TFGITW stands for the fattest girl in the world, which is what I’ve always felt like and still do, to some extent. I may have something like body dysmorphic disorder, but whatever it is, it must be the Jekyll and Hyde strain because in my mind’s eye, I’m thin or at least average-sized, but emotionally I feel like the fattest person in any situation — even if intellectually I understand there is a larger person present.

In college, a classmate of mine was a big guy. We had at least one class together every semester. He was significantly bigger than me, but it didn’t matter. He was male. In my messed up thinking, that didn’t affect my position as the fattest person present. See, guys are allowed to be big in Jekyll/Hyde land.

In high school, I definitely felt like TFGITW. Even though there was a girl in the class under me who was bigger. It’s such an effed up thought process. Even noticing different sizes made me feel bad (still does), but when objectively I saw that someone was larger than me, it didn’t change how I felt. I truly felt like the fattest girl in existence.

Ditto when I “successfully” dieted my way to what turned out to be what I wish I weighed now. At that time, in my mind’s eye and with my actual eye, I was still TFGITW. Yet currently, in my dreams, sometimes I’m thin/average and other times I’m fat. It’s so weird.

Of course, pre-FA I was desperate to lose weight. In addition to the Slim-Fast, exercise bike, aerobics videos, Weight Watchers, Richard Simmons, and pocket calorie guides bought at the supermarket checkout display, I also turned to prayer. I asked God to help me lose weight in a healthy way.

The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways. One of my last weight loss attempts involved joining an online diet support group. I’m planning a future post about just how little their advice helped and also how laughable their strategies were in light of what I’ve learned through fat acceptance. But it’s ironic that I learned about fat acceptance through that diet group.

Several fat acceptance articles got posted to the diet group, including a lot of press material on Paul Campos’ The Obesity Myth.  Now, I don’t believe for one second that fat acceptors were trolling a diet group. The real trolls were just strangers belonging neither to FA nor the diet group, trying to pit the two groups with conflicting views against each other.

Finally reading The Obesity Myth is what introduced me to fat acceptance and HAES. It’s what led me on my way. So while I had prayed to lose weight, I think God brought me to fat acceptance instead. It makes a lot of sense because the way I was raised in Catholicism was to put much more emphasis on Jesus’ ultimate commandment rather than tie myself in knots over sins. He said the greatest commandment of all was to love God and also love your neighbor as you love yourself. I think a large part of loving yourself is accepting yourself.

I am glad I found fat acceptance before learning about Jesus diets. I’m not sure when I first became aware of the religious weight loss diet, but I did first learn in Losing It by Laura Fraser that the Christian WLD is often sexist/misogynistic/patriarchal, especially with its emphasis on deference to one’s husband. [Yes, again with Losing It. I know it's old (1997), but if you're at all interested in FA, I think you would love reading what she writes. She discusses the history of every major diet and tries them, IIRC -- basically exposing them for the shams they are. She interviews a woman who has horrific problems from WLS -- and this was before it was fashionable to have it done. Your heart will really go out to this poor woman. And the kicker is when Fraser talks about all the major obesity researchers coming to the conclusion that diets don't work. Their advice? Diet anyway. I really should re-read this one and post more specifics.]

The religious diet has also been covered in the Fatosphere. I remember posts earlier this year at The F-Word (“You may now love yourself”) and Big Fat Blog (“Faith-Based Dieting”). The concept is a bit distasteful to me, because it focuses on two of the Seven Deadlies, gluttony and sloth. Well, I think it’s been well covered in the FA movement how little either has to do with one’s weight. If I truly believe my weight is as much under control as my height and eye color (and I do), then how can I have any guilt over it being the result of supposed “sins”? It’s how God made me.

I know some fitness fanatics like to talk about how a body is a temple and should be treated as such. For them, that translates into eating “clean” and lifting weights. Probably not smoking and drinking, but that’s not always a rule. For me, viewing my body as a temple means I should respect it as it is. I wouldn’t go into a temple and start redecorating it, tearing down walls, and shaming the worshippers into tearing it down and rebuilding it into something more fashionable. I would honor it.

I’ve always thought, since God/ the universe/Fate made us how we are, that natural hair color is what suits us best, for example. But that doesn’t mean my hair hasn’t been white, Psylocke purple, and Pillarbox Red. It also doesn’t mean I won’t be dyeing it on a regular basis now that some gray is popping up. But for things we can’t change? The most loving thing we can do for ourselves is to actually be ourselves.

I have often felt guilty about praying for something appearance-related (until I learned about Jesus diets). I never lied to myself or others that my wanting to lose weight had to do with anything but looks. It took FA and HAES to shift any of my focus to health and feeling good.

So, no, I haven’t lost any pounds that I haven’t since regained after praying to lose weight. But just maybe the weight I lost is the weight on my shoulders, the pressure to starve and over-exercise myself into a size I was never designed to be.

[A minor housekeeping note about why you'll no longer find this blog on the Fat Liberation feed can be found here.

Also, if you'd like to be on my blogroll, please read this.]

I once had a commenter attempt to dismiss the invaluable resource that is Junkfood Science by stating that Sourcewatch claims the author, Sandy Szwarc, is being paid by corporate interests. I finally got around to taking a look at Sourcewatch, and one potential bias they point out got my attention:

Another large sponsor of the CEI, the Coca-Cola company, which could benefit financially from easing the consumers’ fears of calorie intake, refined sugars, high fructose corn syrup, Type II Diabetes, and the possible consequences of obesity.

Setting aside the “obesity” panic scare tactics, I find the site’s interpretation of a Coca-Cola company connection noteworthy. Why? Because, as I first learned in Laura Fraser’s Losing It, diet sodas are considered part of the diet industry. I was quite surprised by this. According to Coca-Cola’s website, Diet Coke is “the most popular sugar free soft drink in America!”

Diet Coke was the third best-seller of any soft drink in 2007 with 10 percent of the market share, according to Beverage Digest. It just made me laugh to see how Sourcewatch chose to spin this connection between JFS and the Coca-Cola Company. Of course, another way to spin it actually results in the exact opposite “potential bias.” Imagine, Junkfood Science is written by someone with a link to a weight loss diet company!

I’m not seriously claiming JFS is influenced by ties to companies like Coca-Cola in either direction. I try to be a discerning reader, and JFS has never given me cause not to take its content at face value. It’s very important and iconoclastic work Szwarc is doing, and I thank her for it.

[Edited for emphasis.]

My relationship with my breasts — how I feel about them, how I view them — is inextricably tied to being fat. Therefore, my breast image has always been negative, like my body image. I’m working to change that though.

It’s a challenge. I came of age when the paragons of beauty were the original supermodels: Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista. They all had the requisite modelly modest bust. I, too, wanted a more humble bosom. At least that way I would be similar to the ideal in one way. It was not to be. I was fat with large-ish to large breasts. I amfat with large-ish to large breasts.

Of course, in my mind it was cause and effect. My being fat caused me to have the opposite of the breasts I wanted. I wasn’t able to fathom that either being fat or having the type of boobs I developed was just the way I was made. Or that the two went together just like any other hereditary traits. No, I sadly believed I caused myself to be fat and my being fat caused my undesired bazooms.

What bothered me even more about my girls than uncooperative size was droop. It may’ve been the case all along, but I started to notice around age 20 that I actually began manually lifting and positioning them into the bra. I had always thought the dreaded sag was a result of aging and/or going braless. Well, I had just turned 20, and I’ve worn a bra since I was a pre-teen. So I figured any lack of perkiness was due to being fat. Thus began a decade of breast hating.

My first breakthrough in making peace with my bust happened while watching the film The Magdalene Sisters. I highly recommend this movie, although it could possibly be triggering due to, amongst other things, sexual assault/abuse and anorexia. The film is based on true life experiences and chronicles the punishment young Irish women endured in the 1960s for being raped, unwed mothers, or just too pretty. They were sent to work in the Magdalene laundries, run by nuns. Sometimes they were imprisoned there the rest of their lives.

There is an especially harrowing scene where the girls are lined up naked while two nuns assess their bodies: who has the biggest breasts, who has the largest bum. It’s heartbreaking. Quite unexpectedly I noticed something that took me out of the film for a moment. One of the young women had breasts just like mine, but she wasn’t fat. That really floored me. I had associated the shape of my breasts with the fact that I was fat so much that it never ever occurred to me that just maybe that shape of breast was but one flavor of many.

In my experience, I had little to no exposure to other women’s naked bodies. I should clarify: real, live women. Of course, I’d seen actresses bare their breasts in movies and many paintings, sculptures of nudes. But I didn’t have a clue as to the breadth of variety of breasts. I wonder how many of us do. A problem, I think, is pr0n (I don’t like typing the real word). Naomi Wolf wrote an excellent essay* about this.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value.

As Wolf writes, not only are men’s expectations about women’s bodies held to a pr0n standard, but women’s expectations of their own bodies are filtered through those men’s eyes. I think the proliferation of pr0n also profoundly affects women’s evaluation of their own bodies — in whole and part – in relation to their body image self-esteem, independent of what men would think. Because when else do we get to see bared breasts other than our own? Even if we actively avoid it, pr0n is rather permeative.

The more I learned about breast diversity, the less I hated mine. I caught most of a great documentary simply titled Breasts. Another one I’d heartily recommend, especially if you feel uninitiated when it comes to different breast types. This doc has helped me go even further in accepting my bosom as is. Again, it’s really useful to encounter a variety and see myself actually represented there, especially when I started in a place where what can be an important part of a woman’s identity, my breasts, felt like an anomaly and one I’d brought on myself by being fat, to boot.

The participants, most of whom appear topless, represent a wide range of age, size, race and background. They include an 11-year-old on the verge of puberty; a breast-feeding mother; a 24-year-old with a breast reduction; a stripper with implants; two women with mastectomies; the self-proclaimed leader of the “Strong Breast Revolution;” a transsexual; a 49-year-old who is concerned about the safety of her silicone implants; a 420-pound comedienne; and two mother-daughter pairs. Their candid thoughts are humorous, moving, and often surprising.

One of the latest steps in my journey towards a more positive breast image happened while I was shopping for Japanese goods at J-List. If, like me, you are susceptible to episodes of prudery, I strongly suggest going to the under-18 version of the shop, JBOX. Of course, if I hadn’t mindlessly been browsing the 18-and-older site, I wouldn’t have made a bit more breast positivity progress. At J-List, I saw a thumbnail pic of Shoko Goto, “a busty Japanese adult video actress.” I was surprised. Her bust size is larger than mine, but the shape/ptosis was the same. And here she was being held up as a certain type of ideal! It made me feel better, especially since she’s not fat. This really caused me to believe that sometimes it’s not that large breasts sag. It’s more that they’re shaped differently from large and perky breasts. It’s just a variation. This is in danger of becoming my mantra, but variation is not aberration.

The latest boost to my breast esteem was after I read Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. The book inspired me to actually look at myself naked in the mirror once in a while — without being negative, actually with kindness. It’s not always easy, and it does take some effort and dedication. But it’s helping. As do the Fatosphere and especially The Adipositivity Project. It’s nice to be coming to the conclusion that my breasts just are. They aren’t a result of something I did wrong. Sometimes they’re even pretty to me.

If you’re worried about your boobs, rejoice. You’re not a freak. Maybe you just didn’t know that there are others out there just like you.

*[Excellent except for a faulty conclusion that processed foods and supersize portions cause "obesity."]

[Another attempt to reclaim our headless images. Found the image itself at Charlotte Cooper's.]

I’ve mentioned in passing before that I think Oprah could be a powerful FA ally if won over to our cause. In fact, a fat-accepting Oprah has the potential to change the national (and perhaps international) conversation about fat, health, and body image.

Alas, it will likely never happen. Oprah will never stop dieting. I think I know why.

I just remembered catching a show of hers when the topic was class. Oprah discussed the three major indicators of one’s class status as follows: teeth, accent, and weight.

Oprah practically has all the wealth in the world. She wants the class indicators that go along with that wealth. With enough money, teeth can be perfect. With enough money, accents can be unlearned. Is there enough money in the world to permanently control one’s size? I surmise Oprah thinks so.

Just a theory.

You’ve probably seen this already, but in case you haven’t, be sure to check out The Fat Experience Project.

Stacy Bias writes:

The goal of the Fat Experience Project is to map the global experience of fat in a way that is human, has a face, a heart, a mind, a body and a voice. The Fat Experience Project is an oral, visual and written history project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism. By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals of size, the Fat Experience Project seeks to engage with, educate, empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies and the world at large.

As the project grows, it will be filled with first-person, non-fiction narratives (in text, video or mp3 format) that speak to the many and varied aspects of the life lived large. Some of the content will come from interviews already gathered on an extensive 2-month road trip (with the lovely Val Garrison) in both audio and video format. Some content will come from trips on the horizon. Most content will be submitted via the website by readers such as yourself.

You can learn more about Stacy at http://www.stacybias.net.

Spread the word about this great project and think about participating!

In this case, “LOL” stands for living out loud and getting the last laugh.

I encountered the above picture again while reading a recent post at Big Fat Dynamo. I felt like reclaiming one of our decapitated images.

The caption is the “eff-you haiku” from this very cool shirt.

I would love to tell the subject of this photo, “Good on you! For not letting anyone — including smarmy photo’journalists’ — keep you from living your life.”

The meme originated here. [ETA: Wow, I've been out of it lately. According to Big Liberty's entry, the meme started at Sarah's? My apologies. I first saw it at AnnieMcPhee's and because she called it a meme "Annie-style," I thought she had originated it or even tweaked an existing one.]

“The rules are simple. Answer each question, plug your answer into google search, and pick a picture from the first page of images from your search results.” It’s hard to stick to Page 1 of the results! I want to keep looking for images I like better :p

1. Your age on your next birthday.

2. A place you’d like to travel.

3. Your favorite place.

4. Your favorite object.

5. Your favorite food.

6. Your favorite animal.

7. Your favorite color.

8. The town where you were born.

9. The town where you live.

10. Name of a past pet.

11. Name of a past love.

12. Best friend’s nickname.

13. Your screen name.

14. Your first name.

15. Your middle name.

 16. Your last name.

17. Bad habit of yours.

18. Your first job.

19. Name of grandmother.

20. College/grad major(s.)

And I’m talking about mutation as it’s used in the X-Men universe. The X-Men are Marvel Comic characters who, by virtue of a genetic mutation, have a special power or powers. They call it the X-Factor. It’s interesting to note that in our world, an “x factor” is used to denote that special je ne sais quoi that charismatic people have. It’s usually used to talk about superstars and that “It” they have that makes them stand out.

The X-Men are superheroes essentially. They are called mutants. To them, the term simply describes a genetic variation – some argue it’s evolution from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens superior – a variation that gives them special ability and makes them different from other humans. Jean Grey is one of the X-Men whose mutation enables her telekinetic and telepathic powers. Her teammate Wolverine has a regenerative ability as well as retractable claws. Storm is a fellow mutant who can control the weather.

Some humans (and self-hating mutants) use the term “mutant” as a slur. “Mutie” is another favorite. “Mutie FREAK” is frequently heard, too. The X-Men are often described as defending a world that hates and fears them.

[If you're familiar with the X-Men world, forgive the exposition.]

The X-Men are often described as an allegory for people fighting for their human and civil rights. In fact, this comic universe even struggled with its own version of the HIV/AIDS virus, the Legacy Virus. There is an island called Genosha in X-world that enslaved mutants. In the film version of the X-Men (third installment) a vaccine was developed to turn the mutants into “normal” humans — effectively a “cure” for their reviled “condition.” There are other examples.

I’ve been an X-Men fan for a long while*. Recently I’ve started to wonder if this allegory extends to fat people as well. Can the X-Men be a symbol for fat acceptance? Well, not so fast.

Leaving aside the fact that I think mainstream comics and games in general can well stand to be more inclusive, *especially* of variations in body types — I mean, come on! You have a super power. Why are you in the gym four hours a day getting ripped? — I think the X-Men are particularly remiss in not representing the rainbow of human variation precisely because of the symbols they are. Who exactly is fat in the universe the X-Men inhabit?

The two examples that spring to my mind are both villains. Mojo and the Blob. Stop it, I can hear your eyes rolling. Yes, “Blob” is such an original name for a fat character, isn’t it? Such a fresh concept! Mojo isn’t much better.

From the Wikipedia entry on Mojo:

Mojo is one of the “Spineless Ones,” an alien race that is immobile without advanced technology. He is a slaver who rules the “Mojoverse,” a dimension where all beings are addicted to his gladiator-like television programs.

Spineless, immobile, and addicted to TV? Now, where have I heard that before?

A little intro to the Blob, again from that handy Wikipedia place:

A mutant, the Blob claims to be unmovable. He possesses an extreme amount of pliable body mass, which grants him superhuman strength and his own gravitational pull. Possessing the mindset of a bully, he mostly uses his powers for petty crime and as a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants and Freedom Force.

Another stereotype applied to fat people: the bully. A criminal on top of it. Bonus.

So no, X-Men, you aren’t really cutting edge anymore. But you could be. The following two clips from the first two X-Men movies easily apply to fat people, too. Now how about taking that a step further and having a fat hero/heroine?

The first clip is from X-Men. It runs 00:53. If you find it difficult to decipher the pertinent line or you just don’t feel like watching the video, you can highlight the text below the video to read it.

Highlight here: You know, people like you were the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child?

The next clip is from X2. It runs 00:23. Again, if you find it difficult to make out the exchange due to the accent and the voice FX, you can highlight the text below the video to read it.

Highlight here: Nightcrawler: Excuse me. They say you can imitate anybody, even their voice.

Mystique: [Imitating Nightcrawler] Even their voice.

Nightcrawler: Then why not stay in disguise all the time, you know? Look like everyone else.

Mystique: Because we shouldn’t have to.

Note that Mystique is one of only a handful of mutants who would be able to stay in disguise all the time. (I wonder if the percentage of those with that ability — shapeshifters — is between 2 and 5.)

I always thought the same thing about the argument “people can’t change the color of their skin, but you can lose weight.” Even if we could choose a different skin pigmentation, we shouldn’t have to. The same goes for enduring a permanent state of self-imposed semi-starvation …

So yeah, fat is a mutation à la the X-Men: it’s a genetic variation that makes some of us different from others of us. It may or may not imbue us with super powers.

*[Although I'm not currently up on the goings-on in the X-universe. So if I'm out-of-date on any information in this post -- like if there is a positive X character who is also fat -- please correct me in comments. I'd appreciate it.]

Fat hatred? Check

Sexism? Check

Ageism? Check

Hat trick!

H/t rumorofrain. Be sure to read the post that directly relates to the fake ad, which includes the following:

Do people not realize that whenever they bash Clinton for non-politically-relevant things they’re sending an incredibly powerful message to girls everywhere? The message is: No matter how smart you are, how good a job you get, how much money you make, how much power you have, the most important thing about you is how pretty you are and how feminine you act.