I went on a diet, when I had sworn years before to never, ever go on a diet again. Of course I could not keep with the diet. The reason I could not keep with the diet, also the reason why I had sworn never to go on a diet again, and the reason I put on weight to start with when I moved back to Europe, to a new, exciting, but also uncertain and scary part of my life, is that I'm a binge eater. You don't need to know much about disordered eating to figure out that if you try to enforce restrictive food rules in someone who's prone to binging, rather than addressing the underlying causes and anxiety, the results aren't too exciting.

Erm, yes. I guess I should have started with "Hello, my name is Krazy Kitty (no not really it's not), and I've been binge eating since I'm 14, back when it was called non-purging bulimia." I sort of warned you up there? But although that's an important part of the story, today I'm more interested in the "Hello, my name is Krazy Kitty, and I am fat" angle.

Anyway, I couldn't stick to the diet, and started asking the Internet what to do about it. Because I'm smart, or something. Anyway, the Internet, being made of equal parts of porn, diets, and cute kittens, had a lot to offer. One of the motivation techniques I came across while on my diet, devised to help you stick with the celery sticks instead of buying an entire chocolate cake and eating the whole of it in a single seating, was to imagine yourself at your goal weight.

Imagine all the things you'll do when you're thin! Imagine how you'll look and feel and how great you life with be! Imagine all the things you'll do when thin that you don't do now!

I flipped.

Wait, I thought. Can't my life be great now? Can't I have fun now? Do the fatties need to be miserable? What if I never get thinner? Will I never be happy?

Thank you so much, whoever you are, for putting that piece of advice out there. Thank you so much for helping me pulling my head out of my arse and going back to thinking about various things I had already come across and quite forgotten. Health at Every Size. Intuitive Eating. The time my mother told me it took me struggling with my weight and still being to her eyes the most beautiful and fantastic of people on the planet for her to realize that it was okay to be fat. And that I wasn't really that fat anyway.

So I went back to the Internet, but this time looking for reads about body image, self acceptance, and the such. I bought and read Susie Orbach's Bodies. I read "The time to love your body is now. Not tomorrow, not Tuesday, now.". I read "This is me. The cellulite on my thighs, the stretchmarks on my hips.. I re-watched Killing Us Softly, parts 1 through 4. I sat down with my journal like when I was a special snowflake of a teenager and wrote page after page of mostly self-conceited crap. I cried. I screamed. I went on long, furious walks with Biffy Clyro in my ears, shouting along: We're on a hellslide help us help us we're on a hellslide.

And I started sorting myself through.

I have a big ass, y'all. I have cellulite and stretch marks and a belly. Like many people, and unlike the airbrushed people in the magazines, who have no blemishes, no lines, and no goddamn pores. I am fat, and I'm fabulous, and sort of fuck you if you disagree?

So here are a few thoughts.

(1) Bodies. They're amazing. Even when they're fucked up (and I mean fucked up as in full of weird pains and incapacities, not as in fat), they're your interface with the world. They take you to places and allow you to talk and hear and see and dance and smell and touch and cry and laugh and hug the people you love. Bodies are the shit, and they deserve respect and care. Whatever their shape, they certainly don't deserve that you spend every waking hour of your day agonizing over how they look.

(2) Fat kills! Oh wait no not really. Despite the war against obesity and other fat shaming shenanigans, thin doesn't necessarily mean healthy any more than fat necessarily means unhealthy. See The Year My Body Shrank. See Dances with Fat, for instance This Fit and Fat Thing. Health can be improved through healthy behaviors (such as: moving your body, eating a diverse diet, being at peace with yourself), not through thinness. Otherwise we'd all be doing heroin. Also, where's the hateful backlash against people who drink, smoke, don't get enough sleep or don't eat vegetables?

(3) But, but, but, fat! It's icky! Look at these disgusting slobs! How can they eat so much? (You'd be surprised, hon, you'd be surprised.) The reason you think fat is ugly is about 96.7% that it's a cultural norm. See other cultures, see our culture in the past, see photoshopped super models, see a flourishing diet industry, see a good slice of the feminist literature (e.g. The Beauty Myth).

(4) Beauty, shmeautiful. Think about the people you enjoy hanging out with. Think about the people you love. How important to you is the shape of their bodies? Even think about the people you wouldn't mind having hot steamy sex with. I'm not saying the curve of their shoulder or the shape of their butt isn't sending you over the edge, but... I might be overly intellectualizing these things... isn't it only a fraction of the whole attraction? Doesn't a cute guy stop being so cute when he turns out to be a pompous prick? Doesn't a plain girl become lovelier when she's got the quickest wit in the room?

(5) How I Feel About Being Fat is another great read, thanks Sarah.

(6) I am also fed up with the real women have curves saying. That's the same insidious shit, except reversed. No. Some real women have curves. Some real women don't. Deal with it.

The reason I wrote this post was as an answer to Amy's recent thought about her own struggle with her apperance^[1] "There’s a whole lot wrong with how woman see themselves. I have no idea how to go about fixing it," she writes. Well, I'm not sure either, but ladies, and gentlemen, and whoever followed up to that point: fuck. that. shit.