Fatphobia

@annacr0ss on Instagram

After the recent news surfaced about Barbara Palvin “finally” becoming a Victoria’s Secret Angel, so did a lot of posts praising Barbara for being the first “plus-sized” Angel. Barbara Palvin is not plus sized. To be quite honest, the whole concept of “plus-sized” seems ridiculous to me, but that’s a whole other blog post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fatness recently, mainly because Oenone Forbat speaks about it frequently on her podcast, Adulting. Oenone usually talks about “fatphobia” and the way that, in society, fat and beauty are mutually exclusive. If you’re fat, you can’t be pretty and if you’re pretty you’re probably not fat. This, to me, is ridiculous. Being fat doesn’t mean anything more than carrying more fat on your body compared to other people. Maybe you have an under-active thyroid, maybe you’re on medication that causes weight gain, maybe you don’t have time to exercise or maybe… maybe you just really enjoy eating good food. Nobody asks thin people “why are you thin?” – being thin is the societal norm. But is it? According to the Daily Mail, the average dress size for women in the UK is a size 16.

Fatness is not something to be ashamed of. If you’re happy, healthy, successful and doing nothing to negatively affect others then why does your size matter? Don’t get me wrong, I know the feeling. I was overweight in my early teenage years and I hated myself. I hated myself so much that I ended up destroying my relationship with food for a very long time (I wrote about this on my friend’s blog, Talking Heads). Why did I hate myself? Well, it’s obvious: the media and most of our society view fat people as lesser than others, and they praise thin people. They praise thin people so much that eating disorders are glorified and blatantly underweight models are the next 14-year-old’s “thinspo”.

Now, I’m not saying that anybody should necessarily strive to become overweight (or underweight for that matter). You should be comfortable and confident in your own skin. To be honest, I did lose weight; but this was because I started training and instantly fell in love with it. Since then, I have found that the more negatively I think of my body, and the more I try to change something about my body, the less I enjoy working out. I work out because I love to work out, not because I want to lose weight.

This is another thing that really bothers me. Just because I am a woman who enjoys working out, a lot of people automatically assume that I want to lose weight. I do not. In fact, I really like my body and I’m grateful for all the things it allows me to do! My body is a product of my progress in the gym – gaining muscle (thus changing my body) is just a side effect of getting stronger. Yes, I like my body more now than I did when I was 14, but… so do most adults. Besides, this just feeds into the idea that we have been conditioned to always want to be smaller.

This was a pretty unplanned and quick post; I saw all the news about plus-sized Barbara Palvin and was struck with inspiration. I just want to say that being fat is okay!!!!! Don’t try to lose weight just because society has made you feel like less of a person for being a bigger person. Anyway, you’ll probably fail. If being fat is prohibiting you from doing something and losing weight will bring you closer to your goal, then by all means go for it! But make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. And finally, we need to remove the stigma from the word fat – it is not a nasty, offensive or taboo word, it’s literally just an adjective.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time…

Ella X