THIS.

Through my experience I’ve gotten a lot of “but you’re tall” which always baffled me because with my warped perception of femininity and fat and years of feeling like a huge hugey lumbering monster I always felt that it was WORSE to be fat and tall, not better, as some seem to think and I was actually always jealous of the petite fats because to me it was at least more compact, less intimidating, and as a result, more feminine.

This reminds me of something I wrote a while ago and I think it’s something every FA/Body Acceptance advocate needs to examine, this assumption that everyone “KNOWS” what fat looks like and weighs like, and that of course, no one’s friend, lover, loved one, or family member is THAT fat.

I’ve hovered my entire adult life between 180 and 220. At my fattest I was 220 and a size 16. My friends refused to believe I was 220 lbs. I got a variety of combinations of “no, Swan, the scale was wrong, there’s no WAY” or “but you so didn’t look it” or “but you weren’t unhealthy”.

I suppose my frame does “carry it well”, after all, my proportions are large all over, heck, even my feet are big. And I tend to have a rather boxy, athletic, boyish frame that I think is often equated to thinness which also might be what people also mean by “carrying it well”. However, it’s as you said, fat is subjective and relative and a number of other things. Just like tall and short are subjective and “cute” and “ugly”. Heck, even haircolor is subjective. No one can seem to decide if I’m blonde or brunette.

But if we start preaching that people might actually start thinking that the myth of perfection is, you know, a myth.

The thing is: Fat is not a nice word. I don’t know why or since when, but it has a lot of negative connotations. So people like to use different words. Big, overweight, voluptuous, round, other words. Because fat has this negative feeling clinging to it. That doesn’t mean we don’t know that we’re fat. We just don’t like to call it that.

“Round is a shape” indeed & it is a very beautiful one. I believe that some cafepress shop has a t-shirt which says that. I just wish that we could all develop more confidence, self-love, & genuine self-acceptance, & understand how good & wonderful a thing it is that everyone is unique & irreplaceable, & see the beauty in all sizes & shapes, including our own. I really hate words like “obese” because it medicalizes & judges natural variations in bodies & maybe even more ‘overweight.’ Over WHOSE weight? What you weigh is what you weigh & how can you be over your own weight? Are some of us also ‘over-tall’ or ‘overshort’?

And, btw, I will be 60 in September & have been working on all this for about 30 years, so I am aware it doesn’t happen overnight &, in this insane culture which sends us all insane messages & sets unattainable standards, it is nothing short of miraculous that body love & acceptance happens at all for anyone.

Well, I’ve already lost a bit of weight after I began exercising. Part of being faster and having more endurance is simply having less mass to move around, so losing some jiggliness, to me, is automatically part of that. In general, strength training does not necessarily decrease weight, since building muscle will actually weight, but it would increase my daily activity, which I suppose would lead to me losing weight.

Of course, I’m still going to have some jiggliness afterward, and I’m perfectly fine with that. For the most part, I just want to condition my body so that I have better control over it and so I can do more with it. Losing weight, to me, is not the objective, but merely a welcome side-effect.