By the way, even if you’re like me–a big and not terribly limber gal–you can lift weights, too, without ever touching one of those ugly little barbells. Those of us who have had any exposure to Tai Ch’i know that lifting any part of your body can be just as much work as lifting a barbell. One of the toughest yoga exercises I know of consists of lying flat on your back, raising in turn each of your limbs and your head a mere inch off the floor, and holding it as long as you’re able. Strength training can be simply a matter of how you move: what muscles you use, where the effort is placed, what parts of your body you relax, and how slowly you go Sitting in a chair and pushing your feet against the floor or lifting an arm or leg can be a strength-training exercise. Everyone who has a body of any kind at all has a full set of gym equipment. After all, it ain’t what you got; it’s how you use it.

I really, really hate the way that clothing shops fold or tie clothing to make it as small as possible. It’s hard enough when I can’t tell what size it is due to non-standardised labels, I also have to untie items or remove them from their hangers altogether to see how big they really are against me. That has to be a vanity thing, too… picking up a top in “your size” and holding it up and it looks so small and slim!

Oh, and the sizing thing that seems to go on at the moment where “larger size” means “wider but exactly to scale” and gives no thought to, for example, larger/deeper breast cleavage or a longer arse, meaning that it fits fine width-wise but either your chest is cut in half or your buttocks bulge out of the top.

Incidentally, my cousin is a stylist and once worked on a fashion shoot where one of the samples supplied didn’t even fit the slenderest model they had; they wound up shooting it on a 9 year-old. Real woman? Discuss.

I think that fat in terms of definition is not simple. Fat is used to describe people that are simply not thin or slim. They have returned fire, they do often do it differently to what a lot of us would, they experience body issues differently to us and have not been subject to the same mindwarp to us, so don’t tend to notice how crass real women sounds. It’s something I’ve never had any time for, it is irrelevant to me, but it is obviously an attempt to raise ones self esteem when one is being told that your inferior, so your response is likely be, no people like you are inferior and so on, not very high toned but then none of this body hate stuff is.
Yes some fat women go along with this, you can’t blame them for snatching at being able to defend themselves for once instead of feeling undone all the time by the constant barrage of insults.

We are all a bit ignorant of experience that is not our own and we fatties have some misunderstandings about slim people no doubt, a lot of it comes out of their own mouths. A lot of them grab hold of this superiority with both hands and attempt to fashion their narrative in these terms, not knowing what it’s like to be slim in my adult life, it’s sometimes hard to tell the truth from a carry on.

I hope I don’t sound like I think I’m blameless I can think of many mistakes made.

Oh hang on no, today I’m wearing the M&S UK size 22 ones which are almost exactly the same fit. This is about as big as any “regular” store goes at the moment, and a lot bigger than they did 10 years ago when you were lucky to get an 18. I know, cos at that point I was an 18 :-)

But yes, in general I’ve been led to consider my US size to be 1-2 sizes smaller than my UK size – depending on manufacturer.

I get completely muddled by the US misses/junior/W sizing though. It used to be the case that you didn’t get it so much here because you wouldn’t get the same store doing a separate plus range, but looking at M&S’s webpage recently the 20 in the plus range had different waist and hip measurements to the 20 in the normal range.

As has been mentioned, using “curvy” or “real” to mean fat is a bad idea. Not only are they linguistically inaccurate, but calling fat women “real” is insulting as well. There are curvy thin and curvy fat people, as well as thin and fat people who aren’t curvy.

I also thnk it’s a bad idea to act as though all thin people (which usually means all thin women, since just because you believe in size acceptance doesn’t mean you haven’t internalized our culture’s sexism) are shallow, vain, slaves to the fashin industry who never read anything more challenging that Us Weekly. That’s just as false as the image of fat people eating ice cream while watching soaps.

Anything else?

I don’t know how I missed that but it just gave me the vapors.