Fat, so what?

My parents didn’t name me Fat Tart. I imagine that you’ve guessed that my friends and relatives weren’t always called Marmalade, Knitty and Goodly. I like to use a variety of pseudonyms. I’m not a drug dealer or otherwise trying to evade arrest or detection, I’m just not attached to my name at all and if I were to tell you that it is the most boring girls name ever I bet you could make a good stab at what it is. Partly using invented names is for anonymity, but really who’s bothered by who I am? Do I really care if some random dieter who stumbles across this blog knows my name? I do however feel that I shouldn’t expose my friends. It’s interesting that I used the term, ‘invented names’, because all names are made up. Nobody arrives in this world with a name label attached like a piece of fruit in the super market. Naming a baby when you’ve barely met them seems crazy to me, how do you know the name will suit them?

Having a naming scheme helps. One way I chose names for friends relies on what they do, much like the medieval tradition of naming people after their jobs, Tailor, Smith, Forrester for instance. I wonder if Trump’s ancestors were particularly flatulent? Anyhow, another naming scheme I’ve used recently is inspired by my friend Marmalade. Marmalade and I share work space sometimes and we both love Agatha Christie, so we often have Poirot or Miss Marple playing in the background. In one Poirot story there is a character called Egg. Marmalade was rightly disturbed. ‘Egg! If you could be named after any food stuff would you really want to be called Egg?’. We narrowed down the food stuffs from which you could chose your name to breakfast ingredients and still Egg wasn’t anyone’s first choice. Under this scheme my name is Sausage, Marmalade is Marmalade, my husband is Corn Flake and my sister is French Toast to be known as Frenchie. Frenchie knows a very posh family that has a complex naming convention involving the name of a battle, a county and various other rules. The resulting names are magnificently upper class and down right hilarious but you might not dare laugh. Frenchie named her bear using this convention, his name is Thomas Tobruk-Harbortonfordshire-Twertonhay and he is undeniably a very posh bear.

My question today is; does it really matter what we’re called? Wouldn’t we be who we are regardless? What’s in a name? Some names/words carry with them a negativity that I’m not sure they all deserve. ‘Fat’ for example.

I know a clever, great looking woman who also happens to be fat and she hates it. She doesn’t like the way she looks and she is upset by her sartorial limitations, there are of course complex reasons for this. One day I felt I had to say something, I hate that she hates her body. I hate it for her and I have to acknowledge that in being so vocally negative about her size she is also being negative about me and my size. I told her this and I told her that she is fat, that I am fat, that being fat is not illegal, not immoral, it isn’t necessarily unattractive, does not preclude fabulousness and if you’re lucky it’s not necessarily unhealthy, if you can’t sort it, accept it, don’t be so hard on yourself. I heard from a mutual friend that she was really upset that I said she was fat. That was what she took away from what I said. She hates the word and I’d called her it and I’m sorry she was upset.

There was a very pretty girl at my bus stop earlier this week. She was tall, big, wearing leggings and a pretty fluted top. She looked strong and smooth and reminded me of a statue that might be a column holding up a building. She was fat. Her magnificence was directly related to her size and apparent confidence. The Statue of Liberty is a big girl but who would have her any other way? As the Bard said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Call fat what it is, if you don’t like it in reference to yourself do your best to lose it but really try and keep it in perspective. Don’t be defined by your scales. Fat will never be the only word to describe a person, everyone is more that their weight, fat or thin.

I saw a sign outside a cafe recently encouraging people to eat more cake because heavy people are more difficult to kidnap.

You see Dear Reader there’s always an upside.