Virgie Tovar

I don’t drink much, and embarrassingly I don’t even know how to smoke, but I do have a tendency to use experiences the way addicts use substances, because I learned addictive behavioral frameworks growing up.

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.

Truthfully, I really want to be able to walk into every new interaction with the hope — the expectation — that everyone knows how to treat everyone else with full humanity. But the culture’s gonna have to do a lot better before I emotionally disarm. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to expect pursed lips and side eye from me.

Even children experience fatphobia. Children deserve to be treated with care and responsibility, free from the stigma we grew up knowing.

I got tired of waking up and being terrified for my health and so I decided to do what I’d been taught to do in moments of distress: craft.

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.

Solidarity strategies are possible. They happen all the time — though often less frequently in the realm of romance, unfortunately.

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

I finally left Goodwill with about 15 pieces and the sense that I had a new friend who donated her wardrobe. Fat intimacy and solidarity!

Fat liberation and fat people’s full humanity and our right to a life free from discrimination — not our health status.