Angela Martin loves to be around people. For the past three years she’s been living in Toronto and loving the buzz of the city around her. She lives right in the heart of the action in one of the busiest downtown areas of the city, Yonge and Dundas Square. Even when she’s at home – in the 30th floor apartment she shares with her partner of seven years, Gord – she can look down through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the verve and swerve of the city.
For Angela, there’s a strange paradox in all this.
She’s a person living with obesity, so mixing it up in the city also means coming into direct contact with the myriad ways in which the world – and all those people that Angela loves to be around – can be cruelly indifferent or even hostile to her as a large person.
“I just want to feel good in my skin and feel like I fit into this world,” she says.
It doesn’t seem like a tall order.
But going out for her can require some extra steps – and angst.
Her daily planning might include making sure she can fit into the seat at the restaurant where she and Gord have reservations, checking if there’s a life jacket her size when going to kayak with a friend, or buying a seatbelt extender in advance to spare herself the embarrassment of asking for one when boarding a flight for a fun trip away.
Angela and her partner Gord, Christmas 2022
Life is full and busy and difficult to navigate as it is, but for people with obesity the advance planning required is much more burdensome and mixed with feelings of dread. Every silver lining can have a black cloud.
Angela knows that all too well. She’s been managing these issues in one way or another since grade school. “I was a normal kid up until, like, the age of five. And then I had an incredible growth spurt. I got very tall. Everything grew, and so I probably ate more… And by the time I was ten years old, I was just as tall as I am today, five foot eight.”
She’s been carrying extra weight ever since then, she says.
She was always conspicuously the biggest kid… and the subject of jokes and teasing. “It was constant, constant, constant. It was a constant throughout my entire school life,” she says. That didn’t stop her from becoming a competitive swimmer, but even swim practice carries a memory that still stings. One of the kids on her team was unfailingly mean. She describes “Jamie” as “a good-looking kid… tall and lean with nice olive skin.” Whenever she arrived at practice, Jamie called her ‘Orca’. “Six days a week, at every practice – ‘Orca.’ And he gets all the kids to laugh at me,” she remembers.
Angela in Grade 7
The memory has analogs in her adult life. She recalls going into a grocery store one day when a man in front of her stopped abruptly and she bumped into him. When she apologized, he said, “Oh, Fatty. No wonder.”
“He called me right out on it,” she recounts. “I mean, I started crying immediately.”
Blistering memories of shame like this can cloud even her own perception of herself – and get so tangled that she can become her own worst enemy, with wickedly brutal self-talk inside her head.
“I can’t look at myself in the mirror to this day,” she says. “I have the worst negative self-talk. I mean, I can acknowledge that I am a good person, I’m a good mother, I’m a good daughter, I’m a good wife, I’m a good partner, all these things that I label myself as – but when I look in the mirror, my sense of self-worth just drops to my shoes.”
She is still searching for the best way to manage that. In Toronto, she’s attended events hosted by Obesity Matters, a Canadian organization that advocates for more public awareness of obesity as a chronic disease. There she’s found some kindred spirits and learned more about the science of obesity. It was there she first heard about the intricate relationship between hormones that regulate hunger and satiety that are often disrupted in people with obesity. That was eye-opening.
She sees progress being made with new treatments for obesity – but there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, she says. She’s hesitant about the new class of weight-loss drugs, and right now, she’s searching for a cognitive behavioral therapy that can work for her. She has used the app Noom with some success, but “fell off the wagon,” as she puts it.
About 30% of Canadians have obesity, according to Statistics Canada, based on a 2022 survey. With so many people moving through the world in larger bodies, Angela wonders, why is there not more accommodation made for them in daily life?
“One thing I notice right now is, when I go places, I’m always scanning the audience to see, hoping that there’s someone bigger than me there,” she says. “Honestly, I do. I scan wherever I go, hoping that there’s just one person that’s bigger than me.”
Sometimes she sees someone. But often, she doesn’t – and she thinks that points to something profoundly tragic.
“I think that there is so much shame in the world… You look at the stats, there are people that are big in the world and LOTS of them,” she says. “And there’s a point where they just protect themselves and they don’t go out anymore, and they don’t enjoy life, and they sit at home, and they order takeout.”
In her own way, Angela is doing something about it by being out there, by always looking for connection – no matter how difficult it can be.
She and Gord like to go to electronic dance events. As she’s dancing away, having a good time, negative thoughts can intrude.
There are people around me that are going ‘Look at that fat chick dancing. Look at that. She’s so big. She must be so uncomfortable.’
Sometimes, she says, she can turn it around. “I try and flip it in my head and I think, Maybe someone’s saying, ‘Wow, look at that lady. She’s still enjoying life. She loves it. I mean, she’s really into the music!'”
Angela can be her own worst critic, and if she can change the way she sees herself, there is hope she can bring others along with her. That is a good reason to keep going out in the city she loves, and to keep dancing.
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Diet and exercise alone aren’t enough to help many people reach a healthier weight. Medical treatments are needed to address the biological changes happening in our bodies that can drive weight regain. To find a physician near you who specializes in weight management, click here.
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This article was sponsored by Novo Nordisk Canada. All content is created independently by My Weight – What To Know with no influence from Novo Nordisk.
