living with obesity: 'for a large part of my life, i’ve felt that i take up way too much space and wished that i could just disappear.'
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andrew locker, a teacher, finds there is a lack of fairness and lack of empathy towards obese people. supplied
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andrew locker is a teacher and director of the field services branch at the ontario ministry of education, and has taught kindergarten through grade 12. he’s very aware of what other kids in larger bodies go through as they grow up and says he’s taken every opportunity to ensure the kids in his school know they’re valued.
i’ve always struggled with body image, weight and weight stigma. i have very early memories of being a kid in elementary school, where i experienced teasing, bullying and harassment related to my size and my weight. my nickname was “piggy wiggy.”
because i was a chubby little boy, i did the only thing i knew how to do, which was to lean into it and make it my persona before i knew what a persona actually was. i would often use food and do gross and silly things to make people laugh. i would eat food off the ground, make a mess with food, eat as much food as i could hold down — just use food for humour. i still do that as an adult, lean into the heavy side as a coping strategy, or as a way to disarm people who may want to do me harm by making fun of my weight or not accept me because i am a heavy-set male.
[but] anything mean that someone would say about me i have already said a hundred thousand times to myself. there’s nothing that i haven’t already internalized and felt about my body, my weight, about how i move. for a large part of my life, i’ve felt that i take up way too much space and wished that i could just disappear.
‘i’ve struggled with anxiety my entire life’
depression has never officially been diagnosed by a professional, but my anxiety is absolutely diagnosed. i’ve struggled with anxiety my entire life; i take medication for it. it’s coincided with, and happens in conjunction with, my weight, my body image and my relationship to food. it’s all interconnected.
i’ve been in therapy for many years, mainly to treat and get support for anxiety and early childhood trauma. i lost my mother when i was three months old, so there were some abandonment issues. my father, despite being almost 80, never dealt with the trauma of losing his first wife. i’m also part of the lgbtq+ community, so i identify as gay and that was a huge piece of my identity that i needed to work out. i’ve done a lot of therapy to try to get to the bottom of some of these issues.
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the world is built for smaller people who can fit more comfortably in chairs, airplanes, buses and cars. i’m not only heavy i’m also relatively tall — almost 6’ 3” — so i’m a rather imposing-sized beast, if you will. but i’m a gentle giant. when i interact with kids in my job i get down to their level, down on the carpet to play with their toys and read them a story.
‘i realized i couldn’t live in this body anymore’
i’ve done a lot of dieting and pretty vigorous exercise, including crossfit and pilates. i’ve been on different diet regimes. just over 10 years ago i had some pretty serious health issues, which turned out to be related to my gall bladder. so i had it removed. afterward i realized i couldn’t do this anymore — i couldn’t live in this body anymore. i needed to take my health seriously.
i’m a workaholic. i am very passionate about my work and i derive a lot of my identity from work. i realized i wasn’t going to live the life i wanted to live, and probably wasn’t going to live nearly as long as i should, if i didn’t get my weight more under control. i lost around 100 pounds and felt really good. my joints didn’t hurt, my head was in the right place, i was eating healthy, my body felt good. i got accolades. it was life- and ego-affirming. but because i hadn’t treated the underlying issues, i gained it all back and more. i’m now probably 300 pounds and my doctors want to put me back on blood pressure medication.
i have absolutely no shut-off valve when it comes to sugary sweet carbs, so i know i have a binge eating problem. at the very least, i have disordered eating. i have started to work on this in therapy. i do a lot of volunteer work with obesity matters where i’m surrounded by the leaders at the forefront of this work — i’ve never reached out and asked for a professional to help me. i talk about my journey, my experiences, the intersectionality of being an lgbtq person with that of a person living in a larger body, but never have i reached out and asked these folks for help for myself.
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i think my therapist would say, and maybe a somewhat enlightened andrew would say that it’s part of [feeling] not worthy of people’s time. i don’t want to bother people because [i think], why would they invest in me? i’ve done a lot of work on that — not being smart enough, not being cute enough, not being thin enough — fill in the blanks. and that’s what my therapy over the past 10 years has been trying to correct: that i am a smart, beautiful, good, fun person who is worthy of care, attention, love.
i see what the heavy-set kids go through and i always make an effort to make them know they are sane, that they are loved and people care about them. i committed from the very beginning of my teaching career that kids would never experience in my presence what i went through, and have it create such a shame spiral of self-loathing. i just wouldn’t allow it in my school.
if only it were that easy, to eat less and move more
i find that people unfairly attribute characteristics to obese people that aren’t necessarily supported or true. they look at someone with obesity and think that person has no willpower, that the person is weak, flawed, bad, or has no control over their life, without understanding the depth and complexity that goes into why a person lives in a larger body. [there’s a] lack of fairness, lack of empathy. i think people way oversimplify the path to well-being for people like us. they say eat less move more, done. if only it was that easy …
when i lost the weight, the way that parents would interact with me as a heavy man versus a skinny man was very different. i would see the difference in the way people would look at me, the way they would talk to me. they would always start [conversations] with how amazing i look, which [means] i must have looked pretty awful before. people didn’t perceive me the same when i was heavy or skinny. but there is no difference in my ability as a teacher or a principal whether i weigh 300 pounds or 200 pounds. i’m the same person.
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robin roberts is a vancouver-based writer.
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