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.