Given all the things that have changed in the past two years of life under COVID, my body is almost certainly among the least important. But that it has changed is undeniable.
When I started to hear people talking about the “COVID 15,” referring to the widespread phenomenon of quarantine weight gain, I thought it was cute because I had already gained more like 40 pounds.
Now, two years into a pandemic that drastically changed everything about the way we live, I’m estimating that number is closer to 70. (I haven’t weighed myself to be sure, but my clothing is now four or five sizes larger than when we took our laptops home from the office in March 2020, assuming we’d be back in a few weeks.)
Pre-pandemic, I commuted to work every day. I used to walk to my subway stop, climb up and down multiple sets of stairs and then move around an office. Before or after work some days, I used to go to a gym, either the nearby chain I belong to, or the one conveniently located in the building where I worked. I used to go to spin classes in small dark rooms full of people sweating while breathing all over each other. Then I used to walk to another subway station and climb more stairs to get home.
When COVID first hit, the gyms shut down. By the time they reopened, the thought of breathing heavily in an enclosed space had become nerve-shattering. I’m someone who actually enjoys working out, and relies on it for mood management, but I was scared to go back except in rare times when the COVID rates would dip long enough for me to hit the elliptical.
got into taking dance classes virtually, something I never would have done without the shield of distance, and clumsily channeled my inner Britney and Beyoncé in my living room (and eventually outdoors, when classes started to meet in the park). Getting out of my comfort zone with dance was a joyful pandemic surprise, and it got me sweating, but it didn’t compare to being an active everyday human.
My diet hasn’t changed significantly, but there are many days when I sit at home all day, barely moving from the one spot where I hunch over my laptop until it’s time to walk the two blocks to pick my son up from school. As a result of all that inactivity, my weight has slowly but steadily climbed.
I’ve got as much internalized fatphobia as the next gal, but I wasn’t initially too alarmed. My weight has always fluctuated, Oprah-style. I was a fat kid who lost 100 pounds in college, then maintained it ― not so much because I didn’t like my body before, but because I didn’t like the way I was treated in that body.
Walking to and from elementary school, people would yell at me out car windows and throw the occasional fountain drink at me. As I got older, strangers felt free to discuss my body, approaching me to to tell me about a diet that worked for their aunt’s cousin’s friend. While visiting a college as a high school senior, a cute guy asked for my phone number, but when he called he wanted to know how much I weighed because, he told me, he “likes a woman he can climb.”
Moving through our society in a fat body means constantly being confronted with others’ opinions of it when you’re just trying to exist. One benefit of having a “societally acceptable” body is that sometimes you’re allowed to forget about it. Nobody, not even Cardi B., gets to “fat in peace.”
Fat people face discrimination in every aspect of society. Weight discrimination plays a role in hiring, determining wages and firing. (Racism also intersects with fatphobia, with studies showing that fat Black women are discriminated against most in the workplace.) We are more likely to to experience medical bias and misdiagnosis, which can be deadly. I don’t like dating apps, but even if I did, I’m not sure I could stomach opening myself up to a volley of microaggressions alternating with fetishizing messages that turn immediately sexual.
Theres more but im not gona post this fat bytches journal
