Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls by Jes Baker

to enhancing self-care behaviors—so they let weight fall where it may naturally.” That’s from Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight , by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor. 12
    See the difference? Exercising, eating “well,” and treating your body like the awesome machine that it is aren’t evil. Believing that you’re a shitty person for not doing those things or that you have to be a certain size to be okay is . Again, I encourage you to pick up Health at Every Size (or Body Respect if you want more of a narrative), because it’s seriously worth the read. But for now, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version of three principles the book focuses on.
    HAES encourages:
    1. Respect, Including Respect for Body Diversity

    Yes.
    Remember that statistic in the beginning, that only five percent of women naturally possess the body type often portrayed by Americans in the media? Ninety-five percent of us are never gonna have that body naturally. Ever.
    But that is NOT what we’re told. We’re told that we can have it, but only if we try hard enough. You say you’ve tried but still don’t look like a photoshopped Megan Fox? Then you’re not trying hard enough . TRY HARDER.
    Isabel Foxen Duke, the creator of the website Stop Fighting Food ( www.stopfightingfood.com ), shared this thought with me so eloquently:
    The myth that our weight is in our exclusive control is more damaging to women than almost any other social fallacy. Despite the fact that every conventional beauty standard that exists is defined fundamentally by its rarity and level of difficulty to achieve, the myth that humans are in control of their own body size propels women into the belief that their inability to attain such standards is their own fault, rather than the fault of the institutions that create them.
    Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and the situations they’re born into also affect their shapes and sizes. Bodies are NOT one-size-fits-all, and it’s time we accept and maybe even embrace that!
    If you want to start working toward that, I’d start implementing the tips in Chapters 6 and 7 , STAT.
    2. Compassionate Self-Care

    A. Eating in a flexible and attuned manner that values pleasure and honors internal cues of hunger, satiety, and appetite.
    I love this principle, because it stops time: It runs in, cuts around all the bullshit our society has padded around food and its implications, removes that bullshit, and then runs off . . . leaving us with something so basic we’re surprised we forgot about it at all.
    Flexible eating (not to be confused with flexible dieting) is a fascinating concept: It emphasizes being conscious while consuming food, enjoying food, staying connected to yourself while eating, and listening to your body to determine what it needs and when it needs it. Flexible eating is the opposite of a strict and regimented diet—it allows us to both reconnect with our bodies and enjoy food. Y’know, minus the emotional shame/pride/bullshit our society teaches us to associate with what we consume. We often forget that flexible eating is an option, because for decades there have been billions of dollars spent to help us forget about it. But by now you already know that.
    So yes, I love this guideline. It goes along with a conversation I had with Isabel Foxen Duke about how we attach SO much to food, and what if, instead of calling it emotional eating, or binge eating, or whatever eating . . . we just called it eating?
    Huh. Eating. No guilt. No shame. No pride. No gloating. Just enjoyable consumption of fuel for this body we have that is kinda fucking rad. Yeah. I like it. A LOT.
    But of course, with every new solution (however wonderful it is) there are always those who don’t have the means to apply it. The go-to advice within body positive groups is sometimes, “If you want Chinese