My priorities in life have changed in the past two years. If you spoke to me while in my last few months of high school, I would have told you how much being skinny meant to me. I use to lay in bed at night, angry at my self for not working out, or eating something I shouldn’t, working my self up for doing all the things that 18 year olds do. It wasn’t until that summer that I started to realize it was stupid for me to be angry at myself for not starving myself, for not conforming to a ridiculous standard that is used to put fear into our society. Over the past few years, it seems at those it is the fat people ruining America; we are the epidemic that could be controlled if we only stop eating.

I went out to the mall to get a bathing suit this past week, fitting my pudgy body into a suit was fine, but when the only options for me are the suits that tell me I will look 10 pounds thinner in 10 minutes, it makes me want to scream. I don’t want to look thinner; I don’t want to be told that I’m fat when I’m buying a bathing suit. The worst part, being fat is expensive; the suits that came in my size were about 30 dollars more expensive than the brand name suits. After going to the mall I went to work, doing my normal thing when I started talking to another heavy girl about priorities in life. The conversation started with me talking about my magazine concept; after she told me it was stupid, she continued to talk about how all fat girls want to lose weight. I’ve gotten to the point where ranting seems pointless. So after saying that 95% of diets fail, and her come back of, “Well that’s because people want to lose it fast.” I just stopped talking.

To be a fat girl is to look up to women that are smaller than we are. We have no one on television or magazines that look like us. Heavy women are put into closets without seeing the light of day, the women that are plus-size models are normal size at their heaviest. We are invisible, looked passed with stereotypes that are pushed upon us by our undereducated counterparts. We see people everyday of different races and ethnicities but where are the different sizes.

I wish fat girls could stop caring what everyone else wants, stop thinking that happiness comes with thinness, and realize that starving our self for a fake healthiness is dangerous and stupid. I want to be fat, happy, and healthy, it’s possible.

My ranting is done, for now.