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Michele Fitoussi
www.michelefitoussi.com mfitmag.blogspot.com
Obesity : A global risk by Nadia Ayadi >
I met Sophie Reverdi coincidentally, in Tunisia, in October 2007. But is there really such thing as coincidence in life? Personally, I do not believe in it. At least, sincerely, I don’t think that people come close to each other due to mere chance. Before even speaking to each other, we know, we smell that there exist hidden connections which time will reveal. With her big blue eyes, brighter than the doors of the houses of Sidi Bou Saïd where she had settled down with her two boys, Sophie attracts you. Immediately, you feel you really want to speak to her. She is a journalist and she claims an interview, that’s good luck! I came to enliven a symposium, a meeting between French and Tunisian women, important active women.
We fixed a rendez-vous for the following day. She leaves in a pretty home which overhangs the village and the sea. We had mint Tea and honey pastries according to the tradition of this beautiful country. Fed, I, the interviewee, go back to my cute sin: to ask questions. Sophie told me shortly her career, her visit to Tunisia, her struggle as an ex-obese. I did not believe my eyes. What? This nice girl was obese? “Yes”, Sophie replied with pride, “but I’ve made it, I’m slim now.”
When leaving, she handed me their Carnet de Route: Logbook. That night I devouredit; it really seemed so to me. Reading this small book, I learnt more about the torments of obesity than I could find in any novel or treaty. How it begins since early childhood, the raids on the fridge, the obsession with the idea of the mouth always full of food, the taut belly risking to crack, the food swallowed endlessly, without being hungry, only to fill, to destroy oneself, the mind focused on asingle thought, dedicated to a single task, to swallow, to ingest, to gorge, to gnaw, to snack, to chew, to devour, to pig out, to want to die once the orgy is over. To digest this despair and start again the hunt, stalking food like a wild beast. Whatever:
soft, solid, sweet, salty. A lot, a surplus, enormous quantities. Enormous is what she is, this girl who do not live like others, those who are her age. At the age of 16, 17, they laugh, they dance, they run, and they love.
However she, she eats.
She is ashamed.
She hides.
She persists.
She is not conscious that something is going wrong with her.
People despise her. As though it was enough to say “when there is a will there is a way.” As though this deformity of the body in a society modeled for thin persons, or even the very thin (another version of this strange suffering…), must not be tolerated.
Outside obese! Come on out! Eat as much as you want. Deform your bodies as you like. But do not show yourselves. Hide this fat so that we don’t see it. You are too obscene with our surplus of flesh, your skin which trickles down, these folds and these jowls, and your cumbersome walk. You resemble elephants. Get out of sight! Reading this sincere testimonial, both raw and true words which are far from complacent, will tear your soul.
That night, I had tears in my eyes several times. And then one day Sophie said “Stop! I want to live.” She got rid of her obesity. Because she is a good soul, she decided to help those who have neither her strength nor her courage.
She invented this method: Smart and Light. Gone. Swept. Terrible souvenirs. Never come back. One must read these testimonies and believe her. Sophie knows what the gazes of others mean. She also knows the price of the precious regained freedom. She is an angel. (And there, in Paradise, everyone goes on a diet… yet now it is so joyful, that one almost becomes a sinner …). 