I Once Thought Fatness Would Ruin My Life. Having a Daughter of My Own Changed That

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In my family, fat was never an adjective; it was a verb. It was a crime that women actively and maliciously committed against the male gaze. All of their accomplishments, personality traits, or even actual crimes would come second to their appearance.

So when I competed as the plus-size contestant on Cycle 9 of America’s Next Top Model, no one in my family knew how to react. On the one hand, I was being celebrated for the highest accomplishment a woman could hope for: being attractive. On the other, it was as… a plus-size contestant.

“You look… pretty thin, don’t you?” my dad said when I came home. I was pretty thin. But I’d just returned from filming a show where esteemed judges had debated my weight so heavily that my body dysmorphia was a raging demon controlling every thought.

“When they called you plus-size, I wanted to sock them,” my dad said.

“When they called you plus-size, that really messed me up,” echoed my mom. “You’re not plus-size.”

I heard that a lot, but I never knew how to respond. Intellectually, I knew it shouldn’t be a compliment—that plus-size wasn’t a bad thing. But my stupid heart still desperately wanted to punish myself into being as small as possible.

My father has three brothers, and if they and my grandfather were discussing a woman, her looks were at the forefront of the conversation, no matter what. I saw the greatest and the worst minds of their generations—Jane Goodall, Ingrid Bergman, Serena Williams, Margaret Thatcher—all subjected to the great equalizer that was whether my grandfather found them attractive. His was the standard that ruled those conversations and, as a result, my internal monologue.

I wasn’t the only one in my family affected by this obsession with thinness. My grandmother stayed slim for most of her life, until she developed a rapidly advancing case of dementia. Suddenly, her caretakers had to hide food from her because, left unsupervised, she would eat until she made herself sick.

“Do you want a cookie, Sally?” I asked her at lunch one day. She looked at me with the face of a child.

“Sarah, I always want a cookie. I didn’t eat any cookies for so long.” We each ate two, giggling more like sisters than grandmother and granddaughter.

“I think Sally was on a diet her whole life,” I told my mom later. “I… don’t want that to be me. I have to stop.”

Eleven short years later, I did stop. During the COVID-19 quarantine, after decades of disordered eating, extreme dieting, and agonizing over every single bite, I started eating intuitively and, as a result, after years of being a plus-size model, I became a plus-sized person. I tried to be positive about it, putting a brave face on social media, but it was terrifying. A part of me still felt I’d committed the ultimate crime: I believed—without actually wanting to—that being overweight was not only a physical failure, but a moral one as well.

Of course, I’d been trying to unlearn that idea. I listened to Lizzo! I followed fat activists! But all my efforts to be body-positive had eventually hit the same wall: If I tried harder, if I was a better person, then I would be thin.

Now, whenever I heard someone say, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams,” I thought, I am my ancestors’ nightmare. Then I’d chide myself for thinking that way and inevitably end up in a shame spiral, feeling bad about feeling bad.

“I want to love my body,” I told my therapist. “But it’s not like it’s done anything special.”

And then, it did something extraordinary: it built the most perfect, beautiful angel baby—and with her, the start of a whole new generation.

Slowly, the shame started to fall away. And not only that, but I started to see how ridiculous it was that I’d needed my body to do something “extraordinary” for me to appreciate it. After all, my body didn’t just carry my child—it carried me. For years, it held me and kept me safe even as I hated and mistreated it, hurling vitriol at it like an angry teenager. I was worse to my own body than I was to my enemies, and still it held me. Two years later, even when I can’t bring myself to love it, I am grateful for it.

I no longer want to be thin to please past generations. I want to be happy and healthy for future ones. It’s time to be brave and let the knowledge that overweight people actually live longer sink into the places where my fatphobic, outdated beliefs used to live.

As I started to consider the attitudes I wanted to pass on to my new daughter, I mourned those years of self-loathing. I would weep if my daughter thought about herself the way I had. After all, if her body was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, surely mine—the one that grew it for 10 months—couldn’t be so bad.

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model

Sarah Hartshorne’s new book, You Wanna Be on Top?, is out now.