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.
Some of the artwork you see here has been created by our founder or moderators, some sourced when applicable. Please be kind enough to source this blog whenever you share it's content.
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.
Hugh Jackman lost 15 pounds, then rapidly gained 30 pounds for his role as Jean Valjean.
No one cares. No one’s asking him how he did it. No one’s worried that he might be setting a bad example for younger fans. There’s no controversy.
This is a really interesting observation and one that can be applied to multiple circumstances. Another one being Christian Bale, who has bulked down and lost extreme amounts of weight in quick succession on multiple occasions. For Machinist (2003) he last over 60 pounds to look positively emaciated. By 2004 he had bulked up to 200+ pounds for his role as Batman in Batman Begins (2005). No to mention his weight loss for The Fighter (2010) and his semi-bulk down from The Dark Knight (2008) to Terminator Salvation (2009), which were all filmed back to back. His weight loss is often featured in articles praising the actor for his method acting and you seldom see any “concern” or “intrigue” about his dieting. Actually, most often it is met with awe and zero confusion that it was done for acting and he was trying to look emaciated. Note that Anne Hathaway has had to repeatedly remind people that she wasn’t losing weight to “look better”.
Hey.: baby—guts: people that post those vintage ads for women saying gaining…
people that post those vintage ads for women saying gaining around 15 pounds will give them curves and men will like them are so fucking stupid. you’re just as bad as people saying you should lose weight. unless you’re using it to prove how society has a tendency to change it’s…
Er, you just explained why some people do it, to demonstrate the same underlying pattern of body dissatisfaction is used to undermine people.
If it makes you angry that’s the point. Now imagine being ridiculed for that response, or told that is a sign there is something wrong with you? Being told you can’t take reasonable correction, or you’re oversensitive, being laughed at because it stings?
Can I just say that “skinny shaming” is not wholly convincing? Fat shaming is more complex than what other people say about your size. It operates within a system set up to pathologize people’s existence. No one is saying thin people need to dedicate their lives to gaining weight, unless they actually have an ED. Even then, they have a voice which counts.
Try to stop trivializing experiences you don’t understand.
And frankly, when are we going to hear from people who whine about skinny shaming about their collusion in the process of being held up as what everyone should aim for?
You’d think they’d want to question the costs of that and how little they seem to have gained from it. That they’d tell the authorities using them to get their hands off their bodies. But no.
Many are still clinging like fury. I don’t think its shaming you to realise that you’ve been placed on a pedestal, that is at the whim of whoever seeks to gain from manipulating people’s insecurities.
I’d have thought you’d be more angry about that.
Oh, advertising…
Making women of all sizes feel inferior enough to purchase “quick-fixes” since the early 1900’s.
I can see a correlation between the “real women have curves” bullshit mindset and these types of weight-gain ads.
There is a pattern, a cycle happening here. We’re repeating the same kinds of body-shaming. Recognize.
Historically, Fat Acceptance has framed body positivity in fairly stringent and problematic ways. I think a lot of work has been done to address these issues, but oftentimes these things get played out over and over again as new people come to the fold.
When you first discover body acceptance, after years and years of hating yourself and fucked up weight loss attempts and (for many) disordered eating, it can be so tempting to latch onto this mantra of “LOVE YOURSELF NO MATTER WHAT, THERE IS NO ROOM FOR COMPROMISE”. This results in a lot of fat activists advising others to simply “accept yourself”, and anything else is automatically Bad Activism.
Of course, not understanding the nuanced ways we experience ourselves/bodies and embracing this approach to self-acceptance often means trying (usually unsuccessfully) to sweep one’s more ambivalent feelings under the rug. It also means not being open to others’ discomfort with their own bodies in ways that can be racist, ableist, and cissexist.
In The ‘Fat’ Female Body, Sam Murray writes about one of the more insidious aspects of this kind of humanist logic: it reasserts a problematic dichotomy between mind and body. It says that we must, in our minds, overcome our bodies (and hatred of them). This is problematic for a couple of reasons: 1) this is the same strategy we are supposed to use, according to contemporary fat-hating society, to lose weight and become “normal” people, and 2) our bodies and minds are not ACTUALLY split—we perceive and understand the world THROUGH our bodies, and to imply that we can just “change our minds” about how it feels to be fat in a fat-hating world—in a world not made for our bodies—disregards this pretty important reality.
Long story short: it’s really crucial that we make room for bodily ambivalence in our activism.
All of this is to say that my own body has changed a bit in the last several months. After a couple years of staying at a steady weight without dieting, I have found myself facing an unexpected shift that has added nearly 30 lbs. to my person. I wouldn’t have known it was 30 lbs. (although I did know I had gained weight—I looked and felt different, and didn’t fit in my clothes the same way), except for the fact that my friend had a scale at her house, and I snuck a peek after weeks of wondering how much, exactly, I had gained.
Prior to knowing the exact number, I didn’t feel BAD about my body. I didn’t like some of the small mobility changes I was noticing (back pain happening after only walking a mile, not being as limber or flexible, pain after any extended period of time in one position, etc.) and I definitely didn’t like my clothes not fitting, but I still loved my body, the feel of it and the look of it. I didn’t blame my mobility and pain stuff on the weight gain, per se, but on a lack of physical activity in general.
Now that I know for sure that I’ve gained 30 lbs., I still don’t feel bad about my body, but I had a moment (or two or three) of feeling like a really bad fat activist. And knowing that exact number triggered a lot of shame in me: shame that I couldn’t help wanting to know the number, shame that I had picked an arbitrary number that I didn’t want to be “over” and when I wasn’t I felt relieved, shame that the act of weighing myself triggered diet-y, weight loss-y feelings in me, shame that I felt shame.
I’m gonna be real honest with y’all right now: gaining a lot of weight really quickly kinda sucks, similarly to how losing a lot of weight really quickly, or any other swift changes in our bodies, can throw us for a loop.
And I’m struggling with What To Do about it. In the distant past when I have gained weight my response has been to crash diet. I’m obviously not going to do that; I’m not going to engage in anything that could be called a “lifestyle change” or that involves me eating less of the things I love. I might try to practice some more intuitive eating—eating that requires that I check in with my body instead of just feeding it the easiest/cheapest things. I will be moving my body more, in an effort to stave off the pain I’ve been feeling lately as a result of my inactivity. And I’ll be working on continuing to love my body, to feel good as a body, to treat me with kindness and respect. I’m going to work on the shame I feel when I experience bodily ambivalence. I’m going to work on cultivating an activism that has room for all the ways I experience being fat in a fat-hating world. I’m going to work on understanding my self as a whole, not a split between a wispy being of thoughts and feelings and a separate, solid thing made of fat flesh and bones.
And I’m maybe not gonna step on a scale again. That shit fucks with my head.
This work is hard. But absolutely, certainly, 100% positively worth it. NOW GO LOVE YOURSELVES OR ELSE.
All the fucking feels in the world right now, this just accurately explains how I feel about everything, ~*~*~body ambivalence~*~*~ y’all
We are all working on different things. I am working on trusting that my body knows what’s up. That for me, “health” is hard (if not impossible) to define, and that’s okay - all I can truly define is my state of mind. Moving my body in pleasant ways alters my mood and my mind in a positive way. Stepping on a scale alters my mood and mind in the most hateful, shameful, and negative way possible. One of these things is not like the other.
I haven’t weighed myself in 4 months because I haven’t had access to a scale or the opportunity to subject myself to stepping on one. When I take that opportunity away it becomes harder, not impossible. I still impulsively step on scales when I see them, I still think that looking at a number is going to validate something. It’s buried in my head, something I acknowledge in my brain but can’t get my limbs to listen to.
A while ago, I designed a poster that said “Life is too short to spend it hating your body” with the best of intentions at the time, but I’ve come to understand that hating your body and the inevitable changes it goes through is simply a part of life. It happens. It’s fucking normal. So is love. It’s a balance, not a face-off.
Skinny shame in the 50s is similar to that of the fat shame that we see today. Why can’t we just agree that everyone is beautiful in their own right? Curvy, thin, fat, chubby, big thighs, knobbly knees: we’re all beautiful and its about time we acknowledged it without putting anyone down.
Because if we are satisfied with our bodies, then they have nothing to sell us to magically fix our problems!
I’ve seen a lot of people posting ads like this - vintage Wate-On ads are particularly in heavy circulation around the internet. What really pisses me off is that a lot of people tack on the thought “How funny is this!” or “We’d never see this kind of advertising today!”
But we do.
Whether it’s for weight loss or weight gain, there is a constant cycle of body shaming and product pushing that changes with the times and societal beauty standards, but the message is the same - “Your body is not right. You should buy this to fix it.”
TW: Weight loss discussion
if anyone mentions weight loss, or a desire to lose weight, they are reminded that it’s ‘ok to be bigger too’…
Yes it is. It’s also ok to be skinny and want to be skinnier too.
If a skinny person said ‘I’ve gained a stone, just half a stone to gain until my goal weight!’ would you hear people say ‘it’s ok to be skinny too’?
I doubt it.
Stop skinny prejudice.
Sorry, but what world do you live in that everyone responds to personal weight-loss rhetoric with “it’s okay to be bigger too”?
My fat body has never received that kind of validation when I used to vocalize my desire to lose weight in the past. In fact, quite the opposite - “I need to lose weight” was often followed by a comment like “well yeah, wouldn’t hurt” or “I know this or that diet that will help” or “yeah, you could definitely stand to lose a few pounds”…
NEVER ever ever ever was I ever told “You know, your body is okay - just as it is. It is okay to be bigger. You are fine.”
That may happen now in the fat acceptance community, on this blog and other places like it - but it exists in these safe spaces because we are counteracting a culture that tells and yells at us from every single angle “your body is not right” “you need to lose weight” “fat is unhealthy”, so on and so forth.
Fat oppression exists. The repercussions and hate towards fat people and the attitudes toward obesity in society far exceed cultural attitudes towards thin people. All bodies are good bodies and I stand behind the fact that every body is meant to be as it is, thin bodies deserve to be shown love and support for their existence just as fat bodies do.
But don’t sit there and tell me thin privileged folks need and deserve MORE validation and support than fat folks, that fat folks are getting more support than the thin privileged, that we’re facing less oppression and hate.
If that were the case, I wouldn’t be here fighting against it every single day.
I know, your body looks different. It has changed, along with your life, and your jeans fit a little more snuggly than you had anticipated. Maybe more than you like.
Maybe you hate it.
You were a size X for such a long time, so comfortable in your skin, and suddenly, you are 10, 20, 50 pounds…
Wow.
I was curious so I weighed myself for the first time in months.
Looked down at my feet, read “220”, shrugged and walked away.
Gained 5 pounds.
There’s a part of me that still twinges - I will admit to that.
I think of it as a kink I’m working out.
Pretty sure it’s all just going to my tits anyway, which is fine by me.