fat

Your body shows up for you everyday. Why do you want to mold it and change it and tell it it’s ugly or fat or saggy or substandard. Why do you hate your stretchmarks? Why is your belly, deflated after childbirth, the object of such loathing? Why are the breasts that fed your kids not enough for you how they are?

I already feel super visible because I’m a fat woman wearing neon most likely, which I’ll admit I’m kinda into. But add a dude to the equation and all of a sudden I feel like people’s eyeballs are a moon orbiting the planet on which our initial fumbling exchanges are taking place. High pressure.

It’s a hard body to live in at times. But I live here. I wake up here and I go to sleep here. I go on vacation here and I wear a bikini here. I walk the streets here. I turn heads — and not in the way that people want to turn heads. I haul my fat ass up on my beach cruiser here. I take the criticism, the emails, the comments, and whatever other unpleasantries come with living in this body.

Here’s something that isn’t rocket science either, Stephen Hawking: Diets don’t work.

In the face of funding shortages, Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has decided that patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above, as well as smokers, will be barred from most surgery for up to a year. But don’t fool yourself, this isn’t about health, or healthy behaviors – this is about money, and it’s about the people in charge deciding whose blatant oppression the general citizenry will tolerate. Years of campaigns suggesting that it’s fine for people to stereotype fat people and blame us for their problems have led to a situation where people are comfortable with us being denied the same medical care that they receive. And that should horrify you.

Read Part 1 here.

I’m mostly really ok, even when my body feels like a sack of skin. If you’re wondering how you can live in your skin-sack peacefully, here are five ways:

I do conference calls from wherever I am at the moment. I answer work emails on the train, while I’m waiting in line for tacos, and (for better or worse) when there is a lull or awkward moment at a party.