Virgie Tovar

I know that not everyone has the same appetite for The Vent, but when it comes to doing work around diet culture and fatphobia, venting is a powerful tool. For people who are in the process of healing from diet culture, we are often wading through an enormous ocean of misinformation, gas lighting and dirty ol’ lies. Without access to venting, our emotions and thoughts occur in sort of a vacuum where we can easily talk ourselves out of what may well be very astute analysis.

Ali Abbassi’s ‘Border’ movie ultimately reminded me of what happens when we meet someone who reflects our power back to us.

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

Dieting is a socially sanctioned method of mentally high-tailing out of whatever is going on and keeping you entirely in your head, laser-focused on your next bite, your scale, your plate.

There had only been room for a persona - a sunshiney child-parent. My mother and grandmother had always fixated on my childhood. It finally made sense how the happiest time of their lives could be my darkest.

The first time I heard about the #DropThePlus campaign I was of two minds.

Sharon is so intensely interesting to me in The Sinner. We get to see a fat woman who is over thirty exercise extraordinary sexual power.

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.

I want to tell you something about me: I’m an obsessive person.

2. Fat People Are In Survival Mode. I then moved onto a very basic reality: fatphobia is unjust, fat people are oppressed, fat people are being forced every, single day to navigate fatphobia while attempting to keep their dignity, heart, and spirit intact.