Virgie Tovar

I arrive at the airport and I see the chubby, bespectacled face of my friend, Andrea. This was the beginning of my adventure with Chile's fat mafia!

Man in 36D who fat-shamed our flight attendant, what happened to you? What (or who) shaped you into someone who could take so much from others?

I’m a fat brown girl from an immigrant family. I grew up learning that no one would ever love me because I’m fat. I was taught that I have to work twice as hard to get half as much. If someone looks at me weird or says something rude to me, I always see it or hear it and I have a massive (exhausting) anxiety/adrenaline rush/aggro response/comedown cycle. I feel like I have to fight to maintain dignity and humanity every, single day.

Fat positivity creates room for fat people to be seen with full humanity — not as failed thin people, but as complete and precious.

I just spent the weekend at adult fat camp — admittedly, a very different kind of fat camp than I used to dream about all those years ago.

Like many women and girls, I was taught that confidence is a commodity that we can use to attain romantic and sexual attention from men. We spend a lot of money and energy trying to capture that elusive sense that we are worth a damn. But for me, healing has become my primary focus and it has led to major shifts in my sense of self, more clarity about what I need, and a deeper relationship to my desire.

A lot of people don’t know this, but fat activism has been around in the United States since the 1960s. Yes, it’s true!

It’s hard to be fat in this culture (period), but it feels alchemical to me to watch these stars rise to the top — highly visible, on screens all over the world, navigating the entertainment industry and also regular everyday boring ol’ fatphobia as well.

Fat Girl Scarcity — the sense that we are not enough or that we don’t have enough — permeates the life of a person in a marginalized body.

Last week I was sitting anywhere between nineteen and thirty-seven feet from Kevin Bacon.