No really.  There's only three letters!  But aside from that, let's think about how certain words have become taboo or insults.  When I was a kid, when someone called me fat, it hurt.  Being fat is a shameful thing to be in our society.  It's more acceptable to be a struggling alcoholic than a struggling fat person.  Everything everywhere tells you this - either directly or indirectly.  Don't know what I mean?  Directly, it's all the diet program/pill ads, fitness programs, gym ads, all the things that say you need to be skinny and ripped.  Indirectly, it's everything else in media that features thin beautiful people and the fat people are usually only there to be stupid or funny ... if they're there at all.  We are all taught that being anything other than thin and pretty isn't acceptable in this society.  Ya know what?  I say fuck all of you who think that way.  The only reason I want to lose weight is because of how I feel - certainly not what society says.

I would much rather look like the first photo than the second, but society says I should look more like Allie Crandell ... just maybe not with my ribs showing and my joints larger than my legs/arms.  I'm genuinely curious ... between the two ladies pictured at the right, what do you see as more beautiful/attractive?  This is a purely subjective exercise.  There is no right answer ... this is not a trap!  :-)  I prefer the woman who is considered plus sized, but I don't see her as fat.  Though if you ask her doctor, she's likely considered obese, if not morbidly obese.  Hard to tell from a photo.  But seriously, with all that fat pretty people in the world, why has the word "fat" become such a horrible thing?  Fat is factual. Fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat!  If I think it'll get a chuckle out of you, I'll say I'm fluffy, but I'm fat.  I'm obese.  I'm morbidly obese.  Factually fat.  Unhealthily fat.  And maybe "fat" got a bad reputation because it is truth, and truth does sometimes hurt.  But there's far more offensive things to call a fat person than fat or obese.  Just go to Thesaurus.com and type in "fat" and here's what you'll see:

beefy, big, blimp, bovine, brawny, broad, bulging, bulky, bull, burly, butterball, chunky, corpulent, distended, dumpy, elephantine, fleshy, gargantuan, gross, heavy, heavyset, hefty, husky, inflated, jelly-belly, lard, large, meaty, obese, oversize, paunchy, plump, plumpish, ponderous, porcine, portly, potbellied, pudgy, roly-poly, rotund, solid, stout, swollen, thickset, weighty, whalelike

Certainly most of those are far more insulting than "fat."  Some of them are quite factual, but the majority are more colorful.  I've been called several of them and many others over the years too.  Butterball.  Chunky.  Whale.  Fat-ass.  Tubby.  Lard.  Michelin.  Ugly.  ... And yes, hearing that all throughout my childhood put some programming in place that is very difficult to delete/rewrite as an adult.  So did the growing up with dieting.  It seems like my family was always on a diet together, but mostly it was my mother and me.  There were weekly weighings, menu/recipe cards, carefully measured portions, Jane Fonda and trampoline workouts, body measurements.  Torture.  So not only was I not acceptable to the kids at school and society, I wasn't acceptable to my family, so how could I ever be acceptable to myself?  I actually wonder if the self-loathing ever goes away.  I've gotten pretty good at shoving it in the back of the closet in the recesses of my mind, but it frequently gets out and runs rampant.  Self-loathing is self-abuse.  I don't need someone else to emotionally abuse me about how worthless or lazy I am because I'm fat, I've got that someone built right into my own brain.  You can eventually leave an abusive relationship or move out of your abusive parent's home ... but you can't move out of your own body to escape self-abuse.  And until I wrote this, I didn't realize that this is what I've been doing.  I didn't consciously realize that I've been beating myself down.  I knew I hated myself for being a failure - failure at getting healthy and losing weight, but I'm a self-abuser and I don't know how to stop.  Maybe this is where part of my fear of success lies: If I lose weight, what will my internal abuser have to lord over me?  I do know that fixing the symptom (being fat), isn't going to cure the disease (self-abuse), but will it make it easier?  I don't know.  I also don't know if seeing a shrink would help, and if it would, what specialty?  Who is trained in teaching people to reprogram their brains to not be assholes to themselves?

And you know what the worst part about this built-in-abuser is?  It stops me from receiving compliments and adoration from the person I love most: my future husband.  He adores me.  He thinks I'm beautiful and wonderful and sexy the way I am today.  I believe him too.  But somehow between believing him and believing his beliefs myself, there's a breakdown.  I can't feel about me the way he does ... and that makes me feel like an ass.  Like I'm robbing him of a more fulfilling experience with me by having this belief breakdown and the only person who is at fault is me ... or better yet, my built-in-abuser.  I imagine that getting this built-in-abuser rehabilitated will do wonders for our relationship ... if only in doing wonders for my emotional health.

And by the way, if I haven't said it yet, I'll say it now:  I have every intention of sharing all of the things.  I expect this to be a heavy, upsetting, rage-inducing, triumphant, dark, frustrating, raw, silly at times, elementary ... a drawn out way to say honest.  I will be brutally honest and I will likely surprise myself with some realizations I come to through this process.