Stephanie Yeboah: Thanks for having us.
Amy Pence-Brown: Yes. Happy to be here.
MC: I’m curious how your path was to come here, be an advocate of self-love and open up this conversation about body image?
HIS: So I think for myself, so I’ve been kind of in the body image / body positivity / fat acceptance field since 2012, I guess. For me, my journey to self-love and learning to love the body I am in has been a long time coming, maybe about 16 or 17 years. For me, when I started my blog in 2008 and started joining networks and platforms like Tumblr and some Facebook groups and stuff like that, it was definitely where I saw these little communities of women who looked like me and were shaped like theirs Confessing love for your body and yourself. Whether through the medium of content such as photos or videos, mind pieces, poetry, and the like, it has been a busy hub of women learning to make love loudly and without apologies.
At that time, especially after I graduated from college, I always had problems with confidence and self-love and I had learned to love myself in this body and had gone through a number of things like eating disorders and internalized fat phobia and all these things that affect my perception have shaped my body quite negatively. So I think being able to access these resources online at this moment was a life changing element for me.
Since then, I’ve been using my blog not only to talk about how I’m learning to love myself, but I’ve also tried to focus on things like mental health and the importance of realizing things like intersectionality when it comes to body positivity and self-love and things like that. So for me it has been a very, very, very long journey and I never thought that I would ever get to a point where I could say that I love myself or I never thought that I would ever be feel comfortable I call myself fat and don’t feel disgusted or embarrassed or embarrassed or anything like that.
So it has been a very interesting journey, but as many of us in this community say, when it comes to confidence and self love, it will always be an everyday thing. It’s not that one shape fits everything. It’s a daily journey to learn how to love yourself.
MC: And Amy, what is your experience like?
APB: Of course it’s a lifetime now that I look back at the age of 45 and how I’ve worked to love my bigger body for most of my life. But it really started when I was a teenager and I started to get more dissatisfied with beauty standards that were imposed on me and not with things that I wanted to participate in, but with things that I felt like I had to do them, like for one with long hair. When I was about 16 and in a rebellious act I cut everything off very briefly, shorter than it is now, in my rural, conservative American western town in Idaho. It was radical. That was a radical step.
And I often say that it was really motherhood that made me a body love activist. It was really motherhood that got me into a more public mindset. I’ve been questioning food culture for a number of years and finished with it when I had my first daughter at 28 and then another daughter at 32, and that was over 13 years ago. And that was it – I was sick of hating my body for its size, and I was done with food culture and all that. And I googled the words “Why am I fat and happy?” 13 years ago. because I don’t know anyone else in real life who feels that way. And I turned to google like all good researchers do, right? I felt like I may not be able to be alone with this mindset, but if so then that’s fine but I’ll try to figure it out. And Google 13 years ago – not so much today, because I’ve typed this phrase in Google many times since then and published many different articles – but 13 years ago Google happily picked it up and turned it into unhappy when it used the word bold, as Google did does. I got pages and pages of ads for the diet industry complex and I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and finally found two blogs that changed my life forever and are now run by co-workers and friends, luckily I can say. One is The curvy fashionista from Marie Deneewho is a plus size fashion blogger.
