How a Former Fat Girl Got Thin (Pre- and Sans Ozempic)
“Wide load!” snickered Eric K., not slight himself, as I walked away from him in the cafeteria in tenth grade.
His comment was just one of many I received about my body growing up. Most of the other commentary was a gift from my (Indian) relatives.
“My brother said you’ve put on weight,” tattled my older cousin, whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
“You’ve got big thighs!” yelled another cousin during a heated argument.
Therefore, I had the rep of being overweight. Today, I know I wasn’t obese, but about 20-25 pounds above what I should have weighed. They had decided to label me as fat, so they all helped themselves to a constant critique of my weight and/or eating habits, even though none of them were in particularly good shape or worked out regularly.
My relationship with food was complicated, to say the least. I dove into my first diet in the fourth grade, when my jeans size surpassed my mother’s. While other kids were eating Twinkies and Bon Bons, I would nosh on lettuce with Realemon lemon juice, salt, pepper, and drink Diet Pepsi. It wasn’t until seventh grade that I started starving myself and pretending I didn’t like any of the food at lunch. When I started eating again, I learned to purge after meals from an NBC Afterschool special on eating disorders, and with that came a sense of relief and euphoria from any and all stress.
In college, I stopped purging because I no longer had my own bathroom. Instead, I simply tried to starve myself, but more often than not, I failed. I remember when the Wash U student paper announced that chicken fingers were 1200 calories and I had definitely been drunkenly devouring them on a weekly basis shortly after my arrival. I started eating more healthfully and exercising in medical school, and then toyed with high-protein/minimal-carbohydrate eating in residency, with little to no exercise, until I got pregnant with my son.
High protein with minimal carbs puts one’s body into a ketotic or starvation state. That obviously can’t be healthy for a baby, so I stopped that diet/lifestyle and reintroduced carbs into my diet in the form of an English muffin or sweetened yogurt. Once I did that, I never wanted to go back to my old habits.
I felt a lot of anxiety during the first few months following the birth of my son due to prolonged sleep deprivation. I hadn’t slept in my last trimester and after he was born, I would breastfeed or pump at night. As my anxiety increased, I knew I had to do something to maintain my functioning in the world. Along with quitting nightly feeds, I began working out and meditating.
Once I began exercising for my mental health, after a few years, it simply became part of my identity. Today, eight years later, I work out around six days a week. It was a natural upward progression, in terms of frequency.
Today, I have a healthy body, a healthy relationship with food, and a very decent body image. I attribute this to my mindset and my true belief that “I am thin no matter what I eat.” I do tend to eat healthfully, but occasionally, I will indulge in a piece of cake and not obsess over it or think it’s going to make me fat; I used to think that way.
I have embodied the belief and mindset that are the opposite of the ones bestowed upon me by my relatives. My grandmother once told me that she, my aunt, and I all had a “fatty tendency.” I now know that I actually have a “thin tendency.”
My mindset is what has really shifted. My body weight, size, and shape have stayed the same for years, regardless of my day-to-day behaviors. This is truly because you are what you believe more than you are what you eat. I have trained my brain to know that I am a person who works out, eats healthfully, and has a healthy, thin body no matter what.
And so it is.