Growing Up Fat: Tales of a Gym Class Zero

Being a fat kid made gym class a horror for me. I dreaded it with a passion, never knowing what embarrassment would next be inflicted on me.



Beginning in the lower grades, it was the small humiliations that bothered me like waiting as teams were picked knowing you were going to be last or the general embarrassment of not being able to do the things that seemed to come so easily to my classmates. One of those things I remember from grade school was rope-climbing. I remember in 4th grade or so we had to take turns trying to shimmy up a rope attached to the gym ceiling, which was the equivalent height of a two-story building. I am not sure how a rational person would think this was a safe activity for 9 year olds, but what do I know? A lot of the kids could scramble up that rope like monkeys but I could not budge one inch up that rope. I don’t really remember anyone laughing or making fun of me, but I remember being horribly embarrassed anyway.

In middle school/junior high, things became a little more traumatic. This was the age where they started making us change and shower for gym class. I was a shy, modest kid anyway, add to it that I towered 6 inches over my dainty classmates and outweighed them by 60 pounds and I was pretty much mortified by the whole process.



Junior high was also when they started weighing us in gym class. To this day I do not know what the purpose of that was. I just remember the absolute panic I felt knowing what was coming on weigh-in days. I remember sitting in class in the hours before gym class bouncing my leg as fast as I could in some vain attempt to shed a couple of pounds before I had to step on that scale. To make matters worse, it wasn’t just the gym teacher who got to see our weights. He selected another student to write down everyone’s weight as he called it out loud for all to hear. Of course he picks the tiniest little girl in the bunch. I still remember Trisha B’s snicker as he read my weight out loud.



It was in high school where gym class really got bad. Mrs. S. was the high school gym teacher and she was a nightmare. Maybe it was my own 300 pound insecurities but I truly felt her disgust and disdain for those of us who were overweight or otherwise athletically challenged. There were two things I remember most from her gym class. One was gymnastics and the other was swimming.



There was a period of a few weeks that we spent on gymnastics. OK, I was a 5’11” 300 pound girl. How was I supposed to do gymnastics? And I am not talking about your basic “hey, let’s do some somersaults and cartwheels.” We had a springboard and one of those gymnastic horse thingies and Mrs. S. was going to teach us to do tricks. So basically, we had to run as fast as we could at a springboard, jump, and attempt to leap over the horse doing whichever trick Mrs. S. called for. For our “safety”, she would always position one of my tiny 100 pound classmates next to the horse to spot those of us going over it. Yeah, I was 3 times the size of the spotters but they were going to keep me from getting hurt. To this day I have no idea how I did not hurt myself. But I do remember one of my classmates did get badly hurt. One of my friends, D, broke her arm going over the horse. This did not deter Mrs. S. in the least. She did not miss a beat of class to stop and check on her injury, instead she simply yelled at her to go to go to the nurse’s office. Later when D came back to school in a full arm cast I remember thinking, “She’s lucky, that cast will get her out of gym class for weeks.” Yes, I would have rather had a broken arm than participate in gym class.



Gymnastics was bad but my most mortifying high school gym class experience of all time has to be the weeks we spent swimming. I did not go to a fancy school with a pool but Mrs. S got the local rec center to let us use their pool. I can still remember the rock in the pit of my stomach when she announced what we would be doing the following several weeks for class. I was in a panic and immediately began trying to think what I could do to avoid the humiliation of being the only 300 pounder in a bathing suit. Had I not been the academic type and an all around “good girl”, I probably would have just skipped out those periods or faked illness for the entire day.



I tried to talk privately with Mrs. S. to tell her I had my period that week and could not go swimming. She very cruelly responded to me in her loudest, most disdainful voice so that the locker room full of my classmates could hear, “You can use a tampon and go swimming anyway.” I was so humiliated. I wanted to die. I look back and I wonder how a teacher could be so uncompassionate. Only an idiot would not realize that I did not want to swim out of embarrassment for my size. I was just a timid, fat, nerdy kid and she was an adult. She should have treated me with more kindness rather than exacerbating my humiliation. She could have privately talked to me or come up with something I could do in lieu of the swimming. But no, Mrs. S. was a bully and she wasn’t going to miss this chance to inflict humiliation on the fat girl and so I went swimming with my class, boys and girls together, which made it even worse. I remember walking out to the pool in my suit surrounded by classmates. I just sort of put up a mental wall and tried to ignore the pain of my humiliation.



When I graduated high school, I remember very clearly one of the things I was most happy about was that the college I was headed to had no P.E. requirement. I had survived 12 years of weekly torture sessions in the form of gym class and was finally getting a reprieve.



I wish every gym teacher could hear my story and countless others out there that are like it. Who needs a positive physical education experience more than the fat kids? Who more than they need to be encouraged and supported to see that physical activity is something that CAN do and maybe even enjoy. Instead, it seems that too often they are humiliated and traumatized which just reinforces their idea that they can’t do athletic things. It’s very sad to me that these teachers have the opportunity to positively impact the health of their most at-risk students but many choose to belittle instead. Who does that help?