WEIGHT, don't say it

HOW CAN A COMPLIMENT ABOUT WEIGHT TURN TOXIC? WHEN IT CONVEYS A MESSAGE THAT BEING SKINNY IS THE WAY TO GO. THE BOTTOM LINE? APPROACH WITH SENSITIVITY, OR NOT AT ALL

- CHELSEA TANG

As early on as the first hint of puberty (when girls graduate from singlets to training bras), Vivien Yap had losing weight as a top-of-mind concern. The idea that she was bigger than other girls, and therefore needed to look small, was drummed into her during her prepubescence, and has continued to haunt her for close to two decades on.

It didn’t help that her mother was a firm believer that being smaller is better. At eight, Yap was taught to constantly trace the contours of her clavicle, in the hopes of getting defined collarbones, otherwise known as “the mark of looking good”. Soon, those quiet whispers of weight loss turned into louder ones — at 10 years old, she was told to get on a juice cleanse, way before juice cleanses became popular as a diet fad.

“I couldn’t bear to starve myself with the cleanse because it meant no food,” she says. “It got to a point when those weight loss methods didn’t work, I’d look into the mirror and wonder, who’d want a person who looks like me?”

Most of the time, Yap, a local singer-songwriter, yearned to have the build of girls with slight frames, the ones who fit into size zero to six. “I hated my body with a vengeance. I hated my size, hated my tummy, hated my hips, my thighs, I hated everything,” she says. A large part of her childhood, and even now, is built upon people thinking they have the right to comment on her weight, she recounts. “Imagine the first thing that distant relatives say to you at gatherings is, ‘You’re so fat’,” Yap adds, noting how these are the people who’ve watched her grow from a child to a young woman. “They feel the need to tell me this, as if their comments will shake me into losing weight.”