The Fat Positive Lounge

[Soft*Silver]

this use to be one of my favorite threads! I am glad it was bumped today!

I had to close my plus sized clothing store because I simply could not do it any longer. It was physically taxing, especially after all those surgeries I had (2 stumach, 2 eye, 2 shoulder). I really miss it, especially the women. I miss hearing all their stories and having so many strong women around me daily! I love my job now, but I am a children's therapist. I dont get a chance to work with adults often but when I do, weight issues always comes up if its a woman...

I am a bit overweight, but not as much as I use to be. Having a horse for a couple years really helped build my muscles and take off some weight. I started a FB group for plus size horse riders...its really tough to handle the criticism we get for being overweight. My horse was part draft horse and was built to carry me, but people can be very hurtful regardless. When I gave up my horse tho, I gave her up because of my health problems, not because of the naysayers about my weight.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she was complaining she had gained SO much weight (like only 20 lbs!) and wanted to lose weight to be a role model for her grand daughter. We were at lunch and I almost choked on my food. Really??? You want to role model that skinny is the only way a woman should look? Rather than attack that premise, I simply said that for my grand daughter, I wanted to be the kind of grand mother I once had...my grand mother had full hips that I could climb up on and a soft belly I could feel warmed by, and large arms that when they embraced me, it felt like the safest place in the world. I wanted to be large against her small and let her feel the the soft warmth of loving flesh. After all, we girls learn how to love our own selves by the laps we crawl up on...

I stunned my friend. She ordered dessert....

[Soft*Silver]

wondering today, how many of us have memories as fat children, of being given toys and stuff instead of candy in our easter baskets?

sometimes people dont have to say IT.

[Soft*Silver]

someone many years ago, asked why so many femmes in the butch femme world were fat.

I was pretty dumbfounded because I hadnt noticed... I was too busy admiring my sisters for how beautiful they were/are.

Sometimes they do indeed say IT.

[Gayandgray]

I find it so crazy how people will actually starve themselves just to be thin!!!!! I have a friend that does that. I want to lose weight,don't get me wrong, because I'm obese. However, I'm NOT going to starve myself just so I can be skinny and wear freaking skinny jeans and look cute. If I'm hungry I'm going to eat, dammit! I need to give up junk food or at least cut back, but I'm not going to go to extreme.

[LeftWriteFemme]

[Kätzchen]

(Photo Credit: Flickr)


Venus of Willendorf (Wiki-Link)


I spent some time today, reading posts here, which led me to explore the topic of Fat Positivity. My online search culminated in reading about Venus of Willendorf, an stone age female figurine, which was found back in August of 1908, at an paleolithic excavation site near Willendorf, an small village in Lower Austria, near the town of Krems. The figurine was sculpted from Oolitic Limestone, and it is estimated to belong to the time period between 28,000 BCE to 25,000 BCE; but upon later examination, archaeologists believe the core of limestone it came from dates back to 30K years before the figurine's discovery.


To me, she's beautiful. She represents a period of time when there was no mirrors to examine one's physical appearance, yet it's speculated that pools of water was the only way anyone could know what their body's looked like.


Keeping in mind, questions posed by Nycfem, in an prior post in this thread (years ago), I examined the text provided in the wiki-link article, for ideas surrounding fat shaming or phrases of thought revealing shame about the notion of being fat. It's hard to know the gender of the person who created the article on Wiki; but I thought it was an positive sign that one of the curators of the stone age sculpture was female: Catherine McCroid. McCroid hypothesized that figurines, such as this one in particular, was created as an "self portrait" made by women from that time period.


As for fat shaming rhetoric posed by either people in our lives or via things we see in print or by things we observe other's say about women who are fat? I can say that for most of my life, I've been told that I'm morbidly obese, that my fat will kill me, that I'm not beautiful, that if I were not fat, I'd be beautiful.



I say to myself that I'm beautiful. I know that I am beautiful because I choose to cultivate all the qualities and traits I possess to be as beautiful as they can be.... even if by other's standards my idea of beautiful is not beautiful to them. I think what matters the most to me is that although I will never be skinny, and although I may lose some weight, that my fat body is as beautiful as it can be, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet and end of my toes. I'm kissable. I'm squishy. I'm loveable and valuable as an fat woman. I am the portrait of my own beauty.

Venus of Willendorf inspires me as much as all my sisters in the community.

I believe we are beautiful as we are and I celebrate being fat as a positive sign of our collective self acceptance and unconditional love for the state of existence each one of us experience in our lives every day.

Sending Femme Sister love to all,

Kätzchen

[clay]

Thank you Katzchen for posting & bringing this thread back on main page.

For me, I love BBW women. It is all those beautiful facets of them, I find so beautiful. I always have!

In the last year, I have been made aware that my very own fat (daddy belly) has made me realize just how sexy & comforting my girth, as I lie on my own BBW, is to her. And even more so, just how much a daddy belly is to a femme...... I still smile about that! Thank you all for making me aware of this....I heart you all.

To all who come into the Fat Positive Lounge, let me wrap that deliciousness all over my own self....yummm...just decadent!!