My Body is Freakin Awesome. Fact.

I used to think that if I was thin I’d be happy. The odd truth about this is that I was thin. I look back at pictures from high school, and my early 20s when I hovered around a size 8 and I can’t believe I didn’t see what I really looked like. I mention this for a few reasons. It reminds me that when I had made my mind up that my body wasn’t good enough, thin would never have been thin enough. It also reminds me that being thin is like having money, if you truly get obsessed with it, enough is never enough; and if you aren’t happy without it, you will never be happy with it.

This is me in 2003, looking pretty thin and feeling fat because my weight was still 10 lbs over a "healthy" BMI.

Please don’t misunderstand what this is about… I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who run marathons, lift weights, love exercise or live the life they love in whatever way they see fit and find fulfilling. What I am saying is that hating myself for being less than perfect was a disease that was eating me alive, and I have to do something about that.

I’ve struggled with social anxiety and gone through periods of mild depression. Do you know what the common thread was, whenever I was feeling like my breath was nowhere to be found and my heart was beating just a little too fast, making my ears pulse and my skin tingle, until I could barely stand to be around people? It was always in periods of time when my weight was going up, and I was losing “control” of all the disgusting fat that was enveloping me. I didn’t want people to look at me and think that thing that we’ve all thought on occasion – that it was too bad I’d put on so much weight. How much prettier I’d been before. So I made up for my so-called shortcomings by acknowledging them, by telling people about my plan to fix them. As if by telling you about my plan to try weight watchers, or buy an elliptical, I was acknowledging that I was broken, but had a plan to fix it.

Well, now I do have a plan to fix it… by completely changing the way I look at the problem. By realizing that I didn’t even know what the problem was. By changing the questions, and statements in my head. I’m not broken. At least not in the way I thought I was – my body is not broken. But my mind certainly was. My mind has been fed poison for decades, and it rotted my ability to see myself.

The quote above is a bit problematic for me, because being fat is not only not worse than those things, it has nothing to do with being boring, cruel, vindictive, or any of those other adjectives. But the point is that the way we obsess about not being fat, the emphasis we put on not associating ourselves with it, implies that as a society we do think of it as the worst thing a person could be. You don’t see Cosmo publishing a lot of articles about how to better your soul by being a kinder, more compassionate person.

Here’s a new question: What is wrong with being fat?

If your answer is health, then I want you to ask yourself a question: Does the girl I described above sound healthy to you? The thin girl who could only see a fat, unworthy girl in the mirror because her body wasn’t Kate Moss skinny – does she sound ok? She wasn’t ok.

She wasn’t ok, but I am going to be. So how do you go about changing your mind about something you’ve believed most of your life? You change the story. You listen to the voices that are speaking your truth – you seek them out, even though they are quieter than all the others. You cheer on women like Gabourey Sidibe when they refuse to be put down – because they are fighting your battle alongside you, and they need you as much as you need them.

I love fashion, and I always felt like I couldn’t really participate in it if I wasn’t skinny – like I didn’t really have the right to wear certain things. A friend introduced me to the blog GabieFresh. I love Gabie because she dares to wear whatever she wants. She has even designed a line of plus size bikinis! If she can’t inspire you to be brave in your fashion choices, well keep looking I guess…

One of my main sources of fashion inspiration is pinterest, and at first glance it seems like every fashion pin is on a tiny little body… and yes, many of them are, but if you start looking – which I have – there is fashion inspiration to be found above a size 8.

Ever read that old trick that says you should pin pictures to your fridge, or the inside of your closet door that “inspire” you to envision yourself with your perfect body? Well I’m doing that. I’m collecting pictures that depict beautiful bodies.

I can’t make the naysayers disappear, or the world change its mind. Cosmo will always publish articles about how to get a beach body in 2 weeks, pinterest will always be filled with thinspiration memes, and someone will always think I looked prettier ten pounds ago. But I can stop reading bikini body articles. I can unfollow that friend’s board that is filled with quotes about how I’d be a better person with perfect abs which I could have if I would just stop being a lazy, good for nothing slob. I can recognize that what the world thinks of me is none of my business, and is irrelevant to my happiness.