I am not good with the word “fat.” Having had eating disorders off and on since I hit adolescence, my relationship with that word is wholly warped—it is a proxy for something dark and roiling, loaded with everything but actual meaning. So I have really learned a lot reading the thoughts of teen librarians Angie Manfredi and Kelly Jensen on the word—they dauntlessly defang it and bring it back to what it’s actually supposed to mean. As Jensen says in an excellent essay: “Being fat isn’t a disability. Being fat is a physical state of being.”

Nobody tells you this when you’re growing up, but you can be fat and feel good about yourself. You can be fat and healthy. You can be fat and strong. And fat is just a word, that’s all—not an insult, not a feeling, not a moral failing. Having recently seen a ten-year-old get hospitalized for anorexia, heard a first grader scream “Oh, yeah? You’re fat!” to her younger sister, heard a friend tell of the way her eight-year-old niece gets her food policed by her parents with the warning, “You don’t want to be fat, do you?” I think we need to learn this, urgently—I think we need our kids to learn it.

I am saying all of this because I was with my son in the bookstore yesterday and came across this book:

Don’t Call Me Fat: A First Look at Being Overweight

So. No. According this this book for kids, you can’t be fat and feel good about yourself. Being called fat is an insult. This physical state of being is terrible thing to be. And, no, the book isn’t some misguided attempt to help overweight kids navigate the world and feel good about themselves, it is about telling them not to feel good about themselves so they lose weight.

Perhaps you guessed as much from the cover, where, as Megan Blakemore observed, the somewhat chubby girl isn’t playing with anyone else at the party; she’s too busy staring longingly at the cupcakes.

See, if you are overweight, you might get bullied. But not just teased; people will try to stop you from playing with them or from sitting next to them. Because you’re not the same as they are. And because, apparently, you are repulsive. Didn’t you know that? Well, you do now.

You obviously are not taking care of yourself, and you need other people to tell you how to do that because you are too dumb to know how to do it yourself (and if you weren’t, why would you be overweight?)

Oh, and you can’t do the same things as other kids. If you’re overweight, you can’t do fun things like run, jump, and climb as well as other kids. You might think you’re having a really good time, but you’re not. And you’re going to feel bad—says this book, telling you exactly how to feel. Look at those thin girls and their pretty clothes and their big smiles! Don’t they look happy? Don’t you want to be like them? Don’t you feel bad now?

Do you feel bad now?

Some people in eating disorder treatment like to personify the ED’s voice. This is pretty much what that voice sounds like.

This book series has titles on autism, special needs, race, shyness—all kinds of things. And I’m trying to imagine the situation in another book in this series where the author explains to the reader that other kids won’t want to sit next to them.

How many people who published this book looked at that language and thought it was fine?

Kids (overweight or no) don’t need a book to tell them to be ashamed about their weight. They don’t need a book to hear that the word “fat” is bad. They don’t need a book to tell them that it’s just better to be thin. They live and breathe in American society, so they get the message just fine. And they don’t need a book to tell them that everyone believes that if they simply ate less and exercised, their troubles would magically be thin, and thus happy. No, the book says, we shouldn’t bully overweight people, they aren’t greedy and lazy—but if they just stopped eating so much and worked harder, they wouldn’t be fat anymore.

Some well-meaning person could have given me this book as a kid. I was a pudgy child whose grandmother made pointed comments about how nice all the other girls in ballet class looked in their leotards. And I wasn’t unhealthy (though yes, I couldn’t run, jump, or climb as well as other kids because I’m really uncoordinated and would much rather read a book, thank you very much). But it was made clear to me, at an early age, that something was wrong with me. That it would be better if I were thin. And I wasn’t allowed to eat in the same way other kids were.

I am forty-one years old, and standing at the bookstore looking at this book I felt like that kid again, the one who learned that being overweight is bad, the one whose pediatrician muttered that my weight was heading in the wrong direction, the one who went on her first diet in second grade. Then I flashed forward to seventh grade and the way I felt about myself. That was the first time I stopped eating.

*****

I posted this cover and a couple pages on Twitter and got some equally enraged responses from authors and librarians. We’re all a little sensitive about kids, see. And we have this crazy opinion that books are supposed to help kids be in the world, to help them feel okay about themselves—that that is Job #1. This series seems like it’s trying very hard to do just that—other titles include I Am Feeling Bashful—A First Look at Shyness, I See Things Differently—A First Look at Autism; I Can Do It—A First Look at Not Giving Up! (Though I have a lot to say about Don’t Call Me Special, but I digress.)

And there are not many books out there to help fat kids be okay with themselves. Because thinness is such an inherent value in our society that we don’t think we’re supposed to tell overweight kids be comfortable in their skin—we’re supposed to tell them to be uncomfortable. Like in the rest of media fat kids—especially fat girls—are invisible in kids books. And when they are visible the book is often about the problem of their fatness; overweight kids don’t get to just exist and be in the world and have stories of their own.

Manfredi and Jensen speak passionately about the way fat girls are treated on covers of YA books—often, fat characters don’t get on the cover at all. If they do, they’re portrayed with food (cupcakes seem to a popular item of choice), or only part of their body gets shown, or the models used aren’t even close to fat.

I scanned the shelves of the bookstore yesterday looking at the images on the books. Girls on middle grade covers, whether photographed or drawn, tend to be thin—rarely are they even average. On YA covers, the models look like, well, models—and some of them look dangerously thin.

I’m a grown women, and I find these covers triggering. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be a teenage girl and see them.



*****

In my high school, we all had to take a health and fitness class. I remember the teacher explaining that it was really unhealthy to sustain too high a heart rate when your exercised, and one of the cool senior girls scoffed, “But how will we burn off calories?”

As part of the class we had to report to get our BMIs taken. I dreaded this day all semester, and I can still feel what it was like to walk down to the basement toward my appointment. The gym teacher used a caliper to measure our fat on our arms and stomach and inner thighs, pinching and squeezing at the fat as if trying to figure out how much excess needed trimming off. Twenty-five years later, I can tell you exactly what he told me my body weight was supposed to be, and exactly what I weighed. I don’t know what my face must have looked like, but I can still hear some internal writhing in the gym teacher’s voice as he said, “So you, uh, might want to, uh….have this information….” and dismissed me.

I personally knew eight girls in my small school that had diagnosed eating disorders. I have no idea why anyone thought this was the information we needed. I now know so many girls and women who have given up years of their lives to hating their bodies, to obsessed and starving and purging and bingeing. Because they learned early on the worst thing anyone could call them was fat.

We learn to hate our bodies, and so when something traumatic happens—we take it out on our bodies. After a break-up in college, I couldn’t keep down any food. I lived like this for a couple of months until one day I woke up and realized my whole day was planned around eating and throwing up. I broke down and went into health services sobbing. They shrugged and said they couldn’t help me and sent me back home after scrawling one single word on my chart—bulimia. Then they threatened to kick me out of school for the semester if I didn’t get help—standard procedure—and brushed their hands of me.

*****

I forget, sometimes, what it’s like to be around women who treat food as an enemy every day. In my group of friends, women don’t talk about their weight. They don’t ascribe morality to food as “good” or “bad.” They don’t perform the self-shaming routines we’re somehow supposed to do when we eat a lot. It’s surprising then to go out in the world and hear the way women talk about themselves—how “fat” they’ve gotten, since they’re no longer a size 2. How “bad” they were at dinner last night. How they “shouldn’t” eat what they’re eating. How they’re trying to get one size down. This self-flagellation ritual, the “I’m fat” kabuki, the ceremonial public confession of sin—passed on from woman to woman, mother to daughter, friend-to-friend, forever and ever—shaming themselves, yes, and teaching everyone around them they should be ashamed, too.

What they might not know is the person next to them is sick—that the words they use warp into nourishment for a dormant eating disorder. What they might not know is they’re teaching the girls who listen to hate their bodies.

Your daughters are listening.

And maybe we can’t help ourselves anymore. Maybe it’s ingrained too deeply. But maybe we can help our kids.

*****

A few years ago, I left my marriage and moved back to my home in Minneapolis with my three-year-old son. I was on a diet at the time—having gained weight a little past the capacity of my pants. After a while, I reached that ideal weight I’d learned about in high school—but it didn’t seem quite enough. Five more pounds, the voice said. That’s all.

My ex-husband and I had a really nebulous parenting agreement in place, and it created a great deal of conflict for us. Something would happen, I’d feel wrenched apart, and each instance summoned the ghosts of all the ways I’d ever felt ignored and patronized and powerless. They are heavy, those ghosts, and they take up a lot of oxygen.

Five more pounds.

A year later I was in partial-hospitalization, where I met many people who learned as young girls and boys that extra weight was bad, and that it was worth anything to lose it. And the core belief, that they were bad because of their weight, was with them, always, and the only way they knew how to cope with anything was to take it out on these bodies they were taught to hate.

One of the things I discovered in the last couple of years is that I didn’t know how to be angry. I can remember so many times in my adult life backing down from being angry, feeling like there was something wrong with feeling that way. It was not my right. No, no, I would say. I’m not angry. When what I should have said is, Hell, yes, I’m angry. And here’s why. I was so angry that year, and didn’t even know how to name it, and every time something would happen to force a conflict I dealt with it by eating something and throwing it up. It was the only way I knew to deal with it. Emotion, anger, it can’t go outwards, so it goes inwards. And since we learned so early on that our bodies were our problems, everything was our bodies’ fault.

Thanks largely to some magnificent friends, I know how to be angry now (as anyone who has read this Tumblr probably knows.) I know how to live with the feeling, and how to express it. I know I have the right to be angry.

The thing with girls and women is, we’re just not supposed to take up any space. We’re just not supposed to be angry, stand up for anything, be loud. The author Heidi Schulz told me a story of being on a plane and the man next to her was spilling his personhood all over her space—arms draped over the armrest, legs sprawled out. And she said she spent the first half of the plane ride responding by shrinking herself, because that’s what we learn. Be small. But then halfway through she realized: I can take up space. And she spread out.

We are not taught to take up space. We have to learn it.

We can take up space.

It is good to take up space.



****

I can’t help but wonder how much of weight shaming for young kids is actually about health and how much is about the self-image of the parents. That the parents believe that if their kid is pudgy, it will make them look like they’ve failed—because all you have to do to be thin is make “good” food choices and exercise, right?

And, I know, it’s so hard to be a parent. You want the best for your kids and it’s really confusing about what that means. And it’s natural to worry about your kids and want them to be happy—thinness is so ingrained in us as a virtue that it seems like our kids would just be happier if they were thin. But it just doesn’t work like that. Your kids will be happy if they feel okay about themselves. A child’s weight does not turn a kid into a bully. And being thin does not equal being happy. By the end of high school I’d learned that all those popular girls, the skinny ones—they weren’t any happier about themselves. And given the ways some achieved this thinness, they certainly weren’t healthy.

If you buy everything the culture is selling, you are never happy with your body. You are never thin enough. If you believe “fat” is an insult, and being overweight will cause you to be repulsive to other people, thinness is never going to solve anything. If you internalize every message society sends you about weight and about girls and how they’re supposed to act—the two quickly become intertwined and you do whatever you can do to take up less and less space.

I think we need to reframe our notion of healthy when we talk about weight. Because I can’t believe there’s anything healthy about telling kids people won’t want to sit next to them if they are fat. I believe that is dangerous. I believe it plants seeds in young kids that can very easily grow into something poisonous.

I can assure you, whatever the health issues of the extra pounds I carried on me as a kid might have been, they’re nothing like ravages of eating disorders on my body.

Kids don’t need a book shaming them into dieting. They don’t need to learn that food and weight are a moral issue. They need positive images of kids of all weights in their books—from picture books on up—books that tell them that they exist and it’s okay and they can take up space. They don’t need a book like DON’T CALL ME FAT—maybe they just need people to tell them they’re okay the way they are.