You Have the Right to Remain Fat

With dieting, everything depended on me accepting that I was the one to blame because I was fat. With dieting, I had to admit that there was nothing wrong or sick about a culture that taught me how to hate myself. With dieting, I had to believe that the trouble and the problem resided within me, not outside of me

I was trying to starve my way into freedom. I had been taught to believe that weight loss was the key to all my heart’s greatest desires, but the truth is that it wasn’t. Because you can’t find self-love by walking a path paved by self-hatred.

It didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with the idea that anyone—let alone an entire culture—would bully me into believing there was something fundamentally wrong with me and that I needed to change it. It never occurred to me that the standard of normal to which I was subscribing was violent, and always had been. I thought I could earn my way out of oppression, but I realize now that nothing is farther from the truth

The present holds your body in all the imperfection that makes it real

This inability to see yourself in the future is a product of believing there is no room for you in the culture that surrounds you. The future, it turns out, is a lot about the present.

In the dreams I have of my future, I am fat. This simple fact was hard won

On the date he asked me, “Wouldn’t your life be easier, though, if you were thin?”
The answer to this question is simple: no. My life wouldn’t be easier if I were thin.
My life would be easier if this culture wasn’t obsessed with oppressing me because I’m fat.

It was like those transformation teen movies, but rather than my body changing, something else happened. I realized after years of dieting that I had been trying to change the wrong thing. I didn’t need to change my body; I needed to change the way I felt about it.

Fat people are largely absent from meaningful portrayals of the future, similar to disabled people, trans people, and people of color.

As Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks have all pointed out, white femininity has historically played a colluding role in the maintenance of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, acting as a sort of wedge or intermediary third party that solidifies the power brokered between white men of influence and everyone else