In my family, fat was never an adjective; it was a verb. It was a crime that women actively and maliciously committed against the male gaze. All of their accomplishments, personality traits, or even actual crimes would come second to their appearance.
So when I competed as the plus-size contestant on Cycle 9 of America’s Next Top Model, no one in my family knew how to react. On the one hand, I was being celebrated for the highest accomplishment a woman could hope for: being attractive. On the other, it was as… a plus-size contestant.
“You look… pretty thin, don’t you?” my dad said when I came home. I was pretty thin. But I’d just returned from filming a show where esteemed judges had debated my weight so heavily that my body dysmorphia was a raging demon controlling every thought.
“When they called you plus-size, I wanted to sock them,” my dad said.
“When they called you plus-size, that really messed me up,” echoed my mom. “You’re not plus-size.”
I heard that a lot, but I never knew how to respond. Intellectually, I knew it shouldn’t be a compliment—that plus-size wasn’t a bad thing. But my stupid heart still desperately wanted to punish myself into being as small as possible.
My father has three brothers, and if they and my grandfather were discussing a woman, her looks were at the forefront of the conversation, no matter what. I saw the greatest and the worst minds of their generations—Jane Goodall, Ingrid Bergman, Serena Williams, Margaret Thatcher—all subjected to the great equalizer that was whether my grandfather found them attractive. His was the standard that ruled those conversations and, as a result, my internal monologue.
I wasn’t the only one in my family affected by this obsession with thinness. My grandmother stayed slim for most of her life, until she developed a rapidly advancing case of dementia. Suddenly, her caretakers had to hide food from her because, left unsupervised, she would eat until she made herself sick.
“Do you want a cookie, Sally?” I asked her at lunch one day. She looked at me with the face of a child.
“Sarah, I always want a cookie. I didn’t eat any cookies for so long.” We each ate two, giggling more like sisters than grandmother and granddaughter.