I’ve been where you are - and I know that it feels like the only way to have the life you want is to lose weight. You're putting off all the big and small things, until your body looks the way you think it's supposed to. But, that's BS.

Hey, I'm Hannah and I'm fat fat

I’m fat. I don’t mean I’m a little chubby, I’m fat fat. You know, the type of fat where I have to eye up certain chairs with suspicion.

Trust me, a couple of years ago even acknowledging that to myself, never mind typing it on my website for strangers to read would have been inconceivable.

That’s important to get out from the very beginning because I’m about to tell you how being fat has shaped my entire life. And while your feelings about your body are very real and very impactful regardless of the reality of your body and how it’s perceived by others, I personally find it difficult to relate to straight size women telling me they struggle with their tiny back rolls.

I started dieting when I was 12. My narcisstist Dad had made a habit of telling me that I was too fat to have friends. And so, lonely and totally unaware that it was the incredible abuse I was suffering at his hands that was really causing all my social issues, I started calorie counting.

And here started my life-long belief that my weight was the problem and losing it was the solution.

That all the love, success, happiness and fun was just 10, 20, 50, 100lbs away…

I’ve lost hundreds of pounds in my life. I think I’ve lost my entire bodyweight several times over. As you’re well aware, us fat people are actually experts at losing weight, it’s just not that simple to keep it off.

And the inconvenient truth is that I was never that happy at my goal weight. Sure, after I put the weight back on I would stare at skinny photos and tell myself how good it was. And I would misremember how fat, inadequate, lonely, miserable, all the things I felt. How confusing and jarring it was to have achieved the big thing and still not be happy.

I spent most of my life starting every sentence with “when I lose weight…”

And then I was sitting on the sofa one day planning my next diet (you know, counting how much I could lose in how much time on my fingers and lamenting how long it would be before I would be acceptable) and I thought…

“Shit, I have spent the last 15 years of my life waiting to be thin. What if it never happens?”

I didn’t give up on the idea of ever losing weight. I didn’t suddenly become anti-diet. And I also didn’t become some body positivity crusader posting photos of my belly on Instagram.

But, I knew that I needed to find a way to stop putting off living until I was thin.

I knew that there must be a way that I could have a full, happy life…even if I was fat.

And that between the messages the world was sending me and the mean shit in my head, I had never even entertained the idea that my body might not be THE defining issue in every area of my life that I thought it was.

There wasn’t a space anywhere that I could find that let me still want to lose weight, while acknowledging that it might never happen and I wanted to be happy now.

So, I made it for myself and now I share this with other women.

Here’s what I know to be true:

Losing weight (and keeping it off) is nowhere near as easy as we’ve been told. Nor is it a moral failing if you can’t make yourself thin.

Which means, there is nothing more important we can do for ourselves than figure out how to be happy regardless of the size of our bodies.

I’m not the finished article, I still get a pang of shame when I notice I’m spilling into someone else’s seat. I still worry that my body might limit my dating options.

But, I don’t avoid the seats. And I don’t avoid the dates. And I just don't spend a ton of my mental energy on wishing my body was different.

I get that you want to lose weight and be ok with being fat, I get that you think your weight limits your options but you don't want to let it, I get that you flinch when you see photos of yourself but you want to be in them anyway.

I'm not going to lie to you about the reality of the world, ask you to give up on trying to make your life easier, or pretend that I'm in love with my stretch marks.

I'm going to swear, make dark jokes and most importantly, teach you how to do all the things you want, even when all of this shit is true.

This is body acceptance in a way no one else does it. Grab my chubby hand and lets go...