OXK., So I’m Fat Neil Steinberg ‘Some people are no doubt fat because of glandular disorders or the wrath of an angry God. 1 am not one of those people. I am fat because I eat a lot Since fat people are held in such low regard, | should immediately point out that I am not shat fat. Not fat in the Chinese Buddha, spilling-out-of-the-airplane-seat sense. The neighborhood kids don't skip behind me in the street, banging tin cans together and singing derisive songs. Not yet, anyway, But forget the social stigma of being fat. Ignore the medical peril, the sheer discomfort of dragging all that excess weight around, There is still a final ignominy almost too dire to mention: thin people. All the drawbacks of being overweight could be shucked off—the fat are good at denial—were it not for the standing rebuke and constant insult that thin people offer, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by their very existence "Hey, big guy"—t get that a lot, from overly familiar office mates and, especially, from wiry panhandlers, as if it were a compliment that would inspire me to dig for change Worse are those bent on my elevation to the sainted ranks of the thin: the sly references to fad diets, the inspirational tales of heroic weight loss. "Can I get you something?” a 00d friend I was visiting asked. "A Diet Coke, maybe?" Others assume that thinness is forever beyond my grasp [ was once at a dinner party where the hostess was a wisp ofa woman with legs like beef jerky. She prepared some intensely fattening dessert—Bananas Foster, thick slices of ripe bananas awash in butter and sugar and cinnamon and liqueur accompanied by ice cream, The concoction was set before us. I was halfway finished and already thinking about seconds when I noticed that she wasn’t eating, I challenged her, nicely. "This is great Aren't you having any?” She fluttered her eyes and demurred. Oh no, she said, too sweet, too fattening. And she smiled. A halo didn’t form over her head, but it might as well have. The smile said it all—smug superiority, gazing down from on high. | wanted to take my Bananas Foster and grind her face in it. She wasn’t havit because it was bad for her. Bad for her, but fine for her piggish guests to ruin themselves on. "Flere’s some poison I whipped up for you. Bon appetit!" Thanks. That moment of shame and surprise—cheeks packed hamster-full with Bananas Foster while numbly confronting the iron resolve of your moral betters—is the heart of the fat experience. The yin of the primal pleasure of satiation, lips closing happily down on the tip of a thick triangle of stuffed Chicago pizza, balanced against the yang of stunned realization, as the mental fog parts for a moment and you catch sight of yourself in the mirror and see what's really there. 60Small wonder we get mad at those who keep themselves in check. Envy-stoked anger is natural when dessert suddenly tums into a lesson about restraint, a lesson I have endured for years but somehow never absorbed or profited by Surprisingly, I have less trouble with thin people who don’t need to think about their weight, Those who are thin despite having eating habits that, if| practiced them, would quickly turn me into one of those elephantine men who periodically (urn up on the news, dressed in sheets, removed from their homes through a hole in the wall, quickly weighted on a freight scale for the record, then placed under the personal care of Dick Gregory, My wife’s friend Larry, for instances, dresses in those tapered lalian suits and doesn’t have enough fat on his body to make a butter pat, He actually keeps big bowls of candy scattered around his house, Not just for show. He'll casually dig his hand up to the wrist into one of the bowls, pull out a fistful of M & M’s and, tilting his head back, funnel them into his mouth. Trim as a pencil. Yet, paradoxically, I find it easy to be around Larry I’m comfortable, happy, never put off. Maybe it’s because those who are effortlessly thin seem to suggest that thinness is a fluke of capricious fate, and thus out of our control Maybe it's because Larry doesn’t exhibit any of the self-control that I, in my greedy-puppy-fat-person way, would egoistically interpret as a reproach Or maybe it’s just because he has all that candy scattered around his house.