Pinch More Than an Inch

The fat-phobic lessons I took away from a Kellogg’s Special K ad when I was twelve taught me to hate my body

It should be illegal to make little, fat girls go through puberty in Florida. All that oppressive humidity. All that wet, boiling heat. The sweltering tropical climate exacerbates the humiliation of a body going publicly haywire. Pores clog with sweat and become a bacterial breeding ground after layers of concealer melt into the skin. There’s no menstrual pad in the world that’s breathable enough to be worn comfortably during P.E. on a 100-degree day after suffering the humiliation of being picked last for kickball. (Ask me how I know.)

In Florida, where I came of age in the 1980s, I yearned to be one of the effortlessly gorgeous girls I worshipped in Seventeen magazine. Paper dolls of perfection, they were always smiling, filled with exultant joy from simply attending high school and participating in all the “normal girl” activities I was being told I should aspire to, like: boy-kissing, cheer-captaining, and prom-going. I read every page of every issue at least eleven times. I carefully studied what pretty girls, who were fortunate enough to look like girls were supposed to look, wore to pep rallies and which brand of pink razor they used to shave their stubbly legs, and what they daydreamed about during algebra. The magazine made it look so easy. I just had to buy all the clothes and makeup they told me to, and then I’d magically become one of them.

One time, I tore a photo of Princess Diana from a spread paying homage to her trademark look and carried it confidently in my Liz Claiborne purse to the salon. I instructed my stylist to cut my coarse, thick, wavy, and very Jewish hair like The People’s Princess’s. She refused.

“I’m sorry, no.” She laughed. “You don’t have the face for that.”

I didn’t understand. I had a face and I wanted Diana’s hair. What was the issue?

I saw her search for the right words.

“Your face”—here she hesitated—“it’s too…round.”

Round hung in the humid air like a hologram bully. It felt like the time five mean girls at a sleepover held me down and chanted light as a feather, stiff as a board, as they cackled because they knew I was too heavy to ever levitate. Round, of course, was code for fat. She wanted me to know there were other styles I would need to wear, because they’d do a better job of hiding the crime of my chunky face.

“Do it anyway,” I said. I wasn’t leaving until I looked like Lady Di.

She shrugged and picked up her shears. I watched as my curls hit the linoleum floor and bounced. When she was done, I understood what she’d meant. My shield I’d used to hide myself from the world was gone. I could no longer drape my hair over my cheeks to hide my hormonal acne, which had been erupting like a jar of Ragu my mother would forget was warming up on the stove, sputtering up the walls. Most horrifyingly of all, I wasn’t a newly crowned princess at the end of the haircut. I was still just myself.

When she finished, I felt dizzy from my mistake. I walked out of the salon, into the mall, afraid of my reflection. I wandered, 12 years old, sweaty and ashamed, into the women’s section of Burdines, even though I wasn’t even officially yet a teenager. I hadn’t fit into children’s clothes for years. My body was all the wrong proportions. I needed an extender to close the back of my B-cup bra. I needed a cobbler to stretch out my penny loafers to fit my wide feet. I was a can of instant biscuits, busting out, my belly rolling over the top of my Pretty Plus pants, forever holding my breath to try and appear smaller.

No one used words like cute, effortless, or petite to describe me. I was chunky, zaftig, and big-boned. This haircut wasn’t the only clue to tell me something was deeply wrong with me, either. I was beginning to see this wasn’t just a cosmetic issue, it was also a medical one.

On an annual visit to my pediatrician, my middle-aged doctor looked me dead in the eye, and warned me, with grave seriousness, “Luissa, you’re too pretty to be fat.”

I had no idea I would have to choose. Apparently, a girl could only be one or the other. I could be pretty or I could be fat. I was at a crossroads. I was going to have to pick a direction. This was as dire as two roads diverging in a yellow wood. Once I made my choice, I’d be stuck with the implications of my decision forever.

My doctor wasn’t the only presence in my life making sure I understood the graveness of my condition. The television, always on in my house, was yet another kaleidoscope of perfection I worshipped. Channel after channel rolled by with its never-ending lineup of soap operas and sitcoms, a parade of tiny waists, itty-bitty feet arched in Barbie-like stilettos, svelte gowns of soft silk and sparkling rhinestones, every woman perfectly sized and perfectly perfect, the object of some man’s affection.

I wanted everything I saw on the screen. I wanted the dazzling sexiness, but I also wanted the Toll House cookies, the crispy Kit Kat bars, the tubes of Pringles I smuggled out of our kitchen cabinets in the middle of the night after my parents were fast asleep. I wanted to feel the occasional hum of pride on those rare days I had enough “self-control” to skip breakfast, or maybe drink it, in the form of a chalky Carnation Instant Breakfast shake. I wanted every product, on every shelf, at Eckerd Drugs. Clearasil, Seabreeze, and Noxzema, all tubs of mentholated chemicals I hoped might finally erase my face. I knew there had to be some product out there that could help me with what I was coming to understand was my biggest problem: the one of being myself. I just hadn’t found it yet.

Then, one totally normal afternoon, the solution finally found me.

I was alone. My mother was having a cigarette on the couch in the next room; a smooth tail of smoke snaked up into my nose. On the TV was a close-up of a woman’s abdomen. She had no head and no feet. She was just a stomach, wearing a white leotard. I had a white leotard too, but I’d recently learned I probably shouldn’t. I’d been taking acting classes at the local modeling school and was cast in the holiday show as a faerie who grants children wishes. I wore a pair of iridescent wings on my back, white tights, and a spandex one-piece that revealed every divot and extra curve of my growing body. I felt spectacular, like a star, until the kids in the audience snickered when I came out on stage. I didn’t understand. What was so funny about me?

Recently, I found a photo from the show in an old box and saw the issue, 40 years later. Bless the premature cellulite dimples in my thighs, my broad back, the way I towered over the other kids like a chunky spinster giantess. I’d thought I was ephemeral, light as air and floating, but I wasn’t. l was young and I hadn’t fully internalized my predicament. The body rules for women had already been implanted deep into those other kids’ brains, but not mine. When I stood confidently on stage, I had no idea I was breaking all of them so flagrantly.

In the commercial was a headless woman, the bottom curve of her breasts just barely in the frame. Then, a voice-over. A man, of course.

“Have you tried the Special K pinch?” he asked me, and everyone else across America in front of their television sets that afternoon.

No, I hadn’t. I didn’t even know what he was talking about, but I was curious.

The kind man went on, matter-of-factly.

“Pinch more than an inch and you need Kellogg’s Special K Cereal.”

It seemed so simple. If I had extra fat, then I needed this cereal. At that point, I was still just a little girl. I didn’t know how ads worked, or that one day, I’d grow up and make commercials just like this one, designed to make women worry about a problem they didn’t know they were suffering from, until an ad told them they did. Now, here was this amazing solution to this problem I was just beginning to understand I had, and it was just down the street, waiting for me to buy it off a shelf at the grocery store. In that moment, Special K wasn’t just processed corn, dried into flakes. This was sentient corn. A conscious flake. This flake had thoughts and opinions. This corn flake had been spun into skinny-making sorcery and apparently, I needed to eat a shit ton of it immediately.

I found myself grateful for the man’s suggestion. I hadn’t been aware there was a math problem out there, floating around to help me know if my body was good enough to be deserving of love. What a relief! The perfect headless model pulled at her sides. She had pinched, it looked like, about an inch and a half off her stomach. According to the ad, this meant she was committing a serious crime, punishable by Kellogg’s law. I was certain I had more fat on my body than she did, but I’d never measured myself before. I didn’t know I was supposed to.

I lifted my snug t-shirt. I was wearing red polyester shorts with white piping up the sides. My flesh had only been on earth for twelve short years and I already knew it was a mistake.

I held my breath and thought, “Maybe if I don’t breathe it will make my fat…smaller?”

I went over to my book bag and pulled out a ruler. I returned to the couch in front of the TV. Then, I jammed the hard, yellow plastic into the deep crease in my side. The raised numbers scratched my skin. There it was. Three inches of extra flesh, followed by an overwhelming sense of devastation.

I wondered to myself, “Aren’t there organs in there? Are my organs part of the equation?”

No, my organs were not part of the equation because organs don’t count. What counts is looking good in a bathing suit so a faceless man approves your body. This was just science and now, it was official. I’d taken the Special K Challenge, and I’d lost.

Later that night, I asked my mother to buy me a box of the cereal the next time she went to the store. I didn’t tell her why and she didn’t ask.

“Sure,” she said, half-listening. “I think I have a coupon.”

That night, as I got ready for bed, I saw my very bad body in the mirror, along with two purple bruises that had formed on each of my sides from where I’d jammed the ruler.

After that, I worked hard to blur my bodily failures. I tried to be smarter, funnier, quicker, more biting. I thought that if I couldn’t have an acceptable body, maybe I could have an acceptable mind. Secretly, though, every time I ate a bowl of that skinny-making cereal, I prayed it would do what the ad promised it would do: shrink me into an inch of a woman, a woman who was good, who was small, who had passed the test.

Lu Chekowsky (she/they) is an Emmy Award–winning writer, creative director and author of Don't Buy What I'm Selling: On Breaking up With Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self (Little, Brown 2026). She was most recently lead creative director for video at Facebook. Previously, they were the SVP of brand creative at Comedy Central, and VP, creative director at MTV. Before working in entertainment, Lu was a creative director and copywriter at Wieden+Kennedy. Lu is a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in nonfiction literature, and their writing has been supported by MASS MoCA, the Vermont Studio Center, Craigardan, and Tin House. Her essays and poetry have been published in The Rumpus, Pigeon Pages, and Autofocus, and her pieces about the cultural impacts of advertising have appeared in Ad Age and Muse by Clios. Lu lives in the Hudson Valley.