But Elizabeth, You’re Not Fat!

From its very first beginnings as doodles in my sketchbook,
shortly after one of my high school art students died from anorexia,
to the completion of the final illustrations in January 2009,
I heard this comment from everyone who saw More to Love in progress:
“But Elizabeth, you’re not fat!”

Despite the fact that illustrators do not need to look like their characters
(the creator of Maxine, the crabby old lady from Hallmark, is actually a guy!),
I predict that this comment will continue to come up anytime someone who has read “More to Love”
meets me or sees my photo.
I’ve written an answer to the question: “Why did such a skinny woman write this book?”
but that answer is more about "More to Love" than about myself.

I acknowledge that I've never had to endure the mocking, discrimination and downright hatred
that many larger women suffer on a daily basis.
This "thin privilege" however, does not make me insensitive to the real pain
my friends, family, students and co-workers experience.
And as someone who has experienced eating disorders first hand,
I know in my heart how women and girls of all sizes suffer from the pervasive fat phobia that we all live with.

“But Elizabeth, you’re not fat!”

I come from a family of what my Nana called “string beans”.
Every female on my mother’s side of the family,
including my mother, her sister, my grandmother, my sisters, and my nieces
is skinny and lanky, with long, thin fingers and toes (and rather small in the boob department!)
All “ectomorphs”, as the body type is called.
Of the 3 sisters, I was always the biggest, with a naturally round face,
but I was never more than what you might call chubby.

My very heaviest weight was my senior year in high school,
when I was a miserably unhappy new kid with glasses, braces, flat-chested, and with terrible acne.
I wore a size 13/14. 
This is not huge, but compared to the super- skinny models and actresses
I saw every time I turned on the TV or opened a magazine,
I felt like a whale.
In retrospect (and this comes with time, self-knowledge and self-acceptance)
it was all the other unhappy aspects of my adolescence that made me so depressed, not the weight.
But at the time it seemed like being even slightly fat was a real failure
in the normal teenage quest to be an attractive and popular girl.

Once I outgrew the glasses, braces and acne, and became my “set point” weight,
I still didn't’t outgrow my insecurity about my looks.
My girlfriends and I spent at least 90% of our time talking (obsessing really) about our weight.
Hating the way we looked, but mutually assuring each other, over and over again
(you know this conversation: “I’m so fat”, “You’re so not fat”, “I hate my butt/thighs/belly whatever…”)
And overeating, then starving, feeling miserable, then doing it all over again.
When I think about it now, it seems quite stupid, but at the time our biggest goal was wearing
the tiniest pair of jeans we could manage to squeeze into!
To be so ingrained with an image of beauty that is underweight, even for a thin girl,
is to walk the dangerous line between normal, enjoyable, unemotional eating and eating disorders.

Fast forward, past art school, I’m nursing my first baby, and I’m losing weight faster than I can eat
a jar of peanut butter and a whole loaf of bread, washed down with a quart of milk, in one meal.
I’m working full time, right up until the end of my second pregnancy, stressed out in an unhappy marriage.
Again, nursing my second baby, and losing weight so fast that I almost can’t nurse.
Boom! Husband leaves, no child support, and we slide into desperately poor circumstances.
I give most of the food to the toddlers,
work cleaning houses (two a day, fast & physical) and go back to college at night to get my teaching degree.

I am skeletal, but random people, sometimes strangers, ask me “What is my secret for being so thin?”
Bony, hungry, stressed out, and working 24/7 to keep my little family afloat, I am shocked when
I am complimented for being scrawny and underweight!

Initially the stress and lack of money curbed my food intake.
With ectomorphs, once the stress-related anorexia begins
it is common that eating more than a few bites causes your stomach to close up in knots.
(that’s plain ol’ anorexia, as in loss of appetite, not "anorexia nervosa", the intentional starvation while still being hungry)

But the "skinny compliments" kept me from eating,
long past the days when my stress levels became manageable and my appetite began to return.
It’s an odd self-reinforcing cycle to be noticed in a positive way,
especially for someone like me who was such an ugly duckling teenager...
I started thinking “I’m too fat” the minute I began to creep up to my normal set point weight!
I felt terrible hungry most of the time, but I was doing all those abnormal things to avoid eating
that are well-documented as symptoms of anorexia nervosa.

Fortunately for me, I had children that depended on me,
so I never slipped so far underweight that I became too weak to take care of them.
(Although I was always tired, always getting sick and my therapist once threatened to have me hospitalized unless I kept above a certain weight).
I had my art, and my family, friends of all sizes, and a full busy life to lead.
Gradually, ever so gradually, I began to relax, re-examine, and reflect on what was important in my life.
I re-learned to eat when I’m hungry, stop when I’m full.
Now I’m back to the exact same size and weight I was before all of this started!
(and no, I’m not going to tell you any numbers, because that refocuses the conversation back to trivial size/weight data)

It is a tragedy that so many women and girls hate the bodies they were born with,
and develop harmful, destructive relationships to food.
Fat girls, skinny girls, girls in between, we all seem to succumb to it!
I believe that the continuous, unrelenting, non-stop media images of underweight women
are one of the many root causes of all this misery.

“More to Love” is my small contribution to giving normal, curvy, full-figured, beautiful women
some fun, upbeat, adorable images and positive affirmations as an antidote.

I hope it puts smile on the faces of those of you who are on the path of self-acceptance,
and those of you who still continue to struggle with it.

PS: the one skinny girl you see in “More to Love” is based on a photo of me and a friend enjoying ice cream!


Elizabeth Patch creates positive art for the plus size majority!