You may have noticed by now
that I'm really fat.
And that's okay;
you wouldn't be the first.
Back in 1997, when I was in seventh grade,
I heard a question posed about me in the locker room of my middle school.
I sat hidden in a bathroom stall,
hunched over, not wanting to give myself away,
when I heard a girl ask,
"When was the last time Whitney saw 90210?"
I was like more of a Saved by the Bell girl myself,
and I'd actually never seen an episode of 90210.
So I clenched my muscles and held my pee
and waited with bated breath for the answer.
And when it came -
"When she stepped on the scale" -
the girls erupted into laughter,
and I felt the familiar sting of embarrassment seeping into my cheeks.
It took me back to my fifth-grade year, on the soccer field,
where the boys had taken to singing a song about me called "Baby Beluga"
that ended with "She's got a whale of a tail."
You might be picturing now how fat I probably was.
It's easy to conjure up a mental image
of an awkward girl spilling out of her shorts,
running up and down the sidelines like, "Hey, I'm open!"
But if you have that mental image,
you would be wrong.
Because in 1995, when I was 10 years old,
I looked like this.
When I look at that picture now,
my heart aches
because when I was just becoming aware that I had a body
and that other people had opinions about my body,
I became a statistic
like eight out of ten 10-year-olds who, today, are afraid of being fat.
10-year-olds!
That's a real statistic.
I bought the lie that diet culture sold me when I was 10 years old
that told me if I am thin, thinner, thin enough,
then I will be happy.
But at 10 years old, I felt the furthest thing from happy.
And so the emotion that I most connected with my body was shame.
After that,
shame followed me like a shadow.
And after the 90210 incident,
I knew I had to take action.
So I grabbed the handle of my father's toothbrush
and shoved it down my throat until I vomited.
And thus began my nearly lifelong battle with eating disorders.
I continued to excel in school, to play sports, to dance.
Shame and I won lots of awards and trophies.
Sometimes, shame was like a really overbearing adult
begging for a piggyback ride.
And other times,
shame trailed a few feet behind me, dragging its leash
like a faithful dog never leaving my sight.
By the time I was 18 years old, in 2002, and becoming a young woman,
shame had solidified itself as my most faithful friend.
It accompanied me to every dance performance,
to every soccer tournament;
it was even there in the bathroom with me at my prom
as I hunched over a toilet and threw up my dinner
just minutes before being crowned prom princess.
When I moved to college that fall,
I brought shame along into my dorm room,
and I noticed that my body was changing.
By the time I went home for Christmas break,
I'd gained 50 pounds.
And I'm thinking, like,
"Okay, I'm an overachiever,
so clearly the "freshman 15" is just not enough.
(Laughter)
I was getting mysterious bruises all over my body, and I was like,
"Why am I bumping into doorways and furniture?
When did I get so clumsy?"
But then I realized I wasn't clumsy:
my body was expanding so quickly
that I had lost all kinesthetic awareness of it.
My body literally didn't know how to fit in its physical space anymore,
and similarly, I didn't know where I fit in the world.
To say that my weight gain was difficult would be an understatement.
By the time the second semester was finished,
I'd gained nearly 100 pounds.
There was the sympathy from the pretty girls
who asked me if I'd, like, ever had a boyfriend.
And there was that one frat boy
who'd taken me on a dinner date in August -
granted, it was to Ruby Tuesday, but it was a dinner date.
And when he saw me in March,
he looked right through me like I didn't even exist.
It was like I'd been forced into some social experiment against my will,
to put on a fat suit and parade about in public.
The differences in the way
that people treated "average Whitney" and "fat Whitney" were striking.
Suddenly, I was assumed to be lazy, desperate, sloppy, stupid.
And with every single pound that I gained,
my self-worth continued to shrink further and further.
So I became a different person after that.
I quit my dance classes;
I failed a lot of my academic classes;
and in a world where it felt like being a fat woman was the biggest taboo,
I didn't have anyone to talk to.
Sure, there were times where I pulled myself up by the bootstraps
and I said, "I'm going to go to the gym
or I'm going to venture out to this party."
But there was always a whisper, a dirty look, an insult
to remind me why I didn't deserve to be in those spaces.
So I would come back home to my apartment
to the only friend that had never deserted me:
shame.
We would stay up late into the night commiserating,
getting drunk to numb our pain.
I'd order takeout for us both
and do anything to avoid going out in a world that didn't want me.
And of course, all the things that I had done to cope
only compounded the problem,
and I continued gaining weight.
In 2005, I weighed 280 pounds.
And my nurse practitioner swiveled her stool
from in between my legs in the stirrups,
checking her chart
and announcing a little too cheerfully
that she thought I had PCOS.
Well!
My mind started reeling
because I did not remember learning about this STD
in my seventh-grade sex ed class.
(Laughter)
But the more I learned
as I pored over the brochures and the pamphlets -
PCOS wasn't an STD.
It was a syndrome,
a grouping of symptoms with no cure
that affects one out of every ten women in America
and is the leading cause of infertility.
And then, like putting together a puzzle, other stuff started to make sense.
The handfuls of hair that had come out in the shower,
the coarse dark hairs all over my face,
my period that had visited me only twice when I was 15 and never again,
and, of course,
my sudden and severe weight gain in my freshman year of college.
I didn't have an explanation for it then, but I had an explanation for it now:
I was insulin resistant.
So would life with PCOS make it impossible to lose weight?
Absolutely not.
Would it be even harder?
Absolutely yes.
And for a woman who wanted anything but to be fat,
this felt like a death sentence.
And then I got pissed off.
I wondered,
"Why have I never heard of this thing?"
I wanted to know
why I'd always been dismissed when I went to the doctors,
told that I was "young and irregular" or I was drinking or I was on Prozac.
But out of all those emotions that I felt,
the one I felt the most of was shame.
So after college,
I packed two suitcases -
my clothes and shame -
and I set off for Korea to teach English.
I got promotion after promotion,
and I traveled the world.
Shame and I made it all the way to the top of the Great Wall of China;
we ate sushi together in Tokyo;
we vacationed in Malaysia and Vietnam;
we even sunbathed in Bali.
But all of these experiences that should have been so wonderful
were tinged with that disgusting, insidious shame
that sucked the life and the color out of my memories
and left me nothing but black and white
and a never-ending wish to be thin so that I could really start my life.
Now, living abroad wasn't all bad -
I had some of the best experiences there.
But the discrimination I faced
was so much more overt than anything I'd had at home.
I got laughed at, pointed at, and called a pig every single day
in the street, in the store, in the nightclub.
I'll never forget when I got in a taxi
and the driver snorted at me for every mile
until we reached our destination.
There was the guy that swerved his bicycle dangerously close to me on the street,
stopped pedaling,
looked at me, said "pig,"
and then spit.
I chased him,
which was a futile effort because he was on a bike,
and I hurled every Korean insult that I could remember
until I saw him vanish in the dark.
And then I headed back to my apartment to cry.
But it wasn't until ...
I was assaulted in a bar -
a man raced up behind me
to start punching me in the back of the head -
that I realized,
"Hold up.
I don't deserve this."
It took such an aggressive, abusive action
to jolt me into the realization that I was a fat human,
but I was human.
And I told myself,
"I'm going to go back home to the States,
and I'm going to prevent this from ever happening to me again.
I'm going to lose weight."
So I moved back home in 2011.
In 2011,
I weighed 329 pounds.
And I lost 100 pounds in eight months.
I worked out for 12 to 15 hours every week;
I counted my calories;
I obsessed;
and I hid my shame from my personal trainer
and from my family and from my friends,
even from strangers who said,
"You're remarkable.
This is the hardest thing that anybody could ever do,
and look at you doing it.
I've never been more proud of you since the day you were born!"
Pretty soon, I was eating 500 to 1,000 calories a day,
and I was throwing up everything I ate on Friday, which was my "cheat day,"
and my eating disorder had returned in full force.
One day, I walked out of the gym, having run a few miles on the treadmill,
and a car drove by slowly and lowered the windows,
and they yelled at me,
"Fat ass!"
When I climbed into my own car, dripping with sweat,
what happened next was nothing short of a nervous breakdown.
I had literally been working my ass off
to do the one thing that everybody told me would fix it,
the one thing that everybody told me would make me worthy.
But that guy in the parking lot didn't care;
he didn't know who, why, where I was or what I had done to change.
And I fantasized about losing the rest of my hundred pounds
and thinking about my goal weight.
But then all I could see were sagging breasts and loose skin
and crow's feet around my eyes.
And I knew, intellectually,
that as long as I let my self-worth be determined in the eyes of others,
I would never be content.
But I could not disengage from the belief that I had to be thin to be happy.
And so in that moment, all of my hope was extinguished.
I had grown tired of the calorie counting,
of the weight loss,
of the obsession with everything food and exercise.
I wanted something more to live for.
So, naturally, I got a job in radio
where I had to wake up at four in the morning every day for minimum wage.
(Laughter)
And like the vast majority of people
who lose a substantial amount of weight in their life,
I started to gain it back.
And within a year and a half, I was the heaviest I'd ever been.
I was 350 pounds
and in the deepest place of depression I'd ever known.
I didn't have any money to pay my own rent,
so I'd moved back in with my parents.
And on my 29th birthday, I found myself sobbing in my mother's lap,
lamenting about the dismal direction of both my professional and personal life.
And I asked her,
"Mom, how can anything ever change?"
And my mother produced a pendant,
and on it were the words
"Something good is going to happen."
But in my misery, I was hyperfocused on one detail and one detail only:
when?
So I started to reevaluate my life.
I thought back to when I was 10 years old and 90 pounds,
and now I'm almost 30 and over 300,
and it hadn't mattered.
I'd never been happy;
I'd never loved myself;
I'd always carry the weight of shame.
So I decided to try an experiment, and I made a promise.
I said, "Whitney, if there is something that you get asked to do
and your only reason for declining is to say,
'because I'm fat,'
then you are going to do that thing anyway."
The universe was listening
because you'd better believe -
three days later,
I got a message from a local photographer
who told me she wanted to take some boudoir photographs of me for free.
I wrote back to her immediately:
"Sister, I would never in a million years take my clothes off in front of a camera.
So when should I meet you?"
(Laughter)
A bottle of wine and a designated driver later,
(Laughter)
I got an unexpected result.
When I looked at this picture,
for the first time in my entire life,
I didn't dissect every flaw,
I didn't cringe,
and in fact, I thought I was beautiful.
So I decided to keep the experiment going.
My co-workers at the radio station were trying to ask me to do a dance video
and call it "A Fat Girl Dancing"
and put it on YouTube.
And at first, my reaction was "absolutely not"
because no one has seen me dance since I was 18 -
fat girls don't get to do that -
and I'm still balking at the word "fat."
And I had to ask myself,
"Whitney, of anyone on the planet,
don't you know that being fat
isn't synonymous with worthless, lazy, stupid, undeserving?"
I wasn't sure that I knew,
but I wanted to find out if I did,
so I said yes.
And I posted this video onto the internet,
and a few days later, I started getting a lot of phone calls.
But they weren't normal calls
like from my dad asking me if I had toilet paper and stuff.
It was like Steve Harvey and CNN, Good Morning America, and the Today Show,
and they all told me they wanted me to come on their programs,
talk about my dance video,
and explain this new lifestyle,
this new "body positive" lifestyle that I was leading.
And I couldn't understand -
like what is so special or subversive about a fat woman dancing?
But I went on the shows,
and I did my little dance.
And then the letters started coming in.
I got an email from a boy, a teenage boy in Lebanon, and he said,
"Whitney, it's illegal to be gay here,
and I'm gay.
But when I watch your videos, I feel like my life is going to be okay."
And I said,
"Okay."
(Laughs)
Then after that, some more letters started pouring in.
This one was from TLC, and they asked me if I would consider doing a reality show.
I mulled it over and thought about how it could ruin my life and reputation
and all the ways it still might.
But then I thought about that boy in Lebanon,
and for every other person
who had never turned on a TV and seen someone who looked like them,
who struggled like them,
and so I said yes.
It wasn't before long that even more letters started pouring in.
And many of them were from fat women, but just as many of them weren't.
I was talking to little girls,
anorexic women,
people with different abilities,
grandfathers that had always hated their noses.
And then I realized, like, it's not about the fact that I'm fat;
it's about the fact that I am living a shame-free life
in spite of a society that tells me I don't deserve to.
We all have something that society tells us we should feel shame about.
For me, it's visible
in a world where thinness is championed above all else,
where we tell women in no uncertain terms,
"If you are not young enough, thin enough, and pretty enough,
you're disposable"
Living in that world,
deciding to love my body had become a radical act.
And doing what I loved in that body had become powerful.
And then came the inevitable questions from everybody:
"How is this doable?"
I never used to know how to answer this question,
because I didn't know how to tell someone to be like me.
But now I think I know how to tell people to be more like them.
We think that we have to magically have confidence before we do something,
but this is backwards.
Confidence is a product of action, not the other way around.
If I had to wait to have the confidence, I'd never get out of bed to do anything.
I had to do the hard stuff -
in my case, posing half-naked and dancing -
and then the confidence came as a reward,
and the confidence came as a building block.
But living authentically shame-free is not sunshine and roses.
Every day on the internet and in my real life,
I'm told that I am disgusting, delusional,
and should hurry up and have that heart attack I'm bound to have
so the world will be rid of me.
But living shame-free
has also brought more joy into my life than I ever could believe existed.
It has connected me
with millions of people I'd have never met face-to-face
and injected the color and happiness back into my life.
Now, I often think of one of my favorite quotes
from my favorite feminist, Audre Lorde.
She said, "I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."
And then I think back to this picture - 1989.
Five years old, before my first dance recital,
this little girl was deliberate and afraid of nothing,
serving up all the face and sass in the world,
completely unapologetic about what she knew she was put on this earth to do.
I think we get discouraged because we've all been that little girl
but then the world beats and breaks us down.
We think that being confident, being happy
should be as easy as putting on a light switch, right?
Just do it, just be happy, just love yourself.
But it isn't that easy, and I know that.
It's not like a light switch.
Living authentically free of shame
is more like stumbling toward a motion sensor light in the dark.
You have to advance forward to a target that you can't see
but trust that you'll ultimately get there.
And the universe is funny
because the only thing that will turn that light on
is your movement and your action.
And if you live this way -
if you know that every time you're stumbling and spinning and scrambling,
you are actually doing the hard part,
you are actually doing the work even if you can't pinpoint your progress -
if you make a commitment to live a shame-free life
and know that it's an undertaking that you have to do every single day,
day in and day out,
and you are deliberate about choosing that life -
you will find yourself illuminated.
And if you're like me,
it'll probably be when you least expect it.
Thank you.
(Applause)