Virgie Tovar

The reviews for the new Netflix movie Dumplin’

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’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.

For the past two weeks, I’ve met up with my friend Caya in the Mission for acupuncture and pupusas/pizza/both. #HighlyRecommend 

I’ve been ashamed of my indirect communication style for a really long time. Recently I realized that I was done feeling shame for the way I navigate.

[CN: fatphobia] I tell her I have an idea. She loves my ideas, my schemes, our witchcraft. We talk about feeling crazy, because that’s what the culture does to women who really want something, anything...

I thought I’d make a list of regular things that become “radical” (in the culture’s eyes) when you’re doing them while also being fat.

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 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.

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