I am not fat. According to my BMI (not that that is the most reliable source), I am overweight, and if I put on a few pounds, I will be obese. But I’m not fat. My thighs are big, but when I squeeze them I touch hard muscle; my arms flatten like pancakes against my sides, but if I flex, my biceps bulge. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do — I’m a big person. For some reason, even at 5’3” I am bigger than my friends.
I don’t know how it happened. For most of my life, I was self-conscious of my body but I was never really ashamed of my looks. One day in high school, though, I realized that I was the largest of my friends. Admittedly, I have many unusually short friends, so there’s that. However, even the friends who are the same height as me are slimmer. I can’t win either way. I’m either too tall or too wide. Once I became conscious of this, I did what I could to make myself seem smaller: wore baggy clothes and sucked in my stomach when standing with my friends.
I can have a great day — I’ll look at my side profile in the mirror and feel proud of how my clothes fall over me, how my legs look a little slimmer than they were a month ago. Yet the moment I come across someone of similar build who is somehow smaller than me, I suddenly feel that I’m not quite fit enough. I know that I can’t change my height, and there’s only so much I can do about my weight. Your body stops reacting to certain exercises after a while, and sometimes you just stop losing weight.
Genetics are permanent, but my mental attitude is malleable. The little voice in your head is yours to control. I can tell myself it doesn’t matter that I’ll always look a few pounds heavier than I actually am, because the friend beside me is tiny. The first few times I won’t be convinced, but after a while, I’ll see the photo for how I look, not how I look beside my friend. I’ll notice that my stomach is flat in that dress, my arm a straight line, not sagging with excess fat. I’ll realize that my smile is genuine because, in that moment, I don’t know what the photo will look like. I’ll only know how happy I am right then.
Being the bigger friend shouldn’t be a major concern. We are all shapes and sizes, and (typically) people don’t choose their friends based on looks. A reasonable assumption would be that when our friends first met us, they didn’t really care about our size. If they did, our personalities clearly won them over anyway. We need to see ourselves as we are and as we can be, not how we could be if we were a few inches taller or a few inches shorter.
