Like more than half the Australian population, Chrissie Swan is overweight. Unlike most of us, she’s not ashamed of it.
Chrissie — who found fame on Big Brother in 2003 and went on to host morning show The Circle before she quit in December 2011 — has never let her size hold her back. Her attitude is inspiring.
“I never bought into that, ‘I am fat, and therefore I am bad’ way of thinking,” she tells the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, out today.
Chrissie started dieting when she was 10 years old and has been on diets her whole life — even as a child, when she didn’t need to be.
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Chrissie believes this set her up for a fractious relationship with food. Yet now, after almost 30 years, Chrissie says she has come to terms with her size and is happy.
It may have caused her unhappiness in the past, but she has never let it hold her back or define her as a person.
“To me, it was always just weight,” she says. “It’s quite popular now, television shows like The Biggest Loser and all that stuff. They weep and say how ashamed they are and they are terrible people [for being overweight]. Why can’t it just be kilos?
“It’s shaming fat people into thinking their heart’s about to explode, their legs are about to be cut off due to diabetes. They’ll never conceive a child, they’ll never get married, they’ll never find love, they’ll never get the job they want.”
Chrissie — who has two sons, Leo, three, and nine-month-old Kit — is especially upset at the messages conveyed to children, that there is something wrong with them and they ought to be ashamed if they are chubby.
“We can’t say fat people are bad, we can’t have them crawl through mud pits on national television and have skinny people yelling at them, saying, ‘How does it feel?’ Because kids see that and they go, ‘Okay, it’s cool to scream abuse and belittle a fat person. I’ll do that next time I see Billy in the playground.’
“The responsibility is on parents to try to set up a healthy relationship with food and exercise, right from the get go.”
In 2010, Chrissie became an ambassador for Jenny Craig, signing up to lose 40kg before trying for a second baby. She lost 20 and fell pregnant easily, but won’t sign up again.
“I actually don’t think the answer is in a pre-packaged microwave meal, but again, you don’t know until you have a crack,” she says.
“For me, the whole time was about stopping the weight gain, which was just going nuts, and learning about eating because when you are overweight, you actually don’t eat that much. I just didn’t eat, I wasn’t eating almost anything.”
Now, Chrissie is a size 22 and happy. She can’t escape wagging tongues — she was photographed without her knowledge at the beach in a swimsuit with her family.
Yet, as she wrote in her Sunday Life column, she refuses to feel ashamed.
“Life as an overweight woman is an exercise in apology,” she wrote. “You always feel like you have to say sorry for your presence. That’s what those sad eyes on the awkward size-18 waitress are saying, ‘Sorry you have to see me.’
“Ordering a full-cream flat white is often met with judgemental eyes, yet people at their ‘goal weight’ do it every day of the week. So I do it, too. I’m not ashamed any more.”
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Weight, she believes, brings its own benefits. “Fat people are different to thin people,” she says.
“When you are overweight, that’s the first thing everybody sees, so you do have to work harder. You have to be good at something else. I’ve had to get to know people quickly and be interested in them, and all that sort of stuff.
“Our personality muscles I think are stronger because of that.”
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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