Sometimes I find fatshion blogs to be fun and inspirational.
And sometimes, well, not.
I often recommend that clients look at more body positive blogs, especially ones with images of fat people. It’s a way to recalibrate your brain so that fatter bodies seem more like what they are – normal.
(I’m not a big fan of the idea of normal, but often realizing that your body is normal rather than gross, weird, and abnormal is an important step in your body love journey.)
After practicing serious, radical body love for about 7 years now, I rarely see an image that makes me feel bad about my body. But loving your body is often like peeling an onion, and though I’ve peeled away nearly all of the layers of body hate, I noticed that there’s a little, annoying part of the onion left. Maybe it’s only 1% or less of that onion, but it’s there.
I realized that I have a weird issue with my body shape, and that fatshion blogs seem to exacerbate it every once in a while.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a sort of “upside down” triangle shaped body. My hips and waist are essentially the same size. This makes it really hard to keep my pants from falling down (seriously, this is no fun). When I wear tights or leggings, I have to tuck them under my bra in order to keep them on. When I try on pants, if the waist fits, there is literally a foot or more of material in the hips and thighs. The size that would make sense for my thighs is about 6 sizes smaller than the size I wear in tops. Most dresses that fit my top half have feet of extra material in the bottom half. I’ve tried getting my clothes tailored, but the cost ends up being exorbitant because I want to tailor pretty much everything.
My body has been like this forever, so I don’t think about it much and I’m used to working around it. But every once in a while it really gets to me.
I even tried to start my own fatshion blog, Fatshionable Apples, but I haven’t done much with it.
Fatshion blogs sometimes exacerbate my annoyance, because although the wonderful folks who run these blogs look way more like me than magazine models, they still don’t seem to have the challenges I have with clothes.
I don’t know what the answer to this is, but I thought I’d share it because I can’t be the only one!
Plus, I think it’s good to be transparent with you all. I love my body, don’t denigrate it, don’t hate it (anymore) but I still run into these little, uncomfortable parts of the onion (there’s that metaphor!) now and again.
Do you have similar body shape issues or issues with fatshion blogs? If so, let’s chat about it in the comments section below!
Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. To learn more about Golda and her work, click here.