Driving Demons: Twinkies And The Inner Fat Kid

Richard Day Gore, orato, obesity, childhood

I still hear the bullies.

The experience of spending our formative years getting abused because of our obesity damaged our lives on its most essential levels. Its shadow was all-encompassing.

By Citizen Correspondent Richard Day Gore

Date Posted: 05/30/07

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I was a timid little kid. So much so that I've often wondered if my caesarian birth simply sprang me from that comfy womb before I was ready. By the time I was halfway through elementary school, I had managed to shield myself from the growing number of bullies with a growing armor of fat...

Eventually I came to feel terribly isolated and freakish. There was only one kid in class fatter than me. Little solace; I saw my own misery in his. My parents tried to help, but it came to nothing. They took me from doctor to doctor who would charge them top dollar for state-of-the-shyster mumbo jumbo without once saying, "The boy's eating too much." There were few if any "drastic medical procedures" available back then, but pursuing them would have required admitting a problem in a Cold War culture that was all about making pretty. So I dreamed of escape. And I found it in ice cream sandwiches.

My seventeenth birthday was marked by two things: the apogee of my weight and a smile from a girl at the pharmacy. Now scrutinizing my appearance through the merciless lens of hormonal awakening, I noticed a series of lines appearing on my arms. At my pre-college physical, I asked the doctor what they were. Without looking up from his clipboard he muttered, "Stretch marks."

"Stretch marks," I replied, puzzled. "What causes them?"

He put an arm around my shoulder and took a breath.

"O-BE-sity!" he shouted. The clipboard whacked across my stomach for emphasis.

Hearing this so bluntly from an adult hit me in a way that the jerks at the bus stop never could. But I'd learned a passive defiance from the bullies as well as self-hatred. So I said "Screw you" to the doctor-by losing 50 pounds in a little less than a year. It was remarkably easy. I simply stopped "eating too much."

By a few months after college graduation I'd married a sought-after girl from my high school class. I'd also graduated into a being a nice looking guy who actually got lots of attention from attractive women.