Fat people are... well... People too. So, Why Do We Forget?

In Reflections of a fat girl, an autoethnographic paper by Lisa Spinazola, the author walks us through her life as a regular woman who perceives herself as ‘fat’ – a word attached with a slew of other judgements. The paper acts as medium which offers vivid glimpses into her inner world. It let’s the reader peer into her raw, inner stream of thoughts which would otherwise stay inaccessible through this ordeal. The point of it being to bring home her experience so that the reader can relate and hopefully empathize. Articulating her experience in this manner also serves her as an exercise in mindfulness, helping her transcend to higher levels of clarity and perspective about her situation. As she reflects about her reflections in the mirror, therefore the pun in the paper title, she explores through use of ways of autoethnography the origins of her body dysmorphia, her relationship with food and exercise and her perpetual inner conflict between two dissonant sides of her – the successful and confident person, teacher and mother in her and the fat, unworthy of love woman she sees in the mirror every day. She takes us through an average day in her life.


She finds herself glued to her bed in the mornings - a struggle common to any average person. Upon calls from her alarm, she hauls herself off sleep and makes headway towards the bathroom, when a spectacle, on the other side of a looking glass, of a bosomy, curvaceous woman ambling towards her, enters her field of awareness. She turns on the overhead lights, exposing the person - whom she now recognizes to be her own reflection on a long mirror - and accentuating their numerous physical flaws, from evidence of ageing to unsightly accumulations of fat. The blunder of taking one's own reflection to be someone else is again perhaps something most ought to have done, especially given partial wakefulness. However taken in context of information from latter pages, when the author gasps in disbelief at her own photos in which she appears thinner than what she normally thinks herself to be, one may reasonably interpret the mistake to be a show of her incapacity to acknowledge herself as beautiful, due to conditioning she has received from societal norms and a harsh upbringing. She quickly breaks away from the scrutinizing gaze of her internal critic and guides herself into a shower, during which she observes the sensation of the water against her morning skin is one which she finds to be quite pleasurable. She takes a few moments to soak in the little delights of the experience before emerging back out and finishing the rest of her morning routine. If everything she does appears profoundly ordinary, that's precisely because it is ordinary. Like the rest of us she too has insecurities and harbours an appreciation for the smaller joys in life. If it's not apparent the paper certainly serves the crucial purpose of making it so. Indeed, behind all the fat and the blubber and the nasty labels, lies a person essentially no different than you and I.


She draws attention to the fact that discourse and activities surrounding her weight have always been an integral part of her life including some of her earliest memories - that of her parent's one minded preoccupation with her weight and dieting. The damaging legacy it's left behind is their impact on her default thought patterns - which revolve around feeling the constant need to initiate activities in her life that would lead to losing weight. Through interactions with her mother she internalizes that to be fat is to be unworthy of love. Constantly trying to measure up to unrealistic weight and beauty standards portrayed in the media does little to help self-esteem. These same standards then inform dating norms and expectations further reinforcing the need to conform to said standards. Her own negative judgements about her own weight and appearance are thus a product of conditioning from the outside world. She also points out how the media have failed to make the necessary distinction between appearance and health or proper bodily function. The notion that these two go hand in hand is indeed faulty at best. Nonetheless the idea not only persists but has taken a deep-seated position in society as people continually conflate thinness with being in good health. It even infiltrates parent-child relationships, as in the author's case, when love and acceptance becomes something to be traded for conformity to ideal weight standards. Glances at her own reflection conjures painful flashbacks from her past of her parents shaming her for her weight and instilling in her a sense of guilt associated with eating. Food, which had naturally always been something to be savoured and relished, something over which to bond with other people and have conversation, has now been reduced to calories and numbers that need to be calculated and controlled. Similar attitudes have emerged towards exercise too as success in the gym isn't measured by fun or consistency with workouts, rather it's measured by numbers on the scale. As she sways between her internal critic - a wretched inheritance from her parents which also mimics their style of criticism - and the other part of her self which rejects this critic and sees it's inherent flaws and draws from everything wonderful about her beyond her weight, we see this dialectical tension rear it's head in many situations in her daily life. She finds herself becoming self-conscious in front of her students feeling the need to draw her belly in, despite being an incredibly adept teacher. Sometimes she looks in the mirror to find an intelligent, charming and talented person and at other times the same reflection revolts her. But being in silent meditative observation of these swings between her two sides and penning her thoughts afterwards allows her to be increasingly mindful of the same and disposes her to be more accepting of them. Equipped with greater self-knowledge and understanding she embarks on an exercise regimen - bouncing on a trampoline while binging a series from her watch-list - motivated solely by the sheer fun of the activity. Weeks later, she reports back, that although physically she hasn't changed much when perceiving herself in the mirror, she does perceive beyond just the bulges and rolls - she sees courage, determination and resilience.

She signs off hoping she succeeded in her endeavour to communicate a very real sense of what it is like to be her, her experience as a person who perceives themselves as being fat, her internal battles and her journey through trying to extricate herself from older, faulty narratives. She leaves the reader reassured if they too are battling inner-demons they should know they aren't alone.