Virgie Tovar

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.

I think a lot of us are probably walking around with mild PTSD, anxiously calculating risk and making plans about what and who to avoid.... Even though I’m no longer technically walking the halls of junior high, I am living in a fitness-obsessed city that doesn’t feel as safe as it ought to considering almost everyone is over age 13.

Health is the banner we have raised in defense of weight loss surgery, The Biggest Loser, putting children on diets, shaming our friends and family members, fat jokes, weight-based workplace discrimination, and heavily processed low-calorie meals with no nutritional value.

The wound of codependency leaves a haunting question in its wake: Do I actually matter? Diet culture’s answer to fat people is: no.

My jaw clenches in judgmental discomfort whenever I think of any event with "BBW" in the title. To me, the term "BBW" is coded. When I hear that word, my eyes begin a preemptive roll as the keywords "heteronormativity," "hookup," "gendered labor," "mansplaining," and "ugh" scroll past the neon pink kiosk in my brain.

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

This week I went to a networking event and had feelings about it. This is the story of those feelings. 

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.

By the time you read this, Babecamp Jamaica will be over. My 57 mosquito bites will have just stopped itching.

What I’ve noticed, as a fat feminist, is that self-identifying as a feminist or an activist bears a different social cost depending on your body size.