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!

Weight gain is — in my anecdotal experience — quite common once you stop attempting to control your weight. My story is not everyone’s story.

This week I have been thinking a lot about home, and how home shapes the way we feel about our bodies.

One of my yearly rituals is making a list of things I’ve learned in the past year. So, I thought I would make public the list of things I’ve learned, and rather than just focus on one year, I thought I’d share my most important lessons from all the years I have been on this sacred poo-ball called earth.

The word “bully” makes us think we’re talking about a tiny handful of anti-social individuals when in fact we’re talking about a group of people.

I was introduced to the concept of ugliness when I was five years old. It was, for almost all intents and purposes, the totality of who I was. Fat was me. I was fat. I was taught that fat is the opposite of everything that is feminine, moral, and beautiful. Just like ugliness. But even though I still live in the awful world that made my traumatic childhood possible, I know for certain that ugliness isn’t a physical reality, it is a cultural fabrication. I truly believe that we are born with the capacity to see beauty in all things, and it is through the dispiriting reality of our cultural education that we lose that ability.

Hi, my name is Virgie and I’m a fat girl who loves food. During my years of restricting I thought about food more than I thought about most things.

I don’t want to move the line of the socially acceptable body by 50 or 100 or 150 pounds. I want to get rid of the line altogether because the line hurts everyone — even the people who are seen as the “winners.”

A couple of weeks ago I got an email that contained a question I never thought I’d be asked.