By Ruku Taneja
I don’t understand my parents. Actually, scratch that. I don’t understand any parents, and my extended Punjabi family. They’ve always wanted me to be that size zero Kareena Kapoor, even when I was in class 5, but they fed me like Sunny Deol on steroids. So, can I really win at life? I feel like I was set up for fitness failure. Perhaps, I am not alone. You, my friend, you may have been too.
Philip Larkin wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you…”
In my case the “extra” was the whole lot extra they fed me. That wasn’t all, though. Let’s analyse this unintentional parental fuck-up.
My definition of “good food” was butter chicken, and sometimes still is. Is this the case with you too, dear? Do you reach for the menu at a bar and automatically choose chilli paneer with your Blenders Pride? If yes, then welcome to the desi fat club. Yes, mum and dad, I wish you hadn’t encouraged our “who can eat the most food” battle royales at home. Maybe, just maybe, you should have focused on the nutritional value of what I was eating when I was 6, 8 and 13. Aunty Saroj, you are not innocent either. You knew that I didn’t look “weak” but you still made me eat all those aloo parathas.
By the time I’d stopped looking at you guys for life lessons and aloo parathas, what was available from social cues was my peers at Modern School Vasant Vihar who loved their Peppy chips and pizza. Credible? No. Delicious? Yes. The internet was secondary and awesome too, but making your own green smoothies just didn’t give you the same foodgasm at 13 that my taste buds were now accustomed to. Imagine boning Ryan Gosling and then having to switch to solo finger fun. It just doesn’t feel the same.
Most of the time I just wanted to eat what I’d grown up eating, mirroring your food preferences, dear parents. But that would mean staying the fat girl you did not want but had made.
Fine, I am not going to 100 percent hate on you for your upbringing because you were busy making money, sorting out your own inner demons and all that other adulting.
But here is where I am stuck. Why do you hate on me? Why are you now obsessed with how fat I am and how “no one wants to marry a fat girl?”.
You know that fat-shaming isn’t going to make me go, “oh yeah, girl. Take that fat ass to the gym now because you are officially the motu of the family,” right? In fact, it has the opposite effect. A UCLA study has found that girls who are picked on about their weight at a young age are more likely to be obese later in life. So science ki taraf se and meri taraf se, bravo. Aap bhi kamal karte ho.
That study is like a Game of Thrones prophecy, “being labelled as fat is creating an additional likelihood of being obese.”
So what now? I don’t think there is a magic potion to go back in time and set up healthy eating habits but it’s never too late to stop being a d*ckhead. Why don’t we stop pressurising our girls to lose weight for their weddings? Or compare them to Nitu aunty’s kudi from Canada? Because Nitu aunty didn’t force-feed your daughter lassi. Nitu aunty’s kudi was probably eating salad and playing ice-hockey.
And when you start on my eating habits, I just want to skate away too, mummy.