Everybody get fat right now
Confessions of a chronically underweight crossdresser
The Crank combines caustic cultural analysis with fake hair. It updates every Monday.
Without delving too deeply into my many health problems, I am thin. At 63.7 kilograms and 185.4 centimetres, my build is somewhere between a malnourished WNBA player and Slenderman. I have always been this way, nor is it for lack of trying – but this is not enough for my local health authority, who have issued me an ultimatum.
I need to get fat. Or else.
My prime directive is to eat. At least for the time being, I try to gulp down a few bonus helpings here and there; I have always been pro-snacking, which helps. But thirteen slices of lemon drizzle cake in one day has not saved me from my skinnitude: I need to count calories, three thousand of them to be exact.
Since time immemorial, people on Substack have had a lot to say about others’ bodies – the thin ones, at least. Ozempic has hit us like a truck; people have turned inwards, seeking to control their bodies when they cannot control the world around them. It is worth discussing, though that discussion can veer into dissection alarmingly fast.
Without scrutinising anyone’s skinniness specifically, there is a cultural ghoulishness to the sudden obsession with frailty and thinness among celebrities that is legitimately frightening. But we rarely talk about the other side of the problem.
How do I gain weight without becoming a crazy person?
Currently, I need to meet or exceed 3000kcal per day otherwise a health practitioner is going to come to my house and flagellate me with a stethoscope. Everything I do now comes back to an obsessive calculus – everything I eat has an aggregate value. When everything is reduced to a flat calorie count, or grams of protein, or Omega-3, the food starts to matter less and less. It can be subsumed, and substituted, and blended down.
Every day at 15:00 I drink a protein shake. Nutritionally complete, it tastes like vanilla mixed with plasticine: it is 500ml of pure pea protein, and it shows. The packaging is flat and blank, efficient. Black and white.
For dinner, aubergine chicken parmigiana with focaccia. I slice the chicken into small, equal portions, which I eat one after the other. Then I do the same with the aubergine. The only joy left is to tear away a piece of focaccia and let it soak up the tomato sauce, sweet and sharp. After this, I will need two more snacks and – I am already forcing one down – three more glasses of water.
It feels ironic that, no matter where you’re coming from, you can make food so miserable, divorcing it from its juices, its bits. Each slice of chicken becomes a piece of protein; carbs multiply. I appreciate that many an emaciated B-lister would kill for my predicament – to be actively struggling to gain weight – but it is still frightening how I have turned one of life’s great pleasures into a mathematical problem.
Perhaps I am more like them than I want to advertise – I, too, have sacrificed enjoyment for control. Am I any better?
In the end, I stand by my quest for fatness: the trend towards frailty has its implications – that we should be half-people, too fragile to stand alone. The West’s fascination with thinness has been analysed so often: the self-control it implies positions the subject as the perfect neoliberal actor, capable of individual regulation.
But I hope I have shown another side to thinness that is less headline-grabbing – less of a convenient tool to pull apart people’s bodies in the public eye. In all my attempts to be healthier, how much further have I gotten from that self-controlling impulse?
What I want most in life is to be substantial – and it helps that my local health practitioner agrees – but for my sake I hope there’s a way to get there that doesn’t trim the fat from life in the process.
good luck The Crank… i had a similar trajectory over the last few years… one tip is be very very liberal w butter and olive oil ❤️
omg is it the lemon drizzle cake that Ru mentioned in her tik tok? lol. i love it so much.