Everything I Desire Is For Me I Discovered Who I Was When I Stopped Trying to Lose Weight

Secondly and more practically, I had thought leaving dress shopping to the last minute would give me extra time to shift some of my ‘lockdown weight’ before choosing a dress. I was still hopeful that the surge in COVID cases would drop, and all my family and friends would be there to see me, thinner and lighter, tie the knot in person. I wanted to look and feel my best, potentially in something less conventional like Toni Braxton’s 2019 AMA performance dress. I glanced back at the princess dress draped over the assistant’s slender, shaky arm and tried to imagine myself in it. I imagined my body stuffed into the bodice, brimming over like a scoop of chocolate ice cream about to dribble over the edge of its soggy white cup on a hot afternoon.

Grimacing slightly, I turned back to the mirror and took in my reflection. I stood upright in my selection, a simple, elegant lace, and beaded mermaid dress. A Lagos dressmaker had already declared Toni Braxton’s dress ‘unsuitable’ based on my picture and measurements, but this dress had the same mermaid cut. The silhouette was almost perfect; it accentuated my almost ‘figure-eight’ shape, my not quite ‘Coca-Cola’ body. The dress almost fit perfectly. I looked back at the assistant’s choice again and she jumped in. ‘No ma’, she urged, ‘these dresses look very nice on your shape, it’s not just for very slim women. Please ma, just try it and you will like it.’ I did the math. My current choice would look great if I could lose 15 to 20 pounds. I’d need to lose at least 100 pounds to look good in her suggestion. I am 5’5”, bottom heavy, with big thighs, big arms, and a chunky middle, although my waist is small(er). These dresses were not designed for me, or with me in mind. I didn’t want to be the fat Black girl in the puffy princess dress. Those dresses were for the small, delicate, and dainty frames of skinny white girls. I had Lagos market-woman arms. They were dimpled with cellulite and flabby, and I didn’t want to flaunt them. In my more conservative choice, with my arms covered, I would look okay—as long as I could lose those 15 to 20 pounds.

I found the snippet in my inbox recently, while going through old emails and shared it on social media. My inbox was immediately flooded by women in the same sinking ship, saddled with years of self-hatred, insecurity, frustration at the lack of inclusion of Black bodies in retail wear, and the widely held belief that weight loss was the solution. Re-reading that email now, I remember being angry at whatever shop I was in, being angry at the designers, and being angry at myself. If I had been 15 to 20 pounds lighter, I would have found something to wear. I had found so many dresses I liked, but none of them were for fat girls. I had never considered myself stylish, but I was convinced that even this sentiment was because of my weight. Finding fashionable clothes for a body that insisted on expanding felt like an impossible task. I often defaulted to styles and cuts I no longer liked and squeezed myself into the clothes that I could stretch into submission. When I eventually found a decent option, I was often crestfallen because it didn’t cinch in my waist as much as I wanted.

My body also felt too big by comparison. I was bigger than most of the people I worked with and in my friendship group. In addition to being conventionally attractive and smaller, my closest colleagues happened to be more personable and outgoing in the office and I sometimes felt like the ‘ugly fat friend’. Being bigger made me feel out of place and in situations where I was treated differently, I assumed it was due to my appearance—a feeling that resonates with a lot of bigger Black girls. This probably wasn’t true as my colleagues never explicitly did anything to make me feel this way, and I find myself questioning why it would have mattered either way.

When I posted my first full body picture after I recovered, so many people commented and complimented my new figure. Each comment confirmed that I was inching closer to the ideal body and each compliment made me feel powerful and in control. I saw clear differences when I walked past the mirror in my room; my stomach was flatter, my collarbones more pronounced. One of my friends came to visit me when I was discharged and jokingly asked me to spread the germs so that she too could get sick and lose weight. I felt smaller and it felt great, but still 15 pounds heavier than I ought to be. At least now, finally, perfection was almost within reach.

I can’t point to one specific source of this particular form of self-hatred and body dysmorphia. I watched Friends and The O.C.—TV shows full of slim, attractive women and my favourite magazines, Cosmo Girl and Bliss were full of photos of models and actresses in beautiful clothes and beautiful places. They were who I wanted to be. Even Superman’s love interest, Lois Lane, was 5’7” and weighed 120 pounds. There was a deep sense of urgency in my desire to lose weight, and the belief that being smaller would make me look and feel better. Who knew that watching shows as light-hearted as Friends could make me question how I looked?

Interestingly enough, I was not alone in this. I remember in my Sixth Form Psychology class, we looked at a case study on girls in Fiji in the 90s. The study observed cultural changes in disordered eating in traditional societies and found the girls developed eating disorders after television was introduced to their communities. Rounder bodies were the norm in Fiji until new media told them they weren’t. I see similarities in Nigeria. With the dawn of ‘fit-fam’—arguably a great cultural and lifestyle shift towards increased physical activity and greater emphasis on diet and health—has emerged an even more prevalent discourse around the undesirability of fatness, particularly in women. But traditionally, as in the Fiji case study, a fuller and rounder body was a good thing. My mother and her peers are 20-30 years older than my friends, and still on their own lifelong weight loss journeys. The need to be smaller has permeated cultural and generational divides, uniting us under one combined weight-loss-obsessed collective.

I decided to try and make peace with being fat, but my health was still a major concern. I decided to start being more open and honest about my feelings about my body and health. Friends who were sympathetic to the struggles I’ve had with my weight and health concerns referred me to nutritionist pages on Instagram, who weren’t promoting diets, but rather a different way of looking at weight and health. A way that didn’t require calorie-counting, scales, or going hungry. I was easing my way into a lifestyle that emphasized self-compassion, intuitiveness, and focusing on what I needed at any given point in time, whether that was food, water, or movement and exercise. I was listening to podcasts and reading books about self-love, self-compassion, the pursuit of mental and physical well-being over aesthetics. I was hoping to find a better way to exist as I am, and I liked what I found.

The ‘Body Positive’ movement online and offline has made re-think some of my views of about fatness, beauty, and the expectations I should have about my size, body, and ageing. Should I exercise to get smaller, or because my heart needs it to function well, and my joints will hurt if I don’t? Should I eat fruit and vegetables in the hopes that I’ll lose weight, or because they promote good digestion and provide essential vitamins and nutrients? How different would my life be if I decentred my weight as an indicator of my quality of life?

If, as a Black woman, I’ve developed the ability to critique what I read listen to and view—being mindful of how racism and sexism translate into human interactions, medicine and the media—why have I never actively engaged with narratives that promote fatphobia or considered the effect of such narratives on my self-esteem, and mental and physical health? What are the qualifiers for love, joy, dignity, and respect, and who decided that being fat excluded you from them? How slim do I have to be to be deserving of a good life? What happens if I’m never slim again? These are simple questions but asking them and sitting with the answers felt radical.

Throughout my life, I have lived in the future and merely endured my present state. In the future, I am finally 15 to 20 pounds lighter and my life is perfect. The future version of me has a great job that pays well, she wears nice clothes that fit, and enjoys healthy meaningful relationships. Future, thinner me travels and takes beautiful Cosmo-esque photos. She enjoys walks in foreign cities, wine with her lunch, and sitting outside to eat. Future me has the handsome, kind and loving lifelong partner she always wanted, and they are building a life together. She can wear the bikinis she likes because her ‘summer body’ is her year-round body. Looking back at how my body has changed over the past 15 years, one thing is clear: no matter how small I was, I was never small enough to be happy. Each time I’ve stopped to look back at previous iterations of my body, I’ve regretted not embracing the body I had at the time. But mostly, I’ve regretted allowing my weight-obsession to overshadow all the other good things I could have been enjoying. Today, I weigh about as much as Superman, one of the strongest men in the DC universe. I am fat. Dictionary.com includes the following definitions of fat:

(Adjective)  

having too much flabby tissue; corpulent; obese: a fat person.

plump; well-fed: a good, fat chicken.

Reading the definition made me chuckle. I probably do have too much flabby tissue, but most days I feel like ‘a good, fat chicken’. I am plump. I am well-fed. I am grateful. I have not lost those 15 to 20 pounds. Maybe I never will. In any case, it doesn’t matter, because my weight loss target was a moving one, and I will always be 15 to 20 pounds away from my ideal weight. What my school nurse didn’t tell me at the time was that Black bodies can be heavier due to body composition, bone density or muscle mass, or that health could be measured and tracked in ways beyond my weight. These are things I am discovering now at 31 in my fat body. I still have my ‘Lagos-market-woman arms’. But here’s the thing I’ve grown to know and respect about Lagos market women: they are incredible. They are entrepreneurs. They are breadwinners. They work hard, they own and run businesses, they are key members of their communities, they rally together and mobilize, when necessary, they take care of their families and put their kids through school. Those arms carry baskets, goods, babies, and money. Those arms earn them a living. Those arms shake hands and embrace loved ones, and so do mine.