In order to get the vaccine, I had to admit that I was “obese”.

Vaccine diary A series of dispatches to investigate the development of COVID-19 vaccination.

“Name.” “Date of birth.” “Are there any existing conditions?”

“Yes.” I was practicing to say it out loud. “obesity.”

I sat in the waiting room at the vaccine site and looked around the fat brothers as if they were a very sad, sterile version of Hulu’s fat girl pool party scene. shrill..

I knew I was eligible when New York State announced that Phase 1B of vaccination would include “obese” or “severely obese” people. My heart sank in my stomach.

My understanding is that childhood treatment is just playing shoots and ladders in a menopausal divorce until you agree to stop eating. carbohydrate.

I am fat. I am a fat activist. Like many larger body people, I accepted the word thick.. That way, you can buy clothes that fit, not clothes that fit when you change clothes. It gives me permission to go to a spin class (the day before the pandemic) and only worry about trying to beat someone else’s score.It allows me to do Exists. word thick, I have revealed to the people around me and myself, not related to moral or intellectual or health failures. The descriptor. I have brown hair, blue eyes and an excellent taste of kaftan. I’m 5’9 “and I’m fat.

But of all the radical narcissistic coffee mugs I’ve seen, “I love being obese” wasn’t one of them.word obesity Brings me unparalleled sadness. When I heard the long-awaited announcement, I spent three hours in the grocery store wondering what to “should” do for dinner that night. I wasn’t immediately sure if I would claim my position. What do you tell people if you see a comorbidity? It’s obese. I have “obesity”.

People with larger bodies are often told that their weight is the result of their psyche: lack of willpower, lack of knowledge about nutrition, or in my case emotional weakness. After my parents divorced at the age of 5, my pediatrician looked at my BMI and said I was eating an emotional diet and was subsequently treated. Since I was literally a kindergarten child, my dietary intake was largely controlled by adults in my life. I was told that my emotional problem was due to my size, your It makes sense, but I didn’t have many options for health decisions at the time, so I went to therapy. While playing a board game with me, my Upper West Side shrink drew a picture of a body with a prison on its torso. The prison was full of anthropomorphic emotions of “anger,” “sadness,” and “guilt,” protected by pizza and cake. My understanding is that childhood remedies only play shoots and ladders in menopausal divorces until they agree to stop eating carbs.

Each year, I made an appointment with the pediatrician at the end of the school year. Every year, in preparation, I embarked on an extreme diet. An overworked single mother didn’t have to worry about my health because I wanted to maintain a “normal” BMI in the doctor’s eyes. The doctor didn’t actually ask me what I was doing about eating or exercising as long as the height / weight graph data points were on the right side of the curve (which I still see in my nightmares, you know). Street). So 7th grade fasting became my normal. That’s why I made me “normal” with just numbers.

Extreme restrictions and regular seizures of self-loathing “worked” for some time. But when I was 15, doctors told me I was obese for the first time, despite an otherwise healthy diet and my position as an athlete on the three national teams. Almost every day after that conversation, I confirmed that my sister’s Taylor scale numbers were lower than the day before. To reach the “healthy weight” of my height, my doctor eats all the cookies and cakes she kept insisting that I limit my calorie intake and I have to eat I told me I had to stop. There wasn’t much to cut out. I didn’t like sweets and I still don’t. So I did what I could with my limited knowledge of calorie in and calorie out, and my restrictions on food became even more extreme. I just wanted to be healthy.

To be “healthy”, I needed a lot of shotgun diet coke to feel full. After hungry at 1am and sneaking a slice of Healthy Choice turkey, I recorded it as a “stupid fat bitch” under the glow of a clip-on reading light. This classic healthy behavior led me to a BMI in the middle of the “healthy” range and gave me a lot of compliments. No one wondered how it was happening until the numbers continued to decline.Eating disorders affect People throughout the size spectrum, And it has dangerous health effects even for “obese people”.The only hint I had about this was single Grey’s Anatomy An episode of Meredith puncturing the heart during surgery — the patient was obese but had a dangerously thin organ wall due to undiagnosed loss of appetite.

No one noticed me until I became the Olsen sisters. Why did I live on ketchup-soaked carrot sticks and cherry tomatoes when I was 180 pounds, but not when I was 103 pounds? The BMI chart was ugly again, and I needed to gain weight, or I couldn’t play sports or stay in school. This does not include becoming “healthy”, just continuing to try to game the charts. Instead of fasting and taking diuretics before stepping on the scale, I was biting a Polish spring gallon in the bathroom of my clinic before a weekly compulsory weight measurement.

Most of my final recovery meant completely discarding charts and formulas. The last weight I saw on the scale was double digits.The doctor doesn’t really necessary To weigh you, it Weigh This data point goes beyond the theoretically possible preventive care. (You can diagnose diabetes based on a blood test — who knew?).By finding out Weight neutral doctor Rather than making quick decisions based on my prejudices, those who see my health as a whole were finally able to focus on being really healthy (mentally). And Physically). I have been about the same size for 10 years.And I know it’s much better than when I was Diet cycle Aim for weight loss.

But when I heard the good news about vaccination eligibility, the little voice in my brain was afraid that it would pull me back soon. Even a quieter voice liked the outlook. I looked back at my picture of my underweight teenager and at the same time realized that I was thinking about the deep pain of words. obesity Not only did she cause her … but also how disappointed she is now with me. Then I panicked that I was a bad fat activist. Not being able to face the numbers on the scale, I felt it was just one burden from losing the identity of my choice. A number on a scale close to or less than what you saw at 15. Only after all these years did I need to know BMI to ensure my qualifications and I wasn’t sure if I could do that. deal with.

How i reminded myself Problematic BMI As a measure of health, and how it leads to weight discrimination and the perpetuation of the diet and industry complex ( Actively harms the health of large patients).I remembered all the manual work on weight and COVID-19 results Maybe more about the effects of lipophobia in medicine (And this crossroads of abuse With other forms of discrimination) More than about the actual relationship between the virus and someone’s body size. But the trauma I experienced as a result of food culture did not just disappear when I “recovered” from anorexia.

I am healthier than ever. And I’m gaining more weight than ever before. Clinical obesity does not take into account that different people weigh differently and appear to be good for your health. Setpoint weight theory (In essence, the idea that different people have a genetically determined “ideal” weight), or for some, the diet-industry complex is more painful than ever. I understand. thick Not black and white, as I know mine Health is not black and white. obesity is.

As far as I am concerned, I was fat with a BMI in the range of 14-40. No matter how thin I was, there was always a bigger person trying to get out. I can own being fat because I have internalized that it is the identity of my choice, regardless of my weight, and ultimately the identity that gives me more freedom than robbing me. Obesity is not the identity I give myself. It’s a label given to me by someone else I can’t control. But it was worth it if simply calling myself obese made me safer. And more importantly, I realized that was what I could do.

After returning home from a three-hour excursion around the grocery store, I checked my weight. And now I am vaccinated.