beefy, big, blimp, bovine, brawny, broad, bulging, bulky, bull, burly, butterball, chunky, corpulent, distended, dumpy, elephantine, fleshy, gargantuan, gross, heavy, heavyset, hefty, husky, inflated, jelly-belly, lard, large, meaty, obese, oversize, paunchy, plump, plumpish, ponderous, porcine, portly, potbellied, pudgy, roly-poly, rotund, solid, stout, swollen, thickset, weighty, whalelike
Certainly most of those are far more insulting than "fat." Some of them are quite factual, but the majority are more colorful. I've been called several of them and many others over the years too. Butterball. Chunky. Whale. Fat-ass. Tubby. Lard. Michelin. Ugly. ... And yes, hearing that all throughout my childhood put some programming in place that is very difficult to delete/rewrite as an adult. So did the growing up with dieting. It seems like my family was always on a diet together, but mostly it was my mother and me. There were weekly weighings, menu/recipe cards, carefully measured portions, Jane Fonda and trampoline workouts, body measurements. Torture. So not only was I not acceptable to the kids at school and society, I wasn't acceptable to my family, so how could I ever be acceptable to myself? I actually wonder if the self-loathing ever goes away. I've gotten pretty good at shoving it in the back of the closet in the recesses of my mind, but it frequently gets out and runs rampant. Self-loathing is self-abuse. I don't need someone else to emotionally abuse me about how worthless or lazy I am because I'm fat, I've got that someone built right into my own brain. You can eventually leave an abusive relationship or move out of your abusive parent's home ... but you can't move out of your own body to escape self-abuse. And until I wrote this, I didn't realize that this is what I've been doing. I didn't consciously realize that I've been beating myself down. I knew I hated myself for being a failure - failure at getting healthy and losing weight, but I'm a self-abuser and I don't know how to stop. Maybe this is where part of my fear of success lies: If I lose weight, what will my internal abuser have to lord over me? I do know that fixing the symptom (being fat), isn't going to cure the disease (self-abuse), but will it make it easier? I don't know. I also don't know if seeing a shrink would help, and if it would, what specialty? Who is trained in teaching people to reprogram their brains to not be assholes to themselves?
And you know what the worst part about this built-in-abuser is? It stops me from receiving compliments and adoration from the person I love most: my future husband. He adores me. He thinks I'm beautiful and wonderful and sexy the way I am today. I believe him too. But somehow between believing him and believing his beliefs myself, there's a breakdown. I can't feel about me the way he does ... and that makes me feel like an ass. Like I'm robbing him of a more fulfilling experience with me by having this belief breakdown and the only person who is at fault is me ... or better yet, my built-in-abuser. I imagine that getting this built-in-abuser rehabilitated will do wonders for our relationship ... if only in doing wonders for my emotional health.
And by the way, if I haven't said it yet, I'll say it now: I have every intention of sharing all of the things. I expect this to be a heavy, upsetting, rage-inducing, triumphant, dark, frustrating, raw, silly at times, elementary ... a drawn out way to say honest. I will be brutally honest and I will likely surprise myself with some realizations I come to through this process.