Hello all! I know this site made an automatic first post for me, but I figured I should make my own. It will set this up better.
I’m a BBW, which stands for Big Beautiful Woman, if you didn’t know. I’m also an artist, and have been doing work about size-acceptance for the past couple of years, thanks to the urging of my lovely BBW girlfriend. However, that was really the extent of my activism until now. I’ve been a fat girl all my life, and until the past few years, I’ve been wishing for something different. Well, not just different – thinner. I come from a family of dieters, specifically women dieters, always watching calories like hawks and hovering around scales, frightened that the numbers will keep going up. I grew up with that, and tried the dieting thing. It never took. The only time I lost weight was for a short period in my adolescence when I just stopped eating as much because I was clinically depressed and didn’t want to do anything, much less sustain my body. I wasn’t anorexic, but I wasn’t really eating, so the only way I was able to buy into and succeed in my culture’s obsession with thinness was to starve myself (though that does make it sound way more extreme than it was, I just don’t know any other way to put it). I gave up on that once I started getting help, but still internalized the hatred of my size.
Now, thanks to my amazing girlfriend who loves me for who I am, and years away from home where I could begin to think and learn for myself, my opinions have changed. I am fat, and happy to be so.
However, just being happy in my own self-contained bubble of a life is not enough. I look around me and see that no matter what I think of myself, I still live in a culture that equates fat with unhealthiness, pushes women and girls into eating disorders in order to achieve an unattainable body goal, and worships celebrities the thinner they get. This is a world where countries are starting to mandate the waistlines of their citizens by imposing monetary punishments on those “too fat,” where bills are being pushed to try and prevent restaurants from serving obese patrons. Word needs to be spread, and I need to speak up.
So basically, this blog exists as a place for my voice on this matter. I’ll be posting links to articles I find about body image, both negative and postive. I’ll post artwork and anything else that inspires me and stirs my BBW pride. I’ll share my own stories and experiences as a fat girl in the US. I will try to raise awareness.
And that about sums it up.
EDIT: I changed a bit of my passive-speak in the last full paragraph, at the rest of Lady Prophet ^^; She had a good point about my belief in myself. So, much thanks to her!
