To Be Fat like Me

Plot

Pretty, popular and athletic Aly has been banking on a softball scholarship as her ticket to college. She has an active life and never seems to sit still. When she injures her knee, she realizes that she will have to fund her education in other ways. She resents her mother because a few years ago, her mother became ill as a consequence of binge eating and used the money from her daughter's college fund in order to pay her hospital bill. Aly is overly critical of her family's high-fat diet. She even refuses to eat a cake that her mother purchased for her.

Aly enters a documentary film contest in hopes of using the prize money in order to fund her further education. Convinced that her overweight younger brother and mother use their struggles with weight as an excuse for everything wrong in their lives, Aly decides to take a summer course wearing a fat suit and hidden camera to prove personality can outshine physical appearance. Aly soon realizes how difficult the life can be for the overweight, as she is shunned by other students, despite her resolve to be kind and maintain the same personality she always had. She meets Ramona, an overweight girl in the same class who shares aspects of her personal life with Aly but feels betrayed when Aly uses this material in her documentary. Aly titles her documentary Fat Like Me, a reference to John Howard Griffin's 1961 book Black Like Me, which recounts Griffin's experience living as an African-American in the segregated Southern United States for several weeks after receiving skin-darkening injections.

Cast