Virgie Tovar

I’d like to enter the term “thinspreading” into the running for 2017's new word of the year. Fat people are expected to take up as little space as possible.

If you like the idea of being with a fat fetishist, I think you should do it. If you hate the idea, then don’t. If you want to experiment with it, try it.

Why is it important to call a diet a diet? Because 1. The truth is actually important and 2. Misleading language only benefits the person peddling it.

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.

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

How does a weight loss company sell weight loss products to people who don’t want to be fat but also don’t want to say they don’t want to be fat or identify as being on a diet? This question lives at the heart of what I’m going to call “BoPo-washing.” BoPo-washing is the new paradigm of companies using weight-neutral or body positive language in order to peddle products.

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!

So, recently I started dipping my toe back into the poisonous dump site that is straight dating. Deep breath.

Jacob (boyfriend) lives walking distance to a See’s Candies. This means that half the week I live walking distance to a See’s Candies — which, if you're me, is a little like living next to Disneyland.

The double standard of the soda tax is glaringly absurd, but grounded in a long history of selective regulation and bigoted attitudes.