Matt Joseph Diaz

Matt Joseph Diaz

Bio

Matt Joseph Diaz is a public speaker and social media activist tackling the issues of body image and self love. Matt has been working in social media since the age of 15, and has a long history of creating online content for entertainment and educational purposes. Matts videos have accrued over 120 million views in countries all over the world as well as being featured in People, Cosmopolitan, Buzzfeed, Upworthy and numerous other news websites. He now spend a lot of his time traveling and speaking on self love at conferences, colleges and public events. Matt Joseph Diaz currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.   

Matt Joseph Diaz Articles

She was my Mr. Miyagi — except she was a cute young woman and there was a lot less karate.

4 Things I Learned From Dating A Professional Dominatrix

In the spring of 2013, I met a woman on OKCupid. She was petite, with a kind smile and a voice so soft that it could melt all your troubles away. Her shock of red curls went down to her shoulders — and because of this, and the fact that we no longer speak, let's call her Ann.

Ann was a few years older than I, wise and mature. She also, it turned out, spent her professional life beating up strangers for their sexual satisfaction.

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"The body positive movement strives to put forth one idea: that all body types are valid, regardless of their shape, size, or disability." Image: Thinkstock

Your Body Positivity Needs To Include More Than Just You.

It’s pretty easy to see why people would want to rebel against [our current standard of beauty] — it’s unattainable, and even for those who manage to reach something close to it, it’s often unsustainable. However, in rebelling against the oppressive system, we run into situations where people denigrate others who happen to more closely fit the description of what we recognize as the ideal.

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#MondayMotivation with Matt

#MondayMotivation With Matt Joseph Diaz: We're Talking Mental Health

This week on #MondayMotivation With Matt Joseph Diaz, mental health. Matt talks about binge eating disorder.

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"Why do we feel that strange mixture of conflicted emotions every time we see someone we sort of know get engaged?" Image: Thinkstock

So Your Friends Are Getting Engaged, And You're Having An Existential Crisis

Between all of the political arguments and videos of dogs being excited to see their owners, I’m noticing a trend appearing all over my timeline — seemingly increasing every week. A lot of fucking people are getting engaged.

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Image Credit: Stephen Arnold via Unsplash

On Passing Privilege & Not Belonging

For a long time, passing privilege made me feel like I didn’t deserve to call myself latino.

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Matt Joseph Diaz

#MondayMotivation With Matt Joseph Diaz: Matt Gets Naked

We met Matt a year ago when he showed us his post weight-loss body.

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Photo credit: Emma Wondra Photography "I’m starting to worry that my friends are prettier than me."

What If My Friends Are Prettier Than Me?

From a young age, people (especially women) are constantly taught that we’re in competition with one another. Whether it’s our grades, our social status, our economic status, or those creepy beauty pageants for 6 year olds, we’re immediately thrust into a world where we’re taught to view everyone as adversarial to a certain degree.

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Your child's body is not a "problem" (Image Credit: Thinkstock)

On The Subject Of Childhood Dieting

Though it's worth noting that my weight was beginning to become a health concern, I’d never considered my body a “problem” until I heard how doctors talked about it. In the same way a hurt child won’t start to cry until he sees the worry in his parent’s face, I never felt bad about my body until the first time I felt like I was being looked at with disgust. So whatever route you decide to take with the health of a child, make sure it’s treated as a growing opportunity and not a solution to a problem. Your children are not problems — they are the foundation upon which the adults of tomorrow will be built.

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Life is not a perfect linear story plot. (Image Credit: Think Stock)

If At First You Don't Succeed, That's OK. That's Life.

Success is an uphill climb, but it’s rarely a directly uphill climb. There are cliffsides and plateaus, there are points where you have to adapt and change in order to make things work. These are not steps backwards, nor are they indicative of your failure—they’re simply a byproduct of life. More often than not, this ability to work with the circumstances in order to get by will take you farther than certain “skills” ever could.

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Image Credit: Ivan Karasev via Unsplash

We Need To Stop Telling People To Be Grateful Things Aren't Worse

I promise you, people living with depression are acutely aware that things probably aren’t as bad as they could be.

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