Weight loss for Stephanie Roberts was the biggest
challenge in her life. She was actually a biggest size woman. Every time
someone holds a door open for her, or smiles at her in the street, she does a
double-take, because it has never happened to her before – even though she is
now 37. In her most of the life no one liked her and she hasn’t been used to
strangers being nice to her or treating her like a human being. All because, until 12 months ago, she was
very, very fat. Before she drop the dress size from 32 to 12. She said every
walk down the street was a hostile experience.
I’ve had people spit at me in broad daylight;
tell me I was ‘disgusting’. That was always their favorite word,” says
Stephanie. “They thought I should be ashamed for getting that big. People would
loudly pass comment on my size and I’d shout back, ‘I’m fat not deaf ‘but
others would just abuse me to my face. If she wasn’t being bullied by strangers
she was being blanked. But now the abuse has stopped.
Since she decided to go on weight lossprogram in November last year, losing more than 11st, the world has been a
kinder, very different place for the same 5ft 7ins tall Stephanie Roberts. She
says now I’m a normal size, cars stop to let me cross the road. People want to
talk to me. Men chat me up. It amazes me, but it angers me too. Before I lost
the weight, if I wasn’t being sneered at I was being ignored. Invisible. Are
appearances that important?
"As a size 32, I was a non-person. Now
I’m a size 12 I’m suddenly acceptable. “Yet I’m the same person inside. All
I’ve changed is the outside. What does it say about how we treat fat people?”
It’s only now she is slim that she realizes just how badly others treated her.
Stephanie, from Cardiff, was a picky eater as a child. She only started gaining
weight when she reached her teens. At 14, she was a size 14, she explains. At
18, an 18, and then she just got bigger and bigger. She says, by then I was
greedy, I suppose. I love food but I am a hopeless cook so I ate out of junky
places like petrol stations. I ate man-sized portions of food and I never
stopped eating.
Stephanie Roberts was a confident and
intelligent young woman, a tomboy who loved motorbikes and travel. She started
a good career working with adults with learning disabilities in the NHS. She
had lots of compassion, and faith in herself – but strangers seemed determined
to squash that self-esteem. At parties, I’d hang back and end up going back and
forward to the buffet, but the larger she became, the more abuse her big body
attracted. In the supermarket, people would stare at my trolley to see the
‘revolting, fatty’ things I was buying. They’d stare at me as I ate in
restaurants. Her love life was nonexistent. She went six years without so much
as a kiss. “When a man did spend the night with her, she never saw him again.
Men don’t want to be seen with ‘a fat bird”. Now she has lost all the un-wanted fat she was carrying and that’s wonderful but she is still the same person.
Stephanie’s work with as a behavior
specialist with the disabled makes her think too. My clients face prejudice
because of their learning disabilities – something they can’t change – and it
was just the same for me but because of fat,” she says.
It’s illegal to discriminate against disabled
people, or against a person’s race or religion but you can do what you want to
a fat person and that’s why it happens. Strangers are rude to big people
because they are allowed to be. Can’t everyone see there are feelings
underneath all those pounds of excess weight? She says maybe if we were a bit
more understanding, overweight people would find it easier to get to a
healthier size.
Stephanie’s life has been transformed. She is
happier than she has ever been and wishes all people struggling with their
weight could experience it too. She has started dating but for all the
happiness, she will never forget how it felt to be treated with such casual
cruelty by people she’d never seen before. People have terrible struggles with
weight. I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me but it did” she says. We
need to be kinder about it. No one should expect abuse every time they walk out
their front door.”
