Judith Moores Fat Girl - Essay Example

Fat Girl Judith Moore’s autobiographical tale about being overweight in Fat Girl is a poignant look into the traumatic events that contributed to the author’s being overweight at the same time that being overweight helped shaped some of the traumatic events of her life. Throughout the narrative, one can begin to trace out several major issues emerging that are shared by many overweight children and are only just beginning to be recognized. Moore makes this possible by devoting the majority of her book to her formative years, including a short biography of her parents as they were growing up, their emerging relationship, their divorce and their adult relationships with her. Speaking on an adult level and extremely candid, Moore makes it possible to see how abuse, neglect, genetic history, society and a number of other factors both contributed to and were (and are) influenced by her weight. Understanding how this first person account brings forward these issues of overweight children provokes a deep reaction on the part of the reader and provides clues as to how health professionals, such as a pharmacist, might better help their patients through the experience and insight gained through reading this book. Although Moore doesn’t say she is genetically incapable of losing weight, she makes it clear that she is genetically predisposed to the capacity for gain as she traces the line of overweight relatives back on both sides of her family. However, she doesn’t use this as an excuse for her own weight issues. She describes herself in college as “finally slender”, but this does not solve her problems as she continues “awkward, homely and half nuts and Sam didn’t love me any more thin than he’d loved me chubby” (p. 187). She instead traces her weight issues back to when she was four years old and her parents divorced and left Moore with her maternal grandmother, Grammy, where Moore says she “ate and ate and ate. I starved for my father, whom I would never once see for many years, and my mother, who came to visit for Christmas and soon again was gone” (p. 77). With only an adversarial relationship with her grandmother and an equally adversarial relationship with her mother, Moore describes the life of a very lonely little girl eating as a means of filling the hole where love should be. Her mother’s constant beatings and verbal abuse regarding her weight, as well as the starvation and other diets she inflicted upon her only served to further remove any chance that Moore would be able to overcome her weight issues as a child. As Moore describes it, although she was religiously faithful to many of the diets her mother placed her on, the moment she was out of her mother’s reach, she would slip back into her old eating habits, again as a way of attempting to fulfill a need for acceptance. “I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of the evil in me that seemed to rise out of nowhere and take me over” (p. 152). This perception that her mother could not accept her because she was overweight, reinforced by her mother’s actions and words on every level and in every aspect of her life, made it necessary for Moore to build a defensive wall around herself as well as continuing to try to find the love she so desperately craved. “I was stuck behind my walls of fat and I could not, no matter what I did, climb over. If I climbed out on the wide slate windowsill and threw myself down, if I flew past one after another apartment window, down to the concrete, I could split open my fat house and my soul would squeeze itself out of me and float to heaven on wide white wings where Jesus sat on his chair and suffered little children” (p. 179). Other little children were also a part of the overall puzzle. The way in which other people, especially children of her own age group, responded to her made it impossible for Moore to reach out for help from outside very often. At her grandmother’s farm, she had no one but chickens to play with and in New York, she was both fat and an outsider hillbilly. The children would not only call her names to her face, but would often poke her or touch her in other inappropriate ways because they felt they could. Embarrassed by her own weight and feeling there was something inherently wrong with her for not being able to overcome it, she was incapable of defending herself against these children and was encouraged more and more to withdraw from society. “Once I found my classroom, I did what I always did when I was in a new situation with children my age. I looked to see if anyone was fatter than I was or if there was anyone uglier” (p. 162). The cruelty did not stop at the children, however. The nurses in the school loudly reading out her weight for the other children to giggle over, the teacher who condemned her just for being overweight and the lack of any fashionable clothing styles for a child her size all contributed to her feeling outcast and eventually leading to her own denial of herself. “I was in fifth grade when I began to try to keep from throwing myself out of my bedroom window so that I would fall on the concrete and break apart into millions of tiny pieces. I would finally be small” (p. 120). Instead of allowing herself to be hurt, Moore ceased thinking of herself as a person. “I did not want to be a woman, I did not want to be a man. I considered myself more animal than human, more rock than animal” (p. 181). She also describes herself as “one of those three little pigs who built a house of fat to keep from the door the ravening wolf from whose long teeth dark blood dribbled” (p. 194). Throughout her description of her life, it was easy to see how difficult it was for her to try to break out all these aspects of what made her fat and how being fat contributed to her consistent weight issues as well as other issues. She doesn’t put blame on any one person or thing, but rather illustrates how society, parents, lack of love, loneliness and self-loathing all contributed and were influenced by a number on a scale. Although I had read about recent studies regarding the challenges being faced by overweight children in their attempts to lose weight, this firsthand account helped to provide additional insight and almost a personal experience of what it was like to grow up in such a hostile environment. The way in which she expressed her need to feel love to such an extreme degree that she was willing to continue talking with a strange man in a movie theater on the extreme outside chance that he might be her father in disguise even though she knew if he wasn’t her father she would probably end up dead was terrifying to me. That anyone should feel that isolated and alone in such a busy, populated place with family around her seems incredibly wrong. Although her family was angry and abusive, it was easy to see how their reactions to her weight served only to intensify the reasons why she was overeating in the first place. The way the children, and now adults, treat her as she walks down the street, still calling her names and making barnyard animal noises, is shocking. I realized before that overweight children often were called names on the playground, but I hadn’t realized the level of abuse expressed in these pages or really connected the various ways in which that abuse would be carried over into other aspects of that child’s life. As a pharmacist, I think there are several insights that should be realized from this story that can help in answering questions brought forward by patients similar to Moore. If the patient was a mother of an overweight child, I would first recommend they read several books on the issue of what an overweight child experiences, especially this book by Judith Moore. Other more scientifically-oriented books could help these parents learn appropriate ways of helping their child learn to take control over their own weight that have proven more beneficial than the condescending, reactionary ways in which Moore’s mother dealt with her. Although most parents would not be this abusive in the situation, there are several issues that the average parents might not realize, such as the desire for fashionable clothing that does not accentuate the additional pounds or the tendency to focus on the negative issue of overweight as opposed to the positive issue of excellent grades and early high school completion. If the patient was already an adult and requesting information for themselves, I would still recommend they read this book as a starting point to understanding their own story. Rather than turning to diet pills, surgery or the latest restriction diet, I would recommend they begin to take a look into their own story to determine what need they have been feeding. Although it sounds like a lot of psychobabble, an acceptance and understanding of who you are can often be the first step toward taking control of the issues that control you. As part of that analysis, I would also recommend that people reassess where they are now in reality. Although they might still identify themselves with the fat little kid in the corner of the playground being viciously teased by a group of older kids, when they actually look around, they might find they are instead the ranking superior at their place of employment with the highest income, the most respect and a close-knit circle of friends. This type of reassessment can lead to a greater level of acceptance, which further clears the way for making positive changes in life without the need for expensive and sometimes dangerous pharmaceutical procedures. References Moore, Judith. (2005). Fat Girl. New York: Hudson Street Press. Read More

This perception that her mother could not accept her because she was overweight, reinforced by her mother’s actions and words on every level and in every aspect of her life, made it necessary for Moore to build a defensive wall around herself as well as continuing to try to find the love she so desperately craved. “I was stuck behind my walls of fat and I could not, no matter what I did, climb over. If I climbed out on the wide slate windowsill and threw myself down, if I flew past one after another apartment window, down to the concrete, I could split open my fat house and my soul would squeeze itself out of me and float to heaven on wide white wings where Jesus sat on his chair and suffered little children” (p. 179). Other little children were also a part of the overall puzzle.

The way in which other people, especially children of her own age group, responded to her made it impossible for Moore to reach out for help from outside very often. At her grandmother’s farm, she had no one but chickens to play with and in New York, she was both fat and an outsider hillbilly. The children would not only call her names to her face, but would often poke her or touch her in other inappropriate ways because they felt they could. Embarrassed by her own weight and feeling there was something inherently wrong with her for not being able to overcome it, she was incapable of defending herself against these children and was encouraged more and more to withdraw from society.

“Once I found my classroom, I did what I always did when I was in a new situation with children my age. I looked to see if anyone was fatter than I was or if there was anyone uglier” (p. 162). The cruelty did not stop at the children, however. The nurses in the school loudly reading out her weight for the other children to giggle over, the teacher who condemned her just for being overweight and the lack of any fashionable clothing styles for a child her size all contributed to her feeling outcast and eventually leading to her own denial of herself.

“I was in fifth grade when I began to try to keep from throwing myself out of my bedroom window so that I would fall on the concrete and break apart into millions of tiny pieces. I would finally be small” (p. 120). Instead of allowing herself to be hurt, Moore ceased thinking of herself as a person. “I did not want to be a woman, I did not want to be a man. I considered myself more animal than human, more rock than animal” (p. 181). She also describes herself as “one of those three little pigs who built a house of fat to keep from the door the ravening wolf from whose long teeth dark blood dribbled” (p. 194). Throughout her description of her life, it was easy to see how difficult it was for her to try to break out all these aspects of what made her fat and how being fat contributed to her consistent weight issues as well as other issues.

She doesn’t put blame on any one person or thing, but rather illustrates how society, parents, lack of love, loneliness and self-loathing all contributed and were influenced by a number on a scale. Although I had read about recent studies regarding the challenges being faced by overweight children in their attempts to lose weight, this firsthand account helped to provide additional insight and almost a personal experience of what it was like to grow up in such a hostile environment. The way in which she expressed her need to feel love to such an extreme degree that she was willing to continue talking with a strange man in a movie theater on the extreme outside chance that he might be her father in disguise even though she knew if he wasn’t her father she would probably end up dead was terrifying to me.

That anyone should feel that isolated and alone in such a busy, populated place with family around her seems incredibly wrong. Although her family was angry and abusive, it was easy to see how their reactions to her weight served only to intensify the reasons why she was overeating in the first place.

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