I AM ENOUGH
 Five adults share their stories of living with obesity in the UK.
 Photography and text by Abbie Trayler-Smith
I Am Enough explores the ups and downs faced by adults living with obesity in the UK. All have faced adversity of some sort. There’s Susie, who relaxes by open swimming; Sarah, who works for the charity Obesity UK and is keen to change the language we use to describe ‘fat’ people; and Wynford, whose anger at the rudeness directed towards his body by others is palpable.

“I love swimming, it’s the time when I feel most free. Once you’re in the water you feel like you’re hidden. The hardest bit is walking from the changing room to the swimming pool, but once that is over you can just grin and hold your breath. I feel light in the water.”
– Susie
Susie, 44, Dublin, Ireland.

Susie lives in Ireland and works part time as a swim teacher. She is a powerful voice at obesity conferences and events around the world. She has been through a lot: while disordered eating plagued her childhood, it was only in her late teens that she began piling on the weight that led to her aged 35, with blindness around the corner, begging her doctor for gastric-bypass surgery. She lost around eight stone and since then has regained a few stone.

“Obesity is something that is in my mind every single day. I wish I could go a single day without stressing about food or about making right choices, but that’s never going to happen. I will live with obesity for life.”
– Susie

“The big body wasn't the problem. The big body was a problem for everybody else and that's what the problem was. Before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I was what was termed ‘fit obese’. The problem was society because you're judged and stared and every day was a battle of some days you didn't want to go outside the door because just couldn't cope with that day emotionally. You just couldn't face it. It was mentally torture.”
– Susie

“That was a regular one: “You can't go out in that it makes you look fat. They don't know the hurt. Your family love and care for you. They want the best for you but they can be the worst. They really can be the worst. ”
– Susie

“Calling obesity a disease, and treating it as one, are very different things. Policymakers, government, healthcare professionals and anybody who can effect change, need to understand that patients with clinical and morbid obesity have the right to the same care as other chronic diseases.”
– Susie

[Read more quotes...]
Wynford, 58, Dorset, UK

After working in advertising in London for many years, Wynford is now caring for his mother full time.

Wynford is a bright and hardworking man. At 58, he has had a few careers, spending much of his life in London working in the advertising industry; he is now a carer for his mother in rural Dorset. He stands out from the crowd with his poise, his stylish dress sense and outgoing personality. I met him about 20 years ago and knew him as a confident fun character on the London scene, but it was only when I saw a rant on Facebook recently that I realised we have so much in common. I found his honesty very moving and could relate to his frustration.

“I’d like to be thin to see how different it is. Would I be happier? I’m not sure.”
– Wynford

“People often pat your stomach and go, “Oh, I see you keep the squash routine up there.” It is rude. There’s a rudeness about it whereas if I had a withered arm or Parkinson’s they wouldn’t hold on to me and stop the shaking; it’s the same with obesity.”
– Wynford

“I started using smaller and smaller plates which is one of the suggestions you get and then you portion and looking at the portion sizes fit is the amount of stuff you should have. I've constantly gone back to the doctor and got all the stuff which is a fat blocking pill and it's the only thing on the market that does anything for you.”
– Wynford

“I've dreamt about having liposuction one file swoop getting like two stones off, but apparently that's not the way to do it. I spoke to the doctor briefly about bariatric surgery and they nearly had a fit because they don't want to do it. It's the same way when I go to get mental health advice, they never refer me to anywhere else because there's no one available and I just have to get through it on my own.”
– Wynford

[Read more quotes...]

Spoon, 39, London, UK.

Spoon is an author, actor, voice-over artist and accomplished singer-songwriter with a UK number-one hit single to his name.

Spoonface has a quiet, relaxed confidence about him; it oozes out of him. Having always been a big kid, he found a way to make peace with himself early in life, with martial arts in his teens, finding that using the mindset of making yourself the best you could be worked well in all aspects of life. He has gone from success to success in the music industry and through acting and is now a brown belt in ju-jitsu and coaches people at an academy in north London. He has never allowed his weight or his size to hold him back in life and walks with his head held high and a big smile on his face.

“I learned to use food as a support mechanism. My parents would often argue; looking back now, food was very much my way of coping.”
– Elroy Spoon

“I feel like people have this focus on losing weight as if that’s going to change everything. They forget to look at what else is happening inside a person. How you feel about yourself and about your world around you. And everything else falls into place. I do this exercise - martial arts. This isn't something I do because I’m trying to be trying to lose weight, it is because I want to be healthy. I think it’s just that little adjustment of the mindset can make a difference.”
– Elroy Spoon

“I think with weight, a lot of it is figuring out what's going on with you internally, your mental health is really important. You know, why are you really eating that doughnut and you're not hungry?”
– Elroy Spoon

[Read more quotes...]

Abigail, 29, London, UK

Abigail calls west London home and works as an actress. As a teenager, she competed as a heptathlete, with her main event being the shot-put.

Abigail is a relaxed and warm person with an infectious laugh and a smile to light up a room. She stands tall and people are drawn to her. As a teenager she was a competing athlete representing the UK in heptathlon. She was always tall, even as a child, but didn’t start gaining weight until she went to university, when she began training less and using food as a comfort. Abigail works in the entertainment industry and holds herself very well. On the outside, her weight doesn’t appear to affect her too much, but dig a little deeper and the effects are there.

“I feel like I’ve got to a point where I recognise that being this size has affected my career. I got cast in the show to be a nurse actually. I was very happy about it, as you would be. I got called a few days before the shoot and was told that I was getting dropped. I asked why and they said it was because we realised that the nurses’ uniforms won’t fit you. I was absolutely devastated and shocked.”
– Abigail

“There are normal people out there. And I feel that TV doesn't represent that sometimes. And that's very frustrating. I like that to change. I don't want to feel like I'm forced to lose half my weight in order to get a TV role, or a film role or stage role.”
– Susie

“I find sometimes people almost want me to be even more conscious about my size. And I'm like, Hello, I'm living this body. I'm conscious enough, but they want me to be more worried. Aren't you worried about diabetes? I'm like, No, No, I'm not. I'm not gonna walk around with a bag of worries because I'm a bit larger than the average person. Yes, I'm big. I hope to lose weight. But whilst I'm in it, I'm not going to be depressed.”
– Susie

“One thing I would like to tell people about being big or living with size is, we're allowed to be sad about our weight. And just get upset. The reason I say that is because sometimes when I've complained to my friends or I had a really bad day. They say, “Oh, lose weight then”. And it's not that easy.”
– Susie

[Read more quotes...]

Sarah, 37, Yorkshire, UK.

Sarah lives with her partner and baby daughter in the Yorkshire countryside. She has a full-time job as an account manager for a pharmaceutical company and is a powerful obesity advocate through her work as a director of charity Obesity UK.

Sarah is an extremely bright and impressive woman. Smart and extremely well informed, she uses her own journey of living with obesity as the motivation for her work.

“I think if I had felt better about myself when I was a teenager, then I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. My mum, through love, used to tell me I couldn’t wear certain things.”
– Sarah

“I don’t like the word “fat”. I think it’s a word that’s used as a kind of bullying or to be said in a nasty way. It’s not really a very pleasant word whereas to me, the word “obesity” is a description from a medical perspective. There aren’t really any descriptive words that aren’t pejorative. I’m passionate about changing that language.”
– Sarah

“I’m so passionate about my daughter, Emily. I don’t want her to ever have an issue with the way she looks, or for her to think that she’s not ok the way she is.”
– Sarah

“I find Healthcare professionals quite frustrating. In the area where I live in North Yorkshire, there are no weight management services, so over the years when I have been in my modes of desperation where I have just wanted someone to help me I’ve gone to my GP and said please, what can you do, and there have been times when they’ve said, I can’t do anything. I was hoping for some kind of psychological support or are there any programmes they could have sent me on or to find out if there were any drugs available, just anything to help me. Psychological support is important for people living with obesity because there's always a why to some extent, and I think understanding what that why is can be helpful in then working out how you’re going to manage that moving forward.”
– Sarah

“I genuinely believe that in 10 / 20 years time we will look back at the way we have treated people living with obesity and be absolutely horrified. It wasn’t that long ago we thought the world was flat and now we know its not and I just think, I hope, that society will understand there’s a huge complexity with obesity and its not as simple eat less and move more and that whole narrative changes and that we suddenly realise that we’ve been treating people horrendously and that we need to have a bit more empathy and understanding and support people living with obesity and not point the finger like we do now.”
– Sarah

[Read more quotes...]
This series was commissioned by global healthcare company Novo Nordisk, after seeing a portrait of my long-standing muse Shannon on the front cover of Huck magazine..

Share on
Photography Abbie Trayler-Smith
Home
Contact
Credits
Follow