Category: Overexposed: A Self-Love Project.

Your “high-school” body is your teenager body. You look back and see just how young your body looked; baby face, possible baby fat, B-cup size bra, and the list goes on.

But then college comes along, you enter your twenties, and then you notice your body changing. In society, people love to call that your “freshman 15”. People who were 15 pounds lighter just a year ago get upset about the weight gain, girls wish they had their high-school body again, not knowing that there’s more to your weight gain than the endless amounts of ramen you eat between classes. But what do you say to yourself when you were a fat girl as a teenager, yet gets even fatter throughout her twenties? Even more so, what if your “freshman 15” wasn’t even because of eating bad foods, what if it was a result of a health condition you had no idea about?

Hi, my name is Liz, and I had the “freshman 50”.

When I graduated high-school, I was a 200-pound teenage girl that was heavy for her age, but still was able to fit into a size 18-20. I was still able to get my clothes from most stores that weren’t online exclusive, I was able to wear things that were considered “flattering” to my body shape, and I wasn’t rocking a visible double chin. Although I didn’t like how I looked weight-wise during my teenage years, I didn’t consider myself to be “that fat”, not until I turned 19, and things started to change with my body.

After my first year of college, I started to get extremely bad lower back pain that would keep me up at night. There were nights I had to sleep in a sitting position because laying down was extremely painful, and there were nights when I didn’t sleep more than 3 hours a night due to the pain. One morning at 6AM, I cried to my mother, asking her to take me to the emergency room to see what was going on with my body. She did, and a couple of hours later, I found out I had gallstones. Later that year, I had surgery to remove my gallbladder, which was great since I wasn’t in pain anymore, but in doing so meant that I would have to watch my weight since it would be easier now to put on weight, and of course, I didn’t listen. 

Within the time I graduated high school to the time I became a sophomore in college, I had gained 50 pounds because of my now non-existent gallbladder.

Heres a little science lesson: the gallbladder is located right behind your liver, and it’s the part that helps store the biles, in other words: it helps the liver control the amount of fat by storing it, I guess; I got a D in my Biology class in college.

Anyway, when you remove the gallbladder, the liver has to work twice as hard, and if you don’t control the food you are eating or “eat healthier”, weight gain is inevitable. Me being a college student with a tight schedule meant that I was going to eat junk food in between classes just to hold me over until I got home. Before I knew it, I had gained 50 pounds, and I hated myself for doing it.

I hated myself for making that decision to remove my gallbladder; I kept telling myself that I would’ve rather be in pain and “thinner” than to be at ease and fatter. I hated that my weight gain, which everyone thought was due as me being careless of what I was eating, was caused by something I had no one control over. I couldn’t starve myself anymore; my stomach couldn’t handle not eating for hours at a time. Because of something I could not completely control, I hated my body for being what it was.

It took me a lot of conversations with other people, particularly plus-sized women who had the surgery done themselves, tell me that the same exact thing happened to them and they hated that it did at first. Knowing that I wasn’t alone and what I was feeling wasn’t completely irrational and stupid. This was a health condition that millions of people can’t control, and if you’re already overweight, you have a higher chance of getting gallstones.

Six years later, and I’ve accepted that I was a part of that group of people that gained weight after their years in high-school. Some people are able to lose weight and “glo’ up”, and others simply just can’t. It took me years to finally understand that our bodies change, and even the skinniest of people who were teenagers develop into adults, and sometimes that requires weight gain. It also took me years to accept that fate for myself as well, that although I was overweight in my teenage years, that my body is going to develop and change as well, and that requires some weight gain as well.

We, as a society, tend to forget that when we grow up, our bodies do as well. Our legs get thicker, our boobs get bigger, and yes, asses do get fatter. But stomachs do as well, and we shouldn’t punish our bodies for doing the one thing it’s supposed to do, which is to develop.

Also, we have to stop thinking that weight gain occurs only because of overeating and poor food choices. Yeah, it plays a role, but some of the people in society have actual health issues that cause extreme weight gain. Some medications cause weight gain, some diseases cause weight gain, your health conditions could be the reason you gain weight, like me!

Instead of hating yourself for the uncontrollable, be gentle with your body. She’s doing the best to keep you up and running! Just because she’s heavier, doesn’t make her any less deserving of your love.

Teenage Liz had to go through a lot for me to be where I’m currently standing today. Let us all honor our teenage selves because only God knows the things we had to go through in order for us to be where we are today.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I was once a target for people who have a fat fetish.

Lemme break it down for you: Being a teenager wasn’t the easiest thing for me. I’ve written and told many of stories throughout the years on this blog, and I’m honestly at the point where I’m tired of talking about the horrible things that happened, blah blah blah. But, understanding where I was and why I went through the things I did, is the point I’ll be making in this chapter.

You see, as a teenager, I was a hopeless romantic. Being called pretty and even getting the slightest attention from boys automatically gained me a new crush to have. But, instead of just getting the typical heartbreak from being in a relationship came with, I never was in a relationship as a teenager, mainly because people didn’t want to be in a relationship with a fat girl unless you were a fat girl that had money, style, or was “thick in all the right places”.

Lemme introduce myself once again: Hi, my name is Liz, and I’ve always had fat in all the right and wrong places.

I learned that there are three types of people in this world when dealing with a fat chick: you’re either actually really into the girl and like her for who she is and how she looks like, you either liked a fat girl but didn’t want to be seen with a fat girl so you kept her a secret, or you really didn’t like fat girls romantically and only wanted to be with one “for the experience”.

It took me a lot of insecure nights sitting on the bathroom floor asking why I was never good enough to be truly liked for me and for the body I lived in that it even drove me to times where I self-harmed because I began to hate the body I was in too. It took me years of asking myself why I was always everyone’s secret, why people saw me as an easy target, and it took me these past experiences of old crushes and love interests to finally realize that damn, some of y’all love the fat folk, but don’t want to admit that you truly like loving the fat folk! I mean, what isn’t there to love? We are just like skinny people! Just fatter!

As comical as I’m being, it really is sad to realize that my body, although normally looked down upon in society, is also a target towards people who have a fat fetish. When I talk about fat fetish, I mean when you only want to sleep, bang, fuck people who are fat, thinking that the experience will be different. “Does everything jiggle more when you fuck a fat person? Is it true that fucking fat girls are better because there’s more ‘cushion for the pushin’?”

For the love of all sugary drinks and salty foods, my body is not an experiment.

I had to learn this during the time where I was growing up while going through a very severe case of depression. I mean, I had one person tell me straight forward that they only pursued me because they saw me as “broken and weak”; it was just a difficult time to truly understand that there are just people in this world that do not love your body, that does not think your body is beautiful, and that you are not worthy of realness because of the type of body you carry.

That does not mean I love my body any less than I do, and it does not mean I view my body lesser than your average, skinny one. Again, my journey has taken years to be here, at this moment, accepting my skin for what it is and the body that it carries. I don’t need anyone else telling me that they “like my body”. I have a mouth; I tell myself that! I don’t need validation from anyone to tell me my body is a good body. I know my type of body deserves the type of love that a “normal” person gets, and although I’m lucky to have found my own, I hope every boy or girl knows that their body is capable of actual respect and love, and a person with a fetish of that isn’t the one!

Fat folks love and fat folks fuck, but we don’t want none of that fetish shit you got going on.

Periodt.

 

Isn’t it funny when teenage girls are in arguments or fights, they have to call each other negative things about their appearance to make themselves feel better?

Hi, my name is Liz, otherwise known as: “Fat Bitch”.

Yes, you heard that right. I am the “Fat Bitch” in arguments with skinny girls, other fat girls, boys that teased me, men that catcalled me, and friends who stabbed me behind my back.

Nice to meet you.

I don’t exactly remember the first time I was called a “fat bitch” by someone, but I could tell you it was before I hit puberty. “Fat Bitch” is always that insult that I believe every single fat girl on this planet has been called at least once in their lifetime, and if you haven’t, well, I got some news to break to you. The first time you get called a fat bitch is usually going to be either that mean girl that doesn’t like you or by your own best friend. The first time I remember being this “fat bitch” was when one of my closest friends in grade school passed a note to another girl saying I was a “fat bitch” because I gave them an attitude. Of course, it hurt; how can one of your closest friends see you in such a negative light? Do they see my fatness as an ugly thing and wanted to hurt my feelings by calling me that? Being called a “fat bitch” hurts the first couple of times, but after that 10th or 11th time, you just shrug your shoulders and take a sigh.

It’s not the first time, nor the last time I’ll hear my name being “Fat Bitch.”

As I got older, the “Fat Bitch” comment came out of more people’s mouths; they weren’t just the mean girl in your class or your friend that you got into an argument with, it’s now the boys that tease you, and the men who sexualize you while you are walking down the street. Getting the “Fat Bitch” name from boys wasn’t a surprise; they would call me that and they got a reaction from me. I chased them (because middle school boys seem to love when girls run after them to hit them or slap them; maybe it turns them on in a prepubescent way), I’d get tired because I was chubby, and hear them laugh and call me a fat bitch until they got bored of me. Once I got used to the name being called out by boys nevertheless, it didn’t really bother me anymore. Boys were stupid, they stunk, and they weren’t even that cute, to begin with. But when you find that one boy that is really nice to you and you like him because he gave you some sort of attention in a place where boys didn’t want to be seen with any fat girl, you go all head over heels for the boy.

Being 12 or 13 years old, the things that these boys can say about you can break your heart, so it used to be devastating when these same boys that gave me attention and were nice to me in private would call me a “fat bitch” in private to their homies because, again, they didn’t want to be seen with the “fat girl” of the class, it hurt like a bitch.

It seemed like the name would never leave me; I was damned to be “Fat Bitch” until I wasn’t fat anymore. As I got older and men started to call me “fat bitch” after failed catcalls, I knew that I was nothing but a “Fat Bitch” in this world; people only saw me as being fat and whenever I stood up for myself in any capacity, I was a bitch.

At 25, I am still “Fat Bitch”.

I’m just now “Fat Bitch who doesn’t give a fuck so you could kindly kiss my fat ass.”

There is only so much you can do to a society that will always have negative thoughts about fatness engraved in their heads. To this day, fatness is still negative, it’s a before, it’s always a target for fitness freaks to poke fun at, and yes – as long as I’m a fat woman, I will be a “Fat Bitch”. Who the hell cares?

As a woman, we will all be called a bitch once in our lifetime, men will always call us “bitches” when we don’t conform to what they think we are supposed to be like in society and depending on our outer appearance, there will always be something “negative” about us to accompany “bitch”. Mine just so happens to be “Fat Bitch”, although now, I might be a “Bald Fat Bitch” because I don’t like the luscious long locks that “beautiful women” are supposed to have.

My point being: I stopped letting two words define my self-worth and the respect that I deserve. Hell, I call myself a fat bitch because I refuse to allow it to be a negative thing in my life. Whether or not, I am who I am and I have to love who I am and that includes the body that I’m in too.

If you don’t like me and think “Fat Bitch” is going to hurt my feelings, you’re about 13 years too late, sweetheart.

I thought I looked better than my friend that one day we went to the swimming pool together just because I was wearing a one-piece swimsuit and she was wearing a bikini. This friend was fat.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I fat-shamed a friend a mine who wore a bikini to the pool.

When I first moved into the neighborhood, it took me a while to make a group of friends that actually lived close to me, and although I had some friends in the apartment building I lived in, I didn’t really have much that was my own age, let alone in my own grade. Not until I met a new friend, a fat friend.

After years of being the fat friend to a group of skinny girls, it was nice to have a friend that looked like me. They understood how it felt like to be disposable just because of their size; they knew how it felt to be considered the “weakest link” in the girl group because of their size. As friends, we conquered the world.

So when that summer came and we both decided to go to the community pool in our neighborhood, we were excited.

Since we were young, we did need some parental supervision on our girl’s day out. My mom dressed me in my one-piece navy blue swimsuit, picked up my friend, and went to the pool to have a great time.

My friend didn’t care what kind of swimsuit I had, but I couldn’t stop staring at the lack of swimsuit they had on. They had on a bikini. From what I recall, I believe it was a pink and purple bikini, which in hindsight I thought was a very pretty bikini, I was just telling myself I wished it wasn’t on them. 

Without a care in the world, my friend swam and enjoyed herself at the pool, and so did I. Seeing them with that bikini on, I didn’t feel so disgustingly fat next to them. I had confidence standing next to a friend for once in my life, and I felt superior.

Every time this person got out of the water to take a break, I laughed at them for thinking they looked cute with that bikini on their body.

Why would Mary* ever think that she looked good in that bikini? Her whole stomach is sticking out!

I know I didn’t know any better back then, and maybe seeing them in this bikini so carefree and happy made me jealous that another fat person loved their body, but I should’ve known that thinking it, even saying it out loud, was wrong. 

If a young, insecure child was able to think this about another child, what do you think how everyone else around them thought when seeing them? Were they saying the same thing? Of course. Were they looking at them thinking this child doesn’t realize she can’t wear that because she’s fat? Most definitely. At the end of the day, even at a young age, the restrictions of what I could or couldn’t wear because of my body were already known, and I knew that bikinis were not meant for fat people.

Oh, Little Liz, how naive, insecure, and cruel you were. 

At 25, I still believe that my body and my body only is not meant to be in a bikini. Maybe I’m just not that in love with my body just yet. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with covering my stomach up, who the hell cares, but that doesn’t mean that bikinis are not for every type of body.

As I got older, more fat women have embraced their bodies for what they are and started to wear as what we like to call a “fatkini”. It’s bikinis for fat people. Was the idea still laughed at by people who believe that bikinis are a skinny person’s privilege? Of course, but did these women care? Hell no. The more progressive we’ve become, the more women started to flaunt their bodies in ways that made them feel sexy and confident, and if a fat girl in a bikini makes a fat girl feel sexy, then that’s a fat girl in a bikini and we leave her the hell alone. 

So, maybe my friend was more progressive than me in a sense. Maybe I was just more insecure and rude and an example of a fat girl fat-shaming another fat girl. I was an example of how society wired us to believe fat is ugly and fat shouldn’t be shown in the world.

I hope that girl is still out here in the summer, showing her fat body and throwing up her middle fingers to the people who just don’t want fatness to be an okay thing to have.

They say people will do anything for money. I mean, Fear Factor was seriously a show of four people who did crazy stunts and ate a disgusting concoction of critters just to win $50,000, so the idea of doing anything for money isn’t a surprise.

Hi, my name is Liz, and my grandfather once made a deal with my sister and me.

Since childhood, my sister and I have been on the more chubbier side. We honestly loved to eat; we still do. We stayed fat for most of our lives, but when we both reached the age where fat wasn’t considered “cute” anymore (in this universe, it’s 12 for me, 16 for my sister), my grandfather made a deal regarding weight loss one day at a family gathering at my aunt’s house in Staten Island, NY.

I’ll give you $100 if you are able to lose 100 pounds.

We all pretty much laughed it off. Even me. Which is why I never did it.

At the time it was said, I was young, and thought nothing of it. My grandfather wouldn’t stoop so low just to have his grandchildren lose weight during the years where they aren’t even fully developed? I was 12-years-old, whose to say my body was going to stay the way it was? Same for my 16-year-old sister.

But, my sister took on the task of losing 100 pounds, and in 2013, nearly 8 years later, she got that $100 from my grandfather.

I’m not mad at her for taking that money, nor losing that weight. I’m not even mad at my grandfather, who was once known for making a joke here and there, putting up the deal in the first place.

I’m mad that weight loss got rewarded in the form of compensation. 

At 25, I wished I voiced out my concern about this ridiculous betting of weight loss like it’s some damn horse race. I wished I was able to express to my family, who praised this achievement, that you are making a 19-year-old girl who gained 30 pounds since graduating high-school like she was an ugly piece of shit for gaining weight. Where were my comments about “how good I look?”

To now understand that the offer of that $100, currency, a form of greed that everyone wants to have a lot of, could be linked to something like losing weight is so unhealthy and dangerous, and I’m glad I never tried it, nor will I ever take anyone seriously if they offered me money to lose weight.

My fat is not your betting table, and rewarding weight loss with a fucking prize isn’t either.

It’s taken me a long time to remind myself that fat is not ugly and losing it (whether it’s my choice or not) does not make me any prettier than I wasn’t already before. Although my grandfather isn’t here with me today, nor I will ever get the chance to explain how it felt like when we rewarded my sister for the weight she lost, he was a good man, he loved me, and he is a man that sticks to his word. But, I wish I was able to tell him, at 25, that we are beautiful for being ourselves, looking like this, and no amount of money should encourage us to do something that insinuates that our current form of fatness isn’t rewarding worthy in the first place.

I never got my $100 for losing 100 pounds, but I did find some self-love for my body along instead. That’s truly the reward here. 

In a time where being bone thin was considered beautiful, I read something online that pretty much said if you replace meals with water every once in a while, you would lose weight.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I tried the “Water-Only” diet when I was 12-years-old.

Sixth grade was a rough year for me. Being in the same class with boys hitting puberty and girls who became boy-crazy was a lot for me to take in. Needless to say, every day was an adventure in that class, whether that adventure was about someone else’s drama, or if it was me being bullied on my weight. Sometimes it would hurt me, sometimes I would fight back, and occasionally, I diverted the name calling back to them by pointing out a flaw of their own. One boy in particular constantly teased me for being fat. So, one day, I said he had girl lips. He was then known as “Girl Lips” for the rest of the year.

Towards the end of that school year, my self-confidence was at an all-time low. I really did hate the body I was in, and I wished that what I had was just “baby fat” and that it would go away as time went on. But the constant bullying, man the constant fights I had to battle, was tiresome at that point.

One night, I researched on the internet how to quickly lose weight. Thus, the “water-only” diet came to be. That following week, I came to school with a giant Polish Spring water bottle in my backpack.

Being an immature 12-year-old girl, I bragged about being on this water-only diet. I was determined that no one would make fun of me for my weight anymore and that I’d be just as pretty as the girls that the boys liked in our class. While everyone ate their school lunches, I was drinking water. The first couple of days I stood by the plan, hell, I even lost some water weight while doing it, but I was now beginning to feel weak. Being around all the good smelling food during lunch, my stubbornness didn’t allow me to listen to the cues my body were giving me to eat actual food. Instead, I drank my life away in water, until I literally couldn’t do it anymore.

My mother was concerned that I’d drink myself into water poisoning if I didn’t stop doing what I was doing. So, a couple of days later, I stopped.

I came to school the following week and began my routine of eating just bits and pieces of my school lunch, pretty much having all my friends laugh at me and saying “I told you that you couldn’t do it” throughout that day. Of course, like anything in middle school, people tend to move on and forget what was happening, and it was never really brought up again that at 12-years-old, I tried to get on a diet that consisted of replacing meals with water.

Maybe in hindsight, you could do that. Maybe you can control snack-bingeing by drinking water instead but in the mind of a 12-year-old, that method of “losing weight” was extremely unhealthy.

Maybe my body knew all along that it wasn’t going to last and maybe that’s why it only lasted a week. Who knows what would’ve happened if I continued to do that; maybe things would’ve gotten worse. Things would’ve gotten worse. 

I remember the water-only diet mainly for how ridiculous it was, yet how serious I was for losing weight by solely drinking water. To even put out there that you should be skipping meals is absolute bullshit. In 2019, you wouldn’t find anything like that on the internet, and if there is, nobody is even trying to go that far to lose some weight. In 2006, when the Paris Hilton’s and the Lindsay Lohan’s were icons for being extremely skinny and beautiful, things like the “water-only” diet were put out there for people to try it. Thirteen years ago, it was a joke to be fat. Fat, in some fuckin’ universe, meant you were dirty, ugly, stupid, and not classy. Skinny, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. So, imagine being a 12-year-old girl in 2006, being teased for her weight for the majority of the school year, hating her body?

Was 12-year-old Liz wrong for doing what she did? Of course. But, nobody would’ve stopped her.

 

I used to skip lunch in high-school because I convinced myself that I wasn’t hungry. I once threw up acid from my empty stomach, after not eating anything for 12+ hours.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I used to starve myself in public.

You hear skinny people, who think they are still fat, having an eating disorder more often than you’ll hear a fat person having one. If the standard for having an eating disorder is not eating/starving yourself, wouldn’t it apply to all types of bodies?

I am not saying I have an eating disorder whatsoever, but there were times in my life that I said “No, I’m not hungry” with a stomach growling.

I was never self-conscious about me eating in public. To this day, my sister and I talk about the many nostalgic school lunches we had in our public school years. Needless to say, I always ate lunch, and it was actually good. Once I started to get bullied in middle school, slowly but surely that stopped happening. I would eat just a couple of bites before ultimately throwing my tray away, and whenever I went over to a friend’s house, I would say that I wasn’t hungry, despite me really wanting to eat what their parents cooked for dinner.

As my self-hatred for my body began to grow, I started to binge eat in the privacy of my home, after hours of not eating in public.

Even before I knew I had anxiety, I had anxiety. I was afraid of eating in public because I didn’t want to be seen as “the fat girl who’s eating.” I mean, that’s your typical narrative: fat girl refuses to eat in public because she doesn’t want to look fat in public.

If I couldn’t eat actual meals in front of friends, it was even harder to eat in front of my partner for the first couple of years we knew each other. The first time he ever caught me eating was a Big Mac on a coach bus back from a performance we had, and although he didn’t make me feel bad about eating a Big Mac in public, I still was kicking myself for eating a Big Mac in public, in front of the guy I really liked. 

Even after he graduated high-school and we still hung out outside of school, I never ate in front of him. He would offer me a snack, a drink, and meals whenever we would hang out, and by this point in my journey, my response became second nature, like a reflex:

No, I’m not hungry.

After the many teenage years of getting away with eating nothing for hours on end, I was now entering my 20’s, with a freshly removed gallbladder after being in extreme pain for the latter of my 19th year. I still didn’t eat in public for a while, but I realized that now doing so came with more than just a growling stomach. It came with actual illness.

One afternoon during my sophomore year of college, I was on the bus, going home after being out of the house and on campus since 5:30 in the morning. I didn’t eat anything that morning, during the day, even up to this exact moment. One minute I was just listening to my music on my iPod Touch, the next thing you know my stomach is in a literal knot. I couldn’t feel my stomach; it had gone completely numb. I started to sweat profusely, my headache intensified, and I got dizzy. I thought I was going to pass out on a bus just stops away from mine. I did what my mother told me to do: take a Motrin I had in my bag. For the most part, it helped keep my focus, but the stomach pains, boy they are singlehandedly the most painful thing I’ve experienced in my life thus far.

I knew I couldn’t get away from not eating in public anymore. I didn’t get over my fear of eating in public because I wanted to, I had to for the sake of my health. Like, I would choose to eat in public than practically fainting from the pain my body induced when I didn’t.

“Yes, I would love to have something to eat.”

The more I had to accept that my health depended on me eating (even snacking) during the day, I started to care more about my body’s needs instead of my anxieties of eating in public. I accepted that all bodies deserve to be fed and that human beings, big or small, need to fuckin’ eat in order to survive. Slowly but surely, I ate whole meals in front of my partner, I eat in front of my friends, and I will murder a snack package of cookies and a bag of chips in public.

My self-image of not appearing hungry was unrealistic and just plain stupid. Although the removal of my gallbladder has caused a lot of my weight gain, I’m grateful that the removal of it literally made me more accepting to the fact that it’s okay to eat in public! If it’s 9 o’clock in the morning and I’m not going to be able to eat my first meal of the day until lunchtime, then you best to believe I’m eating a bag of chips just to hold me over until then. Of course, there are other healthy alternatives, but it’s whatever I have at that moment, I’m eating.

Just because I’m fat, doesn’t mean I don’t deserve the human right to eat.

We’ve all seen it in the movies: two best friends, one skinny and the other one fat, and they have a pretty good relationship with one another. They’ve probably been friends since their childhood and they’ve been inseparable since.

The skinny one is usually the main character though, who probably falls in love with the popular guy at school (that’s actually dating the blonde-haired mean girl who’s captain of the cheerleading squad) and then there’s her fat friend, being the one depicted as the weird, quirky girl that would body slam anyone who messes with her skinny friend.

Where’s my friggin Academy Award. 

Hi, my name is Liz, and I’m the “fat friend” in this narrative.

For most of my childhood and adolescence years, I had numerous best friends. All were pretty diverse if you ask me: Puerto Rican, Mexican, Chinese, Dominican, Pakistani, Jamaican, Irish – you name it. But, many of these friends had something in common: they were skinny. Sure, I’ve had a couple of chubby chicks as my best friends in the days, and we conquered whatever life handed to us at that moment, but ultimately, they were skinny. I was never envious of them being skinny; to be quite frank, that never even crossed my mind. Still, it doesn’t mean that our differences in our appearance didn’t feel like a burden.

Being the “fat friend”, I never got to experience the whole “can I borrow your sweater?” or the whole “I have a pair of pajamas you can wear for the night!” scenario. One skinny girl pant leg would probably stop at my shin, I kid you not. It was sort of frustrating to see a group of girls wear the same shirt or wear each other’s clothes, and I mean being skinny came in handy when your period came unexpectedly and now you have a big blood stain on the back of your jeans. 

I had to have numerous family members come to hand-deliver clothes to me, in the main office, in front of everyone, whenever I bled through a pair of jeans.

Also, being the “fat friend” also meant that you’d hear at least the words “fat bitch” come from your own friends if you guys were in an argument with one another. I had a friend in grade school tell another friend of ours that I was a “fat bitch” because I was giving her an attitude during lunchtime. I mean, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, get over it, you skinny bitch!”

Being the biggest girl in a group of girls was always discouraging because it constantly feels like you’re the ugliest one in the group and you feel like they only have you around to make themselves feel better. “Oh, I have such bad acne this week, but at least I’m not fat 24/7″…

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get where I’m coming from.

I think the hardest pill I had to swallow during those years was boys. Boy, I was a hopeless romantic and I had tons of crushes on boys. Boys were always a tricky thing with friends, and there were lots of times where both my friends and I had the same crush on a boy in our grade. There were also countless times that my friends dated the boy I had a crush on after openly knowing I liked them too, and there were times when I confessed to me liking a boy to that boy and getting the response of: “You’re not really my type, but can you give my AIM screenname to your friend?”

Being the “fat friend” in my younger years contributed to the self-hate I had for my body growing up, and it’s taken… what, a decade to stop hating the body that I have.

I don’t blame those skinny friends for the self-hatred of my body; I blame the society norms, the portrayal in the media, and the friendzone that we fat girls lived in for most of our adolescent years.

As a 25-year-old woman with not so many friends due to past trauma and the development of my social anxiety disorder, I’m learning to be my own damn fat friend. We’re both fat, we’re both gorgeous, and we’re both striving!

Plus, it’s 2019 – the fat friend in the movies is just as valid as everyone else too!

Hello, my name is Liz, and I’m a Pepsiholic.

This is my intervention.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with Pepsi. Maybe it was even before I was born; you know how when mothers are pregnant with their children and they eat or drink something constantly through that pregnancy and the children come out loving that specific food/drink?

No? Maybe I just made that up to justify my unhealthy relationship with Pepsi.

My earliest memory with the beverage dates back to my childhood; my two front teeth were rotten due to the fact that I liked to drink Pepsi out of a baby bottle way later than I should have. I don’t understand how, nor why Pepsi is a literal addiction for me, but it was, it still is, and it’s honestly the #1 cause of me gaining weight all these years.

I’ve tried to kick the old habit for years now, and if quitting smoking feels the way that it feels quitting Pepsi, then I now understand why it’s almost impossible to quit smoking. Addiction is addiction no matter what it is, and mine so happens to be the sugary concoction that is Pepsi.

The first time I quit Pepsi for good, I didn’t drink it for almost a year. Then I turned 20 years old and decided to have a celebratory drink of Pepsi and bam, back at it again with the constant soda drinking.

Like an addiction, I have a love/hate relationship with the beverage. For starters, it tastes so good after a long day of whatever you were doing, yet I know how bad it is for me and is probably the #1 cause of why I’m now considered pre-diabetic at the age of 25.

Maybe I should’ve listened to my father when he told me at the age of 12 that I’ll get diabetes if I don’t lose weight…

Anyway, it’s something I’m not proud of, but I acknowledge that it’s a problem. No matter how many times I try to quit cold turkey, it’s never a good time.

But, at least I’m trying.

Instead of hating myself and blaming my body for not being able to just pee the goddamn drink out like the skinny consumers of Pepsi probably do, I’m learning that with time, I’ll drink less and less until I just don’t feel like it. Of course, in hindsight, that sounds ridiculous, that’s like telling an alcoholic they can only drink in moderation, but quite frankly this is Pepsi we’re talking about. I know that drinking more water will help me feel way more hydrated and full, and yeah, maybe a glass of soda with my dinner could be the reward I get for staying away from it!

As you can see, this is still an ongoing problem of mine, but I will not link the disgust of my growing fat to my Pepsi addiction. I simply can’t; cutting out Pepsi isn’t going to automatically make me 100 pounds lighter. And that’s the problem I encountered in the past: thinking that Pepsi was causing me to gain so much weight. 

Cutting out Pepsi from my life will probably only help me stay diabetes-free for longer, and that’s what I need to focus on when trying to quit drinking Pepsi. This idea that it’ll make me lose weight simply isn’t true; sure it will stop me from gaining more weight, but cutting one thing out of my diet isn’t going to do it.

So, after all of this, what am I really going to do with this Pepsi addiction?

Well, a couple of things:

• Stop linking the idea of cutting out Pepsi with this automatic weight-loss; it simply isn’t going to happen.
• Drink it in moderation to train myself that I don’t really need to drink it 24/7.
• Lastly, stop punishing myself for gaining weight because once again, drinking Pepsi is not the only thing that is causing weight gain, nor I stop drinking it will solve my weight problem.

But what do I know, maybe I’m just justifying my addiction like any other addict.

 

It could be hard loving yourself, especially being a size 26 knowing that you were a size 20 when you were out of high-school. Sometimes, looking at yourself in old pictures isn’t about missing the memories behind them, you look at them because you think you were prettier back then and now you’re just this “fat blob of a woman.”

But then I remember that I was thinking the same thing even when taking this picture. The deal is: weight doesn’t define self-love.

Hello. I’m Liz, and I am a fat girl with some deep-rooted issues.

Welcome to my world.

I come from a family of Italians and Puerto Rican’s. While my Puerto Rican family is not fat, my Italian side is, and I guess my sister and I just got that “fat gene” in the family. When we were younger, nobody cared if little Liz was chubby; she was a baby, and being a chubby baby met that you were the cutest thing in the world. But then you get older and that same family tells you that you’re getting bigger. “You should lose some weight”. “She’s gotten heavier since I last saw her.” And my personal favorite: “I’ll pay you $100 if you lose 100 pounds.” I’m not joking, that’s a true story.

We have this idea that fat is ugly, fat is bad, and fat is something that you shouldn’t want to have a lot of. We get fed these bullshit ideas that you can lose 16 pounds in 4 weeks (right, Jenny Craig advertisement in Bay Ridge?) and hear other people’s bullshit stories on how they are so much happier being “skinny” and “a couple of dress sizes smaller.”

And I fell for it time after time, thinking I was ugly, that my depression or sadness stemmed from a place of being fat, thinking that skipping meals and drinking only water in middle school would help me get skinny and stop being bullied by my own friends, and thinking that being skinny would stop making me be everyone’s second choice.

So as I got older and as I got fatter, I stopped caring, in all honesty. I stopped holding my body accountable for growing in the way that it does. Could I eat healthier? Of course. Could I be more active? Sure. But those things aren’t going to ultimately help me lose the 100+ pounds that won’t consider me “obese” on the “average height and weight chart.”

My body can’t even get to be that small even if it’s the ideal “weight for my height”, and I learned that from witnessing a family member of mine battle anorexia a couple of years ago.

Yeah, who would’ve thought that projecting this idea of “I’m happy being skinner” could cause eating disorders?

As of this moment, I am focused on loving my body in the skin that it’s in, whether it’s in a size 20, size 26, or in the baggier size 30.

This isn’t just a fat girl story learning to love her body. This is a story on how a fat girl learned that her self-worth isn’t measured in dress sizes, real romance isn’t just a skinny person’s privilege, and that respect, power, and confidence could walk in a body like mine.

This a project about self-love.

To build yourself up after years of abandonment is challenging; you don’t know where to start, you have to clean up the mess that’s gathered over the years, and ultimately you have to create the foundation in order to start building things up strong and tall.

And this is the story of how it began.