What it's like being really fucking fat

When you can't even wipe your arse, life is shit

If you could look like the Ari on the left, why would you look like the Ari on the right? Because psychology is not logical. If it were, there would be no fat people.

At the start of this year, I was morbidly obese, which means I was on course to die from it. But if I had done, they wouldn’t have been able to lift the coffin. They’d have had to kick it along the aisle instead, like I do with a heavy shopping basket in the supermarket queue.

There’s no BMI category after ‘morbid obesity’, just as there’s no life after death, and no stage V after stage IV cancer - for which being very fat is now the main preventable cause, ahead of smoking. Cheery stuff.

The most shameful thing about being morbidly obese was my inability to wipe my arse properly. My backside was huge, my arms were short and I just couldn’t reach, so I’d end up wiping shit all over my arse instead.

Which is all very well when you’re at home - just heave your bulk awkwardly into the shower using your little fat feet, and wash away the filth - but a nightmare when you’re in the office. Trust me, there are few things more embarrassing than sitting at your desk, wondering if your glossy slender colleagues can smell the poo from your bum. Even the naked Zoom call wasn’t quite as bad.

You know what’s nearly worse than that? When you’re hugely obese, you have large folds of flab. And, if you don’t wash daily in the creases, a kind of cheese forms in them (I’m sorry if this is putting you off your egg and cheese McMuffin). So, when I was ill and just lying in bed for a few days, I realised that I was inadvertently producing under-boob fromage. My friends, the only dairy your breasts should ever generate is milk.

Me, back in the heady days when I didn’t have a pizza-face, cheesy tits and a bottom full of excrement.

The very real risk of dying superseded my having inflicted Dairylea and disability on myself, however. My blood pressure was sky high, and a routine eye test revealed that this had caused a ‘sub-retinal haemorrhage’ - a bleed on the back of my eye. My heart rate was around 120, and the Gods of Life-Shortening Medical Conditions had already bestowed upon me an extra heartbeat. I was getting chest pains, my cholesterol was off the scale and I was perpetually short of breath. My dad had died from a major brain haemorrhage and stroke, so I knew that was a possibility.

I worked on the fourth floor of a building. I’m a claustrophobe who hates lifts: what if there was a fire while I was in the lift, I fretted, and it became immobilised with me trapped inside? And I had no mobile reception, and the alarm button didn’t work, and I ran out of air or burnt to death? (My anxious brain likes to invent horrific scenarios that have probably never happened in the entire history of time.)

So, despite being the fattest member of the company, I would hump my nearly 104kg frame up the four flights of stairs instead, panting like a cold calling pervert asking what colour your underwear is. I’d then waddle into the office, leading to the next indignity: my clothes were all too tight and short as I couldn’t bear to buy size 20, so I’d typically flash a wodge of flabby stomach at my colleagues when taking my coat off.

They’d all stare at the panting, flashing weirdo with a mixture of pity and horror, like I was a total loser. Which was exactly how I felt. It was an interior design magazine, and I felt as though I had no right to work there, despite being good at my job, because it was all about aesthetics and I was so visually unappealing. I felt like wearing a badge at interiors events saying “I’m sorry about my face and body!”

Look, Sherine. That Milky Way isn’t going to improve your situation, I promise.

The perks of being fatty boom boom

There are few consolations to being a chubby funster. It’s like wearing a sticker in public saying ‘I've fucked up my life’. A certain type of man is particularly open online about thinking fat women are disgusting: he’ll call you lazy, greedy, slovenly, and say he hates you. I’m sure that kind of angry man is incredibly hot, athletic and successful himself and is drowning in skinny punani, rather than being an incel rage-typing into a phone in his single bed at his mum’s house.