For as long as I can remember, I have been fat. I can never remember a time where my relationship with my body or the food on my plate was a healthy, productive one. Ever since the fourth grade when doctors started noticing that my blood pressure was dangerously high for a ten-year-old, the messages I received about my body from my mother, my doctors, and the media were full of contradictions and harshness. It became increasingly harder to love the skin I was in as stretch marks appeared and the skin seemed to grow out instead of up when I, the person on the inside, barely felt a change until suddenly nothing in my closet fit anymore.
It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I discovered the body positivity community and started to love the skin I was in, and it was for real this time. I learned that it’s OK if I have rolls and wrinkles and thickness. But I also felt as though in order to be a true body positivity magnate, I had to love myself 100% of the time, and when I didn’t, I felt just as powerless as before. It became increasingly harder to find a balance between “I’m happy where I am” and “This meal could be skipped.” These two messages and feelings are still something I struggle with today, but recently, I started to realize a few things about the body positivity and plus size communities.
For most of my teenage life, I’ve done most of my clothes shopping online because I could never find anything that fit my style and my thighs in a store front. And for awhile I was happy with this; I felt like I could escape to a secret society with rebel ladies who looked like me that were just as stylish as I wanted to be. However, when you open your eyes a little bit wider, it becomes obvious that even though these ladies are wearing my clothes, they do not have my body. They have my boobs, but nothing else, truthfully. Their stomachs are flat, for the most part; their arms are flab free, for the most part; their butts are thick, for the most part, and their thighs lack the dimples and rounded edges that mine have. These women were not me. It looks almost as if someone took a straight size model and all of her size 00 glory and dragged the corners of her, turning her larger but not entirely different. It’s unsettling to not see yourself represented anywhere, not even in your own community.
This almost makes me feel worse about myself than seeing only size 0 models on the runway, in the magazines, or in the shop windows because at least then I could shrug it off with the age old “real women don’t look like that.” But, if “real” women don’t look like the girls in the American Eagle posters, does that mean that the large chested, flat stomached, and thick-thighed women in the Torrid store front are “real” women? And if they are, then what am I? Where do I in all of my round stomached glory, fit into all of this?
When you’re fat, plus-sized, curvy, or whatever else you want to call it, you are taught that your body is a political statement. You exist in marches and in half nude “f*ck you’s” on Instagram communities, but never in jeans and a white t shirt. You are either Ashley Graham or a person on My 600 Pound Life. But do things have to stay this way? Women and girls like me have been existing and taking up space for so long, so why are people still trying to put us into boxes that are far too small for us? Bodies exist on a spectrum, and every body is beautiful so why the hell are we made to either be ashamed or be made into bullets for your war on obesity?
But, if “real” women don’t look like the girls in the American Eagle posters, does that mean that the large chested, flat stomached, and thick-thighed women in the Torrid store front are “real” women? And if they are, then what am I?
That is the question we must ask ourselves moving forward. That is the question we must answer moving forward. And guess what? I’ll give you a hint: the media. A change in the photos we take, make, and view, and a change in the way we view ourselves and each other will surely make its way. Promote healthy body image in every way you can and, trust me, your round friends will shine a little brighter.
