☰
World NewsCovid-19NewsUK NewsUS NewsPolitics2020 electionCultureLifePeopleTechEntertainmentIdentitiesGenderClassLGBTQ+RaceEducation
Start writing a post

2020: The year I reclaimed the word 'fat' and made peace with my body

September 11, 2020
Photo by Mollie Quirk
Indy100-Conversations
and
Mollie Quirk

2020 has been a strange year, to say the least. The Coronavirus pandemic has impacted every life on the planet in one way or another. This year has taught us all a lot, but spending more time with myself has taught me how to love myself, my body, and my fatness more. The word 'fat' is met with negativity and disgust. 'Fat' is something we are brought up to believe is bad – it is something that we should never be, and it is something we should avoid at all costs, even at the cost of our mental and physical wellbeing.

From a young age, we are greeted with thin, socially 'desirable' women on our television screens, in our magazines, and described in books. Thinness is the greatest prize, and we must achieve it; we must be thin, and then everything in life will be okay. Thinness and the abundance of joy that comes with it is a lie – a damaging lie that can interfere with a child's perception of their body for the rest of their life. The way the media portrays the 'beauty ideal' is what I believe to be the root cause of fatphobia within society. Fatphobia stems from the beliefs that society holds – thinness is beautiful, clean, classy, intelligent, healthy, and rich.

These beliefs automatically paint fat people as ugly, unkempt, dirty, uneducated, unhealthy, and poor. This is why people become fatphobic and think being fat is the worst possible outcome. In turn, this makes them angry when they see fat people living their lives unbothered by beauty ideals and societal standards. In March this year, the world became unrecognisable. A global pandemic broke out around the globe, and we were all confined to our homes. This stirred up many unnerving feelings for anyone who has ever been at war with their body. I can remember the first few weeks of lockdown focusing on 'getting in shape' or 'maintaining your body.' The weeks that followed after that focused on 'lockdown weight gain' and how to 'get rid' of the weight you'd gained.And then a couple of months down the line, the government released a new campaign to 'tackle obesity.'
For many people, the conversation surrounding dieting and diet culture was uncomfortable in general. For some, it undid a lot of work they had done within their minds – work that took years but aided them in loving themselves a little more. Self-love is a journey – a long one – and for some people, the heightened talk of 'getting in shape,' 'losing belly fat,' and 'tackling obesity' negatively impacted them. But despite all of the negativity surrounding being fat or in a bigger body, the last six months have been a positive force in terms of self-love for a lot of people, including myself. With a lot of time on our hands and our phone being in them most of the time, lockdown meant a lot of that time was spent on social media – Instagram being the most popular choice of app for many.

I spent a lot of time endlessly scrolling Instagram during the lockdown, and I saw a shift – a shift in the way people were viewing their bodies. Regardless of the constant diet talk and fatphobic conversation that spiraled out of control during the lockdown, people spoke out about the love they had for their bodies – they were screaming it loudly and clearly. I think this became a coping mechanism for most – a way to reclaim the word fat, a way to love themselves in a world full of hate and go against society without breaking any rules. After seeing many of my online community embracing their bodies and openly posting about their self-love journey, something within me clicked, and I knew I had to embrace my body. Having blogged for almost seven years and dabbling in body positivity since 2017, talking about my body wasn't entirely new to me.

Openly reclaiming the word 'fat' and speaking up against diet culture was a whole new experience. My first post began with a memory that popped up on Facebook Memories – it was three years since I was first body-shamed on Twitter. I made a post that showed how much confidence I had gained from then until now, and it got the most amazing response – and ever since that post, I haven't looked back, body positivity, self-love, and anti-diet culture is now all I post about. Posting the photos I post on Instagram has not only helped me to appreciate and love my body more, but my posts are helping other people too. The chat around diet culture could have affected my mental health, but I chose to rebel and love myself unconditionally instead.

So here I am, completely unapologetic, raw, real, and reclaiming the word fat. I've reclaimed the word fat because I am more than a descriptive word. I've reclaimed the word fat because I AM beautiful, clean, classy, intelligent, and healthy, even as a size 16–18 fat woman in her early twenties.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
identities

Trending Topics

Can tech help female entrepreneurs break the bias?

Women founders continue to come up against common challenges and biases
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Written by Kelly Devine, Division President UK & Ireland, Mastercard

Starting a business may have historically been perceived as a man’s game, but this couldn’t be further from reality. Research shows women are actually more likely than men to actively choose to start their own business – often motivated by the desire to be their own boss or to have a better work-life balance and spend more time with their family.

The recently published Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurship 2021 found that in the category of 'Aspiration Driven Entrepreneurship’ – capturing those who actively choose to start their own business – women in the UK surpass men: 60% vs 56%. And Mastercard research from February 2022 found 10% of female business owners started their business in the past two years compared to 6% of men – meaning women were 67% more likely to have started a business during the pandemic.

Yet, there are common challenges that women founders continue to come up against - not least the gender imbalance in the household and long-held biases which are still prevalent.

In the UK, women are almost three times more likely to be balancing care and home commitments than men, and this was exacerbated during the pandemic as the additional barriers of school closures and lockdowns meant that the care time of dependents rose significantly on a day-to-day level for women. In addition, women were less likely to have access to a home office, greatly impacting the work they were able to accomplish when working from home was the only option.

It's also widely known that female business owners are still more likely to struggle to access funding for their business ideas. According to Dealroom, all-women founding teams received just 1.4% of the €23.7bn invested into UK start-ups in 2021, while all-male leadership teams have taken almost 90% of the available capital.

Without financial support, and when juggling significant time pressures both at home and at work, how can women grow their companies and #BreaktheBias (as this year’s International Women’s Day termed it)? What tools or support can save them time and money, and give them the headspace they need to focus on building their business?

With female owned businesses collectively estimating revenue growth of £120 billion over the next five years, solving this problem is bigger than supporting women – it’s about supporting the national economy.

Using tech to level the playing field

There are clearly societal issues at play that need to be resolved. But when we look at the rise in technology businesses during the pandemic, we can plainly see an alternative source of support critical for business growth: digital tools.

A third of female business owners say new technologies will be crucial to the success of their business in the future and one in five say it is the most important thing for business growth.

With new technology comes new ways to pay, create, and work. And yet there are barriers that prevent business owners accessing this technology. Women are significantly more likely to say they want to use more digital tools but don’t know what is best for their business and also more concerned about the security of digital tools.

When technology is adopted by businesses – whether using online accounting solutions or messenger services for communicating with staff – it saves them time, allows them to maintain and grow their customer base, and ultimately increases cost savings and profit.

By drastically improving the training and support that is available to women-owned business to access and utilise technology we will allow these businesses to grow and succeed. And we know there is demand for it.

Research done by the IFC and Dalberg shows that female entrepreneurs are more likely to invest time and money in business development. This includes product development, customer base expansion, and digital tools and training and there are plenty of services available offering this type of support – many of them for free.

One such programme is Strive UK – an initiative of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth – which aims to reach 650,000 micro and small business owners across the UK and empower them with the tools they need to thrive in the digital economy through free guidance, helpful tools and one-to-one mentoring.

Working together with small business experts – Enterprise Nation, Be the Business and Digital Boost – we hope to ensure hundreds of thousands of UK female business owners have the tools they need to succeed and reach their ambitious goals. Because this ambition remains strong in the UK, with female business owners largely optimistic about the future despite the multitude of challenges they are facing. Four in ten say they will grow their business in the next five years – compared to only a third of male business owners – and they’re also 35% less likely than men to say they plan to downsize or close the business.

But if we do not empower female entrepreneurs to access the tools and technology they need to grow, there is a risk this optimism could be misplaced. Support programmes that provide business owners with guidance and mentorship can help ensure this isn’t the case, allowing female entrepreneurs to not only survive but thrive in the months and years ahead.