#small fat

and it's not even conscious, all the time. the media we consume and the jokes we all heard growing up created the underlying thought process that leads to fat people of color being demeaned, dehumanized, and desexualized (or in some cases, hypersexualized). when i read Zeba Blay's Carefree Black Girls, she had an essay talking about the fat black bff in sitcoms. and it really hit home.

i'm almost certain i wouldn't have as many problems getting dates or being flirted with if i were thin and white. the same barriers just aren't there when you fit into a privileged category. don't get me wrong: i do not want to be white, and i do not want to be thin. i just want to stop having these problems because i'm sick of it.

New OC. Meet S!

i point this out because the medical industry, and society at large, has such a skewed and dehumanizing view of fat bodies. even the smallest of us are too much, and that sense of existing in wrongness and excess only gets worse the more fat you are. and i feel like straight size people have this idea that body fat is an accessory - that it can be taken on and off at will, and that fat people are simply choosing to have too much - that we're greedy and gluttonous because of it.

but in reality, body fat is a part of the human body. it comes in varying amounts in everyone, and that amount changes throughout our lives, throughout health and ability. and being part of the human body, our fat is us. by asking us to lose weight, become smaller, more palatable, you are asking us to change who we are. to literally take on a new face, because our face - the very thing most attach to our identity as a unique sign of us - is too much. can you imagine how heartbreaking that might be?

heart eyes 😍

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I've been using midsize to describe myself to avoid talking over larger folks - but I saw a post saying that is harmful because it's acting like they don't want to be associated with fat ppl.

I tried to find more info and found a chart saying I should be using the term small fat to describe myself instead of midsize.

If u have the spoons, can u explain what this is about?

I've never heard of the term midsize being fatphobic. I have heard of a fat person here or there against the idea of midsize being an identity, but I've always seen that as just exclusionism.

Midsize people are people who are not fat but also aren't exactly thin either. They're different from small fat people who are fat but on the smaller end of the spectrum. So a woman of average height who shops in the women's section of a store, if they wear an XL, they might be midsize. If the woman's size is more like a 2XL, they're probably a small fat person.

It's difficult to put set definitions on it since everyone's body is different. A person could wear a medium but be very short and thus be fat, for instance. I know someone who is I think under 120 pounds but is about 5' or 5'2", so she's actually a little chubby and I would possibly call her midsize. As you can see, clothing size or weight isn't always the be all end all criteria for whether someone is midsize or fat.

If you don't have body dysmorphia, looking at yourself in the mirror might help you better determine this. Do you look like the wide range of fat bodies posted on fat positive blogs? Then you're probably fat. If you don't think your body quite matches the sizes of the people on blogs like this one, then you might be midsize.

And of course, your body can always change. I'm fat now but was midsize in high school because I had unhealthily lost weight out of a desire to conform. I wasn't fully skinny, but I still felt separated from fatness to a degree. I was in between.

I hope this helps! I know the desire to find a label can be strong, but know that you don't have to figure something like this out right away.