The Body I Hated | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.  

It was an ordinary day in 2007, Valentina Festa was 5 years old, and she was shopping with her mother in Santa Rosa, Argentina. They passed by a store, and in the window Valentina saw a pink T-shirt that she loved.

[Valentina]: I always loved wearing colors, and I was a big fan of pink when I was little, because of the Barbie thing. I loved dressing all in pink. If I could buy something, I would buy it pink. 

[Daniel]: They went into the store and began to browse. Her mother, Maribel, approached the owner of the store and asked for help finding the right size for her daughter. This is Maribel:

[Maribel]: And then she says to me, “The problem is that your daughter is very fat.” I never thought I would hear that. I felt so bad that I turned around and left. I left with her because, really, what could I say in reply as I held her hand? I couldn’t say anything; I only wished that she hadn’t heard it.

[Daniel]: But Valentina did hear it, and that day, at only 5 years of age, she realized for the first time that she was overweight. 

[Valentina]: I loved playing with dolls, I loved dressing dolls, and it was the only thing I thought about. And suddenly the fact that someone told me the pink T-shirt I had seen in the window didn’t fit me, that it wasn’t meant for me because I was fat… And it was like a bucket of cold water to say, “Hey, yeah, sure, I’m fat, I don’t belong here, this is not a space for me.” And suddenly I don’t have any space of my own, because when I watch movies, the only characters that look like me are evil. I look at my dolls and none of them looks like me. My classmates don’t look like me.

[Daniel]: And that’s how she began to realize that the world wasn’t made for people like her. Her mother would do everything in her power to make her fit in, but Valentina would find her own way. 

We’ll be back after a break

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Our senior producer Lisette Arévalo brings us this story. 

[Lisette Arévalo]: The comment that Maribel heard in that clothing store regarding her daughter’s body was not the first. When Valentina was a baby, pediatricians measured her, weighed her, and said things like… 

[Maribel]: “Ma’am, the girl doesn’t seem to meet the… the height, or the… the weight that corresponds to her age.” She was always taller and chubbier than she was supposed to be at her age.

[Lisette]: This worried Maribel a little, but it’s not like she paid that much attention to it. When other people looked at her daughter, they said she was a cute, chubby little girl. A cute baby with fat rolls. That was all. She and her family saw it as something that would pass. 

[Maribel]: But I also said, “Well, they are kids now, but then they slim down, then they do activities and they get thinner.” We always thought that. That her build was going to change and… later on, she would be a thin girl.

[Lisette]: But the years passed and Valentina did not lose weight. What did get smaller and smaller were the spaces where she belonged.

Since Valentina loved to dance, her mother took her at the age of five to a dance studio to take lessons with other girls her age. They were both excited, but soon the teacher told Maribel not to take her anymore because those classes were not for Valentina. And yes, she was saying it because she was fat. 

[Maribel]: I felt bad, I really felt very bad because she was able to do it anyway, even if she wasn’t skinny, a stick. 

[Lisette]: Maribel preferred not to take her to those classes anymore. She wanted to protect her. This was something that she had to face alone, because from the beginning, Valentina’s father was not very present in his daughter’s life.

At school, Valentina suffered the same rejection. When she was about 6 years old, her classmates refused to play with her.

[Valentina]: The girls would say, “Not you, because we don’t want you in the group, because, well, you’re fat and we don’t want you.”

[Lisette]: Those comments came, especially, from the group of the most popular girls in school. There were others with whom she did get along well, but that didn’t stop them from annoying her because of her body. In Phys Ed class, for example, she was always chosen last, and her classmates made it clear that if they lost it was her fault, for not being able to run like the others.

Of course, Valentina would lose her desire to play, or she would look for a way to be taken out of the game. She didn’t want to be in the way.

She didn’t tell her mother any of this, because in a way, she felt she had nothing to tell. Her classmates were telling the truth: she was fat. 

[Valentina]: I also thought inside me that they were right. I mean, why would they want to play with me if I was fat? If the world taught me that I had to lose weight. And that was what would make them love me. So they were right to not love me; they were right to not want to play with me. They were right in what they said to me, calling me fat. They were right. 

[Lisette]: She was four feet three and weighed 41½  kilos. More than the average, according to the Argentine health table.

That’s how she went through first and second grade, hating going to that school where others wouldn’t stop badgering her.

When she turned seven, she moved with her mother and her mother’s partner to another town in the province of Pampa: Macachín, a place with no more than five thousand inhabitants.

At first, it was a good change because she was finally away from the girls who picked on her. But in that small town, Valentina stood out even more. The bullying didn’t stop at her new school. The others would hit her, insult her, spit at her, pull her hair. And as far as she remembers, she never saw another girl who had a body like hers. Not at school, not in the parks, not when she was walking through the town square.

Her mother had noticed the same thing, and for a while she began to see it as a problem. When they went shopping for clothes, the only ones that fit Valentina were several sizes larger than what corresponded to her age. Sometimes they were clothes for teenagers, nothing suitable for such a young girl. It also became inevitable that her mother would compare her to other girls her age and realize that none of them looked like her daughter. This worried her more and more. 

[Maribel]: I had to help her somehow, but I didn’t know how. My fear was everything that she might suffer later for being overweight. That was it. 

[Lisette]: Suffering not only because she was different, because others harassed her, but also because of her health. Doctors said her daughter’s weight would be a problem in the future. Diabetes, high cholesterol, triglycerides, knee pain…

Of course she was distressed. The last thing she wanted was for her daughter to be sick. So she decided to take her to a nutritionist. She thought that that way, Valentina would learn to eat healthy and, in the future, lose weight.  

[Lisette]: Neither Maribel nor Valentina have forgotten that first visit to the nutritionist. The office was in an aesthetics clinic. The entire place was painted white. It had a cot, a brown wooden desk, and a college degree hanging on the wall. Valentina was only 8 years old. 

[Valentina]: And I remember that it had a mirror. And below the mirror was the scale. So you weighed yourself and saw yourself in the mirror.

[Lisette]: The nutritionist wrote down her weight in a notebook. And without asking her a single question, she told her that what she had to do was clear—lose weight. She began by giving her a couple of instructions. What snacks she could eat, what her dinners should be like, how to divide her plate. 

[Valentina]: No ice cream. No chocolates. Except the ones that were sugar-free. And never drink soda. Stay away from birthday things like rock candy, Cheetos, chips. The same for cake—never. Potatoes once a week. Neither could she eat bananas, because, although it is a fruit, it is a very heavy fruit and supposedly makes you fat. 

[Lisette]: She told her that she should drink a lot of water and she could drink chocolate milk occasionally, but only if it was dark and bitter chocolate. That she could eat alfajores cookies, but only those of a specific brand that were rice- and sugar-free. That for a snack she could eat a piece of cheese, but it couldn’t be any larger than the size of a cassette tape. And that before eating a plate of pasta, she had to eat salad, so that she would be a bit full.

Additionally, she told her that she had to write down everything she ate

[Valentina]: If I got a package of cookies and ate ten cookies, I had to write down that I ate ten cookies. So I had to count each cookie to know how much I was putting into my body.

[Lisette]: She couldn’t leave anything out. Not even how many glasses of water she drank. The nutritionist advised her to buy a notebook that she liked, so that it would make her want to use it and motivate her to lose weight. With all these instructions, Maribel and Valentina left the office.

Very soon, Valentina went from thinking about dolls and cartoons to counting everything she ate in a day. Her mother helped her detail everything and control her diet. But it wasn’t easy at all. She was still very young, and not even the pretty notebook they had bought for her motivated her to keep that inventory. Especially when she was invited to a party with her school friends. 

[Valentina]: If you’re going to a birthday party, for example, you’re not going to walk around with a notebook counting how many chips you eat. Because it’s embarrassing, because all your classmates are watching how the fat girl counts the chips she eats. Or this thing about, I don’t know, inviting your friends to have a snack, and then starting to count how many cookies you eat, eh? And writing down, for example, I don’t know, whether you add jam or butter or something to the cookie. I had to write that down, too. 

[Lisette]: To avoid this, Valentina tried to memorize everything she ate when she was with her classmates and write it down later in her notebook. It was very stressful, and her mother noticed it. Besides, she didn’t enjoy having to watch Valentina all the time and monitor everything she did. And it was very hard for her to have to prohibit certain foods. 

[Maribel]: How do you say, “No, don’t eat this, not that. Don’t take this. No…” We’re going to a party and, “No, you can’t eat a piece of cake. No. Or you can eat half a cookie.” The truth is that it was very, very difficult for me.

[Lisette]: It broke her heart. But she thought that pushing her to follow the diet was the only thing she could do to help her. 

[Maribel]: And I thought that was the way, so that she wouldn’t feel different, so that she wouldn’t feel bad afterwards, I don’t know. That’s what I thought.

[Lisette]: To accompany her in that convoluted process, Maribel and her partner followed the same diet as Valentina. Everything in her life revolved around losing weight. Even her extended family had an opinion on her body. Her aunt, for example, told her not to dress in colors, but only in black clothes because that would make her look thinner. 

[Valentina]: And there was a time, when I was seven, from the age of seven to, I don’t know, age 12, when I dressed only in black or gray, and it was very sad because I loved colors. 

[Lisette]: The television shows she watched reinforced that idea: Certain experiences were not suitable for fat people like her. From getting a boyfriend to having certain professions, such as being a dancer, actress or model. Plus she always had the idea that people like her needed other people to save them from their fatness. But, most of all, that she had to change in order to deserve and receive love.

In fact, there was a television program in Argentina about that very idea—transforming fat people. It was called “Cuestión de Peso.” [“A Matter of Weight”]

[Archive soundbite]

[Music]: Yes, you can, yes, you can…

[Host]: And the great day has arrived! This is the healthiest program on Argentinean television! Today begins the seventh season of Cuestión de Peso, and this is how it begins. Fabián… 

[Lisette]: People who wanted to lose weight—around twelve of them— went to the program. Live, they had them stand on a scale and put on a T-shirt with their starting weight: 300 kilos. 180, 140, 83… It was a reality show. They went on diets, they were divided into different categories, and if they didn’t lose enough weight, they were eliminated. At one point they even had a 12-year-old girl on the show.

Valentina watched it while she ate at home, and she remembers one scene in particular that made a very big impact on her.

[Valentina]: I remember clearly, at one point they brought out a wheelbarrow and… I remember they brought that thing out full of fat, fat, fat. Fat taken from an animal. Full of fat. And they put it next to the fat person and said, “This is what you are.”

[Lisette]: It was almost impossible not to think about how full the wheelbarrow would be if it were her.

Her extended family also watched the show, and they didn’t miss the opportunity to tell her that if she didn’t take care of herself she could become one of those people. They told her not to eat like a pig, that if she continued like that she was going to burst. They compared her to her thinner cousins ​​and told her smaller cousins ​​not to eat so much because otherwise they would end up like Valentina. Her body became everyone’s territory. 

[Valentina]: And you grow up seeing how everyone is afraid of getting fat. Well, then, what happens with me, that I’m already fat? So everyone’s biggest fear is being like me. My family is afraid of being like me, because my family is afraid of being fat and I am fat. So it’s shocking and it’s very difficult to assimilate that people are afraid of being like you.

[Lisette]: There was something else that made her suffer. As Valentina saw how much effort her mother put into her diet and how much she wanted her to lose weight, she began to feel that every kilo she lost would give her a little more love from her mother. And also that losing weight was synonymous with being a good daughter. 

[Valentina]: Because that’s what was expected of me. We are told that being a good daughter means obeying, right? So if I wasn’t losing weight, I wasn’t a good daughter, was I? And with everything my mother had done for me, because I was a bad daughter and I refused to lose weight. It was a lot, an enormous amount of pressure for an eight-year-old girl—I mean, a lot.

[Lisette]: Valentina losing weight was a priority for Maribel. First, because she had normalized the idea that, to be healthy, a person had to be thin. That was what she had learned from childhood, everywhere. And second, because people made her feel that in order to be a good mother she had to help her daughter lose weight. So when it wasn’t getting done, she felt like a failure.  

[Maribel]: Even going to the nutritionist made me feel guilty because, well, she had to eat this thing, she had to write that thing and you say, “How can I do it? She is just a girl and no, no, she is not going to walk around with the notebook everywhere, writing what she ate and what time she ate it.” It was like I felt bad because she said, “Oh, what an irresponsible mother, who doesn’t make her do what I tell her to do.” 

[Lisette]: It happened with all the doctors 

[Maribel]: I felt the doctor was telling me that I was doing things wrong. They made me feel like I didn’t take care of her in some way, because the girl was overweight, because I wasn’t taking care of her.

[Lisette]: In general, doctors always limited themselves to attributing any ailment to her weight. Sometimes they didn’t even do any tests or consider looking at other variables. 

[Maribel]: For example, she had a knee problem. The orthopedist would tell you, “The problem is that she is overweight; she has to lose weight because just look how her knees are getting, and if not, she is going to need surgery.” All that happened to us. And so it had become a health issue.

[Lisette]: What happened to Maribel with Valentina every time she went to the doctor is very common. Prejudices about overweight people mean that important illnesses often go undiagnosed even though patients may have all the symptoms. And those hasty diagnoses, in turn, can end up causing or exacerbating eating disorders that often end up becoming chronic.

And that’s exactly what happened to Valentina.

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Lisette Arévalo continues the story. 

[Lisette]: When Valentina was ten or eleven years old, her mother decided to stop taking her to the nutritionist. Partly because she saw how excruciating it was, but also because she didn’t see any results. Valentina remained the same weight. But if she had learned anything in those two years with the nutritionist, it was that food was her worst enemy. So, with no support of any kind, she continued going on all kinds of diets. She weighed 77 kilos and was 1 meter 63 cm tall. 

[Valentina]: For a ten-year-old girl to start controlling, er, not eating. I mean, to suddenly say, “Today I won’t eat anything,” or “Today I’ll eat only apples”—it’s a lot. It was very complicated growing up like that.

[Lisette]: Sometimes she would just skip entire meals. In the middle of all that, she realized that what she had learned from the nutritionist, writing down everything she ate, was actually very useful. She could control how much food she ate each day. Instead of writing it down in a notebook, she wrote it in her cell phone so that no one would see it.

She also adopted a routine. She stood on the scale every morning and every evening while looking in the mirror. She observed every part of her body. 

[Valentina]: I looked in the mirror and grabbed my arm, grabbed my belly… It made me sick. No, I didn’t want to see myself; I didn’t like myself at all. I didn’t feel comfortable in my body. I didn’t understand why I had been punished with this body. My thought was, “I would give anything to be someone else.”

[Lisette]: She wrote down every gram that she lost or gained. If she saw no changes or if they were very small, she felt like a failure. And the comments from her family still didn’t help. There were days when she ate nothing at all, and even so, her mother said that she had gained weight.

The frustration and irritability became worse, and she began to argue with her mother frequently.

She felt very lonely. And to fill that loneliness, at around 11 or 12 years old, she found refuge in social networks. Especially Twitter. She spent a lot of time there and she began to see accounts that sold weight-loss products or gave weight-loss advice. 

[Valentina]: And a lot of people showed up giving advice on how they didn’t eat, how they lied to not eat, how, eh… I don’t know. How much time you had to hold the food before vomiting so that your body would not digest it. 

[Lisette]: And those accounts were from teenagers who frequently mentioned princesses Ana and Mía, nicknames for anorexia and bulimia, and who promoted these eating disorders. They shared all kinds of suggestions which I do not intend to repeat.

Valentina remembers they were profiles of teenagers like her, who sometimes shared photos of their bodies to show how they had changed. They used fake names, and in their descriptions they posted how much they weighed and how much they wanted to weigh. 

[Valentina]: For example, “The goal was to weigh 30 kilos and I’ve lost 20,” and so on. And then everyone around you knew how much you weighed, how much weight you wanted to lose, and what your goal was. And everyone supported you to achieve your goal. It’s crazy.

[Lisette]: They quote-unquote supported each other, because at the end of the day, what they were doing was killing themselves little by little. But it was a group of people who gave Valentina exactly what she needed at that time: an endorsement that what she was doing was viable, and techniques to achieve it. There, for example, Valentina found a cell phone app that calculated how many calories she should eat per day to reach her target weight. 

[Valentina]: You entered how many kilos you wanted to lose and in how much time, and the app told you how many calories you had to eat per day. And I remember that my calories, the calories that I had to eat for the weight I wanted to lose and the time in which I chose to lose that weight, were equivalent to one lettuce and tomato salad per day. In other words, that was all I could eat per day if I wanted to lose that weight.

[Lisette]: Valentina was willing to do that and much more to reach her goal: lose half her weight. Back then, she didn’t care that it was dangerous. She was completely convinced that the only thing she had to do was lose weight. And that only when she was thin could she enjoy life like everyone else. Meanwhile, the life she was meant to enjoy as a 12-year-old was slipping away.  

[Valentina]: The only memories I have are lying on my bed, crying all the time, being angry all the time, having a bad time.

[Lisette]: Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother was getting worse and worse. A 13-year-old Valentina felt like her mother could never fully understand her because she was thin. And although she knew that Maribel tried to support her and accompany her from her perspective, to Valentina those efforts sometimes served only to complicate matters. It bothered her, for example, that her mother dieted to accompany her and that she wanted to take her to do exercise. Or seeing that her mother looked at herself in the mirror and grabbed her fat rolls while saying that she looked fat. All her anger was focused on her mother, but she never said so to her face. Added to that was the fact that every time they went out on a mother-daughter outing, it was torment.

[Valentina]: We couldn’t do it because I would get mad because she could find clothes and I couldn’t. We couldn’t go out for a snack because she would say, “Don’t eat this cake; eat this other one because you are on a diet.” So there were a lot of shared experiences that I didn’t have with her, and I thought that it was partly my fault, that I wasn’t doing enough to deserve them. So I was angry, very angry with myself, and I transferred that a little to my mother, but it was like the sum of many things that together were unsustainable. 

[Lisette]: Maribel also remembers that period clearly. 

[Maribel]: I saw it as rebellion, as a rebellious teenage girl, and I had to figure out how to cope with it, and everything was a clash, everything I said was bad, everything that… I suffered a lot with her because it was very difficult and it wasn’t… I didn’t know how to help her. 

[Lisette]: Maribel didn’t imagine that behind all that, there was something else… It never occurred to her that Valentina was going through a mix of several eating disorders—binge eating, anorexia, and bulimia. Because in a way, it was not obvious. 

[Valentina]: And since I wasn’t down to the bones literally, no one saw me as being sick. So I never got any help. I was losing weight and that’s what was supposed to happen. I was not a person who had an eating disorder; I was a fat person who had gotten her act together, who had made up her mind to lose weight.

[Lisette]: Without knowing how much damage she was inflicting on herself, her mother and family congratulated her when they saw that she had lost weight. For Valentina, the love she received was directly proportional to the number of grams she lost. How could she think differently, if the way they treated her had improved so much.

Valentina lost about 13 kilos… reaching a weight of 64. And so she began to have new experiences. She suddenly started to attract the attention of the boys at school. She could go out to buy clothes in the same place as her mother and her friends. She could wear a pant size that she had never been able to wear. She was getting what she always wanted. 

[Valentina]: I was at my best. For me, not being hungry or not eating was an achievement. It was like, “All of you who are hungry are fools, you who eat while I don’t. I’m making it.”

[Lisette]: It’s not that she wasn’t hungry. She refers to certain times when, for example, she filled her stomach up with water or tea. Because, in reality, she was always hungry. She could think of nothing but food. But depriving herself of it gave her a kind of euphoria. 

[Valentina]: It was this happiness of saying, “Would I throw all this away when it’s giving me this happiness?” I mean, I’m screwing myself. But it is giving me the happiness of seeing my whole family proud that I am losing weight… 

[Lisette]: And there was another factor. Like so many people who go through an eating disorder, Valentina had body dysmorphia. In her head, she was still overweight. 

[Valentina]: I kept looking in the mirror and crying because I was fat, and it’s crazy to see the pictures now and not recognize myself. I don’t recognize myself in the pictures of when I was ten years old to when I was 16. In mean, in my head I feel that it’s not me because I didn’t live it; I didn’t see it. And the crazy thing is that I had gotten the body I had wanted to have all my life and I never enjoyed it because I never saw it. 

[Lisette]: She went on this way until she was about 16 years old. One thing that helped her was the boyfriend she had at the time. When he realized that Valentina was not eating, he encouraged her to go out to eat with him and enjoy that moment. Little by little she stopped limiting herself so much. But, instead, she began to exercise a lot to quote-unquote compensate for all the calories she ate.

She also learned to put on makeup, and gradually this became something that filled her mind and occupied all her time. She found peace in the process, and she was good at it. She began posting pictures on her Instagram account of how she painted her eyes with different shades and glitters.

It was around 2018, and that year she stopped thinking so much about her diet and controlling her every calorie. Of course, she gained weight. And although her relationship with food had improved, when she felt like she had gained a little weight, she would revert to her old habit of not eating for a few days.

A year later, at 17, Valentina was scrolling through her social networks when she came across some posts from fat activists. Of course, it caught her attention. 

[Valentina]: They didn’t do so much political activism, or heavy political activism, but it was about seeing a fat girl who dressed the way I wanted to dress, who wore the skirt I wanted to wear, who used the colors I wanted to use, and no one said anything about it. And she was happy dressing like that.

[Lisette]: And that act, that might seem simple, was what Valentina needed. 

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Lisette Arévalo continues the story. 

Valentina had never seen another fat woman appear so proud of her body. They were activists who published messages like these: 

[Archive soundbite]

[Sol Cardiello]: This is normal. Having a belly is normal. Having fat rolls is normal. It’s not bad to have stretch marks and cellulite. You are human. It’s natural. Go out, enjoy the sun, enjoy the summer, enjoy your body. 

[Agus Cabaleiro]: Clothes should fit our bodies. Not the other way around. So why would you modify your body to fit into a garment? 

[Paula Fernández]: In this video, I am going to bring you my six favorite crop tops. A garment that in theory is not for fat women. But it is a piece of clothing that I enjoy very much. I really like to use them. 

[Lisette]: That’s when she learned a term that would change her life: 

[Archive soundbite]

[Brenda Mato]: Do you want to know what fatphobia is? Fatphobia is one of the most widespread forms of discrimination in our society because people think it is voluntary. But mostly because people think it is something undesirable, something that, for the sake of health, everyone should leave behind. 

[Lisette]: Fatphobia. The hatred, rejection and violence towards overweight people because they are overweight. A hatred that has been brewing for centuries.

According to different studies by activists, this prejudice began to form since colonial times, when the idea of ​​what a female body should look like in order to be considered beautiful and healthy was formed. For example, upper-class English women in England sought to differentiate themselves from African slaves. And that intention of separating from them, from the larger body, makes thinness appear as an ideal of beauty. It is a problem of historical and systematic racism and classism.

To better understand how this historical discrimination infiltrated the medical sector, I spoke with this person:  

[Paola Sabogal]: My name is Paola Sabogal. I am a trained nutritionist, I also have a Ph.D. in psychology, and I am a certified intuitive eating counselor. 

[Lisette]: She focused on this area of ​​health because she experienced fatphobia at home from an early age. She was always thin but her sister wasn’t. And what her surroundings thought about her body ended up causing her own eating disorder: anorexia with underweight. I wanted to talk to her because she is part of Health at Every Size, an international movement that fights the stigma of weight in the healthcare system.

[Paola]: All the ideas that make up fatphobia in the health area  were deeply rooted, even in what I was taught during my training.

If someone is overweight, they are eating fast foods, they are sedentary… The clinical case they present to you is already there, with prejudices around what an overweight person is like, right? 

[Lisette]: The origin of the link between fatphobia and health comes, in part, from an equation that you have surely heard of: the Body Mass Index or BMI.  

[Paola]: The body mass index was never created for the purpose of determining health. It was created in the 19th century by a man who was an astronomer. He did a test with Belgian men. He was actually looking for a ratio estimate. 

[Lisette]: He was a Belgian named Adolphe Quetelet. In addition to being an astronomer, he was a mathematician and statistician. He is considered one of the founders of the social sciences, and what he wanted was to define the characteristics of quote-unquote the normal man, and for that distribution to be the rule. To achieve this, he decided that the measurement would be calculated by dividing weight by the square of a person’s height. The problem is that in this process, he included only men. Neither women nor people who were very tall or who were considered by him to be visually outside the canon were included in this formula. 

[Paola]: And that is why it is considered to be a very racist pattern. First, because it was done only with Belgian men of a specific class who were workers at the time. And second, because it is the perspective Quetelet considered to be the appropriate appearance for his time. A Belgian man of the 19th century.

[Lisette]: The BMI was taken up in the early 1970s in the United States by physiologist Ancel Keys, who proposed that the same equation—dividing weight by height squared—should become an estimation of body fat and thus a tool to detect obesity. For example, a result between 25 and 30 points is classified as overweight, and a result greater than 30 is obesity.

It was not until June 2023 that the American Medical Association recognized that BMI is an imperfect measure. Mainly because it does not take into account all of a person’s health variables.

However, doctors continue to use it. It is easy to calculate, and it is also cheaper because it does not involve doing any additional metabolic tests. The numbers are not insignificant, as they are included in a person’s medical history and end up playing a very important role worldwide: in life and health insurance coverage, for example.

There are other methods used to measure body composition, such as waist to hip ratio, waist circumference, thickness of skin folds, waist to height ratio. There is no medical consensus on the best way to measure body composition. But there is consensus that obesity can cause health problems.

The American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have classified obesity as a disease. It is defined as a condition in which excess fat accumulation puts an individual’s health at risk. It makes them likelier to suffer comorbidities such as high blood pressure, diabetes, certain types of cancer, and heart attacks.

But for Paola, the problematic thing is that the medical field focuses on just one variable—such as fat or weight—to determine a person’s health status. 

[Paola]: To me, there cannot be isolated indicators. Instead, at this moment in some person’s life, what are the buttons we can push so that their quality of life improves, so that their well-being improves, their state of health improves within the context of their lifestyle. Because in the ideal world, I wouldn’t even start with food and exercise. I would start by asking myself about sleeping habits, about working hours, about social equity, about what possibilities people really have of getting health benefits, paying for health care, having access to drinking water, of actually having time for physical activity. Safety conditions for that physical activity. 

[Lisette]: So there are many other factors that can influence whether a person has metabolic diseases.

[Paola]: You can be overweight and healthy, you can be overweight and sick, you can be thin and healthy, and you can be thin and sick. 

[Lisette]: And this is something that no nutritionist or doctor had ever told Valentina in her entire life. So when she found all those activists on her social networks, Valentina began to see the world differently. 

[Valentina]: It’s crazy when you open this little door and you start to realize that, like it or not, fatphobia is everywhere. In the world we live in, there is fatphobia in places we don’t even think about, because the world is not designed for fat people. 

[Lisette]: This is a systematic problem that is reflected in dozens of everyday aspects, from the seats on public transport being very small to not being able to access specialized medical examinations because the machines are not designed for people who fall outside the norm. It is the widespread idea that overweight people have no will power, are lazy, do not exercise and are sick, among other things. “They are fat because they want to be” is often the slogan.

Valentina began to make small changes in her life. She began to put aside black and gray, and dress in different colors, as she had always wanted. She even bought a bikini, which had previously seemed unthinkable. But she didn’t wear it immediately. She still didn’t feel 100% comfortable and kept restricting herself regarding certain foods.

When she turned 18, she went to school in Buenos Aires. There she began going to therapy, and the psychologist helped her understand that she was going through an eating disorder. For the first time in her life, she felt supported by a health professional, and she realized more than ever how much fatphobia had stolen from her. 

[Valentina]: Something that seems incredible to me is: How much time of your life did you spend thinking about losing weight? How much time of your life did you spend stepping on a scale, counting calories, measuring your food? How much time of your life in general, day to day, did you spend wanting to lose weight? What would you have done with all that time when you were thinking only about losing weight?

[Lisette]: So she decided she wouldn’t waste any more time. She had managed to make peace with her body. But now she needed to deal with the rest of the people who had hurt her so much, like her mother.

Her first stay in Buenos Aires lasted only four months. The pandemic soon hit, and in June 2020, Valentina had to live with her mother again. In her childhood home, memories of what it was like to live in that town, a place where she never fit in, came back. But one day it occurred to her that it was time to speak publicly about everything she’s had to experience, and she did something unexpected.

She put on a gold bikini and started applying makeup. She painted her entire face white with black spots, like a cow, and took three close-up photos. You can’t see her entire body. Only the bikini straps and her painted face are visible. She has an orange ring in her ear, similar to the ones they put on cows to identify them.

The text of the Instagram post was titled “Cows don’t wear bikinis,” and it began with this: 

[Valentina]: When I was younger, if you were fat, people insulted you for a long time by telling you that you were, or looked like, a cow. I was told this every day at school, and after a long time I learned it as a rule that I repeated before every summer: “Cows don’t wear bikinis.” I memorized it, I tattooed it on myself, I  branded it on myself, it hurt me, it made me cry, it marked me…

[Lisette]: She talked about everything she had learned to do as a child to try to go unnoticed. But also about everything she had read up to that point and the way she was changing how she saw herself. There was another part that said:

[Valentina]: What I’m going to tell you is that today, I broke the rule that I repeated every year before summer, and I have decided to show it. A cow wearing a gold bikini. And it’s me, that cow is me and the word cow no longer hurts me, and I was able to wear a bikini and I liked it. 

[Lisette]:  She ended by inviting people like her to wear colors and dare to show more skin.

It was a liberating moment for Valentina, and many people who followed her on Instagram were moved by what she had written. They congratulated her and supported her. That post was the beginning of her fat activism, and that’s how she became a clothing model. She posted full-length pictures of herself in a bikini and lingerie on her account.

With this also came hateful comments, but these messages did not affect her as they had in the past. She felt stronger and wanted to respond. For Christmas 2021, she had medical tests and posted them on her account to prove that she was not sick like everyone told her. She did not have high cholesterol, diabetes, or high triglycerides. She had stopped dieting. She stopped controlling her weight. She no longer stood on a scale. And she didn’t need to. She was OK. 

[Valentina]: And I was also beginning to realize that I liked my body and that I was liking it, that I was feeling comfortable.

[Lisette]: But it was difficult for her to make peace with everything that had happened with her mother. When they started living together again, Maribel continued telling her that she had to lose weight for the sake of her health. Valentina would put a stop to those comments by telling her not to give opinions about her body, her clothes, and what was served on her plate. 

[Valentina]: New things began to come up, things that my mother believed and that I no longer believed, and that, of course, generated conflict.

[Lisette]: Over time, her mother began to see how Valentina was changing. Not just her attitude, but her state of mind. 

[Maribel]: I realized that she was happy, so no, it didn’t affect her at all; that she was a healthy girl and that she could achieve everything she wanted even though she was overweight, and that it wasn’t a problem for her. It wasn’t a problem for her at all.

[Lisette]: But for Maribel, it wasn’t always easy. She told me that sometimes she was embarrassed to go out with Valentina when she wore clothes that, in theory, were too small for her or not suitable for her body. But Valentina was there, willing to talk and to have her mother listen. She did not want to break off her relationship with her mother, as has happened to many fat activists, either because they could not forgive their mothers for everything they had put them through, or because her mothers were simply not willing to change the way they saw fatness.

[Valentina]: I mean, I really wanted to have a relationship with my mother, I wanted to be able to figure it out, I wanted her to be able to support me, and I wanted her to be able to accompany me. 

[Lisette]: Fortunately, Maribel began to listen to her carefully. 

[Maribel]: And the truth is that it is very hard, because I am now becoming more aware of things, because with her I am gradually growing. Not growing, but learning. Learning from what she teaches me day by day and how she lives day by day. And I am learning this way. And, well, also helping, accompanying. 

[Lisette]: And perhaps what surprised her the most was the realization that all that suffering was, in part, her responsibility. 

[Maribel]: She didn’t feel bad about her body. She was fine with her body. I was the one who was wrong. And from then on it was like, “Well, that’s it.” I didn’t judge anymore, and I don’t give any opinion on what she is doing. It’s okay and your body is okay. And whatever she wears is fine, and she wears it and enjoys it, and she looks good that way.

[Lisette]: Maribel apologized to Valentina for everything she had put her through. And Valentina also apologized to her through a letter that she posted on her Instagram. That’s how I met them. It started like this: 

[Valentina]: I was once told, “My mother was the first person who made me feel like my body was wrong,” and from then on I can’t count the number of times the word mother came up when talking about problems with our bodies. Mom taught us to lose weight, to see that it looked good on us, and she passed on what she learned to us so that we would do well, so that we wouldn’t get bullied, so as to take care of us, trying to give us the best. Mom was taught to lose weight to get into her body, into an ideal body. In the era of miniskirts, of celebrities with… 

[Lisette]: She talked about how, in the end, mothers are also the result of a society that always told them that if they weren’t thin, they weren’t good enough. That she didn’t excuse them, but that she understands where they’re coming from. And she went on:

[Valentina]: My mother apologized for trying to take care of me with methods that were not ideal, but she did what she could with what she had. She asked for forgiveness, and she learned because I showed her the world that she had never seen. I forgive you, mom, and I ask your forgiveness.

And with that, Maribel managed to see her daughter. Really see her.

[Daniel]: Lisette Arévalo is a journalist who lives in Quito, Ecuador. This story was edited by Camila Segura, Natalia Sánchez Loayza and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. The sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with original music by Ana Tuírán.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Pablo Argüelles, Adriana Bernal, Lucía Auerbach, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Rémy Lozano, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas and Desireé Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.