on a clothing size that I’ll buy a less flattering but lower number to make myself feel better. I’ve even shied away from attending events when I felt I was simply “too fat” to fit into any of my clothes.

But once we started dating, the kind of fat talk I’d regularly engaged in about myself, usually silently, wouldn’t cut it. Knowing that he’s dealt with actual discrimination because of his size has forced me to ask myself tough questions when I do worry about my weight: namely, what am I really worried about? Is it really about my weight, or about my worth? It’s almost always the latter. When I feel like a failure about my body, that extends into other arenas, making me less enthusiastic about my writing, sure that, somehow, other people are making those same judgments. It’s a vicious cycle, so living with someone who simply doesn’t let himself care about what other people think is a constant revelation.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am vain; when I can’t fit into a beloved outfit I was planning to wear because of my weight, I get upset. Dating my boyfriend hasn’t magically made me okay with my weight’s fluctuations, but what his presence has done it make me feel beautiful in his eyes no matter what, and look at why I might be gaining weight. In his case, I believe it’s genetic; he’s been heavy since a very young age, and didn’t slim down even when playing football twice a day. That’s the way his body is meant to be.

If I felt like he didn’t care about his health, that would be a red flag. But he does; he just isn’t trying to alter his body to meet society’s standards.

I’m an emotional eater. When I get bad news, I want to soothe myself with salt. That’s something you can’t hide when you live with someone, nor would I want to. The fact that he knows I have trigger foods, like potato chips, means he won’t leave them in the house, but also that when I do have a binge eating episode, he is kind about it. Rather than berating me, he lets me talk it out and devise ways to not go down that path next time. Contrary to what you might expect, he doesn’t reward himself or commiserate with food, and doesn’t want me to either. He’s helped me nip my wallowing in the bud, offering positive suggestions like walking, yoga, and meditation.

My boyfriend doesn’t “care” about my weight in the sense of wanting me to be a certain size, but he does want me to be healthy. If I suddenly gained 20 pounds in a month for no apparent reason, he would ask me about it, but not in a menacing, shaming way. I didn’t know it was possible to differentiate those two, since I’d always experienced comments about any weight gain as a negative. We live in such a looks-focused world that those became intertwined in my head, and that’s a dangerous outlook because it leads to me wanting to stay in bed all day when I feel “ugly” or “heavy.”

He’s able to navigate that fine line of helping without butting in because he knows my body issues are more complicated than his.When you date a fat person, their size quickly becomes an “issue” for other people in your life. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked if he’s “working” on his weight. The answer is no. He’s working on living his life and doing so in as healthy a manner as possible, one that works for him. Being bombarded with this type of faux-concern has given me empathy for what he and other fat people go through umpteen times a day, and just how unhelpful it is. To these people, being fat can’t coexist with being healthy, and if you truly want to “work on” the problem it can only mean dropping pounds, rather than rationally assessing how you move and eat.

I learned in the first months of our relationship that size and nutrition aren’t necessarily correlated, even though our culture wants us to think that if you eat “healthy” you will magically transform into our thin ideal. We don’t eat an organic, vegan, totally clean diet, but, contrary to the stereotypes about fat people, he isn’t gorging himself on junk food 24/7. In fact, he’s the one who looks at labels more closely than I do. We do buy organic meat, and have each cut back on foods we found we simply couldn’t resist (his was ice cream, mine was cheese).

We each try to eat a balanced diet and to steer our joint meals on an overall healthy path.Just as he doesn’t get on my case when I stray from my overall healthy eating, I don’t try to tell him what to put in his mouth. I do, however, try to get him to expand his meat and potatoes palate, and because he loves to cook, he’s open to it. Whereas I can’t get enough of leafy green vegetables, he’s much more picky. So we experiment; I’ll bring him recipes, he’ll cook them and be open to tasting them, giving me his honest opinion. (Most recently, this was a yes on falafel loaf, a no on garlicky bok choy.)

If I felt like he didn’t care about his health, that would be a red flag. But he does; he just isn’t trying to alter his body to meet society’s standards. If I could wave a magic wand and make him drop 100 pounds, I would, not because I want him to conform to those standards, but because I think it would make basic bodily functions like walking easier on him. But since the only magic wand I have at my disposal is my vibrator, all I can do is appreciate him for who he is, inside and out, and try to do the same for myself.

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Hate Your Body? Take *More* Pics!

Until relatively recently, that was pretty easy to do. Before every cell phone had a built in camera, before selfies and instagram (follow me!), you could really get away with avoiding photos. Only photography nerds (like me) used to carry around cameras, and it was mostly for capturing the raw beauty of a dead pigeon on Avenue A.

Sometimes the fact that everything gets photographed or video-ed really bugs me. (I can’t be the only one who’s been at a concert and wanted to say to the tall dude in front of me, “Hey, how about putting your camera down and just watching the show right now?”)

And yet, I also see it as an interesting opportunity to reclaim your self image. If you sort of go with it, you can actually use things like selfies as a tool to improve your body image.

How To Improve Your Body Image With Photos

Action Step #1: Take Some Really Bad Photos Of Yourself On Purpose — Whip out your phone or camera, and take a ton of pics of yourself. I’m talking in the hundreds. Take them from weird angles. Make funny faces. You can do this with a friend too. You may even want to do this a couple of times over the course of a week or a month. Do not skip this step!

What This Does: When you take “bad” photos of yourself, you get used to your own image. You start to realize that “good” or “bad” pics are all about angles, lighting, expression and not really about you. (Remember, even when models are shot for print ads, hundreds of images are taken, then one is chosen and airbrushed to death.) When you do this process, you get less upset when someone else takes a less than flattering photo of you. You’ll be less triggered when you catch yourself reflected in a storefront. You may even have fun with your image for the first time.

Action Step #2: Take Some Selfies And Post Them — Now, try to take some “good” photos. Think about your “bad” photo experiment and avoid taking pictures from those weird angles. Give yourself time to play around with lighting, angles, makeup, etc. And then, post those pics! If you don’t want them to be public, use privacy settings so that only certain friends can see them. You’ll probably get a lot more positive comments than you expect.

What This Does: This does two things. First, it allows you to control your public image. You get to put out the world images of yourself that make you feel good. Second, you get positive feedback from friends who will cheer you on and, at the very least, “like” your image.

Action Step #3: Join A Body-Positive, Photo-Sharing Community — There are so many great tumblrs of regular folks showing off fatshion, generally being body positive,outfits of the day (ootd’s), and just pics of themselves being fat and exciting. (And don’t forget about Fatshionable Apples!)

What This Does: Looking at tumblrs like this normalizes bodies that you don’t normally see in everyday media. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to the very thin images you see every day. And you get a wonderful sense of community by looking at and responding to posters’ images. You may find it empowering to submit your own images too.

Don’t Forget This Mindset Shift

Photos are about memories and experiences, not just how you look or what you weigh. When you look at your photos, don’t just scrutinize your face and body. Think about what you were doing, who you were with, what was going on in the moment.

When you’re more willing to join in pictures, not only do you get an opportunity to preserve a memory, but your friends and loved ones get that too. They want you in their pictures. You’re part of that memory. Let yourself jump in and say a big, cheesy, “Cheese!”

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