The following is one person’s reminiscence of what it was like to be overweight as a child. Nowadays, childhood obesity is a great deal more common and perhaps accepted among peers. Nonetheless, the childhood stigma presented here has lifelong effects. Also, the attitudes exhibited by the kids illustrate the types of biases carried into adulthood. Why is this child stigmatized? Do the root causes resemble those that lead to stigmatization of obese adults, or does adult stigmatization 'evolve'?

What are the causes of childhood obesity?

From “Pork” by Thomas Wictor

I have an evenly spread layer of fat that inflates and deflates like a pressure suit. When part of me is fat, all of me is fat….I’ve had my weight problem—or ‘fat problem,’ as a guidance counselor once advised me—since I was nine years old. [The author had fallen out of a tree and broken his arm.] I spent almost 3 months in casts. I’d always had a large appetite, and I’d always turned to food as a stress buster, only now I couldn’t play outside and burn it off. So I got fat…At some point early in my fatness, somebody gave me the nickname “Pork,” which might be why I no longer eat pig meat of any kind. I’m gradually going vegetarian, My ultimate goal is crazy, kookie uncompromising veganism. I don’t if I’ll ever I particularly liked. They tend to be somewhat humorless. Passionate but humorless. A sense of humor—better yet, a sense of the absurd—is what I appreciate most in a person, along with the ability to admit being wrong. When I was a seventh grader in Texas, a kid drew a picture of me in art class. He was from a family with 12 children who all looked exactly alike---pale blond hair, long noses, and dark circles around their eyes. They owned a massive grayish-green van, the type used to haul prisoners to the county courthouse. In church, they took up a whole pew and arranged themselves by height. The priests organized food drives for them because the mother was prone to horrible diseases and the father had an incredibly medial job. I think he worked in a bowling alley. Anyway, the family was always on the edge of starvation. I can’t remember if my parents had donated food to them. It would be ironic if they had.

This kid hated me from the second we met. He wanted me to suffer. Maybe he didn’t hate me so much as he hated the fact that I obviously had more than enough to eat at home while he was starving, although there were a few kids at school who were even fatter than I. Most likely, he singled me out because in those days, I was unable to defend myself. I didn’t know enough to say, ‘Hey, is it my fault that you have black circles under your eyes because you can’t get any sleep in the three-bedroom zoo you live in with thirteen other people, and you have to wear five-time hand-me-downs and ride around in a jail van with your stomach growling all day? Are you angry at me or someone else?”

It started my first week at that school. He would make comments to the other kids about an idiotic thing I’d said in class or how I’d screw up a basketball game in PE or how I didn’t know squat about the history of the great state of Texas. He was calm and amused, the most effective approach my nemeses can take. I generally ignored him because if I tried to fight back, he would mimic my s-s-s-stutter or the way I constantly pulled my sweater away from my body so that it wouldn’t cling. These incidents always took place in front of a rapt audience; he was a kind of impresario, really. He produced his greatest show ever when he sat down across the table from me in art class and announced, “Ahm gonna draw Wictor, that’s what Ah’m gonna do. Gonna give him greasy hair, lahk this, zits an’ a big ol’ nose, lahk that, boobs lahk a girl, a fat belly stickin’ out in front lahk this, an’ a big ass lahk he’s stickin’ out in back. An’ a cruddy ol’ sweater lahk he always wears.” When he was finished, he showed it to me—it was a side view, a line drawing with no shading. Then he took it around the room and showed everybody else, including the teacher. They all laughed and applauded, except for the teacher. She only laughed.

That summer, I had a growth spurt and embarked upon a draconian weight-loss program. I was much thinner by the time I started the eighth grade. I still had the same classmates, but they welcomed me now, even calling me on the phone and inviting me to parties. They no longer grouped me with the Italian boy who shouted “Attention!” before he broke wind, the balding girl who didn’t speak, and the boy who liked to stand next to his desk for the whole period. In the middle of the year, my family decided to move to the Netherlands. We attended Midnight Mass a few days before we left, and I ran into the kind who had drawn me. He shook my hand and wished me well. 

From Thomas Wictor, Pork, Bellevue Literary review