I have to say this because I just had a very serious talk with my bestie about weight.
When I first went to college, I was doing acrobatics four days a week and a 15 to 18 hour course load a semester, while spending six months out of the year sick or recovering from such. The bronchitis plus [whatever comorbid illness struck this time] was bad enough, but the recovery took so long because I had so little fat that my body would start eating muscle and tissue.
I had access to a school nutritionist and so I wrote down everything that I tended to eat, how often I did so. My diet was and still is semi-decent, mostly because I have enough texture issues that a lot of junk food and "unhealthy" (I say that loosely) stuff I can only eat very tiny portions of, if at all, and most meat things are completely off the table unless I make it myself.
I was and still am very high energy. I have always been skinny or slender since I started walking, had some body image issues after being sick and I could count every rib. At the time of going to the nutritionist, I was 190 pounds of mostly muscle.
She looked at me like I'd lost my goddamn mind when I said I wanted to gain some fat and I wanted to know why I just wasn't. I was a freshman. I knew about the freshman fifteen. Instead of gaining fifteen pounds, though, I lost it, and it was fifteen pounds I didn't really have to lose. I was eating something ridiculous like almost double what the average woman "should" be, calorie wise, basically constantly snacking because I was always hungry.
Two years later I was in the hospital for a month. A wheelchair for seven. Lost almost eighty pounds in eight months. Died three times.
It's five years past that now. I'll never be able to fly like I used to, but I can pick up unsuspecting coworkers and adoptive siblings again, which is great fun for startling them. I can renovate my house without too much issue. I weigh 160 lbs now, and for the first time in my life, I have fat on me, after seven years of working at it and so many goddamn catastrophes it's ludicrous.
It took me seven years to gain twenty pounds of fat. Of me actively working on it. There's no such fucking thing as "weight gain!" pills, and there's no such thing as "weight loss" pills either, and take it from an Irish woman? Starving yourself doesn't work either. If you feel good in your body, if it works for you regardless of your weight, then you're fine. The only way anything is going to change is a massive force--like illness, or amputation, or cancer, or occupation, or food scarcity.
Fat people's positive representation in media is shit, and the way that Americans, at least, tend to see fat people is shit, and I'm sorry. You are worthy of feeling at home in your body, without fear of judgement of yourself or society, of feeling good without reservation. The twenty pounds of fat I've gained has, no joke, changed my life. I don't get cold standing in front of a refrigerator, I'm not utterly terrified of getting sick again and dying of something stupid like bronchitis or strep throat. I feel good, and I hope that you can feel good too, and not continuously damage your body by yoyoing your weight with attempted diets and pills.
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You know how the Owl House makes fun of Harry Potter sometimes? (The Choosy Hat and Rusty Smidge gags were incredible.) And like, we don’t know much if anything about Darius’s romantic life beyond extrapolation? It would be legitimately so funny if the show just had him randomly announce in season 3 that he is in fact married and had a husband the entire time. And Luz is like ??? How did this not come up when we were doing the whole day of unity plan? And Darius is like “Kid it’s none of your business” and Luz is like okay sure, it’s none of my business but like…wouldn’t he have died? And Darius is like “it’s not relevant to your journey” or something similar that’s almost the exact quote JK Rowling says about Dumbledore never being mentioned to be gay in the books. I would laugh so hard I would be weeping.
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