I’ve never been the kind of person that hasn’t had weight fluctuations. I’ve gained and lost weight a lot of times for many reasons but the first time I gained a significant amount of weight, I was in my first year of uni.
On my first morning in student accommodation, I set off the fire alarm by using the microwave- don’t ask me how that happened, I still have no idea. When the fire alarm went off, it triggered an automatic all- halls fire alarm that meant every single person in my halls of residence (hundreds of people) was woken up and had to stand outside in the cold to wait for the fire service who had to show up and disable the alarm. It was a cold Sunday morning. I still remember how embarrassing that was for me and between that incident and my racist housemates (one of whom was Canadian proving that racists come from everywhere), I ate as many of my meals as I could in my room, which meant a lot of junk food. I gained weight really quickly. By the time I went to stay with some family for Christmas, three months after uni started, I had gained around 20kg/50lbs.
I didn’t lose the weight until second and third year when I took up running and started cooking majority of my meals. I lost the last dress size by falling extremely sick and having to be admitted to the hospital. By the time I left uni, I was maintaining my weight loss and was also officially a runner.
For the next few years, I ran a lot and I walked everywhere. I always lived within a 30-minute walk from work, so I often walked to work, ran a lot and ate like a bird- little and often.
Even at my absolute smallest, courtesy of two weeks of crying and sleeping after a breakup, I still dieted on and off. In fact, dieting to me was almost like a hobby. I can’t remember most of my diets but there were many.
I worked in fashion so people were always feeling so guilty for drinking diet coke and almost any size could qualify as fat since it wasn’t rooted in reality. I took so many “before” pictures and bought lots of extremely tiny clothes that I planned to one day fit into. I wanted nothing more than to be like a hanger (a not-great term used to describe skinny runway models) – thin and small and shaped really straight. I felt HUGE.
In the midst of all of this, I moved back to Nigeria. I started to gain weight almost immediately from the sheer drop in my activity levels. I started law school where I was still running a lot and barely eating during the week, because the food options in law school were pretty dire. I pretty much maintained a small gain throughout law school and did a few half-hearted diets every so often. I started dating someone that would sometimes look at my old photos and say how he wished that he met me when I looked like that. After leaving law school, my activity levels dropped even more, and I gained more weight. I went to visit my partner who had now moved abroad for school and he was disappointed and angry at how much I had let myself go.
At my post law school job, everyone knew me as the dieter- I was always on some diet or the other. I wasn’t alone in dieting, but I think I definitely took it to the next level- juicing, whole 30, vegan- there was always something.
In spite of the inconsistency, I basically went back and forth between two sizes.
I planned to leave my job in 2016. On the day I was going to resign, my mum called my aunt who called my cousin who called me to say my mum was panicking and I shouldn’t quit. What followed was one of the worst years of my life for mental health. I was miserable, I was bullied, confidence seeped out of me and the one thing I did was eat. I had close relationships with so many restaurants and food delivery services. I tried everywhere that sounded good. It wasn’t just ordering food or eating out, it was also interesting stuff in supermarkets, cooking the most gourmet looking lunches for myself, starting pancake Saturdays. Food was a bright spot in my life at that time. Eventually, I quit my job at the end of 2017, at which point I had gained A LOT of weight.
After I left, my mental health started to improve, even though now, I was facing something else I didn’t anticipate- the feeling of rootlessness that comes from being unemployed. Even with that, I was happier, and I actually lost some of the excess weight without trying. I also kind of started to not want to be locked into a constant battle with my body. I started to confront those feelings and was making a little progress, but then, I got engaged.
I’ve touched a little on the pressure to lose weight for your wedding but I definitely felt it. The difference is, I was reluctant to really do anything extreme in pursuit of that- maybe I was tired or maybe I had already started to unpack the body-hate and realise that it wasn’t a sustainable way to live. Either way, I lived my life. About 6 months before my wedding, I hired a personal trainer and when he suggested a diet/calorie limit, I balked at the suggestion. I just could not bring myself to do it- I just wasn’t interested. 4 or so months before the wedding, I tried to diet for a few days and just couldn’t, there were more important things at the time.
I got married and in the first year of marriage, I shut down on weight loss/ dieting etc. That was a transformative year for me because it was the year I learnt to accept my body. Those two years- 2018 and 2019 were transformative. I stopped buying clothes that were for a smaller body, I stopped letting my feelings about my body dictate my life. I stopped doing extreme diets and when people spoke about themselves the way I used to speak about myself, it was jarring, it felt weird and sad to hear. I left fitness groups I was in and just tried to figure out for myself what I wanted/needed.
There have been a lot of arguments about fat people not being the only people entitled to negative self image. While that is true- speaking from my own experience, I suffered negative self image even at my smallest size, which was quite small, the difference is that with fat people, there are a lot of external voices. I find that people are a lot ruder and feel more entitled to say their negative opinions. It’s one thing to battle yourself, it’s another thing to battle yourself and a lot of other voices especially when the voices are confirming the worst things you feel about yourself.
