Virgie Tovar

I arrive at the airport and I see the chubby, bespectacled face of my friend, Andrea. This was the beginning of my adventure with Chile's fat mafia!

There is not a single path to self-love, and so you must become an engineer of that process. We have to feel lots of uncomfortable things.

I thoroughly appreciate that there is a primary focus on self-love, but I also feel the painfully deep silence around the healing power of loving — and dating and sleeping with — other fat people.

I saw my boobs as a way to get me into the secret world of feminine desirability, so I played them like they were my winning hand. I created an entire story about my sexuality that centered my breasts because they felt like the only normal — or maybe extraordinary — thing about my body. I think I hoped that I could use them to get some precious ween (obvi), but also to get MORE.

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.

It's okay to hate Thanksgiving. After years of gritting my teeth I finally gave myself permission to choose what I wanted to do.

My favorite thing about this trip was that I spent my time in Vienna with fat feminists by my side every single day.... Occasionally, our bellies bumped into one another and then rebounded for just a second, like balloons. The familiar physics of fatness multiplied by two or three. I felt like we spoke in shorthand, the language of shared experience.

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

Fat girls have less latitude in every arena – clothing is no exception with high school dress codes. Fat women’s bodies are constructed as “outlaw” bodies.

I find that clarity is the key to getting the exact heterosexual intercourse you want. Part of this involves taking the gloves off around discussions of my body. So, I said it in the ad:
“I weigh 250 pounds.”