Skipping Towards Gomorrah (23 page)

“So it wasn't a feeder-gainer thing. I was just naturally getting bigger, but he loved it.”

Like a lot of FAs, Teresa's husband encouraged her to wear leggings and shirts that showed off her rolls of fat. During her marriage, Teresa grew from 300 pounds to 450 pounds. Teresa is five feet four inches tall. As she gained weight, Teresa began to have nightmares about immobility. Teresa watched some friends get so big (whether on their own or because they're married to feeders) that they gradually became disabled—some couldn't get out of bed anymore. She met a woman at a NAAFA event in 1991 who had been disowned by her family—her father was a film producer—because of her size. Through NAAFA, Teresa's friend met and married a feeder. Her friend weighed four hundred pounds at that point. The last time Teresa saw her friend at a chocolate-themed NAAFA party, she was so big that she couldn't get off the couch.

“Her husband had to do everything for her,” said Teresa. “She could barely move.” Teresa thinks her friend weighed about six hundred pounds at the time of the chocolate party. Recently, Teresa's gainer friend and her feeder husband made a videotape to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The tape documents her friend's growth over the years, and Teresa estimates that her friend now weighs more than eight hundred pounds.

“The tape is all over the Web. It's a turn-on for feeders,” said Teresa. “She gets out of bed only two times a day to go to the toilet. She's enormous, and her skin has these huge bubbles all over it, pockets on pockets of fat. He's feeding her doughnuts, fried food, pizza.” Teresa shakes her head. “I call it her death tape. Watching it was liking watching my friend being murdered before my eyes.”

Teresa's marriage began to fall apart when her husband started putting on weight. “You want to know one of the dirty little secrets of NAAFA?” Teresa said. “There's a lot of talk about accepting people of different sizes and how beautiful fat is and fat people are. Well, most BBWs aren't attracted to fat men. I know I'm not. Most of us want nice, good-looking men. Thin men.” Why? “For all the usual looks reasons. When I was really big, I would look at my body and feel disgusted. I don't want to feel that way when I look at my husband's body.”

Over her husband's objections, Teresa went on the diet drug combination fen-phen in 1996. She lost 182 pounds in eight months. (Luckily, Teresa wasn't harmed by the drug combination, which was pulled from the market when it was discovered to have life-threatening side effects.) Teresa's husband told her he wasn't attracted to her anymore, and they agreed to divorce. Teresa wasn't upset. She wasn't attracted to her husband anymore either, as a result of his weight gain. A year after the divorce and off the fen-phen, Teresa was back up to four hundred pounds.

Shortly after her divorce, some of Teresa's oldest friends from NAAFA began dying. A thirty-one-year-old woman who weighed seven hundred pounds sat up in bed one day, took a breath, and slumped over dead. She couldn't be cremated in Sacramento because no funeral home had an oven that was big enough to accommodate her body. Another friend who weighed six hundred pounds slipped and fell in her apartment and broke her hip. It took eight firemen to pick her up and put her in an ambulance. Her heart stopped while she was on an X-ray table. Another six-hundred-pound friend died of a stroke.

“I was almost five hundred pounds at this point,” Teresa said. “I knew it was going to happen to me. There was not a question in my head: I was so fat that I was going to die.”

This was the point in her life when Teresa began to contemplate something that would forever brand her a traitor in the eyes of her friends from NAAFA.

“I underwent WLS. Better WLS and some small risk of dying from complications than knowing I would for sure drop dead from being fat.”

WLS? Flipping through the NAAFA convention's schedule in my hotel room the night I arrived, I noticed a listing for a seminar titled, “Help! My Friend Is Getting WLS!” I couldn't figure out what WLS stood for. All the other seminar titles were upbeat and self-explanatory—“Fat Friendly Healthcare,” “Combating Workplace Discrimination,” “How to Get What You Want: Sexual Communication”—which made this mysterious WLS seminar all that much more intriguing. It would have to be something pretty awful if you needed help when your friends started getting it. Was it some sort of weight-related disease or syndrome? After all, people don't “get” good things; we “get” audited, we “get” cancer, we “get” cable. Whatever this WLS stuff is, I thought, it must be pretty awful.

Like a lot of fat people, Teresa has gone through life reading disapproval on people's faces. Over the course of her fat life, as she called it, she got pretty good at spotting people who were going to give her grief about her weight—people on airplanes who would see her coming down the aisle and make the face, people in grocery stores or restaurants who would make comments to her about the food in her cart or on her plate. Adept as she was at reading faces, Teresa could tell that I was lost.

“WLS stands for weight loss surgery,” she explained, leaning across the table and whispering. “It's the reason I didn't eat very much at breakfast. My stomach is about as big as your thumb.”

 

T
eresa wasn't planning to attend the WLS seminar; she was afraid she would be attacked for having undergone the surgery. Shawn felt the same way—she wasn't going to spend two hours of her Memorial Day weekend holiday being attacked. For many NAAFA members, Shawn's decision to undergo WLS was a bigger betrayal than Teresa's. In the mid-1990s, Shawn had operated two of the first Web sites devoted to BBWs and FAs. But by November of 2000, the five-three, thirty-four-year-old computer programmer had grown to four hundred pounds, couldn't do her own laundry or clean her own apartment anymore, and had just broken up with her boyfriend, an FA who was encouraging her to get bigger. Worst of all, Shawn was a roller-coaster fanatic who couldn't ride roller coasters anymore due to her size.

“I was fine and active at three hundred and fifty pounds,” said Shawn. “But your body can only take so much. When I got up to four hundred pounds, I was just existing. I wasn't living, and I was going to die in ten years. I decided I would rather live for ten years at a normal size and have some fun than sit in my apartment in misery for the same ten years and then die.”

Seven months after undergoing WLS, Shawn was down to 275 pounds. Her goal is 200 to 225 pounds.

“That's still fat for someone my height,” Shawn said. “I will always be big. I like being big. And I'll always be a part of the fat acceptance movement. But I don't think I can be part of NAAFA anymore.”

Sitting on a couch in the lobby, Shawn told me she weighed just 250 pounds when she attended her first NAAFA event.

“People told me I wasn't big enough,” Shawn remembered. “ ‘Oh, you're not a real BBW,' they'd say. Can you believe it? You're told all your life that you're too big, and then you join this club and all these people are telling you you're too
small
. So you start to eat and eat and pretty soon you're up to four hundred pounds. That's how I got so big. All my friends were in NAAFA, and you see all your friends getting bigger, and so you get bigger.”

Shawn got hundreds of e-mails after she went public about having WLS. While some were from women and men curious about the surgery, most were negative, and the most vicious e-mails came from NAAFA members she thought of as friends.

“They said, ‘You did it because you don't love yourself.' ‘You butchered your body because you hate who you are.' I didn't do this because I hate myself. I did it because I love myself. I wanted a better life. I don't want to wind up in a wheelchair. I wanted to go skydiving. I wanted to bungee jump.”

Shawn was sure I would hear only the negative about WLS at the seminar. “Don't let those women lie to you,” Shawn warned me. “They're going to say you can be any weight you want and be happy and healthy. That's bullshit. When I would ask, ‘What's too big?' they would say, ‘You can't be too big. It's sizeist to talk about being “too big,” ' I would say, ‘What if you're so big you can't walk?' And they would say, ‘You can use a wheelchair.' I thought to myself, This is ridiculous! I don't want to be a part of this crowd anymore!”

Shawn and Teresa both felt that many NAAFA members were threatened by WLS; some fat members didn't want their fat friends to have the option of being skinny. As for FAs, “It's their worst nightmare,” Shawn said, laughing. “What are they going to do if we all get skinny?”

There are, however, some NAAFA members who remember earlier versions of WLS in the seventies and eighties—much riskier surgeries that wound up killing their friends. WLS today is vastly safer, and thousands of people have had the surgery, most famously the singer Carny Wilson.

“They're old school,” said Shawn. “They've been in NAAFA since the beginning, and they remember when people had the intestinal bypass surgery and died. They don't want to admit that there's this new procedure and that it actually works.”

Both Shawn and Teresa were quick to admit that WLS has side effects. Shawn doesn't absorb enough protein, and her muscle mass is low; Teresa has to get shots for vitamin B
₁₂
deficiency, and she takes supplements for other vitamins.

“You can't have WLS and walk away from it,” said Shawn. “You have to constantly monitor your health and food intake.”

But couldn't Shawn and Teresa have avoided becoming hugely fat if they'd simply monitored their health and food intake all along? Neither woman would have grown to more than four hundred pounds if they had paid as much attention to their diets before undergoing the surgery as they've been forced to after undergoing it.

“Oh, I love the people who say, ‘Just stop eating,' ” said Shawn, rolling her eyes at me and looking to Teresa for support. “I tried to do that for thirty-four years. I'd been on diets since I was ten. I was addicted to food. I admit it. I had a food addiction; I couldn't stop eating. WLS forced me to stop.”

 

T
hree women were on the WLS panel: the moderator and two sisters, one who had the surgery and one who wouldn't have the surgery if you put an icing gun to her head. The sister who had had WLS was a nurse. The nurse was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, very little makeup, and her hair was reddish brown. She looked pretty nervous and was sitting close to the door. The sister who hadn't had the surgery designs jewelry for big women. She had bright, blond hair, and wore a flowing, vividly colored dress, tinted glasses, and a few pieces of her own jewelry. I'd checked out some of her jewelry earlier in the day at the trade show. Apparently, designing jewelry for fat women, as opposed to thin women, mostly involves considerations of scale. A necklace that would look fun and chunky on a woman who weighed 125 pounds would get lost on a woman who weighs 400 pounds. The pieces the jewelry designer makes for her clients are lovely, but only big women could wear her stuff. On a four-hundred-pound woman, her pieces look fun and chunky; a woman who weighs 125 pounds, on the other hands, would look like she was wearing a solid gold manhole cover on an anchor chain.

There were about twenty-five people at the WLS seminar, and everyone was silent before the moderator began to speak. The moderator was a fashionably dressed woman with a therapist's calming voice and demeanor who implored us all to keep our minds open. Then she handed out a fact sheet she had prepared that ripped apart WLS. It was clear that the moderator—who was big but not too heavy—had a closed mind when it came to WLS. You could sense the tension when she invited the nurse, the sister who had the surgery, to share her story. The nurse told us she had the surgery after watching several patients undergo it, and witnessing their improvement. Her side effects were minor, and her feelings about her decision were positive. The surgery had changed her life, she said. The only negative? She lost some of her “eating friends,” much like a reformed alcoholic might lose his drinking buddies.

The moderator then invited the jewelry designer to share her side of the story. She was shocked that her sister would even consider WLS. She loved her sister unconditionally, of course, and had watched her lose weight, but her feelings about the surgery were unchanged. She didn't want to lose weight, and she thought her sister looked better when she was bigger. The moderator thanked the nurse for her bravery, but not the jewelry designer. Since everyone at “Help! My Friend Is Getting WLS!” was presumed to be opposed to weight loss surgery it was only the nurse who was being brave.

The moderator opened up the discussion for questions or comments, reminding us once again not to engage in personal attacks. The nurse looked around the room, and I could see her bracing for the condemnations that seemed certain to come. She sat up straight in her chair, squared her shoulders, and rolled her lips between her teeth. The moderator implored us to speak only to our own feelings and, once again, not to engage in personal attacks.

A big man with a red, sweaty face raised his hand—the only other man in the room besides me—and the moderator called on him. The man was perched on the edge of his chair, and was so agitated as he began to speak that he visibly shook. He was having the surgery, he announced. He had diabetes, joint problems, trouble walking, sleep apnea, he couldn't fit in an airline seat anymore, and could no longer tolerate the daily abuse—the slights, the stares, and the jokes he had to put up with at work. Whenever a tool went missing at the plant where he worked, someone would ask him if he had eaten it.

His ultimate reason for having the surgery, though, was the knowledge that he would soon be disabled by his weight. He couldn't stop himself from eating, and he would rather take his risks on the surgery than wind up housebound or in a wheelchair. He told everyone in the room who objected to WLS to open their eyes: the halls of the hotel were full of NAAFA members who were so fat they had to use canes to walk, and there were others who had given up on walking entirely, getting around in wheelchairs and motorized carts. People he knew from years ago, “people who might have been fat and fit once upon a time,” were now fat and dying.