How I learned to be fat and happy
Masha says she is fat. Not fat or chubby - fat. Injured, she does not find the word "fat". Rather, the romping about when it should be played down, which is obvious. You are not fat, it is said then. Corpulent, maybe. "In this egg dance, I feel the rejection most of all," says Masha. Others are less squeamish: "That would not even wear me!", A young, rather thin woman hissed recently to her friend, as Masha appeared at a party next to the two. Masha wore a narrow skirt printed with roses, with a shirt and denim jacket. Dismissive, seemingly casual looks, restrained grin. The volume so well tempered that no word is lost. Masha was the "fat jellyfish," the "fat cow," the woman who, in passing, briefs her on how impossible she looks. Or about which one in the café rolls his eyes when she gets served a piece of cake. "I always hear the same remarks," says Masha. "When it comes to insulting, the ingenuity is limited." Recently you called after a "Cindy from Marzahn". Finally something different. She had to laugh. 120 kilos make Masha fat.
If it was half as much weight, Masha would be a 24-year-old like many others: 1.76 meters tall, pretty, with dark brown, shoulder-length hair and dark brown eyes. A young woman, who is doing her master's degree in English Literatures at the Humboldt University Berlin and describes herself as "happy, open-minded and sociable". And, yes, striking, she also finds herself, because she likes fashion and also shows with clothing size 54: on the bad days jeans and hoody, on the good a feminine dress. Preferably the orange-red fifties look with the black band at the waist. No camouflage, no tents, nothing veiling that turns them into a staffage.
"A slender woman would not notice my clothes," says Masha. "I only do that because such a look with my figure is unusual." Masha says that she falls out of the recognition grid of almost all people. That hurts. As a kid and teen, it was especially hard for Masha. "If you lose weight now, you're a pretty girl," the orthodontist, who was in charge of her braces, prophesied after every check. From the family doctor she was given unsolicited diet plans for years in the hand. Physical education took place twice a week. "When you're fat, it's all about your character," says Masha. "You are a second-class person." For more than ten years, Mascha has responded with adaptation attempts and diets. Sometimes she lost 15 kilos in three months, sometimes ten. However, she was never able to hold the hard-won weight due to sports and renouncement.
"There are apologies for so many things that people do not succeed in. Only we thieves are always the perpetrators"
Slowly it dawned on her: "I would have to fight my whole life - and would never be slim." For my self-mortification my life is too good. " The foundation for her new self-image then lay a semester abroad in London: "In a world metropolis with so many different people, I suddenly had no feeling that I had to defend myself." Stupid comments like home were simply rarer. " Masha made the decision to whistle for the expectations of others and to reconcile with her body: "I no longer wanted to run after a slimming ideal that cost me my happiness, so I have decided to accept my body as it is." Since then, the 24-year-old has been trying to eat as well as possible, accepting the kilos she has ate in the past - and never, never really buying extra clothes for fat.
In the future she would like to forego sports as well as explanations that should make her overweight plausible. Did she go out of business because after a meager few years in the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan - when she moved, Masha was four years old and slim - had to catch up so much in rich Germany? Because her parents divorced when she was twelve? Because she was overwhelmed as a replacement mother for her younger brother? Everything imaginable. Or not. Masha is sick of justifying her weight as if she were accusing herself. "There are apologies for so many things that people do not succeed in. Only we thieves are always perpetrators, because many believe that anyone can be slim if they want it."
"I do not think there is a connection between the dimensions of a woman and the quality of her relationship"
Rule number one, when she is with her friends and acquaintances: no talking about problem areas, dream dimensions or weight gain. No cause research. And do not feel guilty about eating. A few acquaintances and friends have stayed away sometime because Masha was too radical for them. Others have stayed because they, too, have no desire to undergo the constant thematization and evaluation of their bodies, even when they are slim. For Masha, the rejection of the beauty conceptions of the majority is not a rhetorical exercise. Since she has put herself behind her, she feels better in her skin. More and more often she discovers in the mirror a "fat but well-proportioned body". And a butt she "really likes". To accept a body that is pretty ugly enough takes time. Masha says her self-esteem has grown slowly - a process that probably never stops.
"The hardest part are the days when I want to buy something to wear and do not fit into anything," she says. The most beautiful is where she realizes that some people, just like her, and her attempt to stay with her, does not make her lonelier, but stronger. Indispensable on this path: friends, study, books and blogs (see box). Since London, Masha has been in contact with supporters of the US Fat Acceptance Movement, a kind of society against weight discrimination that wants to back up Dicken. "You do not get fat, you're born that way," some people say. Others claim that there are no eating disorders that lead to obesity at all. Or that fat people do not have an increased health risk. Masha does not share all the arguments. But one very vehemently: "It is not the body that is the problem, but the negative attitude towards it." While that does not change the beauty ideal of the majority, it does not change their own.
And the men? Masha shrugs. Is it the overweight or your self-confidence that keeps the other sex at a distance? Or something completely different? No idea. "I do not think there is a connection between the dimensions of a woman and the quality of her relationships, and slim singles do exist." And if she had not dared break with strange expectations? "I would probably have become an unhappy woman," says Masha. "A woman who would have lost more and more of herself and the world trying to please everyone." Instead, she has chosen to go it alone. And found that it is none. On the contrary: "The less I try to please others, the more I feel how many like me the way I am."
What Masha likes
Books Susan Orbach: "Bodies: battlefields of beauty" (Arche Verlag 2010). Marilyn When: "Fat! So?" (in English only, Ten Speed Press 1998) blogs www.therotund.com by Marianne Kirby from Florida. www.reizende-rundungen.blogspot.de: Fashion blog of a german student
