By Stephanie English

I stopped believing in God when I was stick-thin, and have been tempted to reconsider since ballooning to twice my size. The God I hear about has an appetite for vengeance, and it seems He hungered for a chance to punish a skinny woman who loathed fat people by making her obese.

Growing up, I ate as much as I wanted of whatever I wanted, and I usually wanted sweets. Yet I was so skinny that a colleague wanted me followed into the bathroom after a dinner, convinced that the only way I could eat so much and be so thin was bulimia. My secret was not bulimia but good genes – which also gave me blonde hair, blue eyes, and good skin. I was “cute.” Men looked at me; I was desired. I never imagined anything could change.

During those halcyon days atop my pretty perch, I was disgusted by fat people. I mentally threw stereotypes at them: Lazy. Pig. No willpower. Their bulges and excess flesh repulsed me, and that contempt drew God’s attention to me like a dinner bell. He cast His eyes on me and saw a snooty little pop tart. He weighed me on His scales and found me wanting.

He threw a few pounds on me in my thirties – cleverly disguised as the leftovers of motherhood. As I tripped over my double chins on my way to forty, He ramped up the misery: a depressive episode during which I threw muffin after cupcake into the black hole threatening to swallow me from the inside. Within a few years, I’d gained so much weight that if I was a boa constrictor, it’d look like I’d ingested a middle school child. A foreign, moon-shaped face replaced mine in the mirror.

Waddling toward fifty and menopause (when weight gain is typical – ha!), I’m at my heaviest ever. Men do not look at me and I am not desired; I am invisible. The catcalls and wolf whistles echo in my past. I am the one greeted by others’ labels: Lazy. Pig. No willpower. When I see a fat person, I know they’re not happy. What’s your story? I wonder. What’s eating you up inside? Grief? Depression? Abuse? Loneliness? Far from my pretty perch, I know that no one plans to become fat and or is happy about it. Will-power is a fable that thin people tell. As I cast my eyes away from someone’s bulk, empathizing, I sometimes think that if I believed in God, He would be satisfied at the weight of my humility.

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“Confessional” is an excerpt from Women Under Scrutiny,  an honest, intimate examination of the relationships we have with our bodies, hair, and faces, how we’ve been treated by the world based on our appearance—and how we have treated others. The women who created the serious, humorous, and courageous work in this anthology—women ages seventeen to seventy-six—represent an array of cultures and religions from across the United States. They are an extraordinary group of women who all share one thing: the ability to tell the truth.

Women Under Scrutiny  grew out of Randy Susan Meyers’ new novel, Waisted, the story of two women who torture themselves and are brutalized by others around weight issues, who get caught in the war against women, disguised as a war against fat.

Stephanie English has thought of herself as a writer since she was 9 years old, yet only started writing in the past year. She has degrees in Magazine Journalism and English from Syracuse University and is a certified Editor in the Life Sciences. Stephanie lives with her family near Boston.