Today, I'm so thrilled to welcome Toni, one of the publishers of an amazingly cool blog called the Fat Girl's Guide to Living. Toni and Tee are my favorite kind of bloggers: Positive, realistic and confident. Read on to learn more about these fabulous self-acceptance role models.
Funny the things you learn about yourself when you when you set out to teach others.
About a year ago, my friend, Tee, and I started rolling around an idea for a Web site devoted to overweight women. Not a weight loss site or one that kvetches about how hard it is to be fat in a world that values thin – those have been done, and they don’t really improve anyone’s daily quality of life. We wanted to inspire overweight women, whether they wanted to lose weight or were perfectly happy the way they were, to get out there and enjoy a rich, full life at any size — right now.
We knew the subject well; after all, both of us have struggled with our weight since our early twenties. Over the course of those years, we learned a lot — mostly through trial and error — about how to tweak the ideal we had for our lives to fit the reality of our size.
Sometimes it was about logistics: How can we enjoy skiing if we can’t find a ski boot to fit around our 18-inch calves? Sometimes it was misperception about our own abilities: How am I ever going to pull my big, lumpy body up that rock wall?
Often, it was about fear and shame: The fear of being judged, and the shame of potentially living up to that judgment. We knew that if the two of us — already advocates for full-contact living — were still experiencing some of those doubts, chances were a whole lot of other overweight women were, too. So in May, 2009, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Living (FGG) was born.
It’s been almost a year now, and we still stop frequently to marvel at and appreciate the readership we’ve built and the attitudes (and, therefore, hopefully lives) we’ve helped to change. But I think the most unexpected benefits have come in the shape of our own evolution about what size means, what it doesn’t and its relationship to our relationships.
If I had all the time in the world, I’d dig into how our shifting self-perceptions have boosted our relationships with our husbands (oh, yes), made us more forgiving of extended family who don’t understand what it’s like to be fat, made us more comfortable and able to have more fun around thinner friends...but right now, I’d like to talk about the people these changes have affected most in the long-term: Our children.
I have three boys, two in grade school and one in pre-school, and Tee has a teenage daughter with special needs, and an adult son starting a family of his own. We both know that our kids watch everything we do and hear everything we say about ourselves. We’ve always made sure we never made negative comments about our bodies in front of our kids, and both of us have steered clear of unhealthy behaviors like yo-yo dieting, pills and other weird fads.
We thought this was good. That this was enough: The lack of negative references to ourselves would convey a confident, body-positive attitude.
Not quite.
Non-verbal communication is powerful; the things we hesitated to do, avoided and made excuses for said as much about how we felt about ourselves as disparaging comments about our thighs in passing would. In contrast, the things we take on, participate in, try our best at and embrace say as much about who we are and what we’re capable of as the words we use.
Working on FGG helped us see that we still had a long way to go to live the way we wrote. We dug in.
My sons have noticed the changes. When I started kicking a ball around with them outside instead of watching from the kitchen window, they not only loved the extra “mom” time, but they saw me in a completely different light. When I started moving away from baggy clothes that hid my shape and into flattering, form-fitting
clothes that made me feel good, they commented about how nice I looked. When I pulled out the bike for the first time this spring, my two oldest sons tagged along, gaining a couple of extra neighbor kids along the way. By the time we got to the city park, I was leading a caravan of excited followers, none of whom saw a fat woman on a bike (nor one who was worried that they’d think so), just a happy, healthy, young-at-heart mom enjoying herself and her family.
Tee’s experience has been similar. Her son — who once came home crying after school because a fifth grader yelled, “Your mama is fat!” — shakes his head and smiles when he stops by and finds her packing for yet another camping trip. They recently joined a gym together, and make a spectacle of egging each other on at the punching bags. It’s changed the way they relate to each other; where there was angst and disconnection just a few years ago, there’s mutual respect and friendly competition today.
Tee’s daughter — 15, and at the threshold of the body-related high-school drama that will define her self-perception — hasn’t commented on her mom’s shrinking size from all those new activities, but instead on her strength (Tee’s become the go-to girl for opening tight pickle jars in her house) and even on her straighter posture and rosy cheeks after the gym.
Tee says those are the things she hopes her daughter will continue to associate with health — instead of size. In our world, she knows she’s got her work cut out for her.
As parents in a society where false assumptions about overweight adults persist, we've learned that it’s not just what we say or don’t say, but what we choose to focus on and participate in that sends strong messages to our children about our sense of self worth. By walking our talk, we hope we’ve given our kids the lenses through which to see us — and others — authentically, and taught them the value and endless possibilities of pursuing their dreams anyway — no matter what popular culture thinks they can and can’t do or be.
Because I think there is no better legacy than modeling confidence and showing our kids, who will one day be partners, spouses, parents, that a world full of opportunities awaits them at any
size: Flaws, fears and all.
As publishers, we hope we’re doing the same for our readers, so they can carry that legacy into their own families and, by doing so, pass it on to the next generation.
