When I was 22, I took a job as a hostess at a hibachi restaurant in Huntington Village, the Long Island, New York, town I grew up in. Hostessing was lonely and boring, but I got free carrot ginger dressing that I’d scoop into small bowls from the vat in the kitchen and eat like soup. That alone made it worth it.
At that time, it had been over a year since I had started losing weight on my own. Two years earlier I had been discharged from the last hospital I had lived in for six months in Virginia, where weight loss was the misguided treatment prescribed for my Binge Eating Disorder.
From the age of 8 I was told how bad my body was. I was put on Weight Watchers, taken to doctors and nutritionists, and warned if I didn’t start changing my body, I would never have a fulfilling life. People laughed at me, and strangers screamed at me from their cars as they drove by. I was frequently scolded by doctors and told that I didn’t understand how dangerous it was to have a body like mine.
The constant shaming and forced dieting didn’t help me, it merely contributed to my struggle with a severe eating disorder, which along with my mental health issues, landed me in multiple hospitals over the next 12 years and influenced two suicide attempts. How do you stay alive in a world that tells you that you don’t deserve to exist as you are?
When I was 19, two months after being discharged from a treatment center in Florida, I had applied to a different restaurant in Huntington Village. When I got to the interview, I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be hired by the way the owner’s eyes doubled in size the moment she saw me.
For the next 30 minutes, I sat across from her in a small room above the restaurant while she exclaimed in horror about how big I was and laughed in my face while asking, “How will you fit between the tables? How will you fit into our uniforms?” I sat and took it from her, and thanked her for the interview before I ran out of the restaurant and into my car where I sobbed and vowed never to apply to a job again. Three months later, after the biggest relapse of my eating disorder to date, I was admitted into the hospital in Virginia.
I thrived in hospitals. I was an A+ patient who followed all the rules, partially because I was terrified of what would happen to me if I didn’t. I watched other patients get locked in their rooms, have privileges taken away, and sometimes, in certain hospitals, I witnessed patients being abused.
Some rules were helpful, like making my bed every day, or being held accountable for showing up and participating in groups and therapy. Other rules were not, like, depending on the kind of eating disorder you had, having your weight gain or loss be held against you. If my body held on to even a fraction of a pound, I would be accused of stealing food, having food stashed in my room, or eating extra food off of someone else’s tray while staff wasn’t looking. These were things I would never dream of doing because I saw what happened to people who did.
It didn’t matter how helpful or damaging the rules were. I knew the only way to really survive was to follow them strictly. And while some of it was messed up and scary, it also taught me that I do well with structure. Structure was the key to my success.
When I got home from Virginia I relapsed almost immediately, just like I had every other time I got home from treatment. Without a strict schedule in place, it felt impossible to survive in the real world. Then I got hired at a cafe as a barista and everything changed. I found purpose and a work ethic and friends.
With a new structure and a burgeoning life that didn’t solely revolve around treatment, I felt determined to create the body that everyone had been telling me I needed to have in order to truly live. I was inspired to lose weight and call it “recovery,” even though it wasn’t recovery at all.
As the weight melted off of my body, the world treated me differently — like I deserved to be in it for the first time. After losing 168 pounds — but gaining a confused sense of self — I found myself with two public-facing jobs in the food service industry.
On one busy Saturday afternoon at the hibachi restaurant, I stood at the podium silently panicking at the newly formed line that extended through the double doors and out onto the sidewalk. As the line grew, my confidence shrunk. Two top, four top, family of eight — I couldn’t keep track of who should go where or when.
And then I saw her: Brenda with her straight, blonde hair and blunt cut bangs covering the freckles on her forehead. When we made eye contact, she threw her arms up and covered her face with her thin hands, a giant ring adoring each of her fingers.
“Sara!”
Most of the time working in the town where I grew up was no big deal. It was easy to forget where I was — at least during the school year. Most people were still off at college, unlike me, who lasted two months at The School of Visual Arts before going on medical leave and getting admitted into my third and then fourth and then fifth hospital/treatment centre. But sometimes, like today, there would be a run in with someone from high school.
“Sara! Is that you?!” Brenda asked almost hysterically.
I lifted my hand into a half-assed wave, smiled back meekly, and laughed awkwardly.
“Ha ha... hey Brenda,” I replied.
Instead of the “Long time no see! How have things been?” response I expected, she started crying.
She wasn’t crying because so much time had passed since we had seen each other or because we had been close. She started crying at the mere sight of me because my body, which had long been unacceptable to society, to my parents, to my doctors, to my friends, to my classmates and to strangers, was now acceptable.
Brenda cried because my smallness meant to her that I was OK. And I get it, my smallness meant I was OK to me too. Despite the searing self hatred I’d feel when I’d eat more than my allotted calories for the day or when the numbers on the scale stood still, or, God forbid, went up, I was smaller, and my body fit in the world in an unobjectionable way, so I was Ok, I was good, I was worthy of life. Right?
As I watched the tears stream down her face, I wasn’t sure what to do. Part of me felt affirmed. All of my hard work had made this girl I barely knew cry, so clearly I’m on the right path here! I thought. But most of me felt an unbearable pain.
I had already become accustomed to this dichotomy of emotions before Brenda walked into the restaurant that day. Every run in with someone from my past was some version of this scene. They’d celebrate my looks and tell me to “keep up the good work!” and then leave me standing there haunted by what they must’ve thought of me before I had lost weight. Not that I didn’t already know what they thought of me before. The before lived in every cell of my body. The before tricked me into believing that I hadn’t just traded one eating disorder for another.
“I’m sorry...” she said, wiping her tears. “It’s just...”
I swooped in and gave her a loose hug — after all it was my fault for having my body and making the poor girl cry! I prayed no one else in the line noticed what was happening as she screamed, “You look so good!” while drying her face.
It was years before I’d realised my body never belonged to me — how other people’s opinions dictated how I felt, ate, moved in the world. It was years before I looked back at photos of myself as a child and was confused as to how this cute, funny little girl was led to believe she was a disgusting monster who didn’t deserve to be alive in the body she lived in.
But at that moment, in that restaurant with Brenda, I felt validated and humiliated. Confused and confirmed. All I knew for certain was that the smaller me was good and the larger me was bad. I had to keep counting. Keep restricting. Keep shrinking. Keep doing what you’re doing so that the world will love you even as you hate yourself, I told myself. They’ll love you so much they will cry at the sight of you.
During the 16 years that followed that afternoon, I was forced to face how damaging my weight loss had been. My relationship with food and my body felt almost irreparable, and experiencing the stark contrast in how people treated me depending on the size of my body left me terrified and bewildered. I tried to immerse myself in the world of anti-diet and body acceptance that was newly budding at that time. I listened intently and understood just how deeply I had been harmed by the false and dangerous ideals of a fatphobic society.
When I gained back almost half the weight I had lost, I put all my energy into learning to love and accept myself as is. I stopped binging and stopped restricting and tried to have a “normal” relationship with food. I started a career as a health coach in hopes of helping others do the same, and then I left that career just as quickly as I started it.
The truth was I didn’t love or accept myself. The truth was I was spending every night crying in bed wishing I was small again. My body at every size sparked too many opinions, too much shame, too much praise, too much harm. No matter how much work I did or how many healers and therapists I saw, I was never able to disconnect my self-worth from my size. I couldn’t help other people get to a place of acceptance when I couldn’t accept myself.
Recently, with the rise of the popularity of Semaglutide and other weight loss drugs, I’ve grown even more wary of what’s ahead for those of us without bodies that aren’t considered acceptable. The body acceptance and body positivity movements that had finally begun to catch fire have been maimed — perhaps fatally — and the fat bodies that were finally being seen on runways and TV shows are now being pushed back into the shadows. For a good six or seven years I thought kids growing up today would finally have a better shot at a healthy relationship with their bodies. Now I’m not so sure.
I’m not surprised that a quick fix for weight loss has inspired this shift backwards. I doubt that anyone who has ever been fat is. Because while publicly it seemed our culture was beginning to accept more kinds of bodies, behind closed doors, that old story we’d always been told remained the same.
Though we now know body mass index (BMI) is not an accurate or useful measure for health, and countless other myths that equated thinness with well-being have been busted, in the last four years I have still had countless interactions with medical professionals who made it clear they too did not approve of my body. I have been offered Ozempic by doctors. A dental assistant praised me for my oral hygiene in one breath, and in the next told me I should “stop eating junk food,” even though she had no idea what my diet includes, and she was obviously just making this statement based on my size. A gastroenterologist who knew about my eating disorder history told me that I should learn how to “live without dinner.” A fertility clinic refused to move forward with IVF for me unless I lowered my BMI.
The response from the fertility clinic nearly killed me. It caused a mental breakdown that led to me counting calories and restricting my food intake again — even though I knew better. Even though the last thing I ever want for my future child is to be raised by a mother who is scared of food and her own body.
I don’t know if I will ever know what it’s like to live in my body as though it is my own. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to numb the memories of strangers on the street telling me to lose weight, and people I knew praising me and crying in relief because I did. But I really hope someday I do. I hope someday I wake up in my body with my own opinions about what is right and feeling like myself. I hope someday society will realise that size truly does not matter and that we can all exist peacefully in our bodies just as they are.
Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this essay.
Sara Romeo-White is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and cat. Her work has been published on Refinery29, Buzzfeed, and more. You can read more of her writing at sararomeowhite.com.