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This woman's powerful 'before and after' photos crush myths about body positivity

"Body positivity is about saying that you are more than a body and your self-worth is not reliant on your beauty."

@scarrednotscared/Instagram

Michelle Elman, a body positivity coach, helps people who are struggling to find confidence in their own skin.

After persevering through numerous medical conditions and surgeries in her own life, Elman realized a few years ago that body positivity wasn't just about size or weight. Things like scars, birthmarks, and anything else that makes us feel different of self-conscious have to be a part of the conversation, and she tries to make the movement accessible to everyone.

Sharing her own journey has been one of her most effective teaching tools.

In May, she shared a post on Instagram of herself trying on a dress she bought five years ago in order to prove a powerful point.

In the first photo, from 2012 — when she was a size 12, she says — she's wearing a size 14 dress. In the new photo, she's wearing the same dress, though she says she normally wears a size 20.

The dress still fit.

See on Instagram

"NUMBERS DON'T MEAN ANYTHING," she wrote in the post. "So are you really going to let a change [in] dress size dictate your day? Are you really going to let an increase in a number affect your mood?"

"A higher dress size doesn't mean: — you are less beautiful — you are less worthy — you are less lovable — you are a worse human — you are a bad person — you are a different person AND it doesn't even mean you have a bigger body."

The viral photo inspired thousands of people. While a huge majority of the comments were positive, there was still something bugging Elman about the response.

Not everyone was getting the right message.

"Since the creation of this account, I have always been told I'm beautiful 'for my size' and I never wanted to talk about it because I thought I was being pedantic but eventually decided to speak my mind about it," she says in an email.

She decided to create a follow-up post to set a few things straight about what body positivity really means.

In the second post, she took a different approach to the "before and after" shots we see so often on Instagram. People loved it.

See on Instagram

In the caption, Elman addresses a couple of things well-meaning people got wrong about the message she was trying to spread. Some commenters said she looked "skinnier" in the 2017 photo which, though meant as a compliment, just reinforces that being skinny is somehow better.

Others said she wasn't fat enough, to which Elman could only scoff.

"If people tell you they are a certain size, believe them," she wrote.

"People think that body positivity is about trying to convince people that bigger bodies are attractive, either physically or sexually," she says.

But that's totally missing the point of what her work is all about.

"If you are still relating your love for your body to society's perception of beauty," she says, "then you are still reliant on someone else's opinion. Body positivity is about saying that you are more than a body and your self-worth is not reliant on your beauty."

Her second post is currently sitting at over 26,500 likes on Instagram — a clear sign that this is a message many of us desperately needed to hear.

This article originally appeared on 06.08.17

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Identity

Women share the unbelievable ways they were treated on planes for being fat

"The most important thing that fellow passengers can do is just acknowledge the humanity of the people they're traveling with."

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Plane rides can be a dehumanizing experience for many

Before moving to London to pursue a degree in anthropology, Stacy Bias had to decide if it was worth getting on the airplane.

"As a woman over 300 pounds, flying was pretty anxious for me," Bias says. Over the years, Bias came to fear being stared at, subjected to rude comments from seatmates, or asked to purchase an extra seat. The anxiety got so bad that at one point, she stopped flying altogether.

With a little determination and encouragement from her partner, who had recently relocated to the U.K., Bias faced down the fear and got on the plane to London. Soon after, she started a Facebook group to offer discussion, support, and tips to other fat travelers who had encountered similar roadblocks. The group quickly grew to nearly 4,000 members and Bias, in conjunction with a research project for her undergraduate dissertation, presented the group with a survey, encouraging members to share their experiences in the air.

"I had to take the survey down after three days because I was overwhelmed with respondents," Bias says. Like Bias, the overwhelming majority of survey takers reported feeling leered at, harassed, and like an unwelcome intruder in a public space.

Bias interviewed nine of the respondents. The result was the short animated documentary "Flying While Fat," which Bias posted to YouTube in 2016.

"The goal of the animation is to humanize fat people," Bias explains.

"I think fat people are talked about a lot — especially fat passengers are talked about a lot — but rarely spoken with."

Some of Bias' subjects love to fly and to travel, but they express frustration at having to endure "the expression" — the look of disappointment and anxiety that crosses their potential seatmates' faces as they walk down the aisle. Others describe having a "hyperawareness" of their bodies at all times, constantly evaluating how much space they take up. Verbal harassment, threats, even physical abuse are common threads in the interviews.

For one participant, the struggle over fat peoples' access to plane space fundamentally comes down to fairness.

"Everyone is fully aware of how much money they spent on those cubic inches," she poses. Because of the ever-shrinking size of airline seats and aisles, fellow passengers, she hypothesizes, are primed to go to the mat over how much room they believe they deserve.

For smaller people, one person's ability sit comfortably in an airplane seat may seem trivial. But for Bias' subjects, it's anything but.

"It's a topic that people feel strongly about," Bias says. "It really impacts the ability of people to partake of the world, to see family, to travel internationally, to go to funerals, to go to weddings. It's a thing that really impacts peoples' life in a profound way."

policy, standardization, customer, disabled

Animation showing the different shapes and sizes of airline travelers.

Image via YouTube video.

Fat flyers, she contends, frequently feel like excess baggage and a problem to be solved — and that, coupled with hostility from fellow passengers, can make them think twice before purchasing a plane ticket.

Bias believes the solution to the problem starts with standardizing customer size policies across the industry and creating more accessible spaces on aircraft.

Currently, those policies are a patchwork. Some airlines, like Alaska and United, require passengers who can't put both armrests down comfortably to purchase an additional ticket. Others, like Delta, simply "recommend" that customers who can't fit comfortably in a single seat do so.

Airlines "need to prioritize the well-being of passengers over profitability so that people literally can fit into the bathroom if they need to," Bias says.

This lack of concern could pose real health risks for some fat flyers. According to Bias, roughly one-quarter of her subjects reported dehydrating themselves before boarding so they wouldn't have to walk down the aisle or attempt to fit into the restroom.

Fat people, she believes, aren't the only ones who could benefit from an industry-wide policy review.

"It's disabled people, it's people with injuries, it's people with long legs. Everybody is deeply uncomfortable on the plane. It's getting more so."

Bias hopes to publish the results of her study in the coming year.

In the meantime, she hopes the film helps smaller flyers understand the frustration and helplessness their fat counterparts often feel in a space where cruelty can sometimes erupt subtly and without warning.

community, sociology, obesity, health and fitness

Animation of various physical shapes each with a heart.

Image via YouTube video.

For passengers of any size, Bias believes a little empathy and respect go a long way.

"The most important thing that fellow passengers can do is just acknowledge the humanity of the people they're traveling with."

This article originally appeared on 12.07.16

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Popular

Viral stories show how 'fatphobia' has life-and-death consequences— even for babies and kids

Dadmin/Facebook, Evette Dionne/Twitter

Many people who carry extra weight on their bodies have stories to tell about problematic medical care. Maybe a medical issue was overlooked because of their weight. Perhaps a doctor prescribed losing weight as a solution to an issue that had nothing to do with being fat.

In our society, fat is looked upon as a health hazard at best and a character flaw at worst. While evidence does point to obesity being a health risk factor, judgments about other people's extra pounds go far beyond concerns over health. Companies make billions of dollars off of perpetuating society's obsession with thinness, from diet pills to weight loss programs to plastic surgery, and fat jokes seem to be the final frontier of socially acceptable cruelty and marginalization.

This obsession with the size of people's bodies has consequences. People have no problem sounding off about health problems associated with obesity, but rarely do we hear people preach about about health consequences of the fear of obesity. Anorexia and bulimia come to mind, but there are also more nuanced tales of people facing medical neglect and abuse from others due to a pervasive fear of fatness. We're talking about illness and death in babies and children, all because of fatphobia.

RELATED: These 3 stories show how we're subconsciously teaching children to be fatphobic.

In a post on Facebook shared by Dadmin, a series of screenshots of Reddit stories illustrating how fatphobia can lead to dire health problems. Sometimes those problems are even exacerbated by healthcare workers themselves.

One person told the story of a substitute at a daycare where she worked questioning why a large baby needed to take a bottle. A coworker replied, "That's where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water." The substitute replied, "But she's so fat. She doesn't need it." All babies need to eat regularly, and all babies's bodies are different. (For example, my own babies were super roly-poly, and all they had was breastmilk their first 10 months or so. My best friend's baby, also exclusively breastfeed, ate far more frequently than mine and was super skinny.)

As the poster pointed out, "Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn't think she's too fat to be allowed to eat."

Dadmin/Facebook

Another person wrote about their cousin who had her kids taken away because she was starving her baby. Worried about her infant becoming "too fat," she only fed her one bottle of skim milk a day. "I don't want her growing up fat," she said. Even after having her kids removed for medical neglect, she still maintained that the doctors were wrong and she was right. According to the post, she said, "They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes."

Dadmin/Facebook

Other people chimed in with similar stories of babies being starved or evaluated as overweight.

"A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick," one person wrote. "The parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parents straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day...They even had the nerve to say because they didn't want the baby to get fat. People like this are real. They would rather have a dead baby than a fat one."

Another shared the story of their exclusively breastfed 10-month-old being in the 99th percentile and the nurse saying, "He is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that." She said later on, this same child measured off the charts but the doctor said at least he was in proportion. Because they can't control their "weight talk," which research shows is potentially harmful to children, this mother said she no longer allows doctors to weigh her kids unless it's medically necessary. (And it sometimes is. Medication dosages are often determined by height and weight, for example.)

Dadmin/Facebook

Another person wrote about how her mother had her dieting with her from the time she was 11, worried she was going to "get huge." She fed her less than 600 calories per day and grounded her when she found out her friends were bringing her lunches. She ended up in the ER and has struggled since with anorexia. "Please don't starve your fucking children," she wrote.

RELATED: A viral and heartbreaking hashtag proves body-shaming starts early for women.

As another user wrote, "Fatphobia is real and it kills."

Dadmin/Facebook

Sometimes healthcare providers think every health issue is weight-related, which can result in misdiagnosis.

One person shared a story of a college friend who had been having trouble breathing. The doctor told her to lose weight. Time and again over several years, she returned to the doctor with the same breathing problem, telling them she was dieting but couldn't exercise because of the breathing issue. It turned out she had a tumor on her lungs that wasn't caught. She died at age 25, three months after it was finally diagnosed.

Dadmin/Facebook

Yet another user shared a story of her little sister feeling fatigued and dizzy, getting nauseated at the sight of food, and suffering from abdominal pain at nine years old. The ER doctor dismissed it saying she was fat and probably just ate too many burgers. Her mom questioned the diagnosis and took her to another doctor who also told her that the girl was "just fat."

The pain got worse, the girl's skin began to yellow. A third ER visit revealed she had life-threatening hepatitis, which took a year to recover from. "If it weren't for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her," the person wrote.

Dadmin/Facebook

Clearly, some of these stories are extreme, and one must take Reddit stories with a grain of skepticism. But stories like this abound across social media.

They've been overlooking a problem in one of my vital organs—and saying all of the symptoms were caused by the size of my body. If I had not gone to the doctor, thinking I was having an asthma attack, the problem would not have been found.
— Evette Dionne 🏁 (@freeblackgirl) May 16, 2019

And there is more than just anecdotal evidence that prejudice against fat people can cause real medical harm.

A 2015 Lancet study found that doctors take less time with obese patients and are more reluctant to screen them for other health issues. It also found that healthcare workers tend to stereotype obese people as less likely to follow medical advice and stick to medications.

A 2017 review of research from the American Psychological Association also found that medical discrimination based on people's size is a real issue, and obese patients are more likely to have undiagnosed medical issues:

"In one study of over 300 autopsy reports, obese patients were 1.65 times more likely than others to have significant undiagnosed medical conditions (e.g., endocarditis, ischemic bowel disease or lung carcinoma), indicating misdiagnosis or inadequate access to health care."

When societal judgments on weight start affecting people's medical care, we have a problem. And it can't only be fat people battling the issue—it's up to all of us to fight size bias and tackle the myriad messages we see every day that fat people are less than.

Dadmin/Facebook

As one Reddit user said, "I'd really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. Fat people are already here for each other. We need you guys to help us out too. This is something I never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it's disappointing."

Let's talk about it now, and do what we can to eliminate fatphobia before it does more harm than it already has.

health

Family

These 3 stories show how we're subconsciously teaching children to be fatphobic.

I was The Fat Girl™ growing up.

Nearly every school and class has one because fatphobia is about normalizing hierarchy and social control. No matter what the relative weight or size spread of the group, there's always a biggest kid.

Recently I was talking to a group of teenage girls for their high school's Women of Color Speakers Series. I talked a lot about what it was like being TFG.

Fatphobia shows up in a lot of different ways, and those ways change over a person's lifetime. Most people only think of stigma as the "moment of impact" — the moment when one person treats another person in a cruel or violent way because of who they are. But stigma is never just those moments; it can happen without the conscious intent of another person and can often seem harmless.

Children in particular are encouraged to assimilate into our ways of knowing and doing, which aren't always awesome — especially when it comes to fatphobia.

Here are some examples of fatphobia that occur in childhood to help illuminate the nuance of it:

1. Exclusively casting fat children as elders, foils, or villains in plays and productions.

Every fall from age 5 to 12, it came time to rehearse the Christmas play at my Pentecostal church. Each year, the plot was a little different but often included a beautiful girl, a boy hero, and a lesson about humility or the true meaning of Christmas. Every year, I, like most of my friends, really wanted a lead part. As hard as I tried, practiced, rehearsed, or memorized, I knew I wasn't the kind of kid who could ever be cast as a lead — because I was fat.

That didn't stop me from wishing, but each time it fell through, I kicked myself for having wanted something so unattainable.

The last time I was in the Christmas pageant, I was cast as Monica, a third-wheel loser who went around chasing the hottest boy in church as he barely tolerated my advances. I was proud of this role because, unlike previous years, I got several lines. For some reason, I was also dressed like a huge bell the entire time. I liked that I made people laugh, but I didn't have the intellectual tools to understand that they were laughing at the familiarity of the insulting trope.

When fat children are consistently cast as the same type of character, we are sending them (and everyone else) a message about what is possible, who deserves to be visible, what heroes (and villains) look like, and who is worthy of positive representation and outcomes.

2. Monitoring how fat children eat.

Science says that children are often hungry. They like the stuff they've seen popularized on television. They like sugar and starchy stuff because it's delicious but also because they're growing. As a child, I was on the receiving end of differential treatment in both directions — sometimes being encouraged to eat less than my smaller peers or being served twice or three times the amount of food without any indication from me that I wanted that.

It's important to recognize that no matter the size of a child, they have the right to have judgment-free eating experiences.

3. Asking fat children to ignore hateful language and behavior.

Children can understand notions like justice and community and are natural self-advocates.

We teach marginalized children to be disempowered. This is facilitated by adults' and peers' sense that certain types of anti-social behavior are normal. Because of our own cultural education, we don't see certain manifestations of sexism ("boys will be boys," especially if they're white boys), fatphobia, and ableism, for example, as a "big deal."

Furthermore, we are sometimes unknowingly committed to the hierarchies that are maintained through anti-social behavior because we see them play out in our own lives.

At school, it is the targeted child's job to self-resolve hateful language and behavior. This sets up the victim-blaming mentality that fat children carry into adulthood. It's never OK when someone targets someone because of their body size. Older children, peers, and adults can help develop easy-to-remember scripts and create communities of accountability where adults and teachers are not the only people capable of mediation or resolution.

There’s this belief that bigger children are more adult-like and can therefore withstand more emotionally or physically.

This is dehumanization and stigma, plain and simple. Childhood is not determined by how small or large a child is. Children — no matter what their size or what they've been taught about their size — deserve to be treated with care and responsibility, free from the stigma we grew up knowing.

This story originally appeared on Ravishly and is reprinted here with permission. More from Ravishly:

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I'm fat. I'm choosing to stay fat. Here's why.

I'm fat.

The kind of fat I am depends on what side of fat you're looking at me from. If you're a thin person, I probably seem very fat. If you're a very fat person, I might seem average to you. To me, I am fat.

A post shared by Joni Edelman (@joniedelman) on Mar 5, 2018 at 10:48am PST

I've been all different sizes. I've been bigger than I am now. I've been smaller than I was in high school. I've been everything in between. Right now I am fat; I don't love it. Because I know what it's like to be smaller, I know that it feels better than I do now. But right now, I'm also happy — not with my body but with my life.

If you're a thin person who has always been thin (or you're a formerly fat person who worked your ass off to be thin), you're probably thinking something like "if you're more comfortable smaller, why not work hard to be smaller?" If you're a fat person, you might be thinking "me, too" or, alternatively, "there are ways to feel good without being smaller."

You're both right. Also, I already know both of those things.

I've chosen different paths to wellness with my body. I have worked to lose weight in a safe and healthy way and been fulfilled and proud of that. I've also eaten cake with reckless abandon and not cared about the upward movement of the scale needle. I have been obsessed with weight loss. I've lived with and recovered from an eating disorder. I've been miserably fat. I've been miserably thin. I've been average — neither fat nor thin nor miserable.

What I am now is the product of a lot of years of self-loathing, a few years of self-loving, and 43 years of being a human being. What I am now is OK.

For most of my life, I have believed that I only needed to accomplish X to be fulfilled.

X might be being thin or having money; it might mean being married or divorced, living in a home or traveling abroad. I have accomplished many of the X's, and I have been proud of those accomplishments. But ultimately, they have never made me happier in my life. I believe now that you are about as happy as you make up your mind to be.

I think it's true: There is a threshold past which you just can't get happier. If you have food and clothing and your other basic needs met, the rest of the stuff isn't paramount to your happiness; it's just accoutrement.

I thought that being thin was the answer to my happiness, but it wasn't. It was the answer to some things — more attention, a wider range of clothing options, fewer sideways glances from my grandmother over the gravy boat — but there were many things being thin couldn't do. Making me happy was one of them.

I know from experience that my weight is almost irrelevant to my happiness. So I am choosing to stay fat.

I could change my body, but I don't want to right now. The reasons I am choosing not to make any changes are both simple and complicated. I have plantar fasciitis, and I don't feel like walking. Walking is an easy way to feel better in your body, but my foot hurts, therefore walking hurts. Yoga does not hurt, so I'm doing that. Walking might result in weight change, but I'm not really thinking about that right now. Instead, I'm focused on healing my foot.

Overall, though, my health is excellent. There are no pressing physiological issues. My blood pressure is great; my cholesterol is fine. I have no compelling health risks motivating me to change my body.

My mental health is stable. I'm focused on my root health. I'm working on healing my body from the inside, using a combination of spiritual, mental, and physical changes. I am not working on changing my physical body because ultimately my physical body, while important, is less important than all of the other things I'm working on.

My body doesn't prevent me from doing the things I want to do.

I can ride my bike, do yoga, chase my kids, and run up and down a mountain and along the beach. So any attempt at weight loss, right now anyway, would be rooted in aesthetics, and the expectation for me to be aesthetically pleasing is one that I won't surrender to because being beautiful isn't that important to me.

A post shared by Joni Edelman (@joniedelman) on Mar 28, 2018 at 12:13pm PDT

We've been taught to value pretty above all of the other things we can be and are: smart, funny, generous, compassionate, kind, caring. But I am not young, and I am not a fool. I know two things: Beauty is fleeting, and the kind of people who care if I'm beautiful are not the people I care to be around.

For all the work women (mostly) do to achieve and sustain our beauty, our bodies will remain in flux. The thing you try to make beautiful now will sag next year. I cannot prevent the varicose veins, the wrinkles, the stretch marks. I will not waste my time trying. And if my partner one day told me that he thought I wasn't beautiful and was no longer interested in me, I would have to tell my partner to get screwed. I don't want to be with someone who values beauty above my intellect or my kindness.

A post shared by Joni Edelman (@joniedelman) on Mar 31, 2018 at 6:40pm PDT

Someone emailed me recently and said she'd read something I wrote a few years ago about being fat.

She wanted to know if I was still "fat and happy." She wanted to know how to let go of the need to feel thin but also find joy. She wanted to know how I found peace in my body. I don't email everyone back, but I emailed her back because I had something to say I thought she would find valuable and that I needed to hear, too. The answer isn't that I found peace in my body — it's that I found peace in my life. Once I located that peace, I realized that the turmoil I felt around my body wasn't stronger than the joy I found in everything else.

This story originally appeared on Ravishly and is reprinted here with permission. More from Ravishly:

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Trolls called this fat activist a 'landwhale.' Now it's the title of her memoir.

A few months ago, on a clear December day in Paris, France, Jes Baker was standing before a crowd as the city's guest of honor, wearing a shimmering gold dress and a beaming smile.

"La grossophobie, c'est ... bullshit," she told them.

As a fat activist and prominent body image author, she doesn't mince words, even in front of an audience that included the deputy mayor of Paris: Fatphobia is bullshit.

All photos via Jes Baker/The Militant Baker, used with permission.

She was speaking in the ornate salons of Hôtel de Ville as part of a conference of government officials, researchers, activists, and thought leaders from around the world. They had gathered to discuss discrimination against fat people.

The Parisian government, which hosted the event, also unveiled its manifesto challenging anti-fat bias and making a commitment to eradicating it. It was a monumental moment for the city, which had yet to include "size" in its anti-discrimination laws.

But it was also a deeply personal moment for Jes. She could never have imagined that her journey to make peace with her body would someday lead her to Paris, where she would assert the dignity of fat people around the world. And she would do it all while wearing a killer dress and heels.

Almost six years earlier, though, Jes wasn't quite that confident. In fact, she says, that's when she hit her "emotional rock bottom."

At the time, Jes was 26. She was working as a full-time baker, living with a partner who, she says, "would rather watch television while eating chicken nuggets" than be present and engaged with the world or with her. With a demanding job and a lack of intimate connection, Jes occupied her time with lifestyle blogs, including her own about vintage kitchenware.

Surfing the internet one night, Jes found the blog The Nearsighted Owl, written by a woman named Rachele. "I instantly connected with [Rachele's] love of thrifting, cats, and purple beehives," Jes says. But it wasn't the cats or vintage charm of Rachele's blog that captivated Jes the most — it was seeing a fat woman living and loving unapologetically.

While The Nearsighted Owl is no longer online, Rachele's fearless voice led Jes to an important realization. "[I thought] maybe I don't have to hate myself for the rest of my life," Jes recalls. "If she can love herself, maybe I can too?"

Up until that point, this deceptively simple but powerful idea had never crossed her mind.

Inspired, Jes delved into the world of fat acceptance and body positivity, reading everything she possibly could, especially perspectives that were different from her own.

And along the way, those writers gave her something she'd never had before: permission.

"[I found] permission to feel worthy. Of what exactly, in the beginning, I wasn't sure," Jes remembers. "But I knew I deserved better than I had been treating myself."

She continues, "I started to explore what I could do when I was relieved of some of the shame I had weighing me down my entire life."

She stopped blogging about the history of aluminum measuring spoons and did something much more vulnerable: She started writing about her road to recovery.

Her blog, The Militant Baker, became about everything from fashion photography — where she wore short dresses and swimsuits that she never would've dared to before — to political posts taking diet culture and fatphobia to task.

With a mix of vulnerability, humor, attitude, and unfiltered honesty, Jes's blog exploded in popularity, with media platforms like BBC, CNN, Time magazine, People magazine, and countless others featuring her work. But popularity was never the aim.

"For me, it's always about the power of liberation," she explains. "Freedom from any restrictions that others may push towards you. This includes freedom from subscribing to self-loathing and diet culture [and those who] have their own ideas about what that [liberation] should look like for you."

Jes says liberation is a journey — one that begins with giving ourselves permission to live life.

"Liberation is freedom from all outside expectations, even our own," she says. "Liberation is slowly learning how to become the best version of our whole selves."

Becoming our best selves can be an intimidating goal, though. That's why she has a few suggestions on where to start.

Diversifying who you follow on platforms like Instagram is one simple way to begin. "If we want our media feeds to represent real life (and ultimately show us that our body isn't strange, weird, or awful), we need to go out and actively find diverse images for ourselves," she writes.

Jes also advocates for gentleness. As she points out, the journey toward self-acceptance is difficult. "This is not the 'easy way out' in the slightest," she explains. "But just because it's not the easy way out doesn't mean it's not worth it."

Jes admits that sometimes she thinks dieting would be easier in a world that celebrates thin bodies. But if she's going to struggle, she'd rather work toward living her life on her own terms and not make her happiness dependent on something like size.

But it's not about loving her body all the time, either. Rather than doing a full 180 and forcing herself to feel one particular way, Jes found that not obsessing about her body at all — and finding a neutral, self-compassionate place — was most helpful in her journey.

"We used to want the three easiest ways to lose weight. When we reject that, we then start looking for the three easiest ways to love our bodies. It's totally natural," Jes says. "[But] asking someone to achieve body love can quickly become another unattainable prerequisite, much like the desire to change our body into what is deemed desirable."

"The real freedom lies in the gray area," she adds, "which is also the most difficult to sit in comfortably."

Jes unpacks all of this (and more) in her upcoming memoir "Landwhale." The title, which was once an insult used against her by online trolls, is now a source of pride.

Jes's journey shows that a simple idea — "I am enough" — can completely transform lives.

It's a powerful message that can touch people across communities, oceans, and even languages.

Jes was reminded of this power after a panel at that conference in Paris, when a man eagerly approached her to show off his new book. "I looked down and saw an entire section dedicated to the Abercrombie and Fitch campaign I had done years ago," Jes says. "I spoke little French and he didn't speak ANY English, but there was this moment of gratitude for and between both of us — it was humbling."

It's a message that Jes now hopes will come from new voices, too.

"[I want] to amplify marginalized voices that are far more important than my own through this platform," she says. She hopes that those coming up behind her will be a greater reflection of the diversity she sees in this movement.

She knows the road ahead won't be easy, but the right to live your life on your own terms is what ultimately makes it worth it. It's this kind of freedom that Jes keeps fighting for — not just for herself, but for every one of us.

"Trust yourself that you're doing the best you can and that it's enough," she tells me. "And if you ever need a cheerleader in your corner to remind you of this, I'm here for you."

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Stop shaming people who are obese, fictional or otherwise - Upworthy ›

If it seems like body-shaming is a new phenomenon, it's really not.

We hear about it more and more these days in response to mind-numbingly ignorant marketing campaigns, laughably absurd celebrity criticism, and everyday people singled out by mean-spirited strangers.

The extra awareness is a good thing, but the truth is that this kind of weight- and beauty-based bullying has been happening to (mostly) women for as long as anyone cares to remember.

Twitter user Sally Bergesen recently called on women to share their own memories using the hashtag #TheySaid.

She recalled her dad warning her not to eat too much when she was only 12 years old. 12!

Though the comment was likely meant as a playful tease, it left a deep mark on Bergesen. And she's not alone.

— (@)

An avalanche of responses followed, proving that our body-shaming problem is deep, rampant, and extremely damaging.

Fat or thin, young or old, it seems almost every woman who's ever lived has had to deal with other people's verbal opinions about her body.

— (@)

As stories poured in, it became clear girls are being told from a frighteningly young age that their bodies aren't good enough.

Women shared horrible things their parents, friends, and siblings said to them when they were 8 years old, or even 5.

5-year-olds can barely make themselves a sandwich, but we expect them to reel in their calories in order to keep a flat tummy.

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The stories also served as a powerful reminder that body-shaming can take a lot of different forms.

It's not always meant to hurt feelings. In fact, it's often disguised as concern or helpful advice. But its impact is almost always the same.

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The stories women shared were enraging and heartbreaking.

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As hard as the comments are to read, it's incredibly important we do so.

It sometimes feels like we've come a long way as a society in terms of accepting people of various body types as they are — and in a lot of ways, we have.

But you can't read through the thousands of responses to #TheySaid without realizing this remains a huge problem, particularly for women and girls. To move forward as a culture, we need to be brutally honest about how badly we've let many of our girls down, face the problem head on, and make a change.

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