To be clear, I’ve never even seen an episode. Maybe a clip here and there, totaling to about two minutes. But you can’t exist on the internet without encountering Honey Boo Boo in some form or another.

For me, it was a screenshot of a Tumblr text post.

It was the first time I realized that I still thought fat wasn't beautiful. And it was the first time I realized that I didn’t have to tell myself or other women that we didn’t look fat.

Too often, we’re worried about looking fat. We’ll change our outfits however many times is necessary to hide our round tummies or lack of a thigh gap, complaining to our girl friends how we look. Inevitably, the response is “You don’t look fat!”

As if fat is the worst thing we can be.

As if "fat" is worse than being unkind, selfish, entitled, condescending, or inconsiderate.

As is, by being fat, we are no longer beautiful.

Maybe it comes from society and how all women—models, actresses, all forms of celebrities—seem to weigh under a certain amount. We buy into the idea that in order to be beautiful, we must look a particular way, and that way is distinctly Not Fat.

If beauty = anything but fat, then being fat must mean we’re ugly. So we rush to our sisters’ defense (“Of course you don’t look fat! You look beautiful!”), not realizing that such a reaction is propagating the concept that you can’t be both fat and beautiful.

There have been times in my life that I was overweight for my height and age. When I would say that I looked fat and someone contradicted me, I knew they're lying. I knew what I looked like. Telling someone who's fat that they're not fat isn't a way to compliment them; it's an insult. It's saying that they don't look fat because then they wouldn't look beautiful.

Beauty is a construct, meaning it’s subjective and created and perceived differently from person to person. Hence, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What one person considers lovely may not be what someone else does.

But in our culture, beauty is a construct designed by greedy capitalists whose sole focus is to sell us products we don’t need for flaws that don’t exist. We have been duped into thinking our cellulite and stretch marks and flabby arms and sagging stomach are disgraceful, things to be changed if we really want to be deemed valuable or worthy of love.

Spoiler alert: that’s not true.

What’s true is that you don’t need to look a certain way in order to be beautiful. You have a beautiful body if you have a body. That’s it. However we look is enough, and we don’t have to bend over backwards to meet some impossible standard.

"Fat" is not a cuss word, and we don't have to be scared of offending someone if we don't rush to correct their assertion of how they look.

We don’t have to convince ourselves that we don’t look fat in order to feel comfortable and confident in an outfit.

We don’t have to protest when a sister complains about looking fat. Instead, we can switch to “So what if you do? You look beautiful.”

It is not “I am fat but I am beautiful.” It is “I am fat and I am beautiful.”