The Lasting Impact of Being the “Chubby Kid”

The concept of “projecting” is widely understood–someone’s opinion of you has so much more to do with them than anything to do with you. As an adult, I know this to be true, and when I remind myself of it, I can identify it and move through my day mostly unscathed. Unfortunately for my childhood self, the complexities and nuances of human behavior wasn’t something I had been made aware of yet. When you’re a kid and an adult is telling you in more ways than one that your body is wrong, you take it at face value. I was chubby, and that was different from what I was supposed to be, and that meant there was a problem that we needed to fix. I was failing before I even woke up for the day. I was making a bad decision when I ate the pinwheels someone’s mom brought to softball practice instead of the orange slices we brought (who remembers pinwheels? Just me??). When we went for fro-yo and I topped mine with crushed Oreo and whipped cream instead of fruit, I could feel the side-eye from the staff as they rang up the order. While other kids could seemingly eat pizza and cake at the birthday party and think nothing of it, I had anxiety around the food choices I was making. Being chubby didn’t just mean being chubby–it meant that I was a poor decision maker, that I lacked manners, that I wasn’t very bright because clearly I didn’t understand the long-term effects of my food choices. Who knew fro-yo toppings could say so many things!

Let’s call it for what it is–Fatphobia

The adults around me were exhibiting something we know to be “fatphobia,” the irrational fear, dislike, or unfair treatment of fat people. This bias shows up in pop culture, the media, our places of employment, the health care system, and isn’t just reserved for adults.

For many chubby kids who grow up to be adults, whether they shed the baby fat or it sticks around and turns into just regular fat, being labeled the “chubby kid” isn’t an experience left in childhood. Instead, it becomes part of your identity. Long after the comments, teasing and diets have faded from the daily routine, the emotional impact is there. This too, is body grief. 

When the outer voice becomes the inner voice and it’s saying “your body is wrong” 

Many children in larger bodies receive a message early on: Your body is wrong.

Sometimes the message is loud and in the form of bullying from peers. I thankfully never had that problem, it seemed the only people who took issue with my body were the grown adults around me. But the thing about kids is that they believe the adults are right. It’s healthy too, a child should think that an adult has their best interest in mind and is someone you can trust. I followed rules when I was a kid, and if an adult told me something, I accepted it as the truth. So “your body is wrong” became my truth. 

In hearing this message “your body is wrong,” over and over again, children are trained to believe that their bodies are not something to trust or appreciate, but something to improve upon and to fix. This becomes a fact of life, like drinking water when you’re thirsty, getting a good night’s sleep before school, getting the dressing on the side so you can pour a small and controlled amount of it onto your salad versus eating what the restaurant thinks is correct. As adults, many continue to live with the belief that happiness, confidence, love, or belonging exist just on the other side of a different body.

So how do we heal? 

Recovery isn’t about forcing yourself to love your body every day, because frankly, that is just not human. Everyone has bad body image days, there is no getting around it. But in order to heal, we need to show some love to our younger selves–the children we once were deserved better than being body shamed. We deserved to go out to eat with our family without considering calories, go to the pool without worrying about our bodies, enjoy dessert without judgement. 

When we begin extending compassion to that younger version of ourselves, we can start separating our worth from our appearance, and hopefully we can do better for the young people in our lives–our kids, our nieces and nephews, friend’s kids, etc. How incredible would it be to raise a kid who never once thought the adults in their life would like them better if they were skinny?