Chapter 4: The Point of No Return

One night, towards the end of that year, I went out to a party with some of my friends and we ended up talking to this group of guys. They were cute, and me and my friends were all terrible flirts when we got drunk, so we were definitely leading them on. After a while we all kind of paired off, and I ended up making out with this guy on the couch. During our alcohol-fueled tongue wrestling session I overheard my friend’s conversation with another guy. They kind of looked in my direction for a second and then I heard him say something like “Yeah, Dan loves fat girls.” My friend just laughed and they moved on with their conversation. I was mad that she didn’t stick up for me, but then again she was very drunk and was probably about ready to fall over.

I ended up sleeping with Dan that night, and the sex was different than any I’d ever had up to that point. He was very into rubbing and squeezing my belly, and he would grab as much of my butt as he could fit in his hands and jiggle it around. He also focused a lot on kissing the soft underside of my jaw. His friend wasn’t kidding about Dan being into big women; he certainly dwelled on my “meatier” areas. It all felt good to me so I didn’t care, really.

For the next few days after the party I thought obsessively about that guy calling me fat. It became a real eye-opening moment for me. It wasn’t just paranoia in my head anymore; that guy considered me a fat girl. Dan wanted to hook up with me because he liked fat girls and I fit the bill. Maybe my friend wasn’t as drunk as I thought, maybe she just didn’t correct that guy for calling me fat because she knew it was true. Thinking about it really made me take stock of myself. I realized that, even though I was getting big, I still somehow considered myself more or less the same girl I was in high school. Like I still thought of myself as a 140 pound girl who just happened to be chubby at the moment but things would go back to normal soon. But hearing that guy call me fat made me realize that I wasn’t that girl anymore. 140 pounds had nothing to do with me. I was almost 200 pounds by then. I was fat. When people saw me they didn’t think to themselves “that girl used to be thin and she will be again one day but she’s just adjusting to her metabolism blah blah blah.” No, there was no asterisk next to my name; they just saw me and thought “there’s a fat girl.” And I had to be honest with myself and admit they were right. I was fat. Just like all the women in my family, I was fat. I had been able to outrun my genes for almost 20 years, but the jig was up. I think I might have cried a little bit about it but not very much. It was kind of liberating in a way. It definitely helped that my mom, aunt and sister were big; I’d fit right in with them.

When I stepped on the scale that night and weighed myself I was somewhere around 195 pounds. I remember thinking about how I was going to be 200 pounds soon and how insane that thought was to me. I also felt miserable about it and knew that it was going to drive me crazy until I inevitably got there. So, in an act of momentary insanity, I actually began to stuff myself for the first time in my life. I ate everything I could find. My DNA was going to force me over 200 pounds, so why not just get it over with and save myself the misery? I ate a ton of food for the next two or three days, and sure enough I finally stepped on the scale and saw 201 looking back at me. A chill ran up my spine that I will never forget. I felt like an entirely different person, even though I was no different than I was at 199. Something about being 200 pounds just made me feel like everything changed. And I didn’t even think of it as good or bad, just a change. I definitely self-identified myself as fat now. I guess that’s the kind of thinking that only a formerly-thin fat girl would have, but that was my experience.

I stopped going to the gym shortly after that. What was the point? My metabolism was horrendous and all those hours on the treadmill were only slowing down the inevitable. As one would expect, I absolutely ballooned up throughout the rest of college. By the time I graduated I weighed somewhere around 240-250 pounds. I never embraced it by any means, but I didn’t try to stop it anymore. I coped with it through humor; I would make jokes about my weight and my friends were all cool about it. I was definitely the fat girl in the group now. I would think about how I graduated high school at like 150 pounds and here I was graduating college almost 100 pounds heavier. It blew my mind more than it upset me. It was also towards the end of college when I had to start clothes shopping in plus-size stores. It definitely took a few trips for me to wrap my head around the fact that I had gotten too fat to shop in regular stores.

The summer after college was an interesting one. I had kept in touch with my high school friends through Facebook and text messages and stuff like that, but I hadn’t seen most of them in a long time. You know how it is; I had gotten a summer internship the year before so I didn’t go home over the break, and then some people move away or go on vacation or whatever. So going home after graduation was the first time I’d seen three or four of my closest friends in person in like two and a half years. And needless to say, I had changed a lot over that time.

It sounds stupid now, but I remember getting dressed to go meet up with them for the first time that summer and I seriously considered wearing an old, way-too-small shirt that didn’t come close to covering my gut as a funny icebreaker to address the 250 pound gorilla in the room. But thankfully I didn’t go through with that terrible idea. When I finally got there it was just like old times. It was everything I wished it would be. I made a few jokes here and there about my weight and a few of my friends cracked some one-liners, but it wasn’t as big a deal as my anxiety had me thinking it was going to be. One thing that messed with my head a little was seeing Laura, my chubby friend who got teased in high school, and realizing I now out-weighed her by probably 50 pounds. So yeah, I was now officially the “fat friend” in both of my social circles.