Love Your Body Day

Thanks for posting about this initiative, I wasn't aware of it... I'll be sure to take a moment out of my day to celebrate myself and my body!

Thanks for posting about this initiative, I wasn't aware of it... I'll be sure to take a moment out of my day to celebrate myself and my body!

Or two! ;)

As we put some wonderful-smelling lotion all over our bodies, and see a movie or two -especially wonderfully sensual movies celebrating love and lusciously proud fat women- the media continue to saturate the airwaves and net and print with admonishments about fat being bad and with the unbelievably wrong and pernicious junk science that has already been disproven, but that they still trot out with such enthusiasm, often because Diet Centers and Fitness Centers and pharmaceutical conglomerates advertise on all of these media. And it is very very difficult to contradict a lifetime of dieting brainwashing and the wonderfully simple, entirely wrong equation of “People get fat because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough.” But we have to keep on fighting. Otherwise even more people will die from BLS complications and from incorrect and lazy diagnoses by bigoted medical personnel. Otherwise superbly talented people will never be encouraged to raise their voices in literature, drama, music and art. Otherwise it will still be considered okay to make fat people uncomfortable. I like to think of “Love Your Body Day” as a *real* Independence Day for women of all shapes and sizes. May our diversity sparkle and light up a nation.

I hate to get all picky, but when I went to the site a couple of weeks ago and looked at their calendar, I noticed that there aren't really any fat women on it. Like, none. Oh, they have a few ambiguous painted swirly things, but aside from being different colors they're all essentially the same shape. What's wrong with actually visually portraying weight diversity?

That's not picky, Sheana... that's a good point.

I liked the Wrinkled/Wonderful pic, plus the one with Queen Latifa (I've been a fan of hers for years - she was phenomenal as Mama in the movie Chicago). An editorialist I read some time ago made an observation about the Dove billboards - the "fat" women in them aren't really fat. They're just not super-model skinny - though from some of the comments people have been making about them, you'd think they were huge, deformed freaks. Pretty sad, really. On a side note, I was at the mall today and the kids and I happened to sit for a bit directly across from a health food store. I soon noticed that of all the signs I could see from where we were, 1 was for a product to help stop smoking, 1 was for motion sickness, and the remaining 5 or 6 of that I could see were all about weight loss, with all of them being several times larger than the two non-weight related posters. My daughters also noted that for a health food store, we couldn't see any food. It was all pills and powders. My daughters were under the impression that "health food" was stuff like fruits and vegetables, whole wheat pastas, organic foods, etc. They where wondering how this place could call itself a heath "food" store, when there was no food in it.

Kunoichi, what a funny and astute observation! And what a reflection of the times. If you are inclined to write at all, I think that is a jumping-off point for a story or essay. Regarding the main thread here. I wish I'd had advance notice of it. Maybe I live under a rock, but it just snuck up on me and I didn't do anything meaningful (other than visit this blog, which is something, I suppose). Many of us regular BFBers prepared so well for May 6th, International No Diet Day, this year because we warned one another and started brainstorming three months in advance. I hope next year we remember to do the same for this occasion. From reviewing the past posters, it doesn't appear to have always been on October 18th. Does it float like Thanksgiving or Easter, or has it found a permanent home on October 18th?

Good points, DebraSY. The site and day were not publicized extensively. I seem to remember that it was about this time last year, too. I'll try to check it out in more detail.

Also, a lot of the activism that comes out of the day is student-organized, and I haven't yet heard of a college having any kind of Love Your Body Day event in October - my undergrad always did a huge event in April, and now at SDSU the campus NOW is also doing Love Your Body Day in April. Makes you wonder why the national organization doesn't just change the time, and make it a bigger event. How are they working to spread the information about LYBD? It seems like it could be such a great, national movement, but hardly anyone knows about it.