WHAT WE'RE ABOUT
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.
RBI supports all races, genders, classes, and sizes. We try our best to make this a safe space for everyone. If we are not doing our job or checking our privilege, we invite you to please inform us.
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We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.
This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.
This is me this morning. It’s been 3 days since I’ve shaved my face or my chest, a week since I’ve shaved my legs, pits, or stomach.
The first day I was in post two-nights-of-Halloween-parties lazing around in my jammies mode, and I’ve gone a day without shaving before, so it wasn’t really a big deal. By yesterday, however, I realized something I’ve suspected for a while: there is a direct correlation between how much energy/will to be productive I have and how much hair is on my face. When my face is full of hair I don’t feel like doing anything.
Yesterday I didn’t get out of my pajamas or shower. I got up late, worked a 4-hour shift (I work from home, so this merely required sitting down at my computer) and then interneted in bed for the rest of the day despite the fact that my house still desperately needed to be cleaned from Saturday’s party and the baby blanket I’m knitting for my sister’s shower next weekend isn’t even halfway finished. It was kind of gross.
This is the first time I’ve ever taken pictures of myself with my hair grown out. Because I realized that though I’ve come a long way in the 18 years since the hair showed up, I’m still letting it hold me back in small ways, and I’m done with it. I don’t want to feel unclean if I haven’t shaved. I don’t want my energy levels and enthusiasm for life to be affected if my hair is grown out. I don’t want it to have that power over me anymore. I want to feel just as beautiful hairy as I do clean shaven.
So, I’m starting with this one day. Today I woke up, took these pictures, showered, put on an outfit that made me feel like me, and did the shit out of my day. Unshaven. Hairy as fuck. And it felt good. It felt really good. So good I even put on make up and did a naked photo shoot with my fiance (pictures to follow).
I’ll probably shave when I get up tomorrow. But in a week or so I’d like to try to go at least a week without shaving. Maybe even leave the house. Which would have been unthinkable not that long ago, but doesn’t seem quit as panic attack inducing now. Because I made it through today. I made it through this one day.
I’ve just rediscovered some collage work I did a while ago with a scanner and found objects.
Zoe Holmes and Kath Read embrace the ‘F’ word: Fat and proud
DISCRIMINATION on the basis of sex, gender, race and religion is illegal, so why do we continue to judge people on their appearance?
Zoe Holmes is fat. Kath Read is fat. Very fat, even.
They are also intelligent, articulate, funny and successful, each with friends and families they love and who love them.
Drinking tea and preparing for work in her quirky, inner-city art deco unit, the stylish Holmes, 26, slips on earrings as she recounts a recent trip to New York where she saw nine stage shows in two weeks. A good exchange rate meant the musical theatre tragic could also indulge her other love: clothes.
Quietly spoken and personable, Holmes spent two years teaching English in Japan before returning to Brisbane where she works in administration at the University of Queensland and blogs about “fatshion” part-time.
Holmes got to know the heavily-tattooed Read, 39 - a self-described bolshy, punk librarian who has a black tutu (more like a “four-four”, she laughs) in her wardrobe and says pink is her natural hair colour - as participants in a Griffith University study on attitudes towards fat people.
Photos of them shopping, riding bicycles, doing yoga, putting on make-up, working and generally going about their daily lives have circulated nationally in a new image library created for mass publication.
Together with an exhibition by Queensland College of Art photographer Isaac Brown planned for October, stockybodies.com aims to replace the generic “headless fatties” images that negatively represent obese people.
Every now and then, what I define as a less than “flattering” photo of myself surfaces on Facebook. I’m sure this is a situation that is not unique to me. In fact, I know it isn’t. There have been so many times that a friend has asked me to straight up remove a photo of them because they claimed it to be offensive and unflattering.
When we see angles of our faces and our bodies that we don’t typically pay attention to, it can be a difficult thing to confront. It’s not what we’re used to seeing in the mirror. It’s easier to untag ourselves or wipe the existence of the photo off of everyone’s radar than confront those feelings about ourselves, our body image, the way other people perceive us.
The above photo was taken last year during a wedding in Scotland that my fiance was standing up in. The photos were only just posted to Facebook and as soon as I saw it, so many things happened. First repulsion, at my thick cheeks, small eyes and wide, crooked nose. Then I remembered the moment this was capturing. I had turned in my chair to watch my fiance give his speech as best man.
I was taken back to that moment, how utterly proud I was of him, how fucking happy I was to be there amongst his closest friends; having just witnessed another trans-atlantic relationship, quite similar in some ways but vastly different than our own, unified in love, beauty, and holy matrimony.
These were simply moments. That is how we existed - the memories tied to them more precious than any thoughts or insecurities I may harbor.
I spent a very, very long time wiping the existence of certain photos of myself off the face of the Earth, avoiding the camera lens, dodging captured moments for fear of not looking a certain way.
I will admit that when I first saw this photo, I removed it from my Facebook Timeline. I let myself stew with it for a while before I developed a desire to fight that automatic impulse to hide.
What is the fucking point? It’s my goddamn face. It’s me. Why am I ashamed?
<3 Haley Cue
It’s official: Reese Hoffa is my new favorite Olympian.
Olympians: They come in all shapes and sizes - by Erilyn
I’m sure there are tons of fatter soccer players, table tennis players, canoers, etc., who don’t get their fair share of camera time. But these Olympic athletes, whose bodies still show us the diversity of nations — the diversity of shapes, sizes and colors that define the human condition — prove the diversity of fit (not necessarily skinny or fat) athletes and show what the human body can do.
happy hand-me-up fat clothes day!
(wherein my little sister loses weight and i reap the benefits of her discarded wardrobe)
also, it feels like spring in detroit right now, which is fabulous.
<3
Trigger warning: past insecurities.
I am not going to cover my skin so that you feel more comfortable. I am going to hug it. I am going to wrap it in satin and spandex. I will wear something that molds to me like it has been painted on. I am sexy naked and I am sexy clothed. I am not going to justify taking my own photo with a weak “I felt pretty today.” I feel pretty most days. I feel fucking hot as hell most days. And on the days when I wake up and can’t seem to get comfortable inside my traitorous wardrobe, I rebel against it. I decide that today is naked Wednesday and no clothes will touch my strong, protective skin.
So no, I am not going to buy your swim skirt. So that if you accidentally glance at me, you don’t have to see my thick thighs slide together suggestively. I will not wear sleeves in the dead heat so you don’t have to see my stretch marked flesh. It’s beautiful. Like lace and love and pink newness all wrapped around the strength of my muscles.
I am not going to talk about what a self respecting fat girl would wear. Because when I used those words I did not respect my self, my body. I was apologizing for my size, for my sex, for everything about me. I was sorry that I was not your ideal of beauty and needed you to forgive me.
Then I realized that most of you did not blame me for my own shape. I loved my flesh and bone and skin and that made you love me.
So fuck those of you who are disgusted by me. I am not sorry. I am not sorry that I can look at my reflection and smile at what I see. I am not sorry that when I put on my new red-hot hot-pants, not a single moment of insecurity hits me. I am not sorry when I am dripping with sweat from a night spent moving to a rhythm that pulls me.
I am sorry that you are not happy. It hurts to see you, half my size and hating every solid piece of you. It angers me to hear you say that you are too fat for your skin to be showing because, when you say it about you, you are saying it about me. I am sorry that I have to lose you as a friend because your insecurities keep hurting.
I decided once upon a time that I loved me. It was an easy choice to only feel good about the body that keeps my soul alive, and I am not fucking sorry.
Our first day in Paris.
(I had meant to post this on my personal blog, but whutevs!)