Love, marriage, thriftiness and more

A movement of late that’s really caught my attention is the fat acceptance movement. Because, well … I’m fat.

“Wait!” you’re probably thinking right now. “I saw the pictures of you in your last post. You’re … curvy! Yeah, that’s it! Why would you call yourself fat??”

Uh, hello. Because I am. I was reading an excerpt on Salon from Kate Harding’s Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image where she talks about how it’s actually sort of offensive to her when her friends try to tell her she’s not fat because they assume her acceptance of her body type is negative self imagery. But the term “fat” in itself is nothing more than a descriptor of a type of tissue that some people have more of than others. The problem is that somehow “fat” has become associated with “undesirable,” “smelly,” “disgusting,” “unloveable” … and the list goes on.

The point of the whole fat acceptance movement is that different people are simply designed with different body types. That’s why going on crazy diets just doesn’t work for so many women.

What FA does not advocate is being a lazy slob who watches TV and eats french fries all day. Instead, it promotes the emotionally healthy practice of accepting yourself and all your great qualities (physical and otherwise) while engaging in healthy practices of exercise and eating well. The theory is that if you are taking care of yourself, your body will make its way to the weight it’s supposed to be at.

Honestly, I can buy into that. When I was in high school, during softball season, I would be physically active for about four to five hours per day. Granted, I probably wasn’t eating the most incredibly healthy foods, but given the amount of exercise I was getting, you’d think I would have lost tons and tons of weight, right? Well, not really. I tended to stay in the 180 range, pretty much no matter what. It’s likely if I’d been eating healthy food instead of junk (being in high school, I mostly ate whatever my Southern, fried-food-loving mom cooked, lunchroom food and junk food snacks), my weight would have gone down somewhat. But I think it’s fairly obvious that no amount of exercise is ever going to make me a size 0.

What it boils down to, for me, is that I’m no longer allowed to be unhappy with me — who I am, the way I look, etc. That certainly doesn’t mean that I feel 100-percent confident in myself all the time; a lot of days I feel about like a whale.

At the same time, it’s definitely OK for me to be dissatisfied with my choices. If I decide not to go to the gym, if I decide to eat four slices of pizza and half a carton of ice cream — those are things that are absolutely under my control, right now.

It’s pretty hard to make the transition from needing to be thinner to accepting that I’m great the way I am. I’m working on it, and I’m working on making good choices for myself. If it all works out, I’ll be healthier in more ways than one.

See? Even a fat girl can look good, be happy and enjoy herself!