Ragen Chastain

People are using #TheySaid to tell their stories of experiencing body shaming. Sally Bergesen kicked things off by talking about her own memory of body shaming, and hundreds of Twitter responses echoed her story.

You may remember Maria Kang from her fifteen minutes of fame a couple of years ago when she put some time and effort into looking like the cultural stereotype of beauty, had some success at that, then took a picture of herself wearing gym clothes with her three sons. Which is, of course, her prerogative and completely fine. But then she couldn't resist shaming people who made different choices (or made the same choices but had different outcomes) by adding the caption "What's Your Excuse?"

It’s a dangerous and challenging time for many of us to have a body in the United States. There are things we can do to not only love our bodies but give them our support during the era of the bigoted, fat shaming, twitter tantrum throwing man-baby who is, for now, our president.

The fashion world has long screwed up when it comes to fat bodies. You should know better than to market sizes to 2XL as all shapes and sizes.

Bu Kombucha's message on their bottle, “Health is our priority. The Bu supports and donates to organizations that fight obesity.”

The fact that fat people are so thoroughly and constantly lied to by diet culture, and so profoundly oppressed by fatphobia, that they would submit themselves to this is not a justification for it. But that isn’t stopping J.D. Roth, the show’s creator. Not satisfied with exploiting fat people once, he is launching a new show called The Big Fat Truth in which he’ll bring back six former contestants for another round of exploitation, false promises, and weight cycling.

Hey Google - encouraging people to walk, while ignoring there are plenty of people with disabilities, is engaging in ableism. Cupcakes only make it worse!

We could risk the mental and physical health of all the girls in the school by using fat shaming to try to control the way that they dress, or we could just let them wear some damn leggings. Seriously, how is this not a no brainer?

You would think that designers would want their clothes to be seen on a woman who represents billions in buying dollars, but it turns out they would rather cling to their fat bias.

For many white people, our first reaction to hearing about racism is to immediately look for a reason to say “That’s not racist!” That said, in conversations I’ve had where people are struggling with this, they have asked for specific ways to work through this. So if you find yourself in this situation, here are some steps that you can take yourself through.