My Appearance Always Bothered Me. Then I Noticed Something In My Old Photos That Blew My Mind.

The author feeling painfully self-conscious around while embodying the stuff wolf whistles are made of around age 29. This was even more true in my formative years, when headlines called singer and actress Jessica Simpsons “Jumbo Jessica” for wearing a high-waisted pair of jeans she’s since revealed were a size 4, and Tyra Banks was communally weighing models and then shaming them on “America’s Next Top Model.” Let’s not forget mall stores like the retailer “5-7-9,” in which nothing came above a size 9 in juniors. Photo Courtesy Of Emily McCombs I’d like to say it got better when I moved on to a women’s website with a feminist bent, but including photos of ourselves in our articles was mandatory, leading to comments like, “Wow, Emily’s really packing on the pounds, huh?” or one that accused me of having so many wrinkles I “must be lying about my age” when I was 27. So even though I remembered how it felt to be fat, and people were telling me all day I was fat, I now believe I owe an apology to those women’s website readers for really, truly not realizing that I was not the best person to be writing essays on fatness and body image and what it was like to wear a bikini for the first time as a plus-size woman. Photo Courtesy Of Emily McCombs I wasn’t oblivious to the idea of thin privilege ― I had certainly noticed the differences in the way I was treated before and after my triple-digit weight loss.