A fat person talking about fitness is like a nun giving sex advice.

I do look like the kind of person who, as TV or movies might have it, does not exercise, has never been to a gym, and does not, as they say, “take care of themselves.” For a long time, I bought into that story, wholeheartedly, accepting what it said as the truth about me. Until I realized that fatness—that the way I felt about fatness—was something totally different.

I used to throw up after gym class. I once turned blue and had some sort of seizure. Not that any of the teachers cared, because obviously I was a fat kid and so the solution was more exercise.

I have this slight suspicion that they looked at exercise in general and my migraines in particular as a form of appropriate punishment for the sin of being fat. The day they told us gym class was no longer compulsory was one of the top 10 happiest days of my life, a golden and glorious day of liquid sunshine and joy. I ended my time at school convinced that exercise was an elaborate form of torture.