For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Living as a fat person in this world is hard—really fucking hard. As a fat woman, I’m exposed to near-constant discussion about my body by those who have no right to discuss it. It’s a never-ending fight not to be undermined and viewed as physically, economically, or emotionally unnecessary.

Every person’s body journey is different. While finding your voice, you can encounter several different types of activism, different types of empowerment and draw inspiration from people both online and offline. And then there’s the unexpected stuff: hate from within the fat activism community, cliquey attitudes, and false empowerment deemed as activism.

Here is the thing: body politics are complicated and uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better and more inclusive—to ensure the dialogue we’re promoting isn’t as harmful as the feared body-shamers that many of us battle each and every single day.

When I co-founded the blog Fat Girl Food Squad, I created a platform to share thoughts and opinions in the body positivity community. The aim of our blog, which developed into a community space, was to “provide a safe, positive space for all bodies, while showcasing those who identify themselves as fat.” It is not okay to dismiss another fat person’s experiences just because they are “only” a size 16. It’s not empowering or uplifting to call out others in the fat community as “skinny-fats” and tell them their opinions don’t matter.

Privilege does exist, but at the end of the day, fat bodies still matter—all fat bodies. It’s incredibly frustrating that so-called “skinny-fats” are shamed and shunned from the straight-sized community and also deemed unworthy by the fat community. We’re allowed to feel complicated feels and we’re allowed to feel discomfort, but we need to ask ourselves: When do those feelings border on bullying? Where do we draw the line?

There is so much to unpack when we use the word fat. It’s a powerful word, one that we’re still fighting hard to reclaim and one that still makes many people uncomfortable. It’s a three letter word and yet it holds so much power. People are afraid of fatness, they are afraid of you owning your fatness, and they are afraid of your fat being a source of political energy. Let’s stop separating which fat bodies are right and which fat bodies are wrong. Fat holds so much energy over others. Rather than using that energy to tear down one another, we should use it to uplift, empower, and liberate other fat bodies.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

In my TED Talk on fat-shaming and the thin epidemic, I proclaimed, “Fat is just a description. It is not a prescription nor an invitation for hate!” Size discrimination has lasting effects. From micro-aggressive stares to overt verbal, physical, and sexual violence, fat bodies, especially those of women and girls (though accounts of men and boys are rising), are often the targets of unmitigated judgment and groundless assumptions about our value, health, productivity—in essence our potential for being good, successful citizens. It’s as though living in a fat body begets failure. Insidious myths on fatness create environments where fat talk, fat stigma, general body-shaming, and body-based harassment on the basis of size, weight, and shape flourish without accountability.

Children as young as four have thigh gaps on their wish lists. Calling someone a “fat cow,” I’ve been told, “is the ultimate come back.” Body image and more specifically body-based harassment is also a primary source of bullying, according to the 2006 Toronto District School Board student census report. In 2011, the student census showed that 58 percent of students in Grades 9-12 and 67 percent in Grades 7-8 said they liked how they looked—a passing grade, but not exactly an “A.”

Adults like to tell bullied children “it gets better,” but does it really? Without legal protection against sizeism, employers, health care providers, and educators are able to discriminate against fat people without fear of recourse. Fat people are less likely to be hired or promoted and on average are paid less than non-fat employees. Particularly in the workplace, sizeism intersecting with sexism and racism can have a triple effect for women of colour. In health care, fat people have been misdiagnosed or refused services by providers who immediately assume their health issues are associated with their weight—an assumption that has been debated for years in scholarly, scientific, Health at Every Size, and fat activist communities. And lastly, some educators assume fat students are less intelligent or committed to taking on leadership roles. Ironically, absenteeism is often linked with “obesity.” Yet, has it ever occurred to anyone that someone’s choice to discriminate or that being fat in environments where fat talk is left unchallenged might be the actual culprit?

Sizeism must be illegal. I am advocating to have size recognized as a protected ground in our provincial and territorial human right codes and the Canadian Human Rights Act. I am also advocating for the explicit addition of sizeism within all human rights policies in school boards across Canada as well as an instituted Body Confidence Awareness Week across school boards that incorporates body-based harassment and body image issues from a human rights social justice lens. When surveys indicate some young girls are more afraid of being fat than of cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents, I think it’s time we take action. Join me.

Photo courtesy of Jill Andrew/Twitter

As the years passed, the birthday outfits my mum bought me collected in my closet, and with them I began collecting memories of similar incidents. But that first incident was my introduction to a society that reminded me often of my weight problems.

I learned at an early age that people made judgments about others’ habits, personalities, and identities based on appearance. We live in a country where eating disorders affect anywhere from 150,000 to more than 600,000 people; many feel the weight of this judgment. I learned to expect this when we would go on summer vacation to London, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Flight attendants would help my sister and me with our seatbelt, and remark: “Maybe sometimes you should let her eat her own meals,” suggesting I picked from my sister’s plate.

But I managed to escape the prying, judgmental eyes of others with the help of my favourite sportswear. Under the folds of an over-sized tracksuit, I found a way to disappear. These days, I know putting a tracksuit on can’t stop other people from judging me. But clothing served—both then and now—as a way to gain control over my identity, the person I wanted to be.

The day I found my first tracksuit everything changed. I was 10, at home in Mississauga, Ont. School was cancelled: the streets were blocked off with mounds of freezing snow. I finished the book my mom had purchased for me for the month earlier, and I thought the snow day would be the best opportunity for me to look for next month’s book, which she often hid in the house.

After searching the whole house, I headed to the storage room in the basement where we kept my dad’s old suits and our salwar kameez, traditional Pakistani clothing. There was no book, but I found a Reebok tracksuit. That navy blue sweatshirt and its matching wide-legged sweatpants were three sizes too big for me—but it was my escape. I grabbed it, went up to my room, and put it on. It hung too loose and too long everywhere. It was perfect. Wearing something that was too big on me (for a change) hid the flaws people said I had—a kind of invisibility device. I believed no one could see anything in me that I didn’t want to reveal. I wasn’t just choosing what to put on my body; I was choosing who I was going to be that day.

For the next seven years, I wore only tracksuits. Most of them were hand-me-downs from my brother, over-sized and blue, black or grey. When the seasons changed, my mum took me shopping hoping that I would change my mind and buy a dress or jeans. But I always met her at the cash register with my athletic wear. Until I was 15, most of my classmates assumed I played a lot of sports; some decided my parents owned an Adidas store.

By the time I was 16, I stopped caring about what people thought of my body. The transformation occurred when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I studied the writers I read as a child and saw a pattern: they all used the way people spoke, walked, and even dressed as tools in character development. I decided to take the narratives I consumed and the influence of the people in my life into my wardrobe, an exercise in storytelling. I created my own therapeutic process: I wore my brother’s band shirts to school to carry a part of him with me every day. I dressed like Dean Martin to claim his song lyrics as my own.

After my high-school graduation in 2011, I took a trip to Italy with my family and transformed again—this time into somebody who wanted to be visible. There, the philosophy that bodies are vessels to be filled with good food and art ran rampant. Italians didn’t eat to stay alive: they lived to eat. While each city I visited was different on the surface, its heart was always at ease—a contentment I carried back with me to Canada.

This summer, at 22, I donated my navy tracksuit. My mom had already given away the others years ago, and this was the last one in my collection. Before folding it and placing it in a paper bag, I wrote a note on the tag inside the collar: “Served as invisibility cloak since 2003. May it bring you magic.” I no longer wear tracksuits. I’m no longer interested in concealing my body based on society’s expectations. Now, I am visible.

But Alvena is also extraordinary. At the start of Grade 4, Alvena decided to take a stand against her bullies in one of the bravest and most inspiring ways. We all know it can be hard to put yourself out there, knowing others can judge (just see any YouTube comment if you want to see what I mean). Yet Alvena, a member of the Ahousaht First Nation, decided that the best way she could fight back against the bullies was to make her experience public.

She posted a picture of herself, in sports gear and ready to exercise, to the Facebook group Healthy Active Natives. The 9 year old then told her mother:

“I want you to tell everyone I get bullied about my weight and I want you to show everybody what I look like. I want you to show everybody that I am going to change because I want to start exercising, I want to start eating better.”

The photo, along with a chart keeping track of Alvena’s exercise work out, went viral almost overnight. The pair received hundreds of positive comments, thousands of likes, and even some donations, with well-wishers sending handy items like new shoes and store cards.

Annette, Alvena’s mother, told the Huffington Post “As I was reading [the comments to Alvena] I started crying because she was crying. I hugged her and asked if she wanted me to stop and she said, ‘No. I just can’t believe how many people care.'”

Annette has now started a new Facebook group called Team Avena so their many supporters have somewhere to channel their good vibes and supportive comments. As it stands Team Avena has over 1000 members, and is steadily growing.

As positive as all of this is, it also comes with a troubling undertone—something that Alvena’s mother Annette touches on in one of her comments to Nainaimo Daily News. Annette tells that paper that someone as young as Alvena shouldn’t have to worry about how much she eats or her exercise, but is supporting her 100 percent regardless.

And indeed, the focus of this story has very much been on Alvena changing herself to better fit in, rather than addressing the horrible attitudes around fat, and fat-shaming that played such a huge part in the attacks. With shows like America’s Biggest Loser becoming increasingly more pervasive in modern day society, and a growing acceptance of fat-shaming and the so-called “War on Fat,” people with different body types are facing more and more discrimination.

Thankfully, there many, many people fighting back. One website to check out is Militant Baker, and its many, awesome campaigns addressing existing prejudices on body types. One in particular, Bodies aren’t ugly, bullying is, compiles photos of people with a variety of body types juxtaposed against hateful messages formed from the auto-complete function on Google—capturing just how widespread body-shaming is for men and women of all ages. Each photo also features a defiant declarations against such shaming.

It seems that kids at Alvena’s new school, where she recently started, also have the right idea. Annette told the Huffington “It was a really good feeling for me to pick her up today and have her say, ‘Kids are telling me I’m pretty, mom.’ She’s never had that. She’s never had friends like that.”