Gym Class

If you were a fat kid, you can relate quite well to what I'm about to talk about. I'm going to discuss the agony of gym classes in school. Even if a fat kid happens to be not so terrible at some activities or sports, there's so much indignity involved in the classes that they'll learn to hate them sooner rather than later.

Being fat in gym class means being picked last when teams are chosen (unless one of your friends gets to make the choices and chooses you out of loyalty). There's nothing like always being treated as the least desirable person to help tear down any remaining self-esteem that is left after having to wear shorts in front of everyone and show off your fat legs. What is worse, of course, is community showering where people get to see your entire wobbly body in a manner which violates your privacy and puts you on display for others to laugh at.

Of course, being fat does usually mean you're slow and probably not the greatest at sports, and that's all the more reason why gym classes shouldn't be about competition as much as health. I never understood why my gym classes were centered around things like softball, kickball, dodge ball, etc. Those sports actually ensured that we spent less time being active because they were turn based. You spent a lot of time waiting for your turn, acted on your turn, and ran a bit then started the whole process all over again.

What was worse than the competitive sports though was the absurdity of doing gymnastics activities. I'm not sure how walking along a balance beam, jumping over a pummel horse, etc. was meant to make my young body fit, but it sure did make me feel inadequate and hate every gym class. Instead of encouraging fitness, they tested for it and it was a test I always failed. If anything, gym discouraged exercise.

I believe that, if schools were really interested in helping kids be active and healthy, they'd offer a variety of options for gym like constantly walking for 30-60 minutes a day. Can you imagine how much better it'd be for overweight kids to spend an hour walking around a track or the gymnasium each day than facing the humiliation of organized sports and fitness-testing activities? At the very least, the option to do this instead of a regular gym class should be offered. I know I would have been happy to spend an hour walking and talking to friends each day instead of taking gym class twice a week. Walking not only would be better for overall fitness, but it'd encourage daily movement and show how you can get helpful exercise without feeling or looking foolish in front of everyone.

Insensitive Teachers

You'd think that adults would display a certain amount of sensitivity with kids and try not to intentionally do anything to humiliate them. These days, I'm guessing that a teacher who did anything which had a pretty good chance of publicly embarrassing a kid might get in trouble, but it wasn't the case when I was a child. In fact, teachers did things which I find it hard to believe that they'd get away with now.

When I was in 4th or 5th grade, one of my teachers was talking about some topic or another and decided she would make every kid in the class announce his or her weight aloud so she could note it for whatever nonsense she was doing. In a class of about 20 kids, I was the only fat kid. I believe I weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 130 lbs. at that point in time in a class which was full of kids who weighed 70 lbs. or less.

I remember the teacher going down each row and each kid saying his or her weight while I was furiously thinking about how I could deal with this situation without utterly feeling humiliated. I figured that I would pick a weight which was higher than everyone else's but nowhere near the embarrassing truth. When the teacher reached me, she didn't hesitate, but you could tell every kid in the class was just waiting to hear what I said. Once more, I was the focus of negative attention because of my body size and this time every single person in the room was waiting to react to what I said. My lie was, "85 lbs." I didn't fool anyone and my reply elicited a bunch of stage whispers disbelieving my obvious lie.

In retrospect, I wonder if the teacher did this on purpose. Teachers are, after all, no more enlightened than others and I witnessed more than one occasion where a teacher went out of his or her way to be cruel to a kid for one reason or another. For example, one of my fellow students had a bad habit of talking out of turn and not raising his hand. If he wanted permission to do something, he'd just blurt it out and this annoyed the teacher. One day he blurted out a request to go to the bathroom and she chastised him and said he had to raise his hand and wait to be recognized. He then raised his hand to comply with her request and she ignored him for a long time. As he sat there, he started to squirm in discomfort. By the time she finally agreed to recognize his raised hand, he was practically dancing in his seat trying to hold it in and fighting tears. Teachers do not necessarily have to be advanced humanistic beings, even those who work with children and should be more patient and understanding.

In my case, I wonder if the teacher may have tried to embarrass me as a way of exacting more pressure on me to lose weight. It would have been very easy for her to simply ask everyone to write their weight on a piece of paper and then collect them in a hat. It would have served the same purpose as making each of us announce aloud what our weights were as she was simply marking them down in a notebook of some sort. If she was trying to "help" me, it didn't work. In fact, the suffering and isolation I felt only made it all the more likely that I'd turn to food for solace.

From Skinny to Fat Kid

When I was a child, I was thin up until about 4th grade. At that point in time, I'm guessing in part due to puberty heading down the path and preparing to start knocking on my door, I started to gain weight.

I can't remember which came first, but I also started to eat as comfort from the daily torment I received at school. This is one of those "chicken and the egg" questions. Did I get teased because I was fat or did I get fat because I was teased? I can say that the early content of the torment I received was based on my being an unsophisticated member of a poor family living in a remote area. The "townie" kids knew each other and didn't know me, but also word got around that my mother kept a lot of pets, many of which weren't housebroken and crapped all over the house. The irony is that the people who spread this information were likely my childhood "friends". They were the kids of my parents' friends who saw the house and spread the word.

At any rate, around age 10, I started to get fat. The strange thing is that getting fat correlated with marked academic improvement. In first grade, I barely passed and my report card was a series of C's, D's and a few F's. In second and third, I did a little better, but clearly recall struggling to deal with tests, especially in math. In 4th grade, I won contests for reading the most books and was one of the first kids to completely memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 x 12. My grades shot up to all A's.

The improvement in my grades is another of those "chicken and the egg" questions. Maybe I also got teased because I was smarter than I was. Maybe I dug into my studies because I was being ostracized and didn't have friends because I had gotten fat.

The point is that I didn't start off fat, but managed to get and stay there for quite some time. I barely remember the time before I was defined by my body size because it was such a relatively short part of my life. I do know that that was the beginning of not being treated as an equally worthy human being and that that lack of worth has stayed with me ever since.