Confessions to my Grandma…..

This is going to be a very personal post but before I get to the meat of the topic, I have to give you a little background. The past few seasons of my life have changed some of my core values and personal and professional missions.  I spent over 25 years, connected in some way, to the health and wellness field.  Since the age of 15, I have only wanted to help people live healthier lives.  I earned multiple degrees in the field of nutrition and food and both personally and professionally aligned my lifestyle with my beliefs. That is until 2 years ago when I took a huge pivot that was instigated by an eating disorder diagnosis in my younger daughter.  Talk about rocking your core values.  Not only did it fully shift my views on wellness and its part in toxic diet culture, but it also really enlightened me to how fatphobic society is and my own role in this deeply rooted issue.  It has weighed on me heavily since I came to the realization how these discriminations occur, at times, unnoticed in our society and my own part in perpetrating them. 

This has ignited a lot of soul searching and thinking.  When did this start?  Have I always felt this way?  Where did I learn to have such judgement?  One day it popped in my head what my earliest memories of fat phobia and fat shaming were and it was directed at my beloved grandmother.  And it hit me in my gut. Hard.  I grew up very close with my paternal grandparents.  They lived in Baltimore and we lived in Miami, Florida (as they got older, they moved to FL like everyone else’s grandparents).  Growing up, my brother and I would go visit my grandparents in Baltimore a few times a year and often we would go “sans” parents and stay with them for a few weeks at a time.  My grandmother, as she got older, was, as medical professionals would say, obese.  To me, she was my grandma, and this was the only way I knew her.  For as long as I can remember, and I have a good memory, my grandmother was on a diet.  She was one of the first members of Weight Watchers in the 60’s and naturally was a lifetime member.  I remember her being on EVERY diet under the sun (well, in the 70’s there were not nearly as many as there are now – but lots of cabbage soup) and she was the only one I knew that had all diet food in her house – before it was the norm.  She ALWAYS was ahead of the times.  When my brother and I were young kids, we would arrive at our grandparents’ home and often the first game we would play is “let’s check all the junk drawers and find all the candy that grandma hides since she is on a diet”. We would run around the house and scream when we would find any hidden candy (it was always chocolate).  Essentially, we were mocking her, but we had NO idea.  Thinking back on those years has made me very upset.  I often would watch my grandma log her food intake for her “meetings” and it was not uncommon for us to laugh when she would break her diet.  My grandmother loved food and cuisine.  She was not your typical grandma that baked cookies and apple pie – she was the queen of concocting dishes without a written recipe and they were exotic.  My grandparents traveled way before travel was commonplace.  They mainly traveled to the “Orient” (that is how I knew it as) and she would always talk about the culinary delights they would have with my grandfather’s business partners.  Her favorite being Shark Fin soup – I still think I look at the menu of every Chinese restaurant I dine out in hopes that they offer it.  Most of my memories from my childhood had to do with food.  Food was so pivotal in my family life which makes it even more difficult to think how this must have been for my grandmother.  So much of her identity, as I knew it, had to do with her body and her diet.  I vividly remember sitting adjacent to her in the backseat of the car on a longer ride and saying “oh good, I have my own built-in cushions for pillows back here” …referring to her large bosoms.  As the years went on and my grandmother aged, she was ravaged with multiple bouts of cancer and with each illness she physically became smaller.  Ironically, in her last years of her life, she struggled keeping weight on and she was tiny. We used to say she looked like a little bird.   And I know there was a part of her that actually liked this horrible side effect of disease.   

My grandmother sadly passed away in 2001 (I was 6 weeks pregnant with my first daughter, but I was able to tell my grandmother that I was pregnant.  My grandmothers name was Doris and we named my daughter, Danielle, as her namesake).  When we were preparing for her funeral, the Rabbi came over to my dad’s house to talk to us so he could learn a little bit about my grandmother because he had never met her. He sat down with my family and he asked my grandfather to tell him a bit about his ‘beloved’ wife.  My grandfather was a quiet man of few words and often his few words held a LOT of impact (good and bad!)  He opened his mouth and my brother and I held our breath and my grandfather simply said “She was quite Buxom”.  My brother and I could not stop laughing.  (He did go on to say that she had the best set of legs – his filter was gone!).  As I think back to that memory, it makes me both sad and angry.  I am angry at myself for my own fat shaming and fat phobia toward a woman that I loved with all of my heart (even though we did fight as I was growing up; however, thankfully, we grew very close during my teens).  I was taught that it was OK to mock fun at such a sensitive topic.  Making fun of someone for being overweight was normalized.  There was little compassion for her and how it felt to live in a larger body and how much she secretly struggled. And I know she did.  I know this now as an adult, but I did not know it as a child.  I know it was a different generation and I do not blame my parents or family, but it does make me want to do better.  It absolutely fuels my drive to do my part to end fat shaming and fat phobia. I think of days that I would use images of overweight kids, in professional presentations, to prove a point that we have an issue in this country of “obesity”.  Shame on me.  The bigger issue is the shame. Not the extra pounds.  We can do better.  We NEED to do better.  I know I will try to do my part to end the shame.  It is not ok.  

Grandma, I promise from our history, to do better.  It was wrong.  The most unimportant thing about you was your weight.  I miss you and your aqua milkshakes – luckily I’ve made them quite a few times for my girls as they were growing up.