An overweight woman rejects fat activism. Fri May 7, 2021 I was born fat, and I ve been fat all my life. I was my mother s ninth pregnancy. She was an immigrant, often working two full-time jobs as a factory worker and cleaning woman. She said she had nothing to offer me, not even love, so she compensated with food. Food was often noodles dressed with margarine for dinner and grits garnished with margarine for breakfast. You had to eat a lot of that to get anything close to your nutritional needs. Fat kids are likely to grow into fat adults. The body has a set-point, a weight it thinks it should weigh, and the body will fight to maintain that weight. When I eat less, my metabolism slows, I dream about food, I can t think straight, my energy crashes, migraines strike, and sometimes I get really sick – my body thinks I am starving.
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Finding out that an Instagram influencer you love holds a wildly different worldview than you do can often feel weirdly personal. Take Arielle Charnas, an OG fashion blogger at Something Navy, who just as the pandemic was sweeping New York City, announced to her more than 1 million Instagram followers that she’d pulled strings to get a Covid-19 test, was positive, then moved to the Hamptons with her family and nanny without quarantining first. Predictably, fans were furious.
Now imagine that the disappointing influencer had not only impacted your style or home decor but some of the most intimate decisions of your life, someone who you’d turned to for advice on motherhood, pregnancy, or postpartum depression. That’s what happened to thousands of moms on the internet last week when baby sleep expert Cara Dumaplin, known by her (admittedly brilliant) nom de plume Taking Cara Babies and her Instagr