matt-joseph-diaz-blog

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Words can’t describe how different and how much better I feel these days. It isn’t just the weight. It was never just the weight; it was all of the things I thought I wasn’t allowed to be. From a young age, I’d allowed myself to be convinced by society that I wouldn’t look good no matter what I did, so why bother trying? I thought feeling beautiful was only something deserved by the people who fit into our beauty standards, and because of my size and my style I could never be that. I got to a point some time ago where I grew tired of waiting for the world to recognize my beauty, so I stopped looking for its approval. I am who I am, all things bright and gorgeous, and the world can catch up whenever it’s ready. 2009-2018 16 - 25 497 lbs - 200 lbs

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

It’s the season for art festivals, neon colors and breaking gender roles

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

On days when it’s hardest to be kind to yourself, treat your heart like you’d treat someone you love dearly. Think of the gentle touch and kind words you’d offer to your closest friend who told you they were hurting, and offer those same things to yourself. You deserve the same kind of love that you give to the people who mean the most to you. You are worth it. This world is your home, and you deserve to be here.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Always remember to pay your respects to the glow up 👏🏽 2009-2018 16-25 497 lbs - 200 lbs

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

People don’t tell you that your body may never truly and completely feel like it’s yours; that regardless of how many positive affirmations or self care days you grant yourself, your body might always feel owned by the cultural and societal norms that tell you that you can’t be beautiful without being what they want. That’s okay. There is a fight going on within you that starts anew every morning, a fight to treat your body and heart gently and with kindness, and some days we lose that fight. That’s okay also. What’s important is that you get back up and fight again tomorrow.

There are never days when I don’t need to consciously remind myself that I’m beautiful despite the scars that mar my body. I never fail to notice the spots of numbness when a loved one runs their fingers across my skin, reminding me that I’ve been pulled apart and pieces back together in unnatural ways. There will always be times I sit shirtless in the sun and watch as parents purposefully keep their children from staring at the tear across my back, and I will always feel guilty about the fact that it hurts a little.

I promise that no one will blame you for the days you don’t have the strength to fight, too tired from the long nights spent wishing this were easier. But I hope with all my heart that you stand back up and fight again when you are ready, because you’re never more beautiful than when your head is held high and your feet are on the ground.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

People don’t tell you that your body may never truly and completely feel like it’s yours; that regardless of how many positive affirmations or self care days you grant yourself, your body might always feel owned by the cultural and societal norms that tell you that you can’t be beautiful without being what they want. That’s okay. There is a fight going on within you that starts anew every morning, a fight to treat your body and heart gently and with kindness, and some days we lose that fight. That’s okay also. What’s important is that you get back up and fight again tomorrow. There are never days when I don’t need to consciously remind myself that I’m beautiful despite the scars that mar my body. I never fail to notice the spots of numbness when a loved one runs their fingers across my skin, reminding me that I’ve been pulled apart and pieces back together in unnatural ways. There will always be times I sit shirtless in the sun and watch as parents purposefully keep their children from staring at the tear across my back, and I will always feel guilty about the fact that it hurts a little. I promise that no one will blame you for the days you don’t have the strength to fight, too tired from the long nights spent wishing this were easier. But I hope with all my heart that you stand back up and fight again when you are ready, because you’re never more beautiful than when your head is held high and your feet are on the ground.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

My ex once made fun of how I dance and even though I’ve moved past it literally every time I dance privately or publicly I think about it at least once

Moral of the story is don’t be an asshole because you never know just how long you’ll mess with someone’s confidence

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

I’m so disappointed in what’s happening with mainstream body positivity.

There’s almost no way this won’t sound at least partly like the ravings of a twenty-something who’s salty that their instagram following seems to be in decline, but I want you to stick with me here.

I’ve been a part of the body positive movement for a few years now. After going viral in 2015 for making a video where I revealed the excess skin I had from losing nearly 300 pounds, I became a writer, public speaker and social media advocate for the importance of positive body image.

I’ve spoken at colleges and conferences all over the country, written pieces for multiple websites, met body positive advocates far more famous than me, and even spoke at an event for Seventeen Magazine at instagram headquarters.

Now, I need to make this clear: I still believe in the tenants and ideals of body positivity; more than ever in fact. What worries me is the direction the bopo movement is taking in the pursuit of public acceptance.

Like most radical ideologies that go mainstream, it had to be introduced in a more “approachable” form.

So this is something that really can’t be helped. When introducing an idea that completely opposes long held societal beliefs, you really have no choice other than to introduce it in a way “average people (typically meaning the type of person so unaffected by the issue that they have no knowledge of it)” will find palatable.

Obviously I’m writing pretty off-the-cuff here so I’m reaching for examples, but ones that come to mind are stuff like the original debut of Queer Eye, Will & Grace and RuPaul painting specific pictures of the queer community while introducing them as something the Straights™️ could be mostly comfortable with.

Rarely is this a conscious decision. Mainstream society lifts up the individuals and causes it finds different and powerful without being too challenging. Try and force the world to accept something too different, and it becomes offensive.

So what does this look like in the body positive movement?

I remember working at one of the biggest photo retouching companies in NYC during the early 2010s, when we first discovered that one of our clients, Aerie, would no longer be retouching the models in their lingerie ads.

This is indisputably a wonderful thing, and I hope it has inspired other companies to do the same thing. But while Aerie chose to forgo retouching its plus sized supermodels, they were, in fact, supermodels. The net was cast a bit wider, but these plus sized models still checked off a lot of the boxes we associate with the problematic societal beauty standard: all cis women, all “conventionally attractive,” and nearly entirely white.

This is what concerns me.

As someone who follows and is followed by a lot of prominent members of the bopo movement my instagram suggestions are littered with bopo accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers; and time and time again these popular accounts are professional models, cis, white, female and almost entirely plus sized by definition of how it’s seen in pop culture: meaning mostly thin with hips and breasts and ass.

Now, these bodies are just as valid as any other and deserve their time in the sun and to be celebrated. That isn’t up for debate. However, what appears to be happening is that an idea started as a a radical breaking of chains imposed on us by society has been morphed by popular culture into a shift of what we see as “acceptable.”

Basically, what started out as an attempt to dissolve the beauty standard has been turned into merely changing what the beauty standard is. That’s a problem.

There are so few men in the body positive movement.

There are a lot of reasons for this: Beauty standards are by and large more imposing and pressuring for women than men, toxic masculinity doesn’t allow for the vulnerability necessary to be part of the bopo movement, etc. However, if roughly half the population doesn’t step the fuck up and garner attention when they do, a massive aspect of the movement is never going to be acknowledged.

At the end of 2015 I was named one of the top 7 men to follow in the body positive movement by the wonderful Jes Baker, when I’d been an advocate for less than 9 months. Whenever I mention this I always joke that “it was a top 7 because they couldn’t find 10 men involved in the movement,” and it always rings a little true.

The body positive movement in mainstream media is overwhelmingly white.

…I really don’t have a great answer for this. There’s a lot of fucking white people, and if there’s one thing white people love, it’s other white people.

That isn’t for lack of trying, either. The bopo movement is rife with POCs that are celebrating their bodies and trying to empower others, but they get nowhere near the attention of the overwhelming number of whites. The racism inherent in our beauty standards already continue to hold true when moving into the bopo movement.

As a male-presenting latinx in the body positive movement, I don’t know if I’ve ever met another member of the community with even my low degree of online attention that checks both those boxes.

The trans/nb community mostly lacks representation in bopo as well.

This is similar to the issue of non-whiteness in body positivity. We already underrepresent those who aren’t cis in mainstream media, and when we do it’s either to commend how you can’t clearl tell that they aren’t cis, or to celebrate how “brave they are” for celebrating their own beauty despite how freakish society may continue to believe they look.

“Plus-sized” vs Fatness in bopo.

I’ve touched on this a bit already, but in the pursuit of making body positivity approachable it feels like “body positive” has come to mean “curvy, but definitely not fat” in a way that’s as toxic as it is ridiculous.

There have been times when I and people who have reached out to me have told me that they don’t feel like they fit into the body positive movement because they aren’t curvy enough. Body positivity doesn’t mean “hips, chest, but no stomach” in the way it’s so disproportionately portrayed, and “fat” isn’t a dirty word. Curvy people deserve to be body positive, and so do fat people, thin people, and everyone else on the spectrum.

That’s kind of the entire fucking point. You deserve to feel confident in your body, no matter what form it takes.

So, what do we do about it?

In early 2017, I was invited to visit Instagram headquarters to speak on a panel for the National Eating Disorder Association and Seventeen Magazine about the importance of body diversity. I was a last minute addition- I wasn’t invited until the week before the event.

It was a really cool opportunity and I was so honored to be a part of it. However, of the five people in the panel, I was the only one who wasn’t a mostly thin, white, cis woman.

A panel on the importance of body diversity. Five thin pretty white women and me, 6’5” lumbering queer male presenting nonbinary giant, Matt Diaz.

…I…

…fucking…

…what?

During the panel I was asked what I think is the most important thing we can do for the sake of body diversity. There was a group of college students that were invited to the event sitting in the front two row, and they were entirely people of color. And I know there’s no way I was this poetic off the cuff, but I remember saying something akin to:

“Stop waiting for someone to make you feel comfortable enough to be yourself. Be who you are, and force the rest of the world to catch up.”

Nobody is going to suddenly decide that we’re worth seeing. You’re basically going to have to drag people kicking and screaming into accepting you, and that fight has to become a key aspect of who you are.

If you plan on waiting until you see a prevalent body positive Instagram or tumblr user who looks like you before you express your own body positivity, you’re going to be waiting for the rest of your life.

Be that inspiration for someone else. Tell the world that you’re here and demand to be seen. Embrace and celebrate the people you see who deviate from the norm; promote them, talk about them, reblog them, and tell them how proud you are of them.

This is definitely starting to sound like I’m just trying to promote my own Instagram and shit (@mattjosephdiaz) but in all honesty, I don’t care if you don’t decide to follow me. I just want to leave you with something it took me too long to understand.

Your success in the body positive movement will never be about how many followers you get, or how many people tell you that you’ve changed their lives. Your success in this movement comes from learning to love yourself in every form you might take.

Sometimes, the only persons life you change is your own, and that’s more than enough.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

What can I say except you’re welcome🎶

I’ll never forgive dudes on tumblr for pretending they gonna wear croptops outside in 2014 and then never following thru w the revolution kid cudi did not lead y'all to victory for you to turn away from battle

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

I’m so disappointed in what’s happening with mainstream body positivity.

There’s almost no way this won’t sound at least partly like the ravings of a twenty-something who’s salty that their instagram following seems to be in decline, but I want you to stick with me here.

I’ve been a part of the body positive movement for a few years now. After going viral in 2015 for making a video where I revealed the excess skin I had from losing nearly 300 pounds, I became a writer, public speaker and social media advocate for the importance of positive body image.

I’ve spoken at colleges and conferences all over the country, written pieces for multiple websites, met body positive advocates far more famous than me, and even spoke at an event for Seventeen Magazine at instagram headquarters.

Now, I need to make this clear: I still believe in the tenants and ideals of body positivity; more than ever in fact. What worries me is the direction the bopo movement is taking in the pursuit of public acceptance.

Like most radical ideologies that go mainstream, it had to be introduced in a more “approachable” form.

So this is something that really can’t be helped. When introducing an idea that completely opposes long held societal beliefs, you really have no choice other than to introduce it in a way “average people (typically meaning the type of person so unaffected by the issue that they have no knowledge of it)” will find palatable.

Obviously I’m writing pretty off-the-cuff here so I’m reaching for examples, but ones that come to mind are stuff like the original debut of Queer Eye, Will & Grace and RuPaul painting specific pictures of the queer community while introducing them as something the Straights™️ could be mostly comfortable with.

Rarely is this a conscious decision. Mainstream society lifts up the individuals and causes it finds different and powerful without being too challenging. Try and force the world to accept something too different, and it becomes offensive.

So what does this look like in the body positive movement?

I remember working at one of the biggest photo retouching companies in NYC during the early 2010s, when we first discovered that one of our clients, Aerie, would no longer be retouching the models in their lingerie ads.

This is indisputably a wonderful thing, and I hope it has inspired other companies to do the same thing. But while Aerie chose to forgo retouching its plus sized supermodels, they were, in fact, supermodels. The net was cast a bit wider, but these plus sized models still checked off a lot of the boxes we associate with the problematic societal beauty standard: all cis women, all “conventionally attractive,” and nearly entirely white.

This is what concerns me.

As someone who follows and is followed by a lot of prominent members of the bopo movement my instagram suggestions are littered with bopo accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers; and time and time again these popular accounts are professional models, cis, white, female and almost entirely plus sized by definition of how it’s seen in pop culture: meaning mostly thin with hips and breasts and ass.

Now, these bodies are just as valid as any other and deserve their time in the sun and to be celebrated. That isn’t up for debate. However, what appears to be happening is that an idea started as a a radical breaking of chains imposed on us by society has been morphed by popular culture into a shift of what we see as “acceptable.”

Basically, what started out as an attempt to dissolve the beauty standard has been turned into merely changing what the beauty standard is. That’s a problem.

There are so few men in the body positive movement.

There are a lot of reasons for this: Beauty standards are by and large more imposing and pressuring for women than men, toxic masculinity doesn’t allow for the vulnerability necessary to be part of the bopo movement, etc. However, if roughly half the population doesn’t step the fuck up and garner attention when they do, a massive aspect of the movement is never going to be acknowledged.

At the end of 2015 I was named one of the top 7 men to follow in the body positive movement by the wonderful Jes Baker, when I’d been an advocate for less than 9 months. Whenever I mention this I always joke that “it was a top 7 because they couldn’t find 10 men involved in the movement,” and it always rings a little true.

The body positive movement in mainstream media is overwhelmingly white.

...I really don’t have a great answer for this. There’s a lot of fucking white people, and if there’s one thing white people love, it’s other white people.

That isn’t for lack of trying, either. The bopo movement is rife with POCs that are celebrating their bodies and trying to empower others, but they get nowhere near the attention of the overwhelming number of whites. The racism inherent in our beauty standards already continue to hold true when moving into the bopo movement.

As a male-presenting latinx in the body positive movement, I don’t know if I’ve ever met another member of the community with even my low degree of online attention that checks both those boxes.

The trans/nb community mostly lacks representation in bopo as well.

This is similar to the issue of non-whiteness in body positivity. We already underrepresent those who aren’t cis in mainstream media, and when we do it’s either to commend how you can’t clearl tell that they aren’t cis, or to celebrate how “brave they are” for celebrating their own beauty despite how freakish society may continue to believe they look.

“Plus-sized” vs Fatness in bopo.

I’ve touched on this a bit already, but in the pursuit of making body positivity approachable it feels like “body positive” has come to mean “curvy, but definitely not fat” in a way that’s as toxic as it is ridiculous.

There have been times when I and people who have reached out to me have told me that they don’t feel like they fit into the body positive movement because they aren’t curvy enough. Body positivity doesn’t mean “hips, chest, but no stomach” in the way it’s so disproportionately portrayed, and “fat” isn’t a dirty word. Curvy people deserve to be body positive, and so do fat people, thin people, and everyone else on the spectrum.

That’s kind of the entire fucking point. You deserve to feel confident in your body, no matter what form it takes.

So, what do we do about it?

In early 2017, I was invited to visit Instagram headquarters to speak on a panel for the National Eating Disorder Association and Seventeen Magazine about the importance of body diversity. I was a last minute addition- I wasn’t invited until the week before the event.

It was a really cool opportunity and I was so honored to be a part of it. However, of the five people in the panel, I was the only one who wasn’t a mostly thin, white, cis woman.

A panel on the importance of body diversity. Five thin pretty white women and me, 6’5” lumbering queer male presenting nonbinary giant, Matt Diaz.

...I...

...fucking...

...what?

During the panel I was asked what I think is the most important thing we can do for the sake of body diversity. There was a group of college students that were invited to the event sitting in the front two row, and they were entirely people of color. And I know there’s no way I was this poetic off the cuff, but I remember saying something akin to:

“Stop waiting for someone to make you feel comfortable enough to be yourself. Be who you are, and force the rest of the world to catch up.”

Nobody is going to suddenly decide that we’re worth seeing. You’re basically going to have to drag people kicking and screaming into accepting you, and that fight has to become a key aspect of who you are.

If you plan on waiting until you see a prevalent body positive Instagram or tumblr user who looks like you before you express your own body positivity, you’re going to be waiting for the rest of your life.

Be that inspiration for someone else. Tell the world that you’re here and demand to be seen. Embrace and celebrate the people you see who deviate from the norm; promote them, talk about them, reblog them, and tell them how proud you are of them.

This is definitely starting to sound like I’m just trying to promote my own Instagram and shit (@mattjosephdiaz) but in all honesty, I don’t care if you don’t decide to follow me. I just want to leave you with something it took me too long to understand.

Your success in the body positive movement will never be about how many followers you get, or how many people tell you that you’ve changed their lives. Your success in this movement comes from learning to love yourself in every form you might take.

Sometimes, the only persons life you change is your own, and that’s more than enough.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Get ready to see a lot of looks like this in the spring because this stomach was expensive and I’m gonna get the most out of it

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Get ready to see a lot of looks like this in the spring because this stomach was expensive and I’m gonna get the most out of it

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

A lot has changed in the last couple of years. I started a journey that would have me lose more than half my body weight and get more than 50 pounds worth of excess skin cut from my body. I faced and overcame a long history of binge and emotional eating, which I still struggle with to this day. But most importantly, I learned to treat myself with kindness in all forms. I take so much pride in the progress I made, but I’ll never do so by shaming and mocking the people I’ve been. They led to who I am, and they deserve to be treated gently as much as I do. You don’t need to hate who you’ve been to love who you are. 2009 - 2018 16 - 25 497 lbs - 200 lbs.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

I spend more time than I’m proud of thinking about the time when I had a pretty big tumblr following. It was a weird stage in my life when I wanted more than anything to make something of myself bigger than the moments of attention dropped on me from having a video go viral.

I’m still trying to sort out who I am and what I want, but i feel more like myself than ever.

I’d like to throw my hat in the ring for that “get you a man that can do both” thing.

Photos by Revelist.

Oh and also, welcome to the summer of male crop tops.

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

It’s funny because tumblr thought we were dating for years and now we are

😊😊

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Man the way I handle sending sexy pictures has changed a lot since the last time I had to do it

[matt-joseph-diaz-blog]

Man the way I handle sending sexy pictures has changed a lot since the last time I had to do it