I am fat, overweight, a big boned person. Have been pretty much my entire life. And throughout my entire life, I have hated pretty much everything about my body. I’ve hated the fat rolls, the fact that my thighs jiggle when I move, the fact that even the ‘plus sized’ models don’t usually look a little like me. At my highest, I’ve weighed 300+ pounds on my short 5’4″ frame. Over the last few months though, I have lost a little more than 50 pounds.

And with that weight loss, I’ve gotten so many compliments and comments about how my body now looks. “You’re looking so good!” “You must be feeling great!” “How much have you lost?” have all been repeatedly said to me over the past few months and in the beginning I loved hearing them. My self worth became dependent on the weight I would lose every week and my obsession was on the cusp of being incredibly unhealthy.

But recently, I’ve realized how truly fucked up the pressure to lose weight, to hate everything about myself is. I’ve grown to love my body – every single inch and every bit of fat. I’ve come to love myself, to be okay where I am because every day I wake up and get out of bed is another day saying fuck you to my depression, anxiety, and self hatred.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point. I’ve realized that my worth isn’t determined by how much weight I lose every week nor is it determined by my pant size or how much belly fat exists on my body. I most definitely do not exist as someone’s motivation to go to the gym – I exist because I am my own person with my own path in life.

And a big part of why I’ve started to feel this way is because I’m starting to see people in the media who continuously say fuck you to our fatphobic society and love themselves with all their fat. Mary Lambert and Tess Munster are just two of many that have helped me be okay with myself. And people like Caleb (queerandpresentdanger) on tumblr have also been incredible in my own journey. Carol Rossetti‘s fairly inclusive body positive art work has also been so wonderful to look through and her Facebook page is just as wonderful and includes more of her own work.

I think talking about body image and body positivity is incredibly important because in our patriarchal, white supremacist, and capitalistic society – we are all taught to fit into this incredible narrow standard of beauty. We’re taught to be thin but not too thin, curvy but to not have any excess fat. Whiteness and cisnormativity reign over our understanding of beautiful and it’s so important to say fuck you, fuck you, fuck you to all of the standards we’ve been taught.

All of this isn’t to shame people who are thin – far from it actually. This is all to state my worth, my value as a fat person in the US. This is a fuck you to the society that claims that I am lazy, passive, or anything like that. This is to all the other fat people to say you are worthy, you are wonderful, and you are deserving of happiness.