Tolstaya Devchonka

The Fat Girl. It was the name of a television program,, THE television program to watch, when I was living in Russia. The premise was simple enough; fat girl in an orphanage is found by long lost uber rich family who takes her in and terrorizes her for being fat and ugly.

They had a skinny girl in a fat suit play the lead role and the fat suit was no bigger than I am. I longed desperately to have something to talk about with my peers while in Russia and television was free, easy to talk about, and a mainstay in everyone’s life. I watched every show of Tolstaya Devchonka.

Her rich family held general soap opera positions. Everyone was rich and beautiful, but the show focused on the fat girl. I figured out the ending long before my friends. The show was a Spanish TV production translated into Russian: Spain and America both have the tale of “The Ugly Duckling” which is one tale Russia is lacking. When the boy that the fat girl liked started calling her his “little duck” I knew that she would undergo a transformation. (I had it pegged when I realized it was a skinny person in a fat suit, but we’ll ignore that.)

The boy she liked didn’t like her because she was fat. She had a nice personality so she was immediately cast aside as the best friend, kept around for dating and relationship advice.

The show ended with a triumphant finale. She came back from a few weeks of vacation, thin and beautiful, and the boy she liked started to like her as well, because now, she too was thin and beautiful. He was even willing to sleep with her now that she wasn’t monstrously sized.

I was so angry after the finale. My friends adored it. Ollysa felt that it was a beautiful love story. Olga loved how romantic it was. I was angry.

We see the same thing day in and day out. If you are thin you are loveable. Margaret Cho discusses her numerous eating disorders in her comedy routine. She says that when she lost weight her father loved her and when she gained weight she was invisible to him. She laughs about it, but you can hear the hurt in her laughter.

I’m an obese person. At my heaviest I weighed 310 pounds. I was loveable then. I loved myself. I’m down to 280 now. I’m loveable now. I love myself. I have found that if I can’t be happy at my current weight I will never be happy.

I wanted the Fat Girl to find happiness and an inner peace. If she did lose weight, I wanted her to ditch the jerk who wouldn’t love her when she was fat. She did neither. She perpetuated the myth that every fat person is just 20 pounds away from happiness.

I weigh exactly what I weighed when I was 16. My target weight is 250 pounds. If I get down to that weight I will weigh what I did when I was in middle school. But … I’m happy at 280. I’m not reserving happiness for the next goal weight. I’m happy with who I am, with who Christ has made me to be.

It’s no love story. It won’t get the ratings. But, it proves a point. The story of my life.