Ya I love seatguru...i use it all the time...it's really very helpful...i read some of the articles i found too...thanks for that...they were very encouraging... :D

Tips for having a body positive New Year. Love this!

http://mashable.com/2015/12/28/body-.../#A8aEajAZJkq9

sexy dress
 

I'm not skinny, will never be skinny, don't even want to be skinny. But I like this dress because it has 3/4 length sleeves, has an empire bodice, with the dress flowing beautifully over the hips --- which I have hips that sway. I love the color too.

Actually, if I could have several dresses like this in various colors or pattern print, I'd be thrilled.

Anyway, I love this dress because I think it would look sexy on my body.

http://i00.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/707/3...329707_875.jpg

Here is an article about past contestants from the show The Biggest Loser

http://nypost.com/2015/01/25/were-al...eveal-secrets/

Melissa Harris-Perry has a great point about Oprah’s new weight loss ad.

https://upw-prod-images.global.ssl.f...rb-0.3.5&w=730


http://www.upworthy.com/melissa-harr...17bf234a99e51f

Yeah I wasn't too pleased with it either. Oprah has made a misstep with that. It sends entirely the wrong message. The person you're going to be when you're skinny is exactly the same person you are when you're fat - just in smaller clothes. There's no one different lurking inside your fat. Unless you're so heavy you physically can't do things, it's an old and outdated concept of size and how a person lives their life. I was very very disappointed in that ad.

I always wondered about the training methods on that show. I had a trainer for a while and if he tried to work me that hard I would have fired him. I'm not surprised that a lot of former contestants have regained weight--anyone would lose weight under the show's Draconian torture and starvation methods.
I think losing weight is basically just deciding to move around more and eat less. Besides, I think nice, rounded, feminine women are beautiful. Those super skinny ones can often be a little cranky from all that food deprivation.

BUMP.......

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....

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.

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.

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.

Venus of Willendorf (Vienna, Austria)
 

http://c7.staticflickr.com/9/8153/72...96fcae60db.jpg

(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 :bunchflowers:

To all those beautiful fat positive believers here!
 

Fat Positive Podcasts
 

I recently came across a bunch of Fat Positive Podcasts.... and if anyone would like to hear them, here are a few links:

Friend Of Marilyn

Friend of Marilyn (FOM) is a fat positive radio show. It provides counter programming to the normative discourses on fatness and obesity in our culture, hosting conversations in which accepted ideas and stereotypes about fatness are challenged. FOM believes that safe spaces for fat people are important, and the show is committed to providing a forum where fat people get to speak for themselves (not just have their lives thin-splained by others). FOM began in August of 2011, and is celebrating 5yrs by going on a tour around the world. According to the metrics collected by MPR, Friend of Marilyn has over 500 regular listeners, and is ranked in the top 5 programmes produced by the station.



Secret Dinosaur Cult (warning, this podcast is explicit)

A live comedy podcast by comedians Sofie Hagen and Jodie Mitchell, in which they explore identity in order to try and find out who they are - through the medium of dinosaurs. Hilarious, highly addictive and heavily dinosaur-based. SOFIE HAGEN is a stand-up comedian, author and host of 'Made of Human Podcast' and former co-host and co-creator of 'The Guilty Feminist' and a fat activist. JODIE MITCHELL is a stand-up comedian, improviser and a drag king in the drag king troupe Pecs. She is part of the radical and queer stand-up comedy collective The Lol Word.


To find more podcasts of a variety of interest, here is the main page to all types of Fat Positive podcasts:
PlayerFM LINK ( <<<<~~~ click me).

:blueheels: