Fat noise: When your size enters the room before you do

When I was bigger, I rarely entered a room alone.

My size went in first.

It walked through the door ahead of me, introduced itself to everybody and began making wild claims about my character before I had even taken my coat off.

Lazy. Undisciplined. Greedy. Less capable. Possibly stupid.

I had no proof that anybody in the room was thinking these things. That did not stop me wondering whether they were.

I think of that constant background commentary as fat noise.

It is my own phrase, not an established clinical term. Food noise is about eating, calories, restraint and what you are or are not going to have for dinner. Fat noise is about visibility. Judgement. Respect. Likability. Whether your body has changed your position in the room before you have spoken.

And it could follow me almost anywhere.

Sometimes it kept me out of the room entirely

At school, fat noise asked whether I was about to be bullied.

During sport, it asked who was watching me run.

If there was swimming, a costume, a changing room or any activity involving Lycra and public exposure, it did not merely make me nervous. It could make the whole day feel impossible.

There were days I would rather miss school than be seen.

That sounds dramatic until you have spent the night before imagining every stare, every laugh, every comparison and every possible angle from which your body might betray you.

Then staying home starts to look less like avoidance and more like a highly sophisticated emergency management strategy conducted from under a duvet.

I have not owned a swimming costume since I was ten.

Not because I developed a principled objection to chlorine.

I simply stopped putting myself in situations where one would be required.

That is what fat noise could do. It did not just make me feel bad inside an experience. It quietly removed whole experiences from consideration.

Swimming was not for me.

Certain clothes were not for me.

Being carefree in public was very much not for me.

The room did not even have to reject me. I often rejected myself on its behalf before I arrived.

The room changed. The question did not.

Later, fat noise followed me into new jobs.

Before I could worry normally about whether I seemed confident, intelligent or capable, I first had to wonder whether somebody had already decided I was none of those things because I was fat.

Would an interviewer see my size and think I lacked discipline?

Would new colleagues assume I was lazy?

Would somebody decide I was less competent before I had opened my mouth?

It came shopping with me too.

I could walk into a clothing shop where the sizes stopped at a 16 and immediately become conscious of the assistants. Did they think I was in the wrong shop? Were they wondering what exactly I planned to do in there?

Buy a scarf and leave quietly?

On planes, I worried about the exact moment the person in the next seat saw me approaching.

Did they look at me and immediately picture an uncomfortable flight? Were they already imagining being squeezed against the armrest, annoyed before I had even sat down?

They might have been thinking about their connection, their emails or whether they had remembered to switch the iron off.

Fat noise was not interested in reasonable alternatives. It had already written their internal monologue, cast me as the problem and commissioned a full six-part drama for television.

It spread into everything

The exhausting thing was not simply disliking my body.

It was wondering what my body was doing to every other part of my life.

Nobody had to say any of this. Fat noise could produce the entire prosecution without a single witness.

That is what made it so consuming. It planted itself inside social gatherings, shopping trips, holidays, relationships, work and the ordinary business of leaving the house.

It turned nearly every situation into a question about where, and how, I was allowed to fit into the world.

Sometimes literally.

Could I fit comfortably into the chair?

Would my body press against somebody on the plane?

Would the towel wrap around me?

Would the costume zip up?

Could I leave the gathering without everybody watching me cross the room?

But often it was less literal and more damaging.

Could I belong without compensating for being there?

Trying to make up for your own body

When you feel conspicuous, it can become very important not to be conspicuous in any other way.

I wanted to be pleasant. Helpful. Funny. Useful. Easy.

I did not want to be fat and difficult.

That could make saying no harder than it should have been. Refusing something risked adding another imagined complaint to the list.

Perhaps my body had already made me less likeable. Better not make matters worse by having needs, opinions or boundaries.

So I sometimes tried to win people over before they had the chance to reject me.

Be extra warm. Do more. Cause no inconvenience. Make the joke. Put everybody else at ease.

It is a strange thing to make yourself emotionally smaller because your body feels too large.

Even now, having lost a noticeable amount of weight, I can see how much energy that took.

Not just the energy of feeling self-conscious, but the energy of constantly trying to manage other people’s possible reactions to me.

Possible reactions. That part matters.

Some people do judge fat bodies harshly. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Size prejudice is not something an insecure person invented after trying on jeans under unflattering lights.

But I also appointed myself spokesperson for everybody I met.

I decided what shop assistants, colleagues, strangers, friends and partners thought, then reacted to those thoughts as though they had been confirmed in writing.

I could not know whether people respected me less.

The exhausting part was how often I wondered whether they did.

Most people were probably thinking about themselves

Being slimmer has quietened some of that noise. I would be lying if I said otherwise.

Certain rooms feel easier. Clothes shops feel less loaded. I take up less physical space, and sometimes less mental space too.

But weight loss has also made me realise how thoroughly fat noise had spread through my life.

It was never confined to mirrors or photographs.

It had climbed into ambition, friendship, family, travel and my ability to say no. It influenced the jobs I imagined I could get, the clothes I believed I could wear, the attention I thought I deserved and the experiences I quietly removed from my life.

That is an enormous amount of authority to give a body size.

And there is another awkward truth.

Most people were probably not thinking about me nearly as much as I imagined.

They were thinking about themselves.

Whether their clothes looked right.

Whether they had said something stupid.

Whether anyone had noticed their hair.

Whether they seemed boring, awkward, too loud, too quiet, too old, too young, too tall or too short.

Thin people have private insecurities too.

Losing weight does not carry you into some serene class of human beings who never inspect themselves under bad lighting again.

One day your weight may stop being the loudest concern and your brain may simply promote something else.

Perhaps your nose suddenly looks wonky.

Perhaps you decide you are too tall, too short or insufficiently blessed with blue eyes.

The mind is resourceful. Give it a vacancy and it will find a new complaint by lunchtime.

That does not mean every insecurity is imaginary. It means we often vastly overestimate how closely other people are studying us.

Most strangers probably gave me no more than a passing thought.

Many may have thought I looked perfectly ordinary.

Some may genuinely have thought I was beautiful.

And the people whose opinions truly mattered were not standing there calculating my value from the size of my body.

They knew my humour, my kindness, my intelligence, my irritations, my loyalty and the thousand other things that actually made me me.

I cannot go back and discover what every person thought when I entered a room.

Some probably judged me.

Many almost certainly did not.

Most were too busy worrying about how they themselves looked in the room.

Fat noise made me believe I was under constant observation.

Sometimes it frightened me out of the room altogether.

Usually, I was simply another person walking through the door.