9781422288450

Ali Schmidt is five-feet, seven-inches tall, athletic, and slim. She’s attractive, popular, and accomplished, and she usually loves going back to school each fall. But last September was different. Ali was not only starting a new school, she was attending as a “fat girl.” As part of an experiment designed to reveal the emotional and psycholog- ical impact of obesity, Ali agreed to spend two days pretending to be some- one she’s not. The experiment turned Ali into a 200-pound “new girl” enter- ing Connecticut’s Stratford High School. (Ali is from the Bronx, New York.) The results of the experiment were recorded for the ABC News special Fat Like Me. At the start of the experiment, Ali was packed in padding called a “fat suit.” Using latex and makeup similar to that used on Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Shallow Hal , special-effects artists completed Ali’s transformation. Her new look was both dramatic and convincing. Ali was literally a thin person trapped in a fat person’s body. And she hated it. “I felt pain that was excruciating,” she lamented after the first day. “Walking down the halls was like walking into hell.” Kids with whom Ali oth- erwise might have made friends—if she hadn’t been in the fat suit—put her down or dismissed her with just one glance. Some were downright rude. “I wanted them to realize that I wasn’t who I appeared to be.” Students laughed behind her back, and others made mean remarks. In either case, Ali was the object of their ridicule after only one day. That hurt. Ali felt singled out and isolated. She had never experienced anything remotely like it in her “thin” life. “They’re just complete jerks to you,” she admitted. “People don’t go, ‘Ha, ha, you’re white,’ or ‘Ha, ha, you’re black,’ but they see a fat person and they think that they have the right to laugh at them.” In just two days, Ali Schmidt developed a new awareness of and sensitiv- ity to the plight of overweight people everywhere. Fortunately for her, she could take off her fat suit at the end of the day. But for her obese peers, ABC News’ experiment is an unrelenting, daily reality that cannot so easily be escaped.

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