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I think I can speak to this, since at my highest weight, I needed to lose 100 pounds. I was medically obese, although not morbidly obese. How in the world does that happen to a former dancer, someone who used to take four dance classes every single day, then go out dancing at the clubs on weekends just to let off steam?
1. I acquired a health problem that made it difficult to dance, then difficult to run, then difficult to walk, then difficult to stand. At first it was just a little uncomfortable, but after fifteen years of this "little," "easy-to-solve" problem (easy to solve if you've got medical insurance or some other way to pay for it, that is), it was excruciating. I'd have a surgery on it every six to twelve months, hoping to get rid of the underlying issue. What it did instead was give me a perpetually open wound that would burst open any time I got my heart rate and blood pressure up by doing anything dangerous, such as exercising. Believe me, fifteen years with any health problem, you'll be fat too.
2. Thanks to the health problem and loss of the ability to exercise, I lost my then-significant other, who couldn't understand why I was "letting myself go" like that, or why I suddenly didn't want to go out dancing, hiking, biking, or jogging together anymore. We'd built our relationship on the common ground that was sports, and when it dried up, J just decided I wasn't worth the effort of finding something else in common.
3. I lost my dance scholarship, of course. I also lost the ability to be in theatrical productions that involved dance, and I stopped getting the parts for the pretty girl in the play. Soon I couldn't stand long enough to even be the ugly old fat lady in the play. Did I mention I was a performance major in college? Yeah. That entire career line is pretty much gone, shattering every dream I'd had since the age of three, when I appeared onstage for the first time. Every life goal I'd ever had was gone. You try to live normally after knowing, at twenty, that you'll never have what you want in life, that everything you get now will be a very distant second choice.
4. Those losses, health problems, and the fears associated with them, not to mention a horrible new self-image as the Fat Girl, lead to clinical depression. Depression hurts physically, it hurts emotionally, and it makes it very hard for other people to want to be around the depressed person. Sadly, other people can often be an inspiration for the depressed to get help, or at least to begin to heal themselves simply by thinking of themselves as someone who's got friends. I couldn't see the end of any problems. I really, truly felt like I would never be cheerful, happy, or fulfilled in any way again. For Harry Potter fans: Depression is, on a very long-term basis, what Harry experienced for only a few seconds at the hands of the Dementors. It is the most rotten, bleak feeling in the world.
So basically, I laid down and rested my unhealthy body, until finally my parents realized I was actually sick, and ponied up for a doctor. That doctor got me just barely healthy enough to move to another city, where I felt I could start fresh, and started to see that though there were clouds as far as I could see, there were some sunny patches here and there. I wasn't over the depression, but I could see that someday I might be, so it was worth starting to make the effort to find the end of it, instead of willing myself into an early grave. I found love. I found a better job. I found things that interested me, that weren't related to dance (that dream is over; you can't go back to something that requires lifelong fitness, and I have lost 15 years of my youthful bones and musculature).
Two years ago, I also found Weight Watchers. I found it at just the right time, when I was receptive to the ideas and the methods, and I was able to see that I could get healthy again. Sure, I've only lost about 50 pounds, but by golly I have gotten my life back.
My point is: Don't judge harshly when you see someone who's "let themselves go." Don't look at the fat. Look at the person who has health problems, who's been abused lifelong, who endured an assault that made them suddenly not want to be beautiful and eye-catching to anybody anymore, who just had her second or fifth or eleventh miscarriage and hates the body that gives her such hope and then dashes it...
You have no idea what thing, or what series of things, a fat person has been through. You have no idea what pain he or she has endured in the past, what trauma or sadness they're still enduring. And you have no idea how much it hurts to have a perfect stranger look right at you, sweep their eyes over your body, and wrinkle their nose in disgust -- as if the only thing you ever had to offer the world was a pretty body, and now you don't even have that. It isn't true, not by a long shot, but it still stings.
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