What Losing 100 Pounds Taught Me

“It didn’t come as a shock to me that when I lost nearly 100 pounds, the world and its relationship to me changed drastically.

What threw me for a loop, however, was the fact that many of those changes were so deeply unsettling.”

“As my weight came off, I saw the world around me change. Men would enthusiastically hold doors for me. Women, with a snap of their gum and a flip of their hair, would compliment my “cute blazerrrrr!” Employees at coffee shops smiled at me, and made eye contact. Some of my well-intentioned but tacky friends would say that I looked “a lot better.” My (always thin) mother told me she was proud of me; she had the same gleam in her eye that she had when I completed graduate school.

As a fat person, I had been used to folks rushing ahead of me on the subway, not making eye contact at the store, or not smiling back when they passed me in the hallway of my apartment building. These behaviors were what I recognized as normal.”