Fat Positivity - Blog Posts
I’m that fat girl 💋💕
every time a fat girl wears a shirt that shows her belly an angel gets their wings reblog if you agree
I can't believe I've never shared this story with the Internet before. It's how something some random person I don't know and have never met will live in me forever.
It was sometime in the late 90's or early aughts. I was in my early adolescence, so between 11 and 14. I used to regularly read the PennySaver cover to cover. Why? For me, it was one of the few scattered little windows into what everyday life was like for non-famous people outside of my niche world. I also was a fast and voracious reader, but never had enough to read, especially not periodicals.
If you don't know what the Pennysaver is, it was analog Craigslist: That cheaply-printed newsprint booklet that no one subscribed to arrived in everyone's mailbox once a week. Certain ad types cost money to run, plus it ran ads. It was a more family-friendly weekly than, say, your LA Weeklies or, further up the West Coast, The Strangers. Also minus the journalism, I suppose, but there were gay people in it!
Anyway, one week, I'd read something in the PennySaver that started the slow process of catalyzing a change in my life for the better. It wasn't a wanted ad for something I had that turned out to be worth a lot of money. It wasn't a job listing that started my career. It wasn't even for a garage sale that had an item that ended up being important to me.
It was a w4m personal ad. As continues to be the case, those were much rarer than m4[literally anything]. The first sentence was "Thin may be in, but fat's where it's at!"
It was the first time I'd ever seen someone call themself fat in a way that wasn't at all negative, apologetic, or angry. This lady was saying hey, I'm fat! And I think it's a selling point even if the overall culture says it isn't!
I don't recall anything else about the ad other than that it was a woman seeking a man, and that the rest of it was unremarkable. It took a lot of other things to get me to a point of real, lasting comfort with my fatness, of course. But that little quip is stuck in my head for the rest of my life.
Thank you, random lady. I hope you're still alive, kicking, and happy. I hope you found as much love and/or miles of d1ck as you wanted, whether through the ad or by other means.
"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.
The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."
A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.
Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.
And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.
encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.
This year we're not doing weight loss resolutions. No new fad diets or miracle workout programs, no magic pills, and definitely no bariatric surgeries. This year we're listening to our bodies, and more importantly we're loving our bodies. We do not need to be smaller to be worthy of that.
it's okay to be fat and like to eat. it's okay to be fat and enjoy cooking, baking, grilling, canning, drying or preparing foods. it's okay to be fat and work a restaurant or bakery and enjoy what you do. it's okay to be fat and not ashamed of eating in public. it's okay to be fat, but it's especially okay to be fat and have a positive relationship with food. people are supposed to enjoy eating, it's where we get our energy from, it's a very positive and nourishing experience for our bodies, it's okay if it's positive and nourishing to your mental health, too. fat people are allowed to eat, and we're allowed to enjoy doing it, too.