"She is so fat."
"Oh my gosh, I can't eat that, it's bad."
"I just need to lose all of this extra baby weight!"
"Wow you are so skinny!"
"Once I lose 10 pounds, life will be so much better."
"Does this make me look fat?"
"Sometimes I wish I had an eating disorder because then it means I'd be skinny. Haha just kidding!"
"That girl must be less than a hundred pounds she's so skinny. Lucky!"
"I wish I were as thin as her."
"I need to lose weight. No Freshman 15 for me!"
Raise your hand if you've heard all of these phrases or something like them within the past month. We should probably all be raising our hands. Isn't our society crazy? There are girls and women left and right saying all sorts of stuff like this...and it's normal. Do we even notice it? I'm definitely guilty of saying some of the above things more than once and or hearing someone else say it and let it slide as a passable comment. The above pictures are from forever ago and there's actually a reason for that. I never posted these because when I looked at them later, I didn't like how I looked in them and I felt insecure about them. I came upon these pictures again yesterday and wondered why in the world I didn't like them. They are fine pictures, the dress is cute, my hair is cute and I look cute! But yet, something about the way I was feeling affected how I felt about those pictures. We all do things like this all the time. Do we have to live this way, with everyone body bashing themselves and judging and comparing everyone around them? The answer is no, we don't need to live this way. We can change this.
This week is "Fat Talk Free Week." I hope that with me, you'll pay attention to yourself and others saying things that have to do with weight and putting a worth on weight. Start with an awareness of just noticing it happen. And then eventually we start to make a difference by stopping fat talk ourselves and calling out other people when they say it. Just for this week, let's make the world a better place and have no fat talk. There are better things to talk about than weight and we are worth so much more than what we look like.
And just to share, this is one of my new favorite quotes (from the November issue of O magazine):
"You cannot be a healthy person, let alone hope for healthy children, if you sigh and moan every time you encounter your own image, eat a cookie, or see an airbrushed model on a billboard. Even if it amounts to wholesale pretending, go pretend. Walk around pretending to be a woman who likes her body...because every step toward self-love you take, and every inch of confidence you give someone's daughter, makes the world a better place...
"You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful." -Amy Bloom
And in case you want to learn more about this stuff, three of my favorite websites for it are:
Beauty Redefined
Healthy is the New Skinny
BYU Women's Services and Resources
I'd definitely recommend checking them out. :) Go no fat talk! We can do it and make a difference!
