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We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
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[TW: internalized fat shaming, weight loss, self/body hate]
I wrote this last night after reading through the first 10 pages of your tumblr. I don’t know why I felt like I should share this with you, but I wanted to.
I have lost a significant amount of weight fairly recently (about 40 lbs from my heaviest) and it wasn’t until I did that my body image issues fully came to light. I think the reason they never came up much before was that when you’re fat, there is a certain expectation and acceptance that “of course you don’t like your body, you’re fat!” so a little self-hate, those self deprecating remarks are shrugged off as normal, or at least expected. Once you lose weight, though, the expectation is that you will then be happy with your body. Those jokes about “Do I look like I don’t like donuts?!” become more awkward and less hilarious. Of course you don’t magically change the way you think as the number on the scale changes, and only now are people even catching a glimpse of the full depth of my body hate. For many years I hated just about everything about how I looked. My internal monologue was a vicious litany of insults about everything from my struggles with acne (who still has acne in their 20’s?! It’s ridiculous and you look stupid!), to my thighs (ugh! So huuuuge!!), to my calves (look at those man-calves!!). I even filled in what other people were thinking when they saw me eating or buying food in public, so that eating or buying anything “unhealthy” was an exercise in shame: obviously everyone else was thinking “Well, that’s why she’s fat!” or “Clearly she doesn’t need to eat that, the pig!” or something along those lines. Every time I passed a mirror, I immediately leapt to criticisms and thoughts of how I could be “kind of pretty”, if only I weren’t so fat. Even wearing makeup felt like an exercise in futility, because what was the point in making my face more attractive when the rest of me was so ugly? Everything I wore was designed to make me look smaller or hide some aspect of my body, to give the illusion of being thinner, and therefore prettier.
Here’s the thing: those thoughts make getting healthy nearly impossible. Shame does not motivate, it defeats. Self-loathing does not inspire one to go to the gym or eat healthy foods in moderation. No, they come together to beat you before you ever get started. They make you afraid to go to the gym because obviously everyone else there is looking at you (the fat one) wondering what you’re doing there while they laugh at your pitiful attempts. They combine to create habits that are both punishment and comfort. My choice punishment/comfort was to eat various unhealthy foods like candy, cookie dough, or fast food. It was comforting because it was delicious and pleasing, but a punishment, because it fueled even more internal insults and mental lashings. Basically, I was on the cusp of an eating disorder: I had the thinking down, but wasn’t quite practicing the habits of one.
One day, I got tired of this. I got tired of hating myself, tired of wanting to be a pretty girl, and I decided to fix it…from the outside in. Clearly, if I could lose weight, I would be happy with myself. If I could just get to where I didn’t need to shop in the Plus/Women’s/FAT section, I would like the way I looked and be happy! Well, I started going to the gym and eating better, and I did lose weight. When I was around a size 16 (down from nearly a 22), I met and started dating someone. As we got closer, he became privy to (some of) my internal monologue, and brought it to my attention that it was rather unhealthy and unhelpful, perhaps even more than I realized. Our romantic relationship did not last, but our friendship has, and I am forever grateful for that. He helped me think less critically about my body and myself, which was an enormous step in the right direction. I still wasn’t happy with my appearance, but I was less focused on outright hatred ofmy body.
As I lost more weight (getting down to a size 12), it was obvious that mentally, I still had a long way to go. I still wasn’t happy. I was still fat, just not as fat. I still had to lose another 30lbs, because then I’d be really hot. Friends and family caught glimpses of, and expressed concern about my thinking at this point. It became apparent to them that even as I outwardly celebrated my weight loss success, I was not happy with the results. Compliments were accepted, but shrugged off as I told of plans to lose even more weight, because I still had a lot of work to do. Lucky for me, I had some good friends who helped me see that those thoughts, while less obviously toxic than the insults I used to wield against myself, were just as damaging. They were still showing a fixation on what was “wrong” with my body, what I didn’t like, what needed changing to be more attractive and acceptable. There were precious few thoughts of how good I looked or how much healthier I was.
At some point, after much reading, listening, and talking, it dawned on me that I couldn’t diet my way to liking how I looked: if I couldn’t accept my appearance at my current size and weight, whatever it was, I wouldn’t be happy at any size or weight…and that frightened me. I didn’t want to forever be struggling to lose more weight and maintain that weight loss, I wanted to be happy with my body. I wanted to like what I saw in the mirror, and that meant changing how I thought about it, rather than changing my body.
I would love to say that moment was a magical epiphany and I’ve been happy with my body ever since then, but that would be an enormous lie. I am indeed much more pleased with and accepting of my body than I have been at any other point in my life, but I still sometimes fall into my old thoughts. It happens less often and less severely as time goes on, but I don’t know that I’ll ever fully be rid of them. I was in that mental rut for the better part of 27 years, so it’s a tough one to fully escape. As of this moment though, I can finally wear close-fitting clothes and feel good. I can wear skinny jeans and know that I look ridiculously fabulous, rather than just ridiculous. It’s a journey I’m still on, but I don’t plan to stop any time soon.
I think this speaks for itself. Accepting a person doesn’t mean you get to put limits on their freedom. You can’t be an ally and want us to stop talking, or labeling, or demanding to be heard.
Acceptance has no exceptions. Period.
Part two of personal poster series involves smiles.
Poor self-esteem is a hard thing to dissolve, but so many things contribute to it. It’s so personal, deeply embedded and unique to every individual.
Some women feel they need a man to tell them they’re beautiful before they start to believe it. Some women will go to great lengths to attract that kind of attention and feed the loop, when in truth your confidence remains the same, and in most instances is weakened due to the dependence you have on others to tell you that you’re beautiful.
No one loves their body all the time. My first step toward loving my body came with accepting and owning my defining features, educating myself on how/why women are portrayed the way they are in visual culture, realizing where this self-hatred was coming from and killing it at the source.
I did this by looking at photos of women of similar build and body type to myself. I stopped comparing myself to women in the media. I stopped comparing myself to anyone else, period.
I realized that if I could find beauty in the bodies of women similar to me, what was stopping me from finding that same beauty in myself?
I have days where I dislike my body just like anyone else, but I don’t blame myself. Temporary dislike is natural, intense hatred is fueled by outside factors.
Looking back at some old shit when I first started this blog (circa Jan 2011) and was starting to work out my place and how I felt about myself. I’ve learned so much but this pretty much still sums up how I feel. I’ve just expanded on it. A lot.
I feel like I’m finding beauty in everything around me. My sister grabs her tummy in her hands, frustrated with the wrinkled and loose skin from rapid weight loss, and the first words out of my mouth are “what? that is so lovely!”
“No way, I fucking hate it.”
“But I think it’s beautiful.”
I really truly fucking do find beauty in every single body I see, and I don’t quite know exactly when that started happening, but I know this blog and all of you are driving it.
Not to mention everything else I’ve learned and collected and passed on here has been so invaluable.
It’s been a good time :3
Me and me and me. No makeup, no glamour. No pretense.
Sorry kickboxing, these are the only body shots I’m doing.
brilliaaaance!!!
So lately my boyfriend Jamie (hyperopiacheart) and I have been discussing our thoughts on being fat and exercising. I encouraged him to write about it.
- Haley
——-
From a young age, long before I can vividly recall, my character has been driven by a degree of controlled compulsion. That is to say, I was always insanely curious as a child, restless when there was a fact left unknown about something, uncomfortable without as full a picture as possible; it was only as I grew older and more analytical that I realized this extended beyond just knowledge - pretty much everything I do is all or nothing, albeit with a pretty good controlling hand making sure I don’t get too insane and no one things derails me or becomes an obsession.
All of that makes for a pretty circuitous path into the subject that has been stuck on my mind lately – exercise, body image and weight loss. I stand (hunch, more accurately) about 5”10 and I would guesstimate weigh about 230lbs (it’s been a while and I do like cake). As a kid, I took a fairly keen (and equal) interest in food and sports. I liked to play soccer, rugby, tennis, badminton, you name it, I played it; same applied as far as food is concerned. So I’ve always managed a pretty good balance between heft and healthiness.
My attitude to that balance has swayed a lot through my adolescence and up to the present. I’ll skip the childhood bullying which I brushed off as irrelevant, the yo-yoing girth throughout my teenage years finally equalized at the higher end of the scale with the discovery of BEER at age 19, the damage done to my self-confidence by a succession of fairly uneven and discouraging relationships…most of us have the same stories, in some form, and I don’t think I have anything particularly new or touching to take from mine that other, far more eloquent members of the Body/Fat Acceptance community haven’t already articulated better than I ever could.
What weighs on my mind currently is this: I’ve started running again, going out late at night, with my shorts and my Red Wings hoodie on, some bizarre playlist that combines Slayer and Beyoncé blasting in my ears, pounding the pavement in my slowly disintegrating Nikes. It’s not the running that I’m focusing on, I’ve always enjoyed running; it’s my reasons for doing it, or rather, my attitude to the side-effects, namely weight loss.
I got a pudgy belly, a big ass, wide hips, boy tits, rugby players thighs, fairly thick but not so flabby arms and tiny little ears on a big ol’ potato head. That’s the physical components of my body. I know them well and I’ve come to love them dearly. At least, I think I do. Therein lies my quandary at the moment: I’m running again because I missed it, I miss feeling clean, like my veins aren’t clogged with wet dust, like my muscles are firing electricity or, even better, ice cold glacier water through them and shooting off sparks of electricity, I miss feeling alive [qualification: we all feel ‘alive’ or whatever our preferred state is in different ways – without a decent amount of movement/exercise, I don’t feel particularly great, but that’s just my personal preference and I’m by no means stating this as a singular, universal good, or goal]. I know, logically, that when I run a lot, I get in to a cycle of eating in small meals to keep myself feeling fuelled, and so I usually end up eating less and healthier (more fruit, lots of water, yadda). I know that this move to organic produce, coupled with more exercise will likely lead to my losing some weight. And that right there, that is the crux of my existential crisis right now.
I have never exercised simply for the goal of feeling healthy in and of itself. The closest has been the times I exercised to ‘feel better’ which was tied in, to some extent, with losing some weight, or toning up, or whatever. So I have no mental or emotional muscle memory of what it is to lose weight and not view it as a goal, or a good in itself, something to be strived for. And when I think about working out, and the benefits, I go first to feeling more vital, and more energetic….and then this little voice, this voice from the past, the voice broken by the well meaning but narrow perspective of my mother, this voice pipes up and whispers ‘and you’ll lose some of that pudge too’. It whispers with glee.
I can’t reconcile these two things – that I love my body as it is, and that some part of me, however repressed, thinks it would look better with smaller tits and a less pendulous gut. This is where that burning curiosity I’ve had since I was a kid comes in – I’m not only wrestling with this from an emotional perspective, I’m then trying to analyse those emotions: ‘which of these is my true feeling?’ ‘does that matter?’ ‘if my true reaction is that I am looking forward to losing some pounds, am I lying to myself if I think it’s because that’s just a tangible signifier of my feeling better and entirely unrelated to aesthetics?’ ‘should I eat a cake after every run to avoid thinking this much?’. These and about 400 other tangentially-related thoughts permeate my brain every time I try to really tackle how I feel about my body, exercise, my weight, how I look…
And I think it comes down to this:
- I am fat.
- I like to run.
- If I run a good amount and eat how I eat now, or close to it, I might lose a few pounds.
- If that happens, it happens.
- I will feel however I feel about that.
- If I like how it looks on me, I should not feel ashamed of that.
This is a personal story more than anything: my girlfriend, who introduced me to the Body Acceptance movement through her senior college thesis on the subject, is an extremely eloquent and articulate writer and after a recent discussion on this matter, she encouraged me to write about it after she had first suggested she might blog about it. Hopefully that doesn’t deprive the world of her views on it because they will surely make more sense; but I thank her for pushing me to try and work out my feelings through writing. It always works, or helps, soothes, whatever. The reason I tell you this is that my story is not meant to be prescriptive, or any kind of advice – if it was, I’d have made it less rambling, had more bullet points and probably more qualifiers in case someone actually took any advice I might accidentally come up with. It is, instead, exactly what it purports to be from the outset – my own story, a snippet of my ongoing battle with my own hyper-analytical brain, my attempts to uncork the stopper it sometimes puts on my emotions and prevents them from bursting free unencumbered, my experiences as an unapologetic fat dude living in a world that confuses the fuck out of me.
I love my body, and I love who I am, but I am beginning to realize that, like any other relationship, that takes patience, understanding and brutal honesty delivered with the appropriate respect and tenderness. It is not a slogan, it is not an easy solution; it’s a life choice and everything that follows thereafter, good, bad, joyful, difficult, uplifting and upsetting is part of a never-ending process; but there has never been a better time to make that choice, never a better, more visible, more open collection of human beings to share that choice with, offering their own stories and support, in awesome-sauce times or shite ones.
In closing, I’d like to quote the wonderful Glenn Marla, who provided the mantra that has resonated with me most deeply in my journey into this brave, new world, that has kept me resolute in weak times, and provided a particularly incisive means of bringing back down to earth (and cutting down to size) anyone who tries to equivocate or justify their body-shaming:
“There is no wrong way to have a body”.
Was just rereading this and felt I should reblog it because, well, this man is the love of my life and he says some brilliant things.
She’s always beautiful!
(Source: TessMunster)
loving this new trend of tumblr ladies revealing before/after make-up faces. i don’t wear too much make-up, but i fully support all natural as well as dolled up faces. your clean face represents your natural, naked state. make-up not only enhances features but allows you to accentuate your style and stand out in your own way. both gorgeous.
While doing my daily roaming on Tumblr, I came across this picture. My first thought about this picture was that it looked amazing. While scrolling through the notes, the first few comments I read were about this picture was about how “make up does this to people” or “this is basically how every girl looks like”. Seriously? Has the society and the culture blinded you so much that you’d make a bias comment make up differences? I don’t understand how people can be so shallow that they can’t see the beauty from both sides of the face. Supposedly, because she wears make up, she’s ugly. Or because she doesn’t wear make up, she’s ugly. This world views such things in a black and white perspective. I say both sides of the face is gorgeous. Focusing on the left side, her make up radiates her beauty. In other words, it’s complimenting her facial features. Her skin gives off a warm glowing tone, her brows and lips are full, and her eye make up brings out her blue grey eyes. Focusing on the right side, everything is natural. There is no shame in the uneven skin tone. There is no shame in the bags and lines under her eyes. There is no shame in in her unfilled brows and her natural lip color. The beauty about this is that they are not flaws. We are brainwashed by the media and the culture about how to define beauty that we overlook what beauty really is. If you compared the two sides and said one side looked better than the other side, then I feel sorry for you. You truly don’t understand what makes both sides beautiful.
My Fat, Beautiful Body, published at RoleReboot
Without fail at noon on every Friday, 30 minutes before my beginning ballet class starts, a mixture of fear and dread ooze into my mind. It starts when I think of getting dressed for class. Despite a well-stocked closet, I am never content with my choices. I spend 20 minutes scouring my closet for a garment that doesn’t exist—I am looking for something that will make me invincible. Exasperated, I leave wearing the same men’s gym shorts and oversized t-shirt. My nerves don’t get any better once I get to class. I am scared to look at my body in a mirror; I am scared to compare my body to my peers. I try to stand in the back rows as far away from the mirrors as possible, and I still occasionally catch a glimpse of my double chin. Or my belly escaping the drapery of my shirt. I am scared that even after working at accepting my body and fighting tooth and nail to get those around me to change their actions and opinions, I will see something repulsive. I can’t get through a weekly dance class without having to give myself pep talks. It takes all that I can muster to remind myself that I am beautiful and, more importantly, worthy of being in that class. It takes all that I have to remind myself that I love my body and that I can take pleasure in moving it. I can take pleasure and find beauty in my body.
I loathe classifying these problems (yes, I acknowledge that they’re problems) as “body image” problems. “Body image” isn’t really about the image of bodies. It’s about the holistic relationships we have with our bodies. It’s about how bodies look, how they move, what they feel like, and how we treat them. Even if we ignore semantics, conversations about body image almost always come down to health. Most conversations I’ve had about body image blame the media and advertising for exposing young girls to impossible standards in order to sell products. But more than selling products, these images drive people to unhealthy habits—crash diets, disordered eating, and sometimes even more dramatic actions like diet pills and self-harm.
And yet many of these behaviors have been recommended to me by health professionals. You see, I’m fat. Not “does this dress make me look fat?” fat, but eligible-for-weight-loss-surgery
morbidly obesedeathfat. I’ve been fat for as long as I can remember, but the first time I remember my size being an issue was at a check-up. I was 8 years old, and after plotting my height and weight in one of those grids, my pediatrician had one of those “talks” with my parents and me. I was too heavy for my height and age, so he presented me with a Xeroxed list of 10 “helpful tips” for eating.It was meant to be innocuous, but I became obsessed with that sheet of paper. It was the first time I saw my body as a personal failing, and that list was the way to redeem myself. I followed the rules to a tee, and yet I didn’t get any smaller. That simple piece of paper was only the beginning. My adolescence was filled with appointments with doctors and nutritionists, medically facilitated crash diets, and crying fits in dressing rooms. My doctors pathologzied my body, and I believed them. I believed that my fat body meant that I was overeating, even when I would leave the dinner table hungry. I believed that I was lazy, unkempt, untrustworthy. I couldn’t trust myself.
I can’t rely on a conventional understanding of health to fix my body image issues because my body image issues stem from those conventional understandings of health. To find peace with my body I’ve had to reject mainstream medical wisdom. I screen my health care professionals, and I set firm boundaries. I am not interested in weight loss, and I will not step on a scale. I don’t care about a new diet regimen; I care about eating. I’ve learned to love my body—I love the look of my body; I love the way my squishy, soft flesh feels. I have embraced my fat. I do this because I care about my body. I care less about the image of my body, and I care more about my relationship to my body.
When I stand at the barre to begin my weekly ballet class, I am reminded that loving my body is both difficult and important. As we go through the usual warm-up routine I feel my muscles stretch and flex. I am present in my body, and I appreciate the grace and flow of movements. As we transition into leaps and jumps, I am reminded of that power in my body. My hearty legs can push my body in the air again and again in rapid succession. I land easily each time.
I am still scared that even after working to accept my body I will catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and find something ugly. So far, I’ve only seen my body. My fat, beautiful body.
Photos by Liz Naiden
smart and lovely and powerful.
Tonight I spent quality time with my tummy, thick thighs, stretch marks, blemishes, scars and side rolls - all the bits of my body I’ve had a hard time embracing. I lounged in bed with my t-shirt hitched up above my belly. I stared at myself naked and studied myself from various angles. I moved my body in ways that made me happy. I stretched and flexed until my muscles ached. It helps to pay attention and listen to how my body feels.
Reblogging because I think it’s incredibly brave for a woman, in the face of Western culture, to show her normal human body. Because I keep seeing pictures on tumblr of only the thin. There is nothing wrong with being thin either, but we should see other, less typical images of the body too. Of the body being loved for what it is.
Thank you. Really, bodies like mine are quite typical, or the norm - it’s just not typically represented in the media and I’d like to change that. I mean, when the most typical bodies aren’t represented in visual culture, it speaks volumes as to why people with perfectly healthy, normal bodies turn to dangerous eating habits, diets, and other unhealthy outlets looking to morph themselves into this idealized image of beauty that doesn’t exist in real life.
This is real, these photos are untouched. My body grows and shrinks and my skin develops stretch marks as my weight fluctuates naturally. I have an abundance of fat on my body that is soft, but resilient. No amount of exercise or diet will make me a size 2. My thighs touch and my belly rolls over my pants. These things will always exist for me so I just accept and own it the best I can, just as I hope others will.
We each have our own set of insecurities to overcome. Mine revolve around my fat body. Some might feel self conscious about skinny legs, height, prominent hip bones, acne scarring…The list is endless, but the idea behind it all is universal.
All bodies deserve love and representation.
(Stealing Haley’s format cause I loved it)
Amanda // Founder of Love Your Body Detroit // Blogger at fatbodypolitics.com and fatbodypolitics.tumblr.com // 26 year old Detroiter // Life long student // Fat Activist // Enjoys fun physical activity // Cat lady extraordinaire // Intuitive eating enthusiast
I have always enjoyed being active, I like doing fun things. Starting out playing softball when I was 6, figure skating when I was 8, hockey at 12, roller derby at 20 and now I spent the few hours I have during the week doing yoga, either up on a trapeze, on silks or in my dining room. I am slowing gaining the upper body strength to do more with aerial yoga. Aerial silks are fun, the trapeze makes my butt hurt but in the end I enjoy going because I get to laugh and do crazy fun things. I get to challenge myself. I ride my bike when I get the chance, swim if I have access to a pool, walk around campus from class to class, dance when I clean and play tag with my cat…no really.
I don’t measure my body against the bodies that surround mine because the only goals I have are for myself. I think that is something that has always been important to me, is that when starting something new I need to constantly remind myself that it is all about making my own standards for my body, more flexible or stronger, not about keeping up with everyone else.
HAES for me has been really instrumental in learning to assert myself when it comes to how I move my body and the foods I eat. Intuitive eating has allowed me to know what foods will make my body feel good and what ones I should avoid if I am having a bad day. This was something that I had to do before I even knew what intuitive eating was but it made the whole process feel more empowering.
Because I am so busy between school and all of the work I do, finding time for self care has become extremely important to me, that is why I go to yoga once as week and I try to find 20-30 minutes to do yoga at home a few days a week. I take enough baths that my landlord is probably pissed about the water bill. I sleep before I do homework if I am exhausted (which normally means I wake up at 6-7am to do hw the next morning). Tuesday nights is my free no guilt night to do what I want and I try to know when I have pushed myself too far by not feeling guilty if I just want to go home and relax.
hey there. this is my body. it will be changing soon, though. i have recently agreed to be submitted into an outpatient program for people with eating disorders like myself. there is a big scary meal plan with words like full fat and carbohydrates. words that i’ve trained myself to hate. but i’m going to do this. i’m going to get better. i’m not going to let this consume me. i’m not going to let myself get hospitalized. i’m not going to stare at pro ana blogs all day. i’m not going to disappoint my friends and family with another relapse. i am going to achieve a healthy weight and be proud of my body like all of you beautiful people are.