Skinny Discrimination Hurts Too
Society’s Beat Down Of Naturally Thin People
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This is my story and could be anyone's story who is also my size.
Aniel Lia Love
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‘What people don't understand is that calling someone too skinny is
the same as calling someone too fat; it's not a nice feeling.’
Kendall Jenner
Impossibly Skinny
There isn’t much to me.
There never has been or ever will be.
I am not talking about the
essence of Who I Am. I am talking about my physical body.
This body is rail thin.
Physical development stopped somewhere around my mid teens. It grew tall, but did not
grow womanly. Breasts did develop yet they were the economy size and not the
luxury sedan model. Hips stayed straight and narrow. Long, gangly gorilla-length arms and
toothpick legs finish out the picture.
Skinny Discrimination
There has been and continues to be discrimination against large-sized people and, thankfully, that is changing. The flip side of that is discrimination against ‘model’ thin folks. That segregation is just as vicious and prevalent, and perhaps more so.
I have been called a freak, especially as I began maturing. People would see my maturity and get upset because my body still looked like a teenager's body.
My own father would say, “ You just wait. You will blow up one day.” I am 60 and yet to morph into a beach ball.
.
Scads of folks would look at me askance, survey the landscape and judge it unhealthy. Their thoughts would come flying at me or they would literally express disdain. I thought about getting a business card to hand to those flesh-and-blood projectors that read:
I am not anorexic or bulimic. I am perfectly healthy.
Thank you for your concern. You can relax.
If I were anorexic or bulimic I would be dead by now.
Truly Eating To Live
When one has a high
metabolism and a stick figure body, eating frequently is a necessity. Eating
lots of fat and starches (the good kinds) help me maintain a semblance of
normalcy in appearance. And no, there is nothing wrong with any of my glands,
organs etc. Quite a few doctors have checked me out.
It is one thing to be able to eat what one wants and keep the same body size, but it is another when one has to eat substantial amounts of food to survive. It is a chore and sometimes a struggle.
Some people have said that I am lucky I can eat so much and maintain my size, but believe me this is not the case. Having to be acutely aware of where your next meal is coming from or toting a larder around with you everywhere you go is no fun, no fun at all.
On a good ‘fat’ day for me, I still look like a waif. A good fat day is when I have been maintaining what body weight I do have by eating lavishly for long stretches.
When there is a glitch in
life, when the shit hits the fan in any way and there is no eating or eating
slows down because of inner turmoil, then it really gets bad.
It doesn’t take long at
all, a day, and my weight begins to plummet. It is amazing how this happens. I
go from super slim to ultra slim and it only gets worse from there.
I spent years yo-yoing
between loving my body and being ashamed and trying to hide it. You can’t hide
‘skinny’ in clothes though. There are all kinds of suggestions and styles to
hide plus size attributes, but there are no designs or special colors for lean
and lanky.
I also tried different
eating lifestyles to see if that would help. I went vegetarian for a period and
my overall health took a nosedive - not my size, just my health. During that time I was actually yelled at by
a stranger at a party for being too thin and not eating meat. It was horrible, and of course he did not know that my thinness was not due to being vegetarian at the moment. But that still did not give him license to yell at me.
‘Some people who meet me might think I starve myself, because
there's such an assumption that being
thin involves putting yourself through torture and punishing your body, but I'm just naturally skinny - you should watch me demolish a ploughman's lunch.’
Tamsin Egerton
Lots of well-intentioned people would also try to fatten me up. They all failed.
I became accustomed to
weird looks and sudden, angry outbursts from strangers or acquaintances. At a
convention for a week, one particular woman was watching me like a hawk.
At dinner one evening I was
on my second slice of pie and she accusingly asked me why I was having two
servings. I quietly replied that it tasted good and then braced myself because
I already knew what was coming. Certain tones and questions are dead giveaways
to the rage within.
She yelled that that was no
excuse and I should not be eating that second slice of pie. Mind you, the
entire room is full of people, but her rage got the best of her and she was unable to censor herself. I didn’t reply, just kept my head low and
continued eating that delicious pie.
After that incident, she
would follow me after meals into the bathroom and just stand there. I guess she
was waiting for me to purge in a stall. There are more stories, but hopefully the picture
is clear.
A Freak Of Nature
While this narrative may
seem like I am slamming myself, it is not.
Society does the slamming.
We live in a duality setup
and there are extremes in polarities such as male/female and black/white. My
body and other slender frames are just that – an extreme polarity point in
physical nature and extremes can be upsetting.
The Standard American Diet
(SAD) is one of processed and junky foods, produces overweight, unhealthy
people and has established a new standard for the body size of a typical
American.
The SAD diets dictates if
one is not fat, one is not healthy. If one is not fat, one is outside of the poison
box of mass consciousness and disturbing the comfortable, set pattern of the
herd - therefore a threat, therefore a reaction.
‘Really, I don't care if people think I'm too skinny.
This is my body. If they
don't like it, screw it.’
Ellen Pompeo
As time progressed I began
to understand that my actual physical presence was a vehicle that would trigger
unhealed places in other people. All kinds of garbage has been hurled at me
during my lifetime and that garbage did not come from healed, healthy people.
When I finally realized that
my body was a change agent for others, things began settling down for me. It
took a good long while to get to that point. So not only is it and continues to
be a point of change for others, it has been a significant point of change for
me as well.
So give those runway models
a break. Some of them are actually at their natural body size and healthy.
Aniel Lia Love
©02.20.2014
All Rights Reserved
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