Primalsoup

Manipal Hospital, 2019. Before.

The first thing they do, when you are fat and you walk into a doctor’s office, is weigh you. Before asking why you’re there. Before your name, almost. The number on the scale is taken as the answer to every question you haven’t asked yet.

Five years ago I went in for fatigue: not tired, but exhausted in my bones, in my cells. I could sleep fourteen hours and wake up hollowed out. My hair was coming out in fistfuls. My periods had stopped entirely. Three doctors. Then four. Then seven. Lose weight, they said. Try a bootcamp. Here’s an appetite suppressant, though you told me you’re barely eating.

It took nine months and a locum filling in for a regular GP before someone ran the blood tests. The call came two days later: come in immediately. Uterine cancer. Growing, spreading, metastasising while I was being told my body was the problem and also the solution.

The surgeon who removed four organs and eighteen lymph nodes was kind. “This should have been caught months ago,” she said. “The symptoms were textbook.”

Here is the part I am not proud of: the cancer was making me lose weight. My jeans were looser. The scale was finally moving in the right direction. I noticed, and I felt victorious. I delayed that medical appointment for weeks, not wanting to investigate why my body was finally doing what I’d begged it to do for decades.

The cancer was eating me alive, and I was grateful for the weight loss. That’s how deep the programming runs. I mistook dying for winning.

That’s the math, in its purest form. Fat people don’t die from fat. They die from medical neglect dressed up as concern, and from the twenty-five years of arithmetic that taught them to celebrate shrinking by any means necessary.

I.

I was seven when I learned that bodies could be wrong. Not broken, not sick. Just wrong, like a sum that doesn’t add up.

The pediatrician’s office had cartoon giraffes on the walls, measuring height in friendly increments, but the scale was serious business. “She’s in the 95th percentile for weight,” the doctor said, as though I’d failed a test I didn’t know I was taking. My mother’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

That night I pushed my dinner away half-eaten, which was basically sacrilege, my mother could make even a bowl of oats taste like something the gods would argue over. She noticed. She asked if I was feeling sick. I shook my head.

I was seven. I understood: the mathematics of my worth had begun.

For the next three decades I believed that if I could just get the numbers right, I would finally make peace with my body. Calories, kilos, steps, sizes, BMI, body fat percentage. The arithmetic of weight loss became its own language, and I spoke it fluently, obsessively, filling notebooks with food logs and apps with data. I could tell you the caloric content of an apple: 95 for medium, 72 for small, faster than I could tell you why I deserved to eat one.

And still, no matter how well I did the math, I never arrived at the answer I wanted: a body I could stop hating. Though I did become excellent at calculating the caloric content of self-loathing. Zero calories. Infinite consumption.

II.

My days begin and end with numbers. Before my feet hit the floor I calculate what I ate yesterday, what I’ll allow today, what debt I’m carrying from the weekend. The mental arithmetic starts before consciousness fully arrives, a program running in the background, automatic as breathing and twice as exhausting.

The scale waits in the bathroom like a slot machine. Step on, hold your breath, hope for a jackpot. I’ve learned its moods and its fluctuations, how it adds a kilo after flying, subtracts one after crying (grief: the ultimate weight loss solution). I step on, step off, step on again, as though the number might change if I ask nicely enough. Sometimes I step on backwards, thinking I might trick it. The scale, unmoved by my creativity, displays the same number upside down.

The app on my phone congratulates me for logging in 847 days in a row. Eight hundred and forty-seven days of entering every morsel, every sip, reducing meals to data points. It sends cheerful notifications: “You’re 5 calories under your goal!” The goal, of course, is always to be under. To be less. To subtract myself down to acceptability. When you’ve been “good” it sends confetti. A little cartoon avocado dances. An avocado. Because nothing says celebration like 160 calories of fat dressed up as a vegetable.

Breakfast is an equation: protein divided by calories, multiplied by hours until lunch, minus the likelihood of a meeting with pastries. An egg is 70 calories, but also 6 grams of protein, which burns more calories to digest, which means the net caloric impact is actually… and this is where I lose myself, where the math becomes so complex that eating feels like a problem to solve before I’ve even opened the refrigerator.

III.

I have been solving for X since I was twelve.

The diets arrived like a syllabus for a course nobody enrolled in willingly. The fruit diet, photocopied pages passed over the fence by a neighbour: Breakfast: papaya. Lunch: apples. Dinner: whatever fruit wouldn’t send you into diabetic shock. I did lose weight, mainly through diarrhoea and the kind of excessive peeing that made me memorise every bathroom in a two-kilometre radius. The weight loss was real. So was the rectal burning.

In my twenties came the GM Diet – yes, General Motors had a diet, the strangest product a car company ever made. Day 3 began with a whole potato, which I looked forward to like a lover returning from war. By Day 7 you were supposedly “detoxed,” though mostly I was just furious and constipated, which I suspect was also the experience of buying a GM car.

Then the parade: Keto, which taught me to fear fruit like poison. Paleo, which insisted I eat like a cavewoman despite having neither her digestive system nor her lifespan. Intermittent fasting, where 16:8 became 18:6 became 20:4 became one meal a day that I thought about for the other twenty-three hours. The juice cleanse lasted six days before I fainted in a Starbucks, blood sugar so low the barista gave me free banana bread and watched me eat it with the expression of a concerned parent. I was literally green. Six days of spinach juice will do that, who knew you could fail at being human and succeed at photosynthesis.

And then the clinic. Famous for weight loss. They promised to “break the fat” with vacuum suction. I lay there while a machine tried to hoover the adipose tissue off my body, skin pulled into tubes like a horror film special effect. The bruising was “toxins releasing,” they said. What released was my period, a monster haemorrhage that required an emergency gynaecologist. My skin was pinched purple for a month, a constellation of broken blood vessels that looked like I’d been attacked by an octopus with commitment issues.

The math always worked at first. Days 1-10: water weight disappears, clothes loosen, hope inflates. Days 11-21: plateau begins, panic sets in, restrictions tighten. Days 22-30: the binge, inevitable as gravity. Then the self-hatred, hot and familiar. Then the new diet, because this time the formula will hold.

But bodies aren’t calculators. They remember famines, real and self-imposed. They slow metabolisms, hoard fat, protect themselves against the violence of our mathematics. My body learned to resist my calculations, to survive despite my best efforts to equation it into submission.

IV.

The math isn’t only personal. It’s financial, social, sartorial. It’s everywhere.

Fashion carries its own Fat Tax, and I’ve paid it for decades. The same dress costs 30% more in size 18 than size 8, justified by “extra fabric,” though we all know it’s a surcharge for existing. A penalty for taking up space.

Plus-size sections hide in department store basements or back corners, like shame made geographical. The clothes hang on reinforced racks: beige, black, navy, designed to conceal rather than clothe. Occasionally there’s a wild print: tropical birds (because nothing says size 18 like a toucan) or abstract geometrics that look like a migraine feels. Online shopping promised liberation. “Inclusive” brands sprouted everywhere using words like “body positive” while charging three times the price for a basic cotton t-shirt. They know we’re desperate. They know we’ll pay.

Then there is the Personality Clause, the unwritten contract fat people sign with the world. If you are fat, you must be funny. Humour becomes your currency, jokes your entrance fee. You learn to make fun of yourself before anyone else can, a pre-emptive strike of self-deprecation. Or you must be brilliant, accomplished enough that your resume justifies your body. A PhD, a promotion, a publication, achievements stacked like sandbags against the flood of judgment. “She’s heavy, but she’s brilliant,” they say, as though intelligence is an apology for size, as though my brain needs to work overtime to compensate for my thighs’ audacity to touch each other.

Or endlessly helpful. The fat friend who’s always available, always supportive, never threatening. You become everyone’s mother, therapist, cheerleader, anything but a whole person with needs of your own. A human emotional support animal that no one wants to take on planes.

Love comes with its own surcharge. Dating while fat means your profile photos are exercises in strategic honesty, full body shots so you can’t be accused of deception, but angled to minimise, always minimise. First dates are auditions. You’re funnier, smarter, more generous, anything to balance the equation. Men sleep with you but won’t take you to lunch on a Saturday. Women befriend you because you’re not competition. Everyone treats your body as a before photo, your life as a before story, waiting for the after that will make you real.

V.

Perhaps nowhere is the math crueller than in photographs.

You learn the rules like physics: hold the phone above your head at 45 degrees to create the illusion of cheekbones. Never from below, that’s how double chins multiply. In group photos, position yourself at the back, slightly turned, one hand on hip to create negative space. Laugh, but not too hard.

I once spent forty minutes editing a single Instagram photo, sculpting myself into acceptability pixel by pixel. The person who emerged looked like my thin cousin if she’d been put through a Disney filter. Zoom tells me I look best with “touch up my appearance” set to maximum. I’ve watched my face glitch between my actual jaw and Zoom’s preferred jaw when the internet lags. I’ve missed entire meeting agendas adjusting my angle, trying to find the position where I only have one chin.

The iPhone’s Portrait Mode blurs the background but also blurs the edges of you, sometimes losing track of where you end and the world begins. The algorithm can’t quite figure out your borders, keeps trying to slim you into something it recognises as human. When it fails, you get a halo effect, like you’re dissolving at the edges. Which is exactly how it feels to exist in a body the world wishes would disappear.

And then the cruelest compliment: “But you have such a pretty face.” The but is a blade, separating your face from your body like they’re different entities. Your face is the embassy of acceptability in the hostile territory of your body. So, you invest in it desperately. Seventeen-step skincare routines. Bold lipstick to draw eyes upward. I swapped glasses for contacts even though they hurt, made my eyes water constantly, and I was fairly convinced one had migrated into my brain and was setting up camp. But glasses made my face look rounder. Round was the enemy.

My Instagram grid is 90% face, 10% food. No bodies. I’ve become a floating head with excellent winged liner and a great personality.

VI.

This math wasn’t born with me. It was inherited, though not in the way you’d think.

I come from a family of beautiful women. My mother was the kind of beautiful that made people stop in markets. My aunts, all of them, had the same genetic lottery win. At family gatherings people would say the family was “blessed”. I had always wondered if I was somehow the statistical outlier. The glitch in the code.

My cousin and I were the same age, close as sisters. As children we swapped clothes like trading cards. I secretly believed that if I wore her clothes, I might absorb whatever magic made her effortlessly pretty. The clothes would transform me. They never did. She looked lovely in my things. I looked like myself in different clothes.

By the time we were teenagers the swapping had stopped. Nobody said why. She’d still offer sometimes, “Try this on!” but we both knew it wouldn’t fit, and the pretending hurt worse than the knowing.

The women in my family never kept diet journals. They didn’t need to. They’d casually mention cutting out rice for a week and dropping two kilos, genuinely baffled by my inability to do the same. “Just eat less,” they’d say, as though it had never occurred to me. Their math was different. Subtraction that worked. Equations that balanced.

They were all kind to me. They included me, loved me, never made me feel less than. But I would have traded all their kindness for five kilos of fat loss. I would have chosen cruelty and thinness over love and largeness, any day of any week, for most of my adult life. That’s the math I actually inherited. Not how to diet. How to calculate my worth against their beauty. How to measure love in kilograms I couldn’t lose.

VII.

If I could calculate the hours I’ve spent calculating, the math would break me. So, I won’t. I’ll just say: over two decades, it adds up to more than a year of my life. A year spent logging, planning, recalculating, punishing, restricting, bingeing, starting over. A year I didn’t spend writing or reading or being present in my own life.

Add the events I didn’t go to. The beach trips declined, the pool parties skipped, the reunions where I sent apologies and stayed home. Add the exercise that was never really exercise , every treadmill session fuelled by hatred, every walk a forced march toward thinness rather than any kind of joy.

Add the nights lying awake because I ate too much at dinner. Too much meaning: I had seconds. Or dessert. Or simply ate until I was full.

The math is staggering. I was the most dedicated mathematician of my own misery, calculating toward a solution that was never real and a body that was never the actual problem.

VIII.

The math never works. The calorie trackers, the Fat Taxes, the Personality Clauses, the photo angles, the pretty face compliments, the medical neglect dressed up as concern, none of it resolves into peace. The numbers don’t save you. Discipline becomes its own prison.

What stepping outside the ledger looks like, I’m still learning. Some days it means eating breakfast without calculating its numerical value. Some days it means taking a photo with friends without immediately auditing how much space I take up. Some days it means walking for pleasure, not penance.

It means finding doctors who see me as a whole person, not a BMI with symptoms. Buying clothes that fit the body I have, not the body I might theoretically arrive at if I could finally get the math right. Saying “thank you” when someone compliments my face, without the voice in my head appending but.

The diet industry makes $70 billion a year off our calculations. The medical establishment saves money by not investigating fat people’s symptoms, a fact I learned in the most instructive way possible. The fashion industry charges us extra and hides us in the back. The math works perfectly. Just not for us.

Some days I still count. The programming runs deep, automatic, ancestral. But increasingly I recognise the counting for what it is: a learned behaviour, not a moral obligation. A cage I can choose to leave, even if I have to pick the lock one calculation at a time.

I spent twenty-five years trying to solve for X. The cancer, at least, clarified things. What I want now is to live in a body that doesn’t need to balance its books. To exist without arithmetic, without apology, without the constant calculation of my worth.

The surgeons removed four organs and eighteen lymph nodes. They did not remove the part of me that still steps on the scale backwards, hoping to trick it. That part is apparently load-bearing.

The real problem was never the equation. It was that I agreed to be one.

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