I feel "fat".

We’ve all been there. Somehow the clothes we wore last week don’t fit the same or look good on us. Our favorite shirt makes us look bigger. Throughout your entire day you feel crappy because you think you look bigger than you should or than you want.

You feel "fat".

Sweatpants and big t-shirts are suddenly the greatest inventions in the world.

This isn't to say that the term "fat" is bad. There is nothing wrong with being fat. For a very long time women were torn down by the word but now the term has been reclaimed by many feminists as an identifier in order to get rid of body shaming. This piece is a response to women everywhere who use the term fat in a negative way in order to put themselves down.

I can recount several times in both my adolescent and adult life in which I used the term "fat" to belittle myself. These moments usually occurred when I had to wear a piece of clothing I was anxious about or after seeing a movie that exploited its female lead (almost every film released in Hollywood is told from a male perspective and made with a male audience in mind). I would go home and think to myself, “Why can’t I be that beautiful?” “Why can’t I be a size two?” This is where I started to base my standards of beauty and because I did not fulfill that unattainable beauty standard, I began to write myself off as "fat". I felt "fat" when I believed I wasn’t good enough. But I was wrong. These were not my thoughts.

The media and capitalism both thrive off people feeling insecure about themselves. They create clothing, makeup, and diet trends that feed on the notion that beauty is just $30 bucks away and that there's a right and a wrong body type. They make up these lies and set rules in order to keep people consuming their products. Being worthy as a person in our society comes with a set of rules and guidelines. Being bigger is almost always looked down upon within those guidelines and rules. And when we use the term fat in order to put ourselves down, we're perpetuating the negative stereotypes imposed on us by our patriarchal and consumerists system. The phrase “feeling fat” is a familiar, pop cultural phrase that’s unfortunately, and eerily, common. And yet it doesn’t make sense: fat is not an emotion.

The phrase “I feel fat” should not be used to put yourself down or a stand in for sad. If it's used in this light then it should be seen as an indicator for a bigger problem. When a person says “I feel fat” within a negative context it should be taken seriously because what they’re really saying is something happend to them that made them feel like they weren't good enough. They yielded to the societal use of the term "fat" to put themselves down. It is not wise to look at your body and compare it to some photoshopped image the media wants our society to base its standards of beauty off. Fat is beautiful and for a long time it wasn't seen that way. To use the phrase "I feel fat" is to give into the narrow-minded ideologies placed on women throughout history.

Focus on how amazing your body is. It takes you from A to B. Your body is your vessel. You are it’s guider. Beauty does not rely on size. Beauty does not care about size. You make up your own standards of beauty. What is beautiful? Whatever you are.