My earliest memory of being fat-shamed by someone outside of my family was when I was 11 and in the sixth grade.

I was sitting at the back of the classroom, at a table with two other boys, when one of them turned to ask me, “Why are you fat?”

I’m 22 now. Even after 11 years, those words still haunt me. The other boy quickly turned to tell him why he even asked that. I didn’t say anything. I just stared into his horrible eyes.

That same day I asked to change tables. I never told anyone what happened.

If I had told my mommy, she probably would have yelled at me for not defending myself. She would have said something like, “Why didn’t you tell him he’s so poor he doesn’t even have sh*t in his stomach?

Sometimes I wish I could go back and yell those words. Maybe even more. Anything.

I wish I’d told him his mother didn’t love him enough to feed him, or that my mother loved me enough to make sure I was never hungry. I wish I’d come up with so many comebacks. Instead, I sat there quietly. But I was just 11.

I was just learning how to be in my own body, and I felt like something was already wrong with me.

I can’t go back and defend myself and the little girl I was. I can’t change or take away the embarrassment I carried all day.

What I can tell you is that the boy grew up to be a misogynist and racist. From what I last heard, he never amounted to much in society’s eyes; he seemed so eager to judge.

I sometimes like to believe that is his karma. Maybe it wasn’t, but I like to imagine the boy who thought he had the right to ask and humiliate me didn’t become someone worth admiring.

At just 11, I already started rejecting the idea that I could ever be pretty. I felt ugly in my own skin. I had acne, crooked teeth, and was chubby. I avoided the mirror and hated having my picture taken. To this day, I barely have any middle school pictures of myself because I spent so much time hiding from cameras, even with my family.

I hid. Times in my childhood when I had no pictures because I was so ashamed of what I looked like. I was a child. I should have been taking pictures with my friend, making memories, and being excited. Instead, I worried more about how I looked than enjoying the moment.

I hated the idea that my body shape could ever look pretty in dresses and skirts or anything feminine. Whenever I wasn’t wearing my school uniform, I usually wore baggy, dark clothes, hoping they would hide my body rolls and fat thighs. I didn’t love it; I wore them to disappear.

While my friends began dating, wearing makeup, and learning to express themselves through their appearance, I felt like I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to; I just felt like it would never work for me. I believed it was reserved for girls prettier and smaller than me. People who didn’t second-guess what their body shape would look like.

I kept rejecting femininity because I had somehow decided that it was never for me. That’s what growing up fat did to me. It made me feel like I needed permission to be pretty. Permission to dress up. Permission to feel desirable. Permission for it all.

Where did I learn this from?

From comments, to jokes, and the way that people spoke about my body as if it were a public issue. Being fat was treated like a personal failure rather than one aspect of a person’s appearance.

Society loves to say that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. We put plus-size models in advertisements, post body positivity, and tell people to love themselves. But there is a difference that we need to think about between saying you accept plus-size people and actually treating them with respect. Because they are two different things.

You can claim to support body positivity and still assume someone is lazy because of their size. You can say that everyone deserves love while treating fat people as if they’re less desirable, less disciplined, and somehow less worthy of being taken seriously. People want to celebrate body diversity until they actually have to look at a body that doesn’t fit their preferred standard.

And I learned that long before I had the words to explain it.

One of the weirdest things about growing up is realizing how much people’s treatment towards you changes when your body changes.

I know because, for the first time in my life, I lost so much weight so quickly. Suddenly, people saw me differently.

My family treated me better. They let me eat. They bought me prettier clothes. They complimented me more. And they saw me as more than just the fat, funny sister.

To the point that my own aunts commented on my body before anything else. Which is strange because I was usually seen as a fly, not a person. But they just had to comment on how small I was.

It sounds harsh, but that’s how it felt. When i was bigger my body was the first thing anyone saw. When I was smaller, everyone suddenly complimented me. Suddenly I was worth dressing up.

In that moment, I felt giddy because for once the attention on me was positive. Looking back, it makes me sad how something so small just made me grin so much. Was I so desperate? Because I had spent years being reminded how big I was compared to others. For others, it was something to make fun of me or point out something I already hated about myself.

And now, for once, people were saying something nice. I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to believe that I had finally become pretty. I wanted to believe that I was finally being seen. Yet I hit a problem.

I started becoming so consumed by losing weight that I developed disordered eating habits. I became bony. I was dizzy all the time. I wasn’t simply working toward better health anymore. I got caught up in feeling rewarded for becoming smaller.

And that is what scares me when I think about the way society talks about weight.

We tell people that health matters and that we have to take care. But we shower them with attention when they lose weight without knowing whether they are actually healthy. We don’t ask if they are struggling. We see a smaller body and immediately congratulate it. We assume smaller is better.

The biggest switch-up I noticed was how boys treated me. Like I said, I felt invisible.

It wasn’t because I expected boys to pounce on me or needed a boyfriend to feel complete. Still, when you’re surrounded by friends getting flirted with, complimented, and shown romantic interest, it’s hard not to wonder why nobody looks at you that way.

In high school, in 2019, a friend and I ran our school’s meme page. And when we graduated, we finally revealed ourselves. The crazy thing is, when we revealed ourselves, I started receiving DMs from boys.

Except it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Some of those boys started acting like they owned me, so I blocked them.

Still such a difference. Suddenly, people noticed me? You could say I wasn’t really known in my grade. Basically a no one. So seeing a shift in how people saw me since they last saw me because of COVID was interesting. I had spent so much time feeling unnoticed at school. Barely anyone knew my name or how I spoke, and now boys wanted to get to know me.

In college, I got asked out twice.

I’m not saying I’m bragging or saying, “Look how amazing my life was when I was thin.” I knew what it was like to be the girl who watched others be in love. Something I never thought I would gain.

When nobody shows interest in you, you start assuming you’re undesirable. When people suddenly do, you begin questioning whether you were ever undesirable in the first place.

Why did it feel as though my worth had changed? Why does attention seem to depend on a person’s size? I’m talking about being made to feel undesirable even for young girls before they even get the chance to discover who they are.

Personally, when I gained weight, I saw it disappear as quickly as it arrived. My body became a public topic for everyone.

How big I’ve gotten. How ugly I looked. This and that. I wish the comments had stayed between my family. But they didn’t.

One day, as I was heading to class and sitting on the train, a teenage boy and his friend sat down: one next to me, the other in front of him. The boy sitting next to me was doing the TikTok trend where people show strangers strange, AI-generated, brain-rotted memes to get a reaction.

He was deliberately pointing his phone at me, clearly hoping for a reaction. I ignored him because I don’t want to be filmed, and two, I don’t want to give him a reaction. I don’t want to be someone entertaining or end up online for people to pick apart.

He sat there, and his friend just kept laughing and giggling.

I could have moved, but I was so far from my school, and the train was packed, so I decided they wouldn’t bother me. Eventually, he dragged out the joke, and I just rolled my eyes.

That’s when he changed his tone and told me to mind my business. I had my headphones on and pretended I couldn’t hear him. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to not give in.

When he got up to leave, he turned and called me a fat bitch. Just like that. While his friend laughed.

I sat there acting like I didn’t hear. Holding back anger. Should I have insulted him back? Should I have told him off? Is it worth fighting with a teen? I felt like I had a huge X on me because everyone seemed to hear what he said.

I didn’t do anything. I was just heading to school. That’s it. I wasn’t talking to him. I wasn’t asking for his attention. I didn’t even want to be part of his stupid little joke.

Yet he felt like he had the right to humiliate me. I wish I could be more confrontational. I wish I didn’t cry every time I spoke back. I wish I could tell them off. But all I did was freeze. It’s tiring. Tiring that my body is a reason for someone else to make me small.

What makes me even angrier is that I would never insult a stranger’s appearance just because I could. I know what it feels like to have someone say something about your body that stays with you long after the interaction is over.

Why is it so difficult for other people to understand that? Why do people think that because a person is fat, they have somehow given up their right to be treated with dignity? What is it about someone’s weight that makes people think they can say whatever they want? And why is the person being insulted expected to be the bigger person, while the person doing the insulting gets to laugh and walk away?

I remember the boy from sixth grade and the boy from the train. They probably forgot about me. Forgot the interaction. But I carried those moments with me.

That’s the part people don’t seem to understand about humiliation. It can be a five-second interaction for one person and a memory that follows another person for a long time. You can forget what you said, but I have to live with how it made me feel.

You would think that after everything I’ve experienced, I’d learned how to defend myself. Wanna have a laugh? The same thing happened to me this week. LITERALLY!

I was riding the bus after having a fun day with a friend. I enjoyed myself. I was on a streak. I got off the train, and the bus was waiting. I ran and reached it. After I got in, I stood by the entrance because the bus was packed, near an older man.

He proceeded to yell, “Hey, fatass, sit here.” I looked at him and didn’t respond. I simply walked away. And squeezed further into the bus. He continued targeting me, calling me names until he found a new target.

Although I’d had such a good day, in that moment I felt like an elephant in a room. I became hyperaware of myself again. I could feel the embarrassment slowly creep in. It’s a horrible feeling when someone breaks your peace just because they want to say something.

I walked away, and I imagined punching him.

In my opinion, one of the greatest problems with fatphobia is that people think it’s just yelling an insult at someone. They think it’s limited to bullying and jokes. It’s so much deeper than that.

It’s the assumption that plus-size people are lazy. They are overweight because they don’t care for themselves. People look at someone’s size and immediately invent a story about their habits and character. Weight becomes a public discussion for everyone to comment on.

People feel entitled to comment on it, criticize it, and discuss it. They joke about what you eat or comment on how big or small you’ve gotten. And the moment you express discomfort, all of a sudden you’re too sensitive.

I know health matters. How important it is to take care of oneself. I’m not arguing against that. It’s just that there’s a huge difference between a person’s health and having compassion, and using health to justify treating a person like garbage.

You don’t have to insult someone to encourage healthy habits. You don’t have to embarrass them in public to prove you care. And you certainly don’t need to shame someone for their body before they deserve respect. If someone genuinely cares about a person’s well-being, why would making you feel worthless be an acceptable way to show it?

Having an assumption that every fat person is unhealthy, or that every thin person is healthy? A person’s body size alone cannot tell you everything about their medical history, their habits, their circumstances, or what is happening beneath the surface.

You don’t know what someone is going through.

I believe we can encourage health without glorifying thinness. We can acknowledge that bodies differ without treating one body type as morally superior to another. We can talk about weight without making someone’s entire identity revolve around it.

But that requires us to stop pretending that every cruel comment is harmless and every judgment is justified.

Sometimes, a cruel comment is just a cruel comment.

And sometimes, it is part of a much bigger message that a person has been hearing their entire life.

I grew up as the chubby kid. I know what it was like for someone to make comments about it before you even understand your own body. When you’re just the butt of the joke.

One time, while playing with my cousin, one of them pushed me and yelled, “PIGGY!” Stab to my heart, fr.

If my weight gave my family the right to laugh about it, why should I expect strangers to treat me with kindness?

I chose the title for this blog post because that’s how it genuinely feels to be a bigger person in the big 2026

People assume your habits, your health, and your worth just by looking at you. It’s tough no matter your size because people believe they have the right to criticize. So many people have grown up being told that their bodies are wrong. Some avoid photographs, dating, certain clothes, and social situations, or spend years trying to become smaller because they believe it will finally make the world kinder to them.

I want to be healthier. I want to take care of myself. I want to feel comfortable in my clothes and feel more confident when I look in the mirror. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life chasing a smaller body because I am afraid of how people will treat me if I don’t. I don’t want my health journey to become another way of punishing myself for being the person I am today.

I am allowed to exist without becoming a public discussion.

I don’t know if I will ever stop remembering the people who made me feel ashamed of myself. I don’t know if I will ever become the kind of person who can immediately turn around and deliver the perfect comeback. I hope that one day, when someone makes a cruel comment about my body, I can remind myself that their opinion is not a verdict on my worth.

I’m just tired of a society that tells people to love themselves while giving them a thousand reasons to hate what they see in the mirror.