Hello, My Name Is …

… Gabriela Falarz, but in the past I have been called a few other names: fat cow, fat pig, fat bitch, fatty, fatass, and, the moniker universally popular with all fat haters, fatso. I still get called these names occasionally by people who don’t like uppity fat bitches telling them to shut their bigoted mouths.

I came to the world of Fat Acceptance the hard way: kicking and screaming. I did everything I could to not be fat. I dieted. I exercised. I prayed. I hoped. I dreamed. Except for a few very brief periods when I starved myself into the world of the relatively thin, I have continued to be fat. My body seems to like it this way, even though most of society sure doesn’t. I have decided that my body is a lot smarter than I am, and that my body is nobody’s business but mine (and whoever I allow to get close to it).

That decision was anything but easy. I have an encyclopedia of body-bashing memories in my brain, like listening to my mother tell me about her latest diet, or how I shouldn’t be eating that cookie, or watching the skinny girls get all the attention from guys, or hearing a bunch of boys behind me laughing and planning their next insult. I always felt like the sole seer in a world full of blind people. How could they not see how wrong it was? It angered me and I knew that part of me ate to defy them, to show them just how much I didn’t care about their fucking approval.

But the message was so entrenched by then that it practically became a part of my DNA: as long as I continued to be fat, I would not fit in. From my 20s to my late 30s, I did the best I could to lose weight. I dieted when I got fed up with the pressure, hoping it would work this time, and I resolved to try again when it failed. Along the way, I got married and had a daughter. After my daughter was born, I made my last serious attempt to lose weight. I signed up for a very punishing diet program that worked for about six months. After a torturous bout of yo-yoing, I ended up fat again and got kicked out of the program for it.

I did get several thousand dollars lighter, though!

That was the last degradation I voluntarily participated in. After that, I resolved to put an end to dieting once and for all.

When you’re fat, you have two choices: you can join everybody else in hating your body and do everything you can to make it smaller, or you can put your hands over your ears to drown out the voices around you and ask yourself, “What the fuck am I doing this for? What is so wrong with me that I constantly have to punish myself for the way I look?” Then you can decide from that moment forward that you are never going to waste another second of your life trying to fit into somebody else’s fantasy of what you should be (your own fantasies are much more important.)

I have chosen the latter. My fierceness went public this past December, when my blog Celebreight Yourself debuted on Blogger. I consider it one of my missions in life to help other fat people realize that just because their bodies are bigger than society wants them to be does not mean it’s okay to be treated as lesser human beings.

Fat people are stereotyped in so many different ways. I now consider myself a member of a fat army that’s working to enlighten all the ignorant and misinformed people about just how beautiful, cool, sexy, funny, smart, and amazing we are.

But if they still can’t see it, then fuck ‘em.