On the Body
The Troubles of Youth
I have been overweight since I was 6.1 Obvious as it was, people never spared any effort in pointing it out. Growing up, for instance, I constantly heard, "This kid is built so sturdy"—which was, of course, already the polite version. Still, every time I heard it, I felt a faint sting.
Some remarks were not so restrained. The one that stayed with me most happened about ten years ago, when I was a senior in high school. One day, as I was standing alone in the hallway outside my classroom, a classmate surnamed Hu from the class next door said loudly to her group of close girlfriends, right in front of me: "Let's get out of here—there's a damn fatso here." I had known this classmate Hu for two years, and in all that time we had spoken for no more than five minutes in total; trace our families back three generations, and we didn't have the remotest connection. So to this day, I still cannot understand just how unbearable my appearance and my body must have been for her to hate me enough to humiliate me in public.
Ten years ago, I did nothing. I just walked silently back into the classroom and sat down. I have never answered back to any judgment made about my body. Growing up, it was the same every single time. This has become a source of deep regret: my silence in those moments cost me the possibility of ever answering back, while for the rest of my life I have had to work hard to ignore the effect they had on me.
The Body and Power
I slowly came to realize that what is truly difficult to deal with is not a single remark itself. That classmate Hu from ten years ago has probably long forgotten the incident, and the elders who used to say "this kid is so sturdy" when I was little did not necessarily mean any harm. The trouble is that once a person has heard such things enough times, the people passing judgment no longer need to show up. My own voice will do the rest of the work for them.
At first, it was other people looking at my body. They saw that I was fatter than my peers, and so they judged it: sturdy, fat, too fat, damn fatso. Later on, even when no one around me said a word, I began actively looking at my own body. I would even complete the judgment on other people's behalf in advance: whether this piece of clothing makes me look fat, whether this angle looks awful, whether my body shape will be the very first thing people notice. A gaze that originally came from the outside eventually became my own gaze. A judgment about the body turned into an understanding of the self.
In The Subject and Power, Foucault discusses a fascinating question: power can operate through "norms"—that is, by "telling a person what is normal and what is abnormal; what is worthy of praise and what one ought to feel ashamed of." These norms do not remain on the outside forever. People gradually learn to observe themselves using the very same yardstick.
Power is at its most effective when it does not need someone standing beside you watching all the time. A person can take the gaze of others home and install it within themselves. And the body easily becomes the object of this kind of power. It can be weighed, measured, gazed at, and arranged on some partially ordered set: normal or overweight, slender or obese, attractive or unattractive, disciplined or indulgent. The first few judgments may still carry medical meaning, yet the later ones often get quietly mixed up with them. And so "my weight exceeds a certain number" easily becomes "I am fat"; and "I am fat" just as easily continues into "I am not a good enough person."
Foucault calls this process subjectivation: people are not merely described by others, but gradually learn to know themselves through those descriptions. Weight is a state of the body, "fat" is a category others supply for that state, and "what kind of person I am" has already entered the subject itself.
A single remark about the body can sometimes leave an impact far beyond anything the speaker intended. It takes the speaker only a few seconds, yet the listener may replay it on their behalf again and again for years to come.
Rebuilding the Relationship
"Don't care what other people think." That is the comment I see under countless social media posts about body anxiety. Yet it is a statement that is right, and almost completely useless.
The problem is precisely that we cannot neatly separate "what others think" from "what I think." A considerable part of anyone's self-understanding is formed in the gaze of others to begin with. Once that gaze has become part of who you are, telling someone "not to care" is somewhat like asking them not to hear their own voice.
In college, I took an anthropology elective called The Body, Love, and Intimacy. In that course, we mainly explored one question: given that we have already been shaped into who we are today, can we still rebuild our relationship with ourselves?
At least when it comes to the body, I now have an answer: I can change my body, but I do not have to accept every judgment about it as a result.
I can weigh myself, calculate body fat, control my diet, exercise, and lose weight. All of these are actions I take upon my own body. But "I want to change my body" and "I want to keep my body from making me an inferior person" are two completely different things. The former can come from health, aesthetics, or simple personal choice; the latter means I have already turned the judgments others once cast upon me into a moral standard for judging myself.
My body can be seen, it can be judged, and it can be changed by me. But it has no obligation to answer, on my behalf, what kind of person I am.
A Modern Medical Perspective on Weight Management
Modern medicine's understanding of obesity is also undergoing a shift. And that shift happens to offer another way of looking at the body.
For a very long time, obesity was not just a physical state, but also a judgment of character. A fat person was easily assumed at the same time to be lazy, gluttonous, and lacking in self-control. Weight became a moral indicator: thin meant disciplined, fat meant indulgent. The state of the body and the quality of a person were effortlessly bound together.
Modern medicine is gradually untangling this connection. In other words, it is trying to place the question back in the body itself.
Today, a growing number of medical organizations view obesity as a chronic disease. What medicine cares about is adipose tissue, energy metabolism, neuroendocrine regulation, and genetic factors, rather than inferring a person's character from their weight.
If a person can steadily lose weight while strictly controlling their diet and keeping up with exercise, yet their weight keeps climbing back the moment the intervention stops, then what truly needs explaining is not "how weak their willpower is," but why the body always tends to return to its original state.
Different people face different bodily conditions. Some can maintain their weight over the long term without deliberate control, while others must continually contend over the long term with stronger hunger signals, higher food-reward responses, and the body's compensatory mechanisms against weight loss. For someone like me, who has been overweight since childhood, the body's hunger signals and eating behavior are themselves in a state of imbalance. What this requires is long-term management and medical intervention, not moral judgment.
That classmate Hu left the stage long ago. The one who has kept putting me on trial is myself. Every time I step onto the scale, it feels like waiting for a verdict. But a verdict on what? On whether I deserve the words "not to be humiliated"? The logic is so absurd, yet I carried it out for ten years. This ruler was never mine. I am giving it back to that hallway, back to that blinding afternoon ten years ago.
Today I step onto the scale and see an unsatisfying number—and before me are two voices.
One says that I am still not thin enough, still not good enough, and still have to prove myself to others. Then it draws up an even harsher weight-loss plan. I know this voice all too well. It has been speaking to me since the year I turned six.
The other says that what I need is to maintain my own body and keep it running for the long haul. A sound dietary structure, sustained exercise, adequate recovery, steady emotions, and medical treatment when necessary. Weight management is my own business. It does not need to depend on the gaze of others.
That is the voice inside the boy who walked silently back into the classroom and sat down.
Footnotes
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Possibly even earlier, though that is hard to verify. ↩
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