Why Every Body Deserves True Love

It feels like I woke up one morning in 2015 and suddenly, everyone has a six-pack and a spray tan. Everyone drinks spinach and carrot juices not for a cruel dare, but because it’s basically the coolest thing ever to be super ‘organic’. Everyone does yoga and goes for a 12km run every weekend and signs up to half-marathons. Everyone rejects junk food and eats salads all day with the dressing on the side and only eats that half a block of chocolate once every 4 nights, because you know, moderation and balance is everything. And it also seems like suddenly, everyone is an expert on health, fitness and body confidence and gets to decide how people live their lives and who finds love. To that I say, screw everyone.

I am a healthy, curvy girl. I have a visible body shape with a waist and muscle and I’m certainly not obese or grossly overweight. Though I can tell you, I definitley have been in the past. Am I a little chunkier than most girls in the Size 10-12 category though? Yes. Growing up, like almost everyone who now roams the earth, I was bullied for my weight and my glasses and my nerdy demeanour. I wasn’t sexy or cool, just funny and wore my heart on my sleeve. As I grew up and found myself, the weight did drop but never entirely enough to make me feel 100% secure in myself. And even today, I experience so much anxiety, self-doubt and insecurity when it comes to my body and often feel like I don’t deserve love or happiness because of the way I look. But recently I’ve come to realise, eff that shit, because it’s simply not true.

What so many people and especially young women fail to understand is that being fat, plus-size, curvy, chunky, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to celebrate yourself anymore. You are just as entitled to happiness, love, success, beauty, children, marriage and LIFE than any other thin person on this planet. We are not people inspite of our weight or appearance but rather BECAUSE of it. It’s part of who we are and the sooner we learn to hold ourselves to a higher standard, the less likely we are to buy into the bullshit the world around us feeds us.

I remember last year, sitting on a barstool across a guy who I was head over heels in love with. As he looked around the bar at the very many scantily clad ‘fit’ girls, he made a passing remark that he didn’t care if a girl was ugly as long as she was thin as it showed a dedication to her health. Being very obviously NOT THIN, I knew immediately the remark was meant to throw me off balance. And though I knew better and recognised this, I still let it affect me because his opinion mattered so damn much. When I retorted that his comment was ridiculous and that I happened to work out five days a week, he very quickly backtracked and said he didn’t mean me and that I had made excellent progress. And that just pissed me off even more. What the hell kind of progress was he talking about?

Being so infatuated, I very much took to heart what he said and ended up developing a borderline eating disorder that involved eating only 500 calories every alternative day. I wanted so much to show how dedicated I was to being the ideal woman he could love, that I forgot that there was NO SUCH THING. A year later, I now realise how utterly ridiculous his comment was and just how harmful. That he had essentially suggested that somehow because I wasn’t thin, I hadn’t quite achieved my potential as a person yet. Which is not only false but also so demeaning to me both as a woman and as a human being.

I’ve been in that dark place in my head and I’m not ashamed to admit, sometimes I still do go there. You know, that place when you go to a store and you watch all the women around you try on clothes that you only wish you could fit into? That moment when you pull on the 10th pair of jeans and they just don’t fit and you feel your face warm with the sting of your hot tears. That place where you watch your sister who is the perfect Size 4, put on the perfect dress, and look the perfect way for the perfect night. I have felt the burn and humiliation of being rejected by endless men who have told me that I will never be good enough to have on their arms and show off to their friends. I have put my dreams on hold, missed attending fashion week because I felt I was too ugly to be seen in the front row. I have dealt with years of acne and taunts about being a nerd because of my glasses and cried myself to sleep wondering when I’ll finally be good enough to be someone’s idea of beautiful. I’ve binge-eaten, then starved. Been on every fad diet. I’ve lost and gained weight rapidly. I’ve done it all. But what I’ve finally come to realise is, I don’t need anyone else’s approval. This is my life and my headspace and there is no such thing as being too anything to fall in love or find it yourself and the sooner you accept this, the happier you will be.

Often when I read articles written by fat shamers, I notice one very critical component is missing from their ignorant rants. There is always a spiel about how discipline, willpower, mathematics, exercise and calorie counting all play a part in bringing a person back on a ‘healthy’ track when they are overweight. Yet what they fail to note and very clearly realise, is that being fat or overweight is not just a symptom of not knowing or understanding nutrition, but also of not being in a healthy state of mind. And that is really, over 95% of the battle. In fact, you would be surprised to know that I, as a bigger girl probably know more about the average calorie count of most food items and what I should and should not be eating than any of my thin counterparts. It is not the lack of knowledge or awareness, but rather an inability to get out of our own heads based on the cumulated experiences and traumas that we have endured growing up. That is what has made us reach out to food as a source of comfort in the first place.

In my case, it was knowing I was different. It was moving around as a kid, having to make new friends all the time and experiencing a somewhat volatile family life. For many others, it’s their own version of this. Be it bullying, abandonment, broken homes, trauma, being compared to siblings etc. or just a general feeling of inadequacy. Whatever the reason, being overweight is never just because you ate too much. And that is why simply shaming and hating people for not knowing how to balance nutrition, is not the way to get them to find the path to health. A healthy body starts with a healthy mind and until we know how to fix the symptoms in the mind, we cannot fix the body. It really is that simple.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, what I truly love is how hypocritical we are when it comes to the notion of ‘health’ and using it as a thin veil to justify outright ignorance when it comes to this issue. I can tell you, I have a BUCKET load of friends who smoke pot, drink to excess, eat crap all day, smoke cigarettes and never, ever exercise. They don’t wash the make-up off their faces at night, haven’t had a glass of water that wasn’t followed by a shot of tequila in years and don’t care if they’re eating McDonalds for every meal. Yet somehow, I don’t see anyone shaming them for their unhealthy choices because guess what?

They’re thin. They don’t have an inch of extra fat on their bodies and so suddenly, we assume they must be dedicated to their well-being and be sipping kale and spinach smoothies all day to look so svelte and sexy. Where’s all the outcry over their so-called ‘health’ now? After all, isn’t being healthy so much more than just your body weight? And even if it isn’t, what gives someone the right to judge a person or make assumptions about their health just because their flaws are more physically visible than others? Being overweight is not healthy and I in no way endorse it as a lifestyle, but I sure as hell don’t think shaming a person into action so negligently is the answer. Because I can guarantee to you, everything you’ve said to them, they’ve already said worse to themselves before.

I know I’ve spent years of my life hating myself, telling myself I will never be good enough to love and never be good enough to be the woman that I think I can truly be. Though I have had plenty of loving and supportive people around me, it simply did not resonate with me that I can be everything I want and more because I’m not defined by a number on a scale of a pair of pants. It never registered that I am also not single or not deserving of great love because I am a curvier girl. That I do not have to accept subpar behaviour and shitty standards that men will try to exert on me when they treat me like a doormat because of the fact that I do not come in a Size 6 body.

Today as someone that recognises the impact that my mind has on my body, I can choose to live a happier, healthier life. I can embrace exercise, I am able to take care of myself and I am able to lift myself up to achieve my goals and be the ambitious woman I truly am. And this is only because I have after much struggle, managed to somewhat overcome the mental demons that I was battling, not because I learned that there are 490 calories in my sandwich. Even today, I have moments where I doubt if I can’t be in relationships and date around because I don’t fit the ideal woman in her 20s. But with the support of those who clear my headspace, I know this is just because I haven’t truly accepted me for everything that I am and it’s not because I don’t deserve it.

We live in a world where it is so easy to prey on other people’s insecurities to mask our own. We live behind screens, spew hatred and throw stones because it makes us feel better about all of the things that we don’t know or can’t do. It is so easy to embrace insecurity and not know what we stand for as individuals any more. We love to pass judgement and think we know better than everyone else about everything else. For all the people out there that think they don’t deserve love or can’t be loved because they don’t fit the ideal that the media, the haters and most importantly, the cowards try to make us subscribe to, I say to you, forget them.

I’m tired of the hate and tired of forcing people to be apologetic for who they are. Maybe one day they’ll be a Size 4, maybe it’ll never happen. But what I do know for sure is, one day you will be loved, you will be respected and you will be everything you want professionally because you damn well deserve it. And I will never stop using this platform and my words to make sure you know this, every single day.

R xxx