In 2002, I was the type of elementary school kid who was keenly aware of and dependent on the transformative power of shapewear. I wasn’t even 10, but I knew that I didn’t look the way a girl was supposed to look — was I even a girl with a gut like this? I didn’t know. I did know that SlimFast made you dizzy, that Dr. Siegel’s famous Cookie Diet tasted like crap, and LeanSpa was a scam. I drank energy drinks marketed as meal replacements and developed a healthy fear of guarana. A bully whom I’ll neither forgive nor forget once described me as “a rolling sea of flesh waves,” and one whose name has long escaped me once pulled me aside and said, “Everyone thinks you look pregnant, are you?”
Looking back on those days, I don’t know that I was “fat” in the same way we think of fat today. I do know that whatever I was, it wasn’t desirable in the early 2000s. You’ve heard it all before, but that was just the culture. And its impact knew no limitations. As I said, middle school was still a far cry for me when I started shopping for Spanx.
