Although I really want to honor Miriam Heddy’s experience of looking in the mirror and seeing a fat woman, I think it’s also important for us to honor Samhita’s experience of looking in the mirror and NOT seeing a fat woman.

As Kate said, I think Samhita is being accurate, not in denial, about her own physical dimensions. I know someone who’s 5’3″ and feels really tall, because she’s quite a bit taller than her five sisters, but it wouldn’t be very accurate for her to describe herself to strangers as “tall”.

But moving away from that: I don’t think that everyone who is likely to be considered “fat” by society as a whole necessarily has a strong self-identification as “fat”.

When I look in the mirror, I don’t usually see a fat woman, any more than I see a white woman, or a 44-year-old woman, or a woman wearing glasses or a woman with green eyes or a woman with short hair, even though all of those things describe me, physically.

I usually see me. Sometimes I notice my fat; sometimes I notice the fair complexion I inherited from my Irish and English ancestors (and sometimes I contemplate the “white privilege” that carries with it in US society); sometimes I notice my glasses; sometimes I notice my green eyes; sometimes I notice my short hair.

Now, I can imagine that if someone were to describe me, they might well describe me as “the fat white woman with short dark hair and glasses” but I don’t see that when I look in the mirror. I see a unique person, not a checklist of physical characteristics.

Many of the commenters here already got to this and sorry I am late to the thread.

I also want to say, it is amazing how many women of color came to the comments and that is something I want to explore more. What is fat acceptance look like within cultures that have been colonized by white standards of beauty? What is at stake?

And to everyone else, THANK YOU!!!! I have chosen not to have a relationship with my mother, after years of emotional toture and it’s the best, healthiest, most powerful thing I ever did. I realize that strategy might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m here to tell: You DO NOT need to accept the unacceptable from anyone.

It’s useful to know my mom’s not the only one. Useful, but very, very sad. How many women there are who are passing on a legacy of self-hate based on tangled desires that pretend to be self-love when they are truly about social acceptance. A complicated web of wanting to be seen as fuckable but not wanting to be treated as an animate sex toy, of wanting others to react to us as if we could push our inner self to the exterior. Yeah, it would be convenient if our potential friends, lovers, and enemies could be identified from some plainly worn visual characteristics… but life don’t work that way, baby.

And you can’t win anyway! If you’re gorgeous, sure, it’s easier, BUT. At first it SEEMS like people are more apt to listen to what you have to say, or to see your talents or think you are smart or capable. But in truth, they still aren’t listening, now they’re just looking at you raptly because they want to bone you. GRRRREAT trade-off. A gal can look ugly and, example, run for president, and they will talk about her big thighs or whatever. Or she can look pretty and run for president, and they’ll say “I’d tap that!” (Yeah, I’d “tap” my bf too, have in fact, but that don’t mean I want him in the White House for crap’s sake). Meanwhile, men look like everything from Silent Cal to Taft and still get elected. I mean, Lincoln, that hat! And I love Abe, but… dude, not for his looks. That whole “gaunt face and sunken, haunted eyes because I’m prez during the Civil War, and maybe possibly also psychic or something” look got old after my first viewing of Dracula.

Anywayz. Where was I? Looks. Fuckability. The desire to look like that and the corresponding weird urges to be a slut, only not (you know, that somehow alien notion that we’d like to express ourselves as sexual beings without getting raped, threatened with rape, or treated as though we are asking for sex from just any and everyone and so should happily accept such).

I’ve been doodling in my sketchbook more, and lately I’ve had some weird free-form scribbles come out that are pretty telling about this stuff. I draw myself with my dog more often. She’s kind of a combo straight-man and sounding-board sort of character, in my drawings. In one I drew a failed picture of what was supposed to be me, only it came out all wrong, out of proportion, and made me seem to have bigger hips, smaller breasts, and a strangely shaped stomach. I’d been trying to draw a good simplification of my body for pages. Next to this, I scribbled Eppy, ears back, eyes looking dubious. To her right, a more accurate Me is sitting, one hand raised as if gesturing. Our conversation is as follows:
Eppy: Why are you so in love with that image anyway? It’s not even accurate.
Me: Meh. Heck if I know. I can’t even tell if it’s self-accepting or self-depreciating. My self-image is too convoluted.
Eppy: Is this one of those “beauty vs. peer pressure vs. personal actualization” things again?
Me: Yeah. I guess.
Eppy: I will never understand humans.
Me: That makes two of us.

My dog is very wise, you know.

I bet all your dogs are too. We should listen to the critters in our lives more often. Your guinea pig probably knows stuff, like, whoa.

On the “bad body day” thing, I like to look at people’s photos on Fatshionista. It’s a nice pick-me-up to see women my size and shape looking cute (!), in clothes that would actually fit me. Then I get distracted looking for clothes online or go into my closet and dress up in something.

Cutting out almost all commercial consumption from my media diet has been the biggest long-term boost to my self confidence. It’s amazing what a change it makes to not be told by every company on earth that I’m not good enough without their product.

But! Your comment made me get off my butt and make a livejournal community safe from diet talk and focusing on HAES and movement for enjoyment. So if you want to check it out, it’s everyonemoves at livejournal.

As for my strategies? I’ve been getting mad at people talking about diets for years. Since my Fatty Revelation, where I picked up Fat Girl’s Guide to Life and broke off all my diets, it’s the only thing that’s kept me sane. That is, until i found Shapely Prose. Coming here has put into words a lot of my frustrations with diet culture, and being better at articulating my frustrations has helped *immensely* at making my life free from diet talk.

My mom, like those of many other posters here, is pretty bad at understanding that her inquiries about my weight are pretty damaging. I know she keeps bringing it up because she has a lot of health problems correlated to weight, but she ignores the fact that one of them *causes* weight gain, not the other way around. For I while I’d just blow up and storm off, which just lead to neither of us talking about weight or diets and a whole lot of resentment. Once, though, after reading this very website, I talked to her and told her that reducing my health to my size ignores the fact that fat can be a symptom and not a cause, and that it makes me hate myself or feel like I’m not enough just because I’m not a size whatever. I think that let her know just how damaging those comments are and we had a good cry over it.

Since then it’s been better. She’s on WW now, which I’m not all that okay with, but she’s learning intuitive eating through it. She earlier scoffed at the idea that she would know she was full or hungry or needed salt/protein/starch, but she’s getting to know what she wants now and understands me that little bit better. And conversations about health now revolve around my activity level. She complements my skin tone and my strength as results of going to the gym, not my waistline.

I think a lot of it has to do with her own issues, about weight and men and weight and self-confidence, and I’ve broken both of those barriers myself (I have a boything that adores me, last in a long line, and I might be generously described as cocky). So a little compassion helps. But then again, we have an awesome relationship anyways, and she means well, which might not help those Shapelings who have rough relationships with family.

I’m lucky. Growing up my mom rarely talked about weight, never expressed hatred or even disatisfaction towards her body, and didn’t feel guilty about eating what she wanted, (although she was always concerned with nurition and wanted up to get enough protein and eat our vegetables). She was also completely comfortable being naked in front of my sisters and I, and told us there was no shame or inherent sexuality in naked bodies.

My two sisters and I have healthier-than-average body image. And all of my friends with serious body hatred or eating disorders (all but two of my female friends) have at least one parent with a strange attitude about food, who hates their own body, who has hatred and fear towards fat people, etc.

I hate seeing my mother go through this, and I hate the way she dragged me into it, and I hate the way I finally realize how much of my own problems with looks and self-image and self-esteem and self-worth come from HER.

Seriously, for me that was one of those therapy realizations that just left me on the floor for a while. Dammit, I have enough problems on my own, why am I carrying hers, too? You’d think that knowledge would be a relief, but for some reason it’s not — it just feels like more work. :-(