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Interviewer: So what was it like for you to be part of something so positive?

Asia Hall: It was actually an amazing experience. Oh my god, I never thought it was going to be like what it was. You’re in a room with, literally, there are probably maybe 300 girls there, and they’re all varying in sizes. Some of them were much bigger than me, some of them were much smaller than me, but all of them were having the same - they were all the same - you’re like “We all think the same!” And it was just great to sit there and hear them all talk and they were like “How’s my butt look in this?” and girls would be like “I wish my thighs were bigger!” (laughs) But they were all so positive about themselves. Girls came in with like, little tank tops on. One girl actually stripped off and had this bikini on and was like “I’m totally going to wow the judges!” And I’m like “That’s AWESOME!!!” They were just so happy about who they are and their bodies and they were just so excited about themselves.

You have this collective feeling of “We are DAMN proud of our bodies and all of our lovely bulges!” It was just so great to hear them talk so happy about themselves. They were just so proud of everything that they had on their body that you were just like..oh..You can’t help but, y’know, you’re just in that for so long, you can’t help but be like “Oh my god, these women are so beautiful. There are so many beautiful women here.” I never knew there were that many beautiful women like that out there. You know, each one’s prettier than the next. It was such an uplifting experience to be a part of, you’re just like “wowww.”

But you also get this idea that there is such a difference in the way taht certain cultures see beauty. Because I went to the one in Atlanta, and I would say that probably 80% of it was a lot of black women there, and they were SO body-positive. They just loved themselves and I was like, “Please, can I grow up in your family!?!” (laughs) ‘Cuz they were just so happy with who they were, and I was just sitting there being this miserable girl, and I was like “yeah…I’m tryin’ to look all cute.” And it’s like, no wonder these women are so beautiful. Look at how they shine from the inside! Look at how happy they are with themselves! You can’t help but look at that and think, god you have confidence, you’ve gotta be gorgeous. You just see all that and see the way different people look and you think “God, I just missed out. I Missed. Out.”

Interviewer: So did you take that with you? The positivity?

Asia Hall: Yeah, I did. I did. Because you think that fat is a bad thing for so long, and then you get in this room where women are wanting parts of their bodies to be BIGGER, and you’re just like “Maybe it’s not so bad after all.” I mean, you still think, god these people are a little crazy. But then you’re like, you get this idea that it’s OK, that it’s such an OK thing. And you also get the idea that being in the room with so many different sizes, and seeing how each girl dressed herself, how each girl presented herself, and to see so many different attitudes. I took that with me, being like, we’re all so different, but each one presented themselves so beautifully it’s like, you can take one cake, but you can frost it 800 different ways. And that’s kind of what it felt like, it’s like, I’m not doing something wrong just because I look different from this girl over here. We may both be the same size, but just because we dress differently doesn’t mean that she’s pretty and I’m not. Because every girl there was so pretty and they all dressed differently. So I felt like, OK, I can take this with me, and be like “yes, we’re diverse. It’s just different ways to frost our cakes.”

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Asia Hall can be contacted via FaceBook

It’s been a journey for me to get here, and a non-linear one at that. When I was a young fat teenager, desperately trying to escape my own self-hatred, I stumbled upon the Fat!So? online zine. I gazed in awe at pictures of fat bodies, and read treatises on the virtues of self-acceptance. In those days of high school peer-group torture and suggestions of diets from well-meaning parents, this girl was not yet ready to really believe those things she read, covertly as if they had been taboo erotica, late at night when she knew nobody would disturb her.

Fast-forward to university, a place I had hoped would be a haven from the pain and stupidity of high school. When I arrived at university, I was at first dismayed; the same tired old cliques seemed still to be in operation. The girls on my floor in residence were fickle, catty and cruel. The university’s general attitude towards fat was the typical prejudiced B.S. that I’d been internalizing and turning into self-loathing for pretty much my whole life. One residence even had posters up in women’s bathroom stalls advising the girls not to drink too much liquor, since it contained extra calories. Seriously.

It was different in the classroom. In second semester I took my first women’s studies class, and something began to take root in my consciousness. I heard for the first time that “fat is a feminist issue”, and took it to heart. I began to realize how unfair it was that society at large upheld one (unrealistic and often artificially-maintained) image of acceptable womanhood. I also began to see how this related to patriarchy, and the systems which function in a patriarchal society to keep women at odds with each other, passive and weakened by fear and self-loathing. I realized that I had been programmed to believe in standards of beauty that were fraudulent, non-inclusive and at odds with the true range on human vibrancy and physical variation, and that as a result I had damaged myself through self-hatred and poor treatment of my body.

Later in my degree I began to read feminist blogs, and from there discovered size acceptance blogs. I read about the hype surrounding the ‘obesity crisis’, the long-standing truth of the dominance of genetics over personal habits that the media seems to ignore, and discovered the golden beacon of hope that is Health at Every Size. I framed a picture of the fat and fabulous Beth Ditto in a gold frame and hung it in my living room. I stood up to my parents about my size and my personal health.

In the midst of all these monumental changes in the way that I saw myself, I realized that a great anger had been building in me. I can trace that anger back to that girl, 12 years old, a chubby child who did not understand why clothing at ‘normal’ stores didn’t fit her. Who couldn’t talk about her body image issues except in moments of the deepest despair. Who threw on baggy boy’s clothes not because they suited her or made her feel confident, but because she was desperately trying to hide her fat body. Who was shocked when her first three boyfriends found her attractive, and felt betrayed when they told her she was beautiful. All that anger found an outlet in size acceptance, once I realized why I was angry.

I am angry for every fat person who has limited their lives because they believed they were out of a range of physical acceptability. I am angry for every fat person who has stayed in a damaging relationship because they believed that they deserved no better. I am angry for every fat person who is afraid to dance or go on a bike ride or do yoga for fear of ridicule and exclusion. I am angry for every fat person who looks in the mirror and internalizes a bit more self-hatred every day. I am just so damn angry.

I know one day I will have to face my anger, because rage can only take one so far before it either burns out or morphs into something sinister. I know that a more productive exercise would be transforming my anger into compassion for people who face similar difficulties as me, and speaking eloquently and persuasively about the importance of HAES and self-love. I’ve been doing better with these things, though I know I still have a ways to go.

I’m still angry, yes. But I’m getting there.

–

Emiliy can be contacted here.

—

Chrissy can be found here.

Something my partner said unwittingly (and unintentionally) last week really triggered me. I’m nearly always only a hair’s breath away from an emotional crisis around my fitness level these days, so it doesn’t take much to push me over. Another friend said something, as well, today that hit me the wrong way.

And by ‘the wrong way’, I mean, it seconded, (well, I guess thirded,) the things I too-often whisper to myself beneath my breath. And it set me to thinking.

I realized that, while yes, it’s good for me as someone who is often over-extended/multi-tasking to the extreme, to ‘pick my battles’, as it were, in terms of the places I allocate my energy — I am too often surrendering the fights that incorporate moving my body in even the most elementary of ways. I wave the white flag on the battles that impact only me; housework, cooking, self-care. To enable this, I’ve incorporated help by hiring friends who are trying to make an independent living by cleaning houses, or enlisting the help of friends/roommates for larger projects, and I buy most of my meals pre-packaged at Trader Joe’s or do fast food/restaurant dining far more frequently than I’d like.

In the moment, it seems logical;

“Well, I could scrub the bathtub, or I could spend that time updating this website, or making calls about a this event, or doing some research, or sending out this email, or writing this press release, blah blah blah.”

It always seems like a reasonable choice to do the activist thing. There’s always so much to do, or that I could be doing. At the end of any day, there still remains a list past an arm’s-length of things i’ve yet to do. That’ll remain true for the duration, I’m sure. In a single moment, it’s a reasonable choice. In a steady stream of moments, it is a rabbit hole.

For the last year, my house has been in shambles, really. It’s been halfway-done, construction-wise. Every single room was affected because every window in the house was replaced. For this reason, the place has felt chaotic — no room restful. Even “clean” the place felt disheveled. I’ve never let the house get “dirty”, and it’s even been downright presentable at times, but i’ve let the clutter stack up these last few months. I’ve been showering in tyvek tape for 6 months, there was a big hole in my dining room wall, there was bare drywall in my living room, I could see daylight through the uncaulked holes in my window frames - why bother trying to get organized when even at its best my house looked like a construction site?

But now it’s done (for the most part) and as I walked past the over-full garbage can for the 3rd time today thinking “I should take that out.” I wondered, how many more times am I going to say that to myself before I actually DO it? Such a little thing - taking out the trash, and yet it feels like a big deal. Taking out the multiple bags of recycling feels insurmountable. I had to have a big conversation with myself to grab the bag and take it outside, and I still haven’t bothered to find a plastic bag to re-line the can with.

Wtf happened to me?

I have created some really bad habits for myself. I was never Susie Homemaker — but this is ridiculous. I have taken whatever self-sufficiency I had on a personal/household level, and delegated it out to the point where I feel downright helpless; where I feel infantilized by my own hand.

The same is true for my fitness level. My lifestyle is increasingly sedentary.

Today, for an hour and a half, a friend and I worked in the yard to set up the inflatable pool. It involved hauling the heavy thing and its tarp out from behind the shed, emptying it of collected muck and rainwater, spraying it down/emptying it of water, and then spreading it out, freeing it of wrinkles and filling it. It’s not exactly easy work, but i felt my weakness/lack of stamina as we did it. I also felt the novelty of using my body in that way. That it felt like a novelty was endlessly bothersome to me. I also got a sunburn near-instantaneously. Also bothersome. I realize that we were working in the most direct sun and in the hottest part of the day, but is my skin so fragile from lack of exposure that a single hour in it would burn me?

I find myself in wonderment at people who are able to motivate themselves to simple tasks like gardening and cleaning their house and grocery shopping on a regular and consistent basis. I have nearly completely divorced myself from my skin. I feel as if I’ve almost completely moved out of my own body. I don’t wish to challenge myself. It’s like, I’ve broken so many promises to myself that I don’t even believe me anymore, so it seems somewhere along the way I stopped trying to even pretend like I was a capable individual.

This is and always has been a huge part of my fat experience — this disconnect between my hyperactive mind and my nearly ignored flesh. My body has been a shameful reminder of my failings, and so for the most part, I have ignored it as a tool for my survival. It has been under-used, abused and all but abandoned.

I am going to try to sit outside of a place of judgment in this. I’m going to try to come at this from a place of self-realization vs. kicking myself in the ass.

This week, my emotional reactions to the things people have said to me, and my over-sensitivity as its played out in several different realms, tells me that I am definitely in a place that is not working for me.

So, my solution then, is to challenge myself for 20 minutes every day.
I don’t care what it is. Taking out the trash. Doing dishes. Scrubbing my toilet. Going to the store. Dicing vegetables. Going for a walk. Sorting papers. Organizing a room. Picking up clutter. Pulling a few weeds. Cleaning out my car. Whatever. Something that involves movement. Something that involves the kind of self-care that I seem to consistently avoid.

For a while, the challenging myself may simply be working up the nerve to challenge myself.
But I’m going to set aside 20 minutes every day where I discuss this with myself and will myself to tear down the roadblocks I’ve set for me and my body. Someday i will figure out what the root of this problem is. But until then, I’ll challenge myself to move past it.

No drill sergeant - just gentle conversation with the aim of understanding. Forceful but loving mothering.

Self-love is a complex and loaded endeavor. The biggest journey in my own Fat Experience will be learning how to re-inhabit my skin, and how to do so lovingly.

—
Stacy Bias can be contacted Here.

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Abby can be contacted here.

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I definitely am comfortable with the word fat. I mean, it’s part of the language that my community uses. And I like the words like curvy. I like the words are attractive, like Zaftig. But I don’t like them in the sense that…when they’re used as euphemisms to NOT use the word fat. So now that I use the word fat, then it’s like then every other word is also available because I’m not using them just to kind of, like, NOT use the word fat.

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Deb Malkin can be contacted at ReDressNYC.Com

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My mom and dad were both big. My dad was about 6′4″, 350lbs, maybe even more than that, I don’t know. He was a very stocky guy, very Burly — his arms were just MASSIVE, his forearms. And he had a belly on him, but he had skinny legs and he was just massive, he was a massive dude. And fat, yeah, but man — did he pull it off. He had a lot of charisma. He was a con artist. And it just never seemed to hold him back. He was “DAD”. Mom was fat. Mom was maybe 240/250, 5′5″ or 5′6″ - I’m not sure exactly. Very docile, very submissive. She did all the cooking. She also did most of the working, job-wise.

And I remember the hierarchy of the family, and how it played out in terms of how much food you got at dinner. We never filled our own plates. Mom did that. We’d set up the TV trays in front of the TV and she would bring us our dinners. And dad would get the most, by a significant amount - he’d have just a mountain of food on his plate. And Mom and I would usually get about the same portion, but I always wanted more.

I don’t know what that was about; wanting more. I was a kid, but I could sure put it away. I would go into the kitchen afterwards because it was always my job to do the dishes and clean up after and I would eat whatever was left on the plates. I remember one time I was - my timeline is so off, I don’t really remember ages or dates or places. But I do remember being in the kitchen, and we’d had steak that night, and there was a piece of steak left on the plate; a little strip of steak, and I tried to eat it very quickly and I started choking. And I didn’t call for help. I was CHOKING, I couldn’t breathe, I was TERRIFIED. But I was so ashamed that I had snuck something that I didn’t call for help.

I don’t know how I dislodged it. I don’t remember. I mean, I remember being ashamed, but I don’t remember how I saved my own life. The shame was a more powerful thing in that moment than living.

–
Stacy Bias can be contacted at StacyBias.net

In sixth grade, we had our ‘class physical’, where everyone goes to the gym, takes off their shoes, gets their height and weight recorded, an eye exam. Afterwards I was standing around with some girls are on the playground, waiting for the rest of the class to finish and one tall girl says, “You really weigh 160? I weigh 92 lbs.” All of the other girls chime in with their respective weights (78, 85, 95), and I am leered at through side glances. It is clear I’m not like them, that I am fat.

I wasn’t just fat to them, I was gross. Clothing just didn’t fit me, so I wore sweatpants and sweaters with decals on them, legging pants and baggy t-shirts. I longed for pretty, cute clothes that I approved of. When I found an adult size that I liked, it virtually never fit me right, especially in the boobs. At 12 years old, I thought I was supposed to have a rack that would compete with Dolly Parton simply because everything that fit me was intended for an adult woman. So I was a round, lumpy, flat fat kid with frizzy hair and zits. Man, 7th grade was a huge bummer.

I wasn’t even the only person like me. There were other fat kids. Some of them were even popular. There was a girl named Heather who was not only heavier than me, she was taller than all of the other girls so she towered above everyone and really stuck out. Still, she was best friend’s with the popular girls, she managed to find (and afford) cute clothes and always had her hair and makeup done. If I had worn makeup to school, or done my hair in anything other than a pony tail, it would become the subject of a joke among my classmates. When I got my ears pierced in 7th grade, my whole class noticed and quickly decided I had done it so that a certain boy would like me. I didn’t even realize, then, that it was the boy that was getting made fun of in specific, not me. My very presence was being used to tease other people.

I didn’t respond to it very well, either. I was a pretty vocal kid, and when I was teased I generally had abuse to feed back. To this day when a car drives by and the passenger leans their head out and calls me a fat whore, I’ll stand in the middle of the street and respond letting them know what a worthless pile of steaming poo they are at the top of my lungs.

It was a nasty combination, being fat and being on the defensive all of the time. Whenever a kind word was offered, I usually sneered at them, discounting the offering peer, turning them against me with this learned behavioral response. I desperately wanted friends to talk to, kids to walk with at lunch, partners in gym class, friends to chat with on the bus. I didn’t want to be friends with any of them, though, because they were all horrible, and by being around them, they had made me horrible, too. I felt like trying to be friends with people who had been so mean to me would be like giving up, or worse, admitting that what they said was true.

In ninth grade, I made the decision to leave. I wanted a fresh start, in a new school with new people in a different place. My mother let me move 3,600 miles away to stay with my grandmother for 10th grade. It was pretty amazing. I went from a school with a graduating class of 78 to a school who’s pep rallies routinely had more than 4000 students. I disappeared. I was completely unimportant to anyone who might think to be nasty to me, and no one felt the need to point out my flaws. In turn, I didn’t have a need to be defensive- none of these people had proven themselves to be horrible.

I stayed fat, in fact continuing to gain weight. In 10th grade, I weighed 240 lbs, and no one seemed to care. I made friends. I went out. I had people to chill with on lunch and I had friends in every class to sit with. There were so many people around me that it wasn’t hard to find the ones that were like me. Different enough to try to fly under the radar. I watched my friends live right front and center, being gay, being fat, being just plain funny looking and even having a gimp arm. They were all cool, and none of them gave a shit. I learned to stop giving a shit, too.

This change in perception is probably what saved me. I never looked back at those horrible people from my middle school. Some people say that school is hard, and I say it can be nearly impossible for someone who is different. I think the biggest problem is that we are all different, so different that we are scared to be honest, so we pretend we are someone that we aren’t. Sometimes we even change into that person, eventually.

I am still fat. I still eat healthy and I’m still fat. It might reflect on who I am as a person, but I think it had a lot more to do with genetics than America’s obsession with dieting. I’m cool with being fat, don’t mind if someone calls me fat, like most of the clothes available for fat people. Just don’t tell me that I don’t have a right to be fat, or I’ll tell you just what I think of you.

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Melody Rossiter can be contacted at OuterUnderthings.Com

I learned I was fat in sixth grade. This was the beginning of junior high, at a school where I knew no one, having just moved into the area. I did not make friends quickly at this school, but I eventually got to know a boy in my math class who seemed nice. I thought he liked me, so when the Sadie Hawkins dance came around, I asked him. When I asked him why he turned me down, he told me it was because I looked like “the dancing elephants from Fantasia.” The asshole didn’t even know they were hippos, not elephants. The boys began to tease me. The girls simply ostracized me.

During the summer following seventh grade, I decided people would like me if I were thin. I refused to eat anything my mother cooked. She and my father were both fat too. I refused to eat anything with even a bit of fat in it. I became anorexic. When I returned to school, the boys who used to tease me were now competing for my attention. The girls got mean. Instead of ignoring me completely, they began spreading rumors that I was a “slut” and a “whore.” I had never even kissed a boy. I had never even been to a school dance.

In high school, I continued skipping meals and took up smoking. I discovered mini-thins and took them every day. What started out as 6 became 20 by the time I was 18. At that point, I added crystal meth to my regimen. I became a drummer for a male band. I was thin and “hot” and could get any guy I wanted. I felt beautiful for the first time in my life, not realizing that the attention was negative, that my physical attractiveness was all that these people cared about. I have a 150 IQ. I am in MENSA. I paint, I write. But I was just a decoration on a stage, made slightly more interesting by the fact that I excelled at a traditionally male skill – playing the drums. I can’t count the times I heard “Wow! You’re so good for a girl!”

At 21, I overdosed. Could have been the mini-thins, could have been the meth, or the exorbitant amounts of alcohol I’d added to the mix by then. I remember feeling like I was floating away. I saw only blackness, but I heard my friends arguing about to taking me to a hospital. No one wanted to get in trouble. They left me.

I left my friends, I stayed in my bedroom, and I suffered through overcoming my meth addiction. I self-medicated with alcohol. I was now having panic attacks regularly. I gained 85 pounds. My entire identity as “the hot girl,” the identity I had worked so hard for, was gone. I weighed 230 pounds. I was a size 20. I felt as though my life was over.

I made new friends, once again taking up my mantle as the Funny Fat Girl. I had crushes on boys who did not reciprocate. I was desperate to lose the weight. The only way I knew how was by starving. So that’s what I did. When I would “mess up” by eating more than 1,000 calories a day, I would make myself throw up. I got down to 180 pounds.

I met my husband 5 years ago. He tells me over and over that I am beautiful, that he loves me that I cannot expect to get back to a weight that I reached as a teenager on drugs, that I am being ridiculous. He is right. But still I starve, binge, purge, and feel like a worthless pile of fat. I weigh myself every morning, every evening, after every shower.

I am a good person, a smart person, a good friend, a loving wife, and damn good dog momma. I am an artist, a teacher, and a volunteer. I have two college degrees, a husband who loves me, and friends who respect me. I appear successful. But I feel like a failure because I can’t fit into those jeans.

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Agnes Day is a writer, a voracious reader, a music lover, a wife, and a dog momma. Feel free to contact her (especially if you’d like to pay her to write) here.

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Passions and Interests…Wow, that is an open-ended question, isn’t it? I’m passionate about people, like, my friends, my family, myself — like, life lessons. I’m really passionate about learning. Not necessarily academic learning, but spiritual learning; self-betterment. Music, art, the Internet (I’m such a geek.) Comfort. Making a more comfortable world, like, comfortable for me — in nesting in my home, or comfortable in the world. I feel like without comfort, people can’t be…it’s like Maslow’s Pyramid. The levels of need, of basic need — the basic needs are security, food, shelter, love…and I think that a lot of people are missing that basic thing, which means that nobody can advance because you’re just too busy surviving. So, comfort is definitely a big passion of mine. And activism. Making the world, at least my little corner of it, as much improved as I can.

interviewer: I haven’t heard you talk about comfort before. That’s interesting. What is the relationship between comfort and your fat activism?

Stacy Bias: Well, I feel like there’s a basic level of comfort in our skins that we are not allowed to have, or that we have been taught not to have. Our bodies are tools, right? They’re tools for pleasure, they’re tools for function, they’re tools for…anything we need to do in the world, we do in the company of our bodies. And if we have been taught to disconnect from that, if we’ve been taught to be so uncomfortable about the things that we experience aesthetically about our bodies, or even in terms of mobility - then we lose out on significant experiences. Either we do them, but we’re kind of checked out while we do them, so we’re not present for them, or we just miss doing them at all. So I feel like comfort is a huge — it’s absolutely the root, I feel, of this kind of deprivation model that I’ve seen in all the interviews. I feel like discomfort comes — it’s hard to explain;

When people have talked about eating, they’ve been talking about comfort. When people talk about sneaking off and those kind of moments of zen that they get, you know, just being blank, or just consumed by flavor, or whatever, I feel like comfort is what that’s about. And that means that it’s missing.

Interviewer: How does that work with people finding that, and then not feeling comfortable in their bodies?

Stacy Bias: Well, it’s kind of a catch-22. You’re missing that kind of basic level of comfort and security, safety, love, whatever it is that’s kind of pulling at your rickety foundation. And this obviously is not true of everybody who is fat - I’m just talking about the people who have a common experience to mine; So you go out and you do this comfort-seeking in the form of eating and while it’s actually a truly loving thing for a child who doesn’t necessarily have tools at his or her disposal to create that sort of higher level of comfort for themselves, like, they don’t really have the autonomous control as a child to say “Hey, you’re not making me feel secure, Mom. You’re not making me feel secure, Dad.” Who has the words for that, or even the understanding of that as a kid, so the accessible things become that; TV, friends, food, whatever. We seek comfort. And then there’s the shame that follows immediately, because you’ve done something wrong, because you’re sick to your stomach. Because you weren’t, even though you were, it felt like you weren’t in control in that moment. You weren’t strong enough to stop it, you knew the consequences in that you would be fatter, or you would be sick or whatever - and so it becomes this kind of spiral of self-loathing that leads to more and more acting out, and more comfort-seeking because you’re just furthering that lack of comfort for yourself, and it’s a vicious cycle that is un-fulfilling.

I keep coming back to the fact that, as children, it’s actually a truly loving thing to do for yourself; to provide for yourself. I mean, you’re caring for yourself in that way. ::pause for emotional overwhelm:: But you know, as adults, we grow and we have more autonomous control over our lives, and that habit doesn’t necessarily serve anymore. But it’s really hard to un-do and there’s a lifetime of shame behind that behavior. You’re ashamed of yourself for doing it, other people are ashamed of you based on the proof of having done so, unless you’re bulimic or anorexic, and then you get shamed for a whole other reason — and it’s this incredible circle of shame and self-loathing that’s just simply rooted in wanting to be comforted. It’s such a natural, basic thing, but so frequently missing.