by Yna Romero

 I was a happy and playful kid. I tried to display myself the best way I can to show people that I was no different and that I was perfect as is. My parents said that people liked playing with me when I was a kid because I was cute, “healthy” and such. But people always had this distinct word to describe me. The word I could hear from anybody, young or old. The word that haunted me in school, in the malls, the park and even my own home. The word that I heard every single day of my life till it came to the moment that it was a word even I was telling myself. FAT. I was and I am fat.

Growing up, it was never easy. The world is cruel but as a young kid, I didn’t understand that of course, because I was still a baby. When I was young, being chubby and healthy became an asset since I attracted people for being a cute child and it was fun. People pinching your cheeks, hugging you till you can’t breathe and counting the lines in your arms, it was an asset until I grew up. There was this time when I was in a mall and I was just simply walking around with my mom shopping. I then overheard this group of girls laughing and saying that “Ang taba taba niya” and just looking at me from head to toe. Another was in school, there were these moments when I would mention to my classmates that I like this guy but then I’ll hear from people that they were backstabbing me and saying that I am hopeless because he will never like me because I am fat. I even hear comments from my own family and when I meet my relatives in a party they would say “You need to go on a diet.”, “Tumaba ka nanaman.”, “You eat too much.”, “Lessen your rice, Yna!” etc. These were just as few of the many encounters I went through growing up. It was my own Cinderella story. People were mean, so I had a hard time socializing. I had a hard time finding myself. I had no true friends and I spent a lot of time just staying with my mom, reading books or just going around on my own. At times it was so bad that when I would come home from school, I would just cry in my room.

 Being overweight and being called fat took away my confidence. It took away a part of my life. It took away so many tears. It was not something I could just run away from because till this day, it is something I am still experiencing. It haunted me to the point wherein the way I perceived life and my actions changed. I told myself to wear more conservative clothes, to not hope for boys, to know my place in school and I even told myself that I am the lowest of the low. I was scared to face life. I acquired more insecurities and anxieties that even I hated myself for letting this happen to me. People would tell me that I should stop eating this, I should go on this diet, I should do this, I should do that, I should try this and so on. I was being controlled and defined because of my weight and it was something that negatively affected me in life.

 When I entered my teenage years, I started to understand what people were doing to me. This was a case of fat shaming. Fat shaming based form Authority Nutrition is the act of criticizing and harassing overweight people about their weight or eating behavior. It is often justified as a means to motivate people, but research shows that it has the opposite effect. This act has been prevalent and growing the past few years and it has only gotten worse. So many suicide cases and lives have been lost because of a person’s incapability to absorb all the negative comments they hear about their weight.  Being called fat changed me and many other people as a person and hurt us in many ways. They say that fat shaming helps and inspires people, but from experience, it just makes things worse because you resort to food in order to forget the pain. If my experience displayed so much pain and effects, there are millions of more people experiencing much worse and are doing nothing about it. No one deserves to be defined just because of how they look.

Love your body. Love your skin. Love yourself and who you are.

Dont let others define you or judge you.

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