I was overweight and miserable, but I told myself I was okay

I am the firstborn in a family of four children. With the fervour of first-time parents, mine doted on me and made me feel special and important.

My happiness at that age came at a small cost — junk food. I would look at my parents with puppy eyes and they would allow me to eat candy before meals. After school, I would have tea with cake or whatever else I fancied.

I am told I was a poor feeder when I was between two and four years. When I turned five, though, I developed a healthy appetite, and my parents were all too eager to feed me; they were finally having a breakthrough with getting me to eat, and were not about to waste the opportunity. It did not matter what I was eating, the fact that I was asking for something to eat was enough. That was the genesis of my being overweight.

Kindergarten found me waddling about with knock knees and chubby cheeks that threatened to suck up my nose. In the village I grew up in, I was the definition of a child bursting with good health. Bursting, I agree, but good health, not so much. My parents were praised for my “good health” and they delightfully took every moment to doll me up in fluffy dresses with matching shoes. Adorable doesn’t start to describe me at that age.

Adolescence kicked in, bringing with it more weight. I started being conscious of my appearance. I did not like this fat girl in the mirror so much. Around that time, the teasing started. Amnesia struck most of my schoolmates, causing them to forget my lovely name. They started calling me some not-so-pleasant names. I became kanono, fatso, fatty, fatty…kamtungi, drum. I had grown accustomed to being the cute, adorable, chubby girl, so this cruel mockery was very foreign to me and I hated it. I had also noticed that back in my village, the praises were not as forthcoming as before. Something had changed.

With a crushed heart, I decided to seek solace at home.  Here, I was loved, fed, embraced and no one teased me. I was made to feel special and beautiful. It did not matter how nasty the day was, when I went home, all was forgotten over a cup of warm milk and tasty pastries.

By the time I joined high school, I weighed about 95kg. I was in Form Two when my mother decided we should have a little talk regarding my weight. I was horrified, to say the least. She approached the issue very delicately and tried to make it sound like a casual remark. However, I was on her radar. Hardly had she broached the topic than I lashed out defensively. 

I still remember her expression to date. Her face fell, and I could see her pain. I now understand how it must have felt to see her daughter tread the dangerous path of obesity. I understand now her dilemma, she wanted to help, but did not want to damage my self-esteem. What she didn’t know was that I didn’t need her to damage it. I was doing an excellent job of killing it all by myself.

DREAMY PROPORTIONS

I hated my body passionately. I buried it in sweaters and scarfs. I remember a young man who once tried to flirt with me. I lashed out, threatening to beat him into a pulp. You see, I didn’t believe anyone could find me beautiful.

I decided to distract myself from my physical appearance by excelling in my studies. I was a top performer in class and got leadership positions in school. That worked well for some time. In Form Three, they decided to make me the dining hall captain. It is a prestigious position; any high school student will tell you that. In my state however, the position crowned my disgrace. Every time I was called on to make an announcement, I saw fellow students struggle to stifle chuckles. I do not blame them. I was a dining hall captain that weighed 98kg. Thank God embarrassment doesn’t kill.

Fate has a beautiful way of momentarily smiling at us. When I joined Moi University, Eldoret, three years ago, something beautiful happened. A wave of plus-size obsession hit the country. Suddenly, big was beautiful, and this wave found me rocking 100kg. They say he who laughs last laughs best. I was cracking up like crackers on New Year’s Eve. All of a sudden I was in the “right” crowd, and I watched pitifully as the thin girls rushed to amass some flesh, faking it by wearing padded underwear. I however, was a walking definition of abundance, with guys falling on my feet with dreamy propositions. By the time I was winding up my second year at university, I had put on eight more kilogrammes.

In my third year, we were sent out for attachment. I landed a place in a public relations agency.

At the time, I was living with a relative in Kasarani, in the outskirts of the city. One day, while in a matatu to work, I heard it on radio. Apparently, a writer in one of the local papers had written a fat-shaming article hitting out at overweight women. The co-hosts of the show were having a field day, receiving call after call,  poking fun at fat women. The matatu would periodically erupt with laughter. I alighted with the sole purpose of reading that article as soon as I got to the office.

Every word mercilessly jabbed through my heart and left it bleeding. By the time I was sniffing through the third paragraph, the words were blurry as tears streamed down my face. The words rang with an ugly truth. 

There was no arguing with the facts stated therein. I knew at that precise moment that something had happened, though I could not define it at that point. I wiped my tears, switched on my computer and googled: Weight loss. That day, I ate fish and sukuma wiki for lunch - ugali was conspicuously missing from my plate.

I was a girl on a mission to lose weight. The Internet became my best friend, and I gave myself to research. Shopping for food became equivalent to reading for exams. I did the cabbage soup diet because it was affordable, and followed it to the letter. I cut out meat and wheat in my diet for a month. That first month, I had shed 17kg. It was unbelievable. To my utmost shock, my friends and family were ecstatic. Was my weight that bad such that they were on the verge of doing cartwheels now that I was shedding it off?

My second month was hell on earth. My body started craving junk food right from the blues. I did not understand what was happening. I had just begun loving lettuce and oats. I decided to consult a nutritionist, but I was a broke university student, so I could not afford her.

I went back to searching online. I came across an article that suggested ways to manipulate your brain for weight loss. When I craved sausages for example, I would peel a carrot as I pondered on its nutritional benefits. I would bite into it and think of all the wonderful things it would do to my waistline.

I learned tricks such as using a large flat plate and spreading the food to make it look plenty to curb my insatiability. By the end of the second month, I was almost 25kg lighter. By the time I was winding up my internship, healthy food had become more palatable. Thankfully, my family gained immense faith in my resolve to shed my excess weight, and through their support, I was able to occasionally indulge in fancy healthy foods such as tuna, turkey, crispy lettuce, cheese and almonds.

After internship, I stayed home for a month freelancing as a media buyer for my brother’s company. At this point, it is important to point out that my mother is a caterer.  She cooks the kind of food that melts in your mouth and transporting you to delicious lands. Dinners at my home are usually a quiet time as everyone delightfully savours mama’s cooking.

It was a tough challenge to be around her that one month. Before embarking on my weight loss journey, I had been faithfully serving as her taster over the years. I had been robbed of that position the moment I began losing weight, however, she ensured that I got the juiciest fruits and the greenest vegetables.

It is also about that time that I came across Tiffany Rothe, a YouTube fitness instructor who packages her workouts into short 10-minute clips. I could not afford gym membership, so this became my gym. I have been working out with Tiffany ever since. 

SELF DISCOVERY

At the end of that month, I got a lucky break, landing myself my second attachment at Bayer East Africa. The attachment came with free buffet lunches and three days a week workouts in the gym. I was a satisfied intern.  Now I could eat fancier stuff like oven-baked chicken with lettuce salad, and then blast off any wandering calories at the gym. I almost bought a bouquet of roses for the HR department.  At the end of my three months stay at Bayer, I had lost 10kg.

By this time, most of the people who knew the fat me could not recognise me. When they eventually did, they were amazed. Then something familiar happened. The praises and admiration taps that had gone dry started to gush again. It was kindergarten all over again. The world is truly round. Of course, there were a few self-proclaimed experts who felt it was “unhealthy” for me to lose so much weight at once. Rumours ran wild too, that I must have taken sliming pills or that I was ailing from something. That did not deter me. I interpreted it as their way of saying, “Congratulations girl!”

My reason for telling my story is because I know how it feels to look in the mirror and wish the mirror was faulty. I know how it feels like to walk around strapped in a corset, dreading the moment you remove it because your tummy will come tumbling down. I understand how much it hurts to pay double fare in a matatu because you are sitting on two seats. I have endured the elephant-in-the-room joke as well. I am also well acquainted with the lies we tell ourselves; everyone is fat in my family, my boyfriend loves me just the way I am, soon all my friends will get married, get pregnant and fat - and the king of all those lies – “I can’t change, this is who I am”. I get it. Kalekye Mumo, Nazizi, Anerlisa Muigai - any person who has been overweight gets it.

Lighter is better. I know some who will disapprove; one had the temerity to look me in the eye and tell me I looked better when I was obese. Here is the thing, though; I did this for myself. Now I know why that article got to me. It unveiled all those feelings I had stashed away. It made me face reality, and my reality was pathetic. At only 22 years, I was weighing 108kg – this is not okay at all. I didn’t like myself and that was the only reason I needed to change my lifestyle.

It is not going on a diet that will change you. It is changing your diet and working out that will see you live up to your greatest potential. Since it is a lifestyle, I work out every day and eat right every day. As I write this, I weigh 67kg.

Buoyed by my weight loss, I started a blog that features delicious food that I have at times had to invent in my quest to stay on track. Life is short, and as young people, the future of this nation, we cannot afford to spend any minute hating ourselves, running short of breath because of weight we don’t need, or treating lifestyle diseases that we can avoid. We can do better. I did.

Check out my blog https://organicmsosi.wordpress.com.