What does it feel like to be called “grotesque”? Campbell Sociology professor Karen Smith lost 225 pounds and is now in a thin body, but she is still haunted by the “fat woman in her head” and the cruelty of people who shunned her when she was overweight.Meeting in a restaurant to talk about the book she is writing, Smith, who once weighed 382 pounds, is adamant about sticking to her diet. She orders a grilled turkey patty, green beans without sauce and produces an apple from her purse for dessert. She explains that her book, “Thin Skin: Facing the World in a Normal-Size Body,” is not a self-help guide on how to lose weight, but a journey into the social psychology of weight loss.”This book isn’t about dieting,” Smith writes. “I will tell you this: for more than 40 years, I didn’t have the skills to live with myself in thin skin. I am in that skin now. In this book I invite you to burrow around with me, to get under my skin, to see the world from the viewpoint of a traveler in two worlds: one who has been morbidly obese and who is now at a healthy weight.” As an obese child, Smith remembers being called names, not getting picked for teams or asked to dance at school dances.”The not-so-pretty-or-popular girls huddled together in little groups for moral support on one wall, their male counterparts on the opposite side of the gym,” she writes. “Miserable, miserable, miserable time. The only thing worse was to be there alone, with no group to huddle with.”Many people fail at dieting because they are psychologically unable to “bridge the gap” between being fat and being thin, she argues.”The obese are stigmatized in our culture; people don’t want to see them. Like shadows, they are ignored, stepped upon or feared,” she writes. “And on a psychological level, living in the Shadow Dimension is like joining the Mafia: once you’ve joined, you’re in for life.”With the help of a support group, Smith lost weight. Yet as hard as she struggled to adjust to obesity, she also found it hard adjusting to being thin. “I still have a shadow, and when I hear people say those things about overweight people, I still feel that pain because I’m hearing that and I go, ‘Oh wait a minute, this was me,'” she said.Still, there are moments in “Thin Skin” that both shock and delight Smith, like the first time she realized someone was flirting with her. “I was in an electronics store and a young salesman kept trying to talk to me,” she said. “I just thought he was acting weird. When I asked my husband about it, he said the guy was probably flirting with me. That’s totally far-fetched. I look in the mirror and still don’t know what to think.” No matter how thin she gets, however, Smith said she will never get over being fat.”I think the shadow will always be there. Now that I’m here in the world of the thin, people behave differently toward me and expect different things of me than they did when I was obese,” she writes. “Thin-Land has not been the fix-of-all-my-problems that I expected.”Smith’s book has already received positive feedback from two North Carolina publishers, who urged her to find an agent and market the book nationally. On the basis of an essay titled “The Jewelry Box,” she received a Regional Artist Project grant in the amount of $900 from the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. She will use the money to participate in a writing workshop in Vermont this summer.Smith has served as an adjunct professor at Campbell University since 1995 and is currently teaching at the Fort Liberty campus and in Campbell’s Distance Education program. A gerontologist, Smith was recently appointed to the Advisory Board of the African American Alzheimer’s Alliance. The regional organization is dedicated to providing education, advocacy and assistance to African Americans in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease and aging in general.For more information on Smith’s weight loss, contact her at [email protected]/* */Photo: Before and after, Campbell professor Karen Smith at 382 pounds and at her current weight. She lost a total of 225 pounds.
Before and after: Smith writes about the social psychology of weight loss