I’ve gone from ‘fat’ to ‘fluffy.’

The complexities of losing weight, and why everyone else cares about it way more than I do...

TW/ Eating issues, weight, diets, body size, BMI

Back in October I went to an incredible ‘cults and conspiracies’ themed Halloween party. It was held at an about-to-be-renovated house in East London, and felt like a ghoulish modern-day version of The Great Gatsby. As I was queuing at the makeshift bar at the end of the garden, a young chap tapped me on the shoulder. 

“Are you an air hostess?” 

I see how he arrived there I suppose. I was dressed in a lilac skirt suit, hat, pearls, carrying a vintage vanity case (see above.) With more than a hint of outrage, gesturing to my meticulously sourced props I replied: “No, obviously I’m a zombie Avon lady!” Maybe this created a frisson for him, or perhaps it was just 1am at a house party on Halloween, but either way he just skipped the pleasantries and cut straight to: “I love your curves, you’re so fluffy!” 

It’s always struck me as odd if you’re plus size and somebody cracks on to you, so often they reference their penchant for your body type with words like curvaceous, voluptuous or the less sexy, cuddly. But fluffy was a new one to me, so I asked him for clarity on its meaning: “You’re just the right size, not too big, not too small; just curvy.” This wasn’t the compliment he was perhaps hoping for, because what this guy didn’t know is that I’ve only been this size for a few months. If we’d met at the start of the year I wouldn’t have been fluffy at all - I’d have been some other word that reduces you to your physical appearance, or perhaps even a type (or fetish.) In any case, should he have gone with: “I think you’re hot!’ instead, his attempts might have worked (it was 1am at a house party on Halloween after all.) That was all he needed to say.

I’m not sure how I feel about euphemisms about body shape. On one hand they might carry less stigma than fat does, and though some people have reclaimed that word to take ownership of it, for others it can hold trauma, and memories of playground taunts. Those euphemisms; curvaceous, voluptuous, cuddly and now, fluffy also signify that you’re somewhere on the spectrum of fat, without using the word itself. They suggest that somebody finds you attractive, in spite of your body or not being the beauty standard - and that’s the rhetoric I really hate. Are we ever going to step away from the idea that thinness is a universal sexual and beauty ideal? Maybe that’s too much to ask.

My lowest weight was 2006 (above) and I’m smiling, but was in ED hell.

The world seems to see weight loss as an achievement, but for the first time in my life I - with a history of eating disorders and poor body image - really don’t. As the result of a two-year burnout, insomnia, unrelenting anxiety, depression, overworking, a break up and more, I lost my appetite for a while. That isn’t my usual pattern, by the way - 99% of the time I tend to do the opposite. But even that in itself is worth looking at; why is losing your appetite seen as ‘better’ than comfort eating? Both are coping mechanisms, yet we’re conditioned to berate or pity anyone who ‘eats their feelings,’ but surely comfort eating is better than resorting to a crack habit right? It has to be better than physically taking your rage out on somebody too? Or is our society so deeply fat-phobic that those are infinitely preferable? So, for only the second time in my life (the first was during a really bleak period at University) the idea of eating made me want to hurl.

There was another initial weight-loss trigger before the burnout sads took over though. Earlier in the year, just after finishing writing my book UGLY, I finally had the head space to think about ‘the future’. Cue resolute TERROR. I started to look into egg freezing like many of my friends have, and set up a consultation with a recommended clinic. On the initial call after talking through the process and the (extortionate) costs, the nurse asked for my weight. I was pretty surprised; surely my hormones, or cycle details were more relevant? I asked why they needed it, and she explained that there is a BMI cut off for egg freezing and for this clinic, it was a BMI of 30.

Now, if you’ve read any of my work, my book, or this here Substack column, you’ll know that I’m one of life’s over-researchers, but nowhere in the reams of articles, scientific features or first person accounts did anyone mention egg freezing had a BMI cut off. I just assumed I’d have the same experience as my straight-sized friends; how wrong was I. As I put the phone down, an intense feeling of shame washed over me and I raced to a cupboard to grab my (deliberately hidden) weighing scales, stepped on, and sure enough it was over 30 - way over actually. In my broken head space, I didn’t feel angry. Instead, I just felt intense panic coupled with a sense of hopelessness; on top of everything else I was feeling, now I was ‘too fat to have a baby’. 

Egg freezing is sold as the ‘take control of your life’ solution to all women, but the invisible asterisk seems to be: *only if you’re in a relatively small body. From my research, in the UK that BMI cut off seems to be a BMI of around 30-35 and is perhaps a bit higher at 40ish in the US. What I found is that there isn’t a huge amount of data to suggest that weight can directly impact egg freezing, but there are some studies on BMI and IVF, though even the results of those aren’t clear cut. 

Juno Calypso’s Egg Freezing Self Portrait series…

It’s more likely that the reason for the cut off is the ‘generalised’ higher health risk associated with having a BMI over 25, or as I was told by said clinic, was due to the medical insurance used by the private anaesthetists the clinics use. Anaesthetic risk and complications can increase with BMI, and egg harvesting is usually done under sedation, which is a light anaesthetic. For those with higher BMIs having the procedure done under general anaesthetic could be preferable, depending on what the anaesthetist advises. But of course, this too also carries risks, whatever your BMI.

It’s hard to sit here and argue with science and medicine as such, but a blanket cut off does seem both unfair and discriminatory. Other fertility treatments have BMI restrictions too; the NICE guidelines in the UK state that only those between a BMI of 19-30 qualify for free NHS fertility treatment, for example. But BMI as a sole measurement of health has many, many flaws (one to explore fully another day…) but notably, it usually doesn’t account for differences in body composition, gender and ethnicity.

Its widespread use as a health measuring tool does mean that it can disproportionately affect people of colour. And in this context where pregnancy is concerned, to me it harks back to darker times in history we’d rather forget; namely the forced sterilisation and eugenics programs of the earlier 20th century that primarily affected women of colour (and other minority groups, like disabled people) in many countries, including the UK and US.

Juno Calypso - egg freezing

I have to say, despite the huge amount of work I’ve done to reach a place to extricate my self esteem from my weight, hearing that I was potentially too fat to freeze my eggs did affect me enough to try to lose a bit of weight initially. It felt like I had no choice; this gatekeeping was something I couldn't bypass. The egg freezing process, the huge amount of money and making the actual decision to do it is hard enough; to then be told you’re too big to even do it, is a horribly low blow. When I stood on the scales and saw the number, it did feel like my future was being taken away from me.

The more that sunk in, the less I wanted to eat, especially when everyone around me seemed to be pregnant, engaged or had met their person. Then the toll of my book launch (and the giant amounts of unspoken and unpaid work that come with it), worsened my burnout and killed any self care routines I had; I was too anxious to eat and too depressed to prioritise eating.

 

Since losing some weight, very few people have mentioned it directly, which is definitely a small cultural shift in how we celebrate thinness, but those comments end up becoming thinly veiled instead; I’ve had so many generic “you look great,” comments, and I know what they’re getting at. People also automatically assume that weight loss = happiness. But I am exhausted, there are giant dark circles under my eyes, and my insides feel like they’ve given up; I’m just thinner. One comment did cause me to snap back at somebody who told me ‘whatever I was doing was working.’ I replied angrily, because of the assumption was that as a plus size person, I should be trying to lose weight. 'Actually, I've been depressed, burnt out and too tired to eat.”  Likewise when a friend with crohns lost weight, she was cheered by those around her, not realising that she was just desperately unwell, and they were inadvertently applauding her illness.

This has been a tough/weird column to write; there’s so many big topics that I’ve only briefly touched on here. Though I’m still adapting to how my body size links to my self perception and identity, perhaps what’s most important is that unlike my younger self I don’t have thinness on a pedestal anymore; it’s not a marker of success to me. Another shift is that I don’t hate my former body, because I’m still the same person, and I don’t have that internalised fat phobia that makes some people who have lost weight post their before and after pictures to berate their former larger-bodied selves, all to distance themselves from fatness entirely. 

So at the moment, I guess fluffy rather than fat is where I reside for now, but the journey hasn’t been a particularly joyful one, and we should never assume that it has been.  

LINKS THAT MAY BE HELPFUL…

Nicola Salmon - is a fat-positive fertility coach I discovered online. I’ve not worked with her personally, but on her page she has some global recommendations and useful info about fat-positive fertility clinics.

Emma Haslett - is a podcaster and has recently penned a piece for the New Statesman on IVF and BMI.