Everyone hates the Fat Kid. The Fat Kid is always annoying, whiny, and soft. No one in the 80s had any hesitation making fun of the fat kid’s weight. From Vern in “Stand By Me” to Chunk in “The Goonies,” there were abundant models of what the Fat Kid is like, and how you should treat the Fat Kid.

Some of my earliest memories are around food. Not just food, but food I ate by myself. I was 5 in the early 80s, so I was allowed to go to the store across the street by myself. I would buy a can of tuna, a can of lima beans, a cup of lemon yogurt, and, on a great day, a 1-lb block of chocolate. They had this enormous bin of these rough-cut blocks, and I lusted after them every day. Once in a blue moon, I got to get one. I would take my bounty back to my parents’ store, and eat dinner alone.  

I was always pretty soft, looking at old pictures, but I really started to plump up around age 7. My family had moved and I was at a new school. From 2nd to 4th grade, chubby Matt G. (I’ve forgotten the names of people very dear to me, but will always remember his name – yes, I remember what the G stands for) teased me endlessly. My mom pointed out that as an overweight kid himself, he was probably trying to deflect negative attention from himself onto me. In retrospect, she was absolutely right about that. At the time, it didn’t matter why, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that information – what, tease him back? It wasn’t insight that was going to make the problem stop. 

It was around this time that my family started working with me to try to get my weight down. They offered incentives for dieting, and encouraged me to eat less and exercise more. I didn’t want to be fat, but I didn’t want to give up food either. I would sneak into the pantry at night. I would squirrel away blocks of cheese in my room. I didn’t get in trouble much as a kid, but on the rare occasions when I did, it was nearly always over food. 

Things really took a turn from 5th grade through 7th grade. I had changed schools, and started from scratch in the friend department. Now, in addition to the come-hither fat, I had crooked teeth, greasy hair, and body odor. The kids were really, really mean. New to me, the girls put me down too. I was the punchline of a lot of “She’s your girlfriend” jokes. When you’re the worst-case scenario for a girlfriend, you know the boys you like will never reciprocate – it would be social death to hitch your wagon to the ugliest fat girl in school.

I learned the rules quickly. Never say you’re hungry. Never finish your food. Never buy more lunch than your skinny friend. In fact, I was so mortified to be judged by my eating that I would have no lunch at all. I would arrive from school after 10 hours without eating (2 hours each way on the bus), absolutely ravenous, and eat in private, where it was safe.   

When you watch “The Goonies” and see yourself reflected in Chunk, but you really want to be Steph, you internalize the message, but work hard to be something different. I saw that fat kids were wimpy and complaining, so I strove to be stoic and rock-hard with resolve. Fat kids were dim and clueless, so I worked hard to show the world I was smart and funny. It was never enough. I was always on the periphery, always the butt of jokes, always a hard no on the question of coupling up. 

I can draw a direct line from being a fat kid to being a drunk young adult. When I started drinking, years later, the most tangible experience it gave me was a sense of belonging for the first time. That these friends truly saw me, and did perceive me how I saw myself – smart, hilarious, worthy. I wasn’t any thinner, in fact I was obese from junior high on forward, and I still wasn’t girlfriend material, but I was at least, at last, good enough to be part of the group.

I countered the Fat Kid narrative well into adulthood. It is common knowledge that your office fatties are your laziest and most incompetent colleagues (think of Kevin from “The Office,” and Mimi from “The Drew Carey Show”). There was a lot to try to work against there. In nearly every job, I “hustled for my worth,” as Brene Brown says, and tried to show up as twice as good to break stereotypes about fat lazy slobs. I had, not only the pressure of needing to show up strong as an individual, but having to represent my people well.

And you do things even among the people who respect you. I was recently at a banquet dinner for work, and one of my obese colleagues left his plate mostly uneaten. I don’t know what his real motivations were, but I remember leaving a lot of food uneaten in public to reflect an image that I needed to project – that I have restraint where food is concerned, and am not an out-of-control Food Hoover. I remember making ordering decisions in restaurants based on what looked most modest, not based on what I actually wanted to eat. Of course, that was before my weight ballooned in my mid-30s. By then, I had given up the charade entirely. There is no pretending you have restraint when you weigh over 300 pounds. 

When I was morbidly obese, I did pretty much all of my binge eating in private. In public, I had to pretend to eat like you. Behind closed doors, I could eat like me. The way food was most satisfying wasn’t a meal joyfully shared with friends and family. It was a secret, something you would get in trouble for and be judged for. Food was something to fret over in public, but alone, the guardrails were off.   

I still have insane food issues. In a world where I can’t drink any more, and can’t smoke any more, I often indulge food as the last vice (and, see above, as my first vice). At another work function, a little sulky about not being able to enjoy a glass of wine, I ordered a mountain of food – in public! And my boss’s boss – kind of a horrible guy, for a lot of reasons – publicly shamed me for it, saying, “Where do you put it all?” Up your ass, buddy. That’s where I put it. I was mortified. Pro tip: Don’t ever comment on how much a person is eating. You do not know what they are struggling with.

All the weight I’ve lost has liberated me from a lot of the posturing I’ve felt the need to do. It’s a huge relief. But this I know for certain: If I was carrying that 200 pounds around still, I would still be hustling and hiding and trying to be twice as good to be thought of as half as deserving. A lot of my heavy brethren are still out there on the hustle. It’s one reason why I love watching the Food Network. It’s the only TV environment where you see morbidly obese people absolutely crushing it at the top of their profession. You can see them and assess that they love food. And they’ve made it their life’s work! No shame in that game. I am so grateful to see obese people who aren’t a joke, and are actually held up as exemplary in their work.   

In good news, there’s increasingly inclusive language around the Fat Kid – that it’s not suitable to tease a kid for their body type any more than teasing them for their skin color or preference for non-binary clothing. Will this change things for Fat Kids coming up? Hard to say. They will probably still watch “The Goonies.” At least Chunk proves to have the biggest heart in the gang, as demonstrated by his love for poor disabled Sloth. Will we see a positive narrative with a Fat Kid at the center? Molly in “Booksmart” sent me over the moon. Fat Amy “Pitch Perfect” is…more complicated. After all, her fatness is her defining feature, right in her name. But there are fewer caricatures, and more nuanced and fearless portraits than there have been historically.

I hated that I was fat. I hated myself for being fat. This is hard to say: When I was super morbidly obese, I would see Fat Kids, particularly fat little girls, and think, “You might as well give up now, kid, it’s only going to get worse.” I saw the struggle they would have to go through and the degradation they would have to live with, and saw no hope for them. I didn’t know if they were funny, or smart, or kind, and I knew it didn’t matter. They were fat, and they would suffer. I’m relieved I don’t think like that any more. There is room to be more than fat in a kid’s life. And I also know that the skinny kids are suffering in their own ways. We are all carrying around shame and self-doubt, some of us on the outside, some of us even though we look like we have the world on a string. None of us is immune.

Being the Fat Kid has shaped me for decades. I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove that the archetypes are wrong, and writhing with humiliation when my behavior reflects that the archetypes are kind of right sometimes. It’s turned me into a person who binges in secret, and who drank to feel belonging. For now, I’ll be content with my own story, which is a…complicated narrative with a Fat Kid at the center. She had a tough time for a long time, but she turned out to be wildly happy in the end.