Virgie Tovar

I spent most of last week in a southern California heat wave.

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.

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

The politics of food are the politics of class, and the subtlety of those politics creates a kind of deniability that makes it hard to discern the rules of engagement. One’s success in ascending the ladder is marked by fluency with these invisible boundaries.

I have come to learn that most of the things I hate are things I can manage (if not eradicate) with boundaries, introspection, a sense of my needs as valuable, and the language to articulate what is happening.

Recently there’s been an uptick in fatphobic derailments, and I thought it would be helpful to share them as well my responses to them.

“Chill” is, I think, a coded word that describes an environment where low expectations, low commitment, and zero accountability are considered normal.

Dieting isn’t just a practice; it’s a way of life. What do we do when we don’t have any more calories to count and we have to deal with the wide-open space left in their wake?

It took me a long time to bury the dream of being thin. For some people it doesn’t take much to let go, and for others it’s a slow series of awakenings.

After years and years of fatphobia-induced body dysmorphia, it’s hard to actually just see my body with anything approaching objectivity. But when I finally looked at the photos of myself in my underwear, I knew there was nothing that fatphobia or my inner asshole could do to take away the beauty and the magic that was right before my eyes.