Up and Doing

    "You're fatter." A phrase I'm getting accustomed to hearing. I'm also getting tired of it. Apart from the fact that it makes me flinch and say "ouch!", it's annoying. Just yesterday, I was reminded of how big I look by my best friend.
It's very easy to make harsh comments and feel like you're being helpful or honest but the truth hurts.     Especially when you're on the receiving end. I'm not being ungrateful, I know all those people mean well. So I say a very big thank you to everyone who has pushed me, without mercy I must say, towards my weight-loss journey.
    We all know that our society frowns upon fat or obese people. As girls, Our models of beauty are skinny, stick figured women, most with eating disorders, killer diets and killer heels. We all want to
be beautiful so we idolize them anyway. Did I mention that most of them aren't black? They don't have our abundance of melanin, our beautiful kinky hair, our fierce and formidable strength or our rich heritage.
   They don't have our unique beauty. We are clearly very different, so why are they more beautiful than me? Why is it that a light skinned girl who is "just pretty" gets more followers and likes than a dark skinned one in the same category. Dark skinned girls have to try harder, be bolder, or be models to get the same kind of recognition. But you can hardly be a model if you aren't skinny. So much prejudices against the ordinary girls like me who aren't gorgeously beautiful or skinny or light skinned.
    So what's a girl to do? Some take matters in their hands and bleach their skin. I'm sure we all know or have heard about that one girl who was as dark as night and is now as white as light or err.. snow. *sigh*. You can't walk into a beauty store today without your eyes being attacked by rows and aisles of bleaching creams or lightening solutions. Solutions to what problems?
I think it's funny how in music videos, our own artistes feel it's okay to use our nigerian girls for the twerking and club scenes but for the love and marriage scenes, they bring the fine, fair foreign girls in. This insinuates that we aren't beautiful enough for them to marry. I really think it's a horrible trend. We believe a lot of what we watch unconsciously whether we know it or not. A lot of teenage girls feel inferior because of their skin tone and the men and women they love and look up  to aren't helping.
   My "unskinny" sisters, my great size 10 to 20 fam, walk into clothing stores and find clothes that can't fit them or are aren't their style. Big girls need stylish clothes too. We need to feel beautiful and sexy and not so big. We need to look good so the first thing people notice isn't our tummies or our thick thighs but how beautiful God made us. By the way, I absolutely adore Meghan Trainor and her songs.
To my unskinny sisters, my size 10 to 20 fam, we have our veggie shakes, sport gear and long workouts to look forward to. Isn't that great? If you really want to lose weight, abandon us and join the skinny sisters fam, no problem. And if you don't, no problem. Just stay healthy and don't have heart disease.
    I am not against skinny girls. I have a particular skinny friend and after reading this post, she told me that she gets judged a lot just because she is super slim, So I put this in just for her. Skinny girls do eat, sometimes more than their unskinny sisters but they've been blessed to stay that way and we can't judge them for that.
   I believe there is beauty in every girl and every woman, black, white, yellow or green. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.
  Happy new year.
Till someone calls me fat again, Sayonara!