🍗 Deathfat Virgie Tovar - #losehatenotweight HAES, BoPo Snake Oil Salesman. Fat AF.

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What the fucking shit.

Retire ‘Tightening The Belt’: Why Fatphobia Doesn’t Belong In Your 2022 Financial Goals​


Virgie Tovar
Contributor
ForbesWomen

I subscribe to a newsletter called Money Musings put out by certified financial planner Landon Tan. He opened December’s edition - titled “A Budget Is Not A Body” - with a story about being on a cringy conference call with the Seattle Times for a piece on money makeovers:

“The idea that dollars are like calories, budgeting is a diet, and financial advisors are personal trainers is wrong, but I hear it all the time from people in the industry… Weight loss is triggering for many people and especially traumatic for fat people… It just does not need to be invoked in financial planning.”

I decided it was time to give Landon a call and see what other gobsmacking wisdom he had to share for the start of 2022, when people are often setting financial (and weight-loss) goals.

Tan is quiet and thoughtful over the phone. He takes pauses to make sure his answers are precise and also to let new ideas sink in. He begins by sharing that the world of finance invokes fat-shaming ideology all the time. Phrases like “trim the fat” or “tighten the belt” are, according to Tan, fatphobic and unacceptably ubiquitous.

Tan identifies as fat positive and draws a lot of parallels between the pitfalls of diet culture and those of mainstream financial attitudes: an over-emphasis on personal choices (when they are typically not the most important factor), a connection between restriction and morality (fake news), a whole lot of needless shame (that won’t likely actually change your financial future, he says), and the tendency to utterly miss the point of everything: to live your best life right now.

In his December newsletter Tan points out, “Personal choices are not the biggest component in our wealth. Personal choices are not the biggest component in the expression of our bodies either.”


He’s quick to follow up by saying this doesn’t mean that we can’t have autonomy and awareness, but maybe a middle-ground could be something he calls “intuitive spending.” Instead of shame-spiraling over doing the “wrong” or “right” thing financially, we can ask ourselves, “How does it feel to spend like this? How does it feel in my body?”

“It’s considered immoral to be poor or indebted because these things are connected to the idea of being out of control.”

Higher body weight is highly stigmatized culturally for very similar reasons. “This creates a situation that potentially puts too much emphasis on what restrictiveness can actually do for someone’s finances or their body size,” says Tan. “So often people will completely avoid their money. They don’t know their credit score or what they’re invested in because there’s so much shame around money. There’s a feeling that we’re supposed to be doing a certain thing. It’s all trapped in shame.”

Tan shares that he often sees clients agonize over spending decisions, and reflects that in his experience spending habits are relatively fixed whether we agonize over them or not.

“People’s spending tendencies are generally pretty fixed. There are people who struggle to save and people who struggle to spend. I do think people should save. However, there are people who are going to drain their investment accounts no matter what. There’s nothing really to do about that.” Tan believes that we can work with the emotional side of our financial decisions in order to find methods that work for us. “If you’re someone who’s a little too frugal, you can create a spending account. If you really spend a lot, create a system that makes it really hard to get to that money. Then you can really enjoy your life and not think about it. People, in a sense, are going to be who they are and when we know what those habits or patterns are we can create systems that work for them.”

“Sometimes we get caught up in asceticism and diligence with our money and we forget what the money is for. It’s for you to live the life that you want to live,” says Tan.

He points out that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model when it comes to a person’s finances. Some people value thrift. Others want to seize the moment and really live their life to the fullest. What if we were just honest about who we are and what matters to us? What if we shamelessly accepted that we’re already spending or saving in ways that align with our values? What if we trusted ourselves?

And, finally, Tan asks us to consider this: what if we believed that our worth as people had nothing to do with how we spend or save?

Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture. She started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight and in 2018 gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign. She pens a weekly column called “Take the Cake.” Tovar edited the ground-breaking anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and The Feminist Press published her book of non-fiction,You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018). She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching "Female Sexuality" at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host "The Virgie Show" (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is a former plus size style writer for BuzzFeed and was the recipient of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, Yahoo Health and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco and offers workshops and lectures nationwide.

Tan is, amazingly, not a fatty. And for a TIF, appears to pass pretty well:

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But holy shit, that bio:

About Landon​

As a fresh-faced, trans-masculine former spoken-word poet and social justice trainer, it was a bit awkward for me when I first followed in my father’s footsteps to begin working as a financial advisor.

Instead of differentiating sex and gender, I was differentiating stocks and bonds. I started the rigorous training for the Series 7 and Series 66 securities licenses, now held through LPL Financial. I began on-the-job training in portfolio management and financial modeling, and eventually earned a Certified Financial Planner™ designation, considered by many to be a core standard of competence in the field.

I learned to love the nerdy quirks of the field and knowing I could do my part to help people to avoid unseen threats and go after what they want. I realized that I could use my knowledge of financial systems to act as a cultural translator and help empower my peers to make decisions with more clarity and information.

I hope that this work can lift up the people around me and clue them in to the secrets and the realities of the financial system we live in.
 
My god, she's got even fatter and looks even more like a Neapolitan mastiff.
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And as she gets older, she looks prone to Hawing and Cherry Eye. Her "boyfrand" better have her looked at by a qualified DVM soon.
 
I desperately want to know how Virgie squares her ideas about fatness being an oppressed class with her writing for forbes... i mean, i know that she's essentially just making blog posts about the plus-size market, but isn't it kinda, "classist" to be giving financial advice from her high (fat) horse? does she suffer the woke cognitive dissonance from writing for a big conglomerate while also representing the marginalized "folx"? or does it not matter because it's a win for a fat-of-color or whatever?
 
I desperately want to know how Virgie squares her ideas about fatness being an oppressed class with her writing for forbes... i mean, i know that she's essentially just making blog posts about the plus-size market, but isn't it kinda, "classist" to be giving financial advice from her high (fat) horse? does she suffer the woke cognitive dissonance from writing for a big conglomerate while also representing the marginalized "folx"? or does it not matter because it's a win for a fat-of-color or whatever?
Working class people have more important shit to do than write a whole-ass article about how triggered they are by an analogy.
 
I desperately want to know how Virgie squares her ideas about fatness being an oppressed class with her writing for forbes... i mean, i know that she's essentially just making blog posts about the plus-size market, but isn't it kinda, "classist" to be giving financial advice from her high (fat) horse? does she suffer the woke cognitive dissonance from writing for a big conglomerate while also representing the marginalized "folx"? or does it not matter because it's a win for a fat-of-color or whatever?

It's the same as any other whiny little bitch crying about muh oppression while being handed opportunities hand over fist that they only get because of the place they claim in the progressive stack - they convince themselves they are the exception to the rule and only got where they are because they're just so damned amazing and special and work so hard compared to every other member of whatever marginalized (or "marginalized") group they claim to be part of. Most diversity hires or people who know they got where they are based on affirmative action just keep their head down and their mouth shut, but egomaniacs can't do that. Tbh if Virgie was complaining that her life is a little harder than most because her face looks like a hyena's asshole I'd probably give her that one.
 
Tbh if Virgie was complaining that her life is a little harder than most because her face looks like a hyena's asshole I'd probably give her that one.
Seriously, she’s fat as fuck but there are more fat women than ever who live their lives and find themselves partners and career opportunities completely unrelated to their mass. Virgie’s true accomplishments are getting speaking jobs with her insufferable personality and dates with her dogshit face.
 
I was poking around for info on the Bacon Backlash and found that Virgie Tovar is "no longer" speaking at the ASDAH conference. I'm not up to date on their business, but I was wondering if anyone knew why she's "no longer" speaking, as opposed to "we mistakenly said Virgie was speaking, we totally pulled that out of our asses, whoops, didn't mean to get your hopes up."

wheres-virgie.png

In an earlier version of the article, she was listed alongside Sabrina Strings and Da’Shaun "health is a social construct" Harrison. The blurb is still visible on search results.
virgie-listed.png

The article in question is from March 18, 2022.
 
Oh god, I hope she did something super problematic! :optimistic:
What's problematic to these women? Their entire modus operandi is being snarky, self entitled, self important, bloviating, pseudointellectual bullies. They only accept getting bigger, not losing or maintaining. The only thing you can do that's problematic to them is not screech, listen to other's perspectives, consider eating vegetables body positive or lose weight intentionally or unintentionally.
 
What's problematic to these women? Their entire modus operandi is being snarky, self entitled, self important, bloviating, pseudointellectual bullies. They only accept getting bigger, not losing or maintaining. The only thing you can do that's problematic to them is not screech, listen to other's perspectives, consider eating vegetables body positive or lose weight intentionally or unintentionally.
Maybe she was a bitch to someone who is more oppressed than her, thus creating an un-safe space, which makes her literally Hitler?
 
What's problematic to these women? Their entire modus operandi is being snarky, self entitled, self important, bloviating, pseudointellectual bullies. They only accept getting bigger, not losing or maintaining. The only thing you can do that's problematic to them is not screech, listen to other's perspectives, consider eating vegetables body positive or lose weight intentionally or unintentionally.

Virgie was almost cancelled before for accusing a black writer of plagiarizing her. The issue amongst her community wasn't so much that Virgie has no proof of the alleged plagiarism (she really didn't), but that the accusee was black and should therefore be immune from ever having anything bad said about them ever. Even if Virgie had a leg to stand on during this incident, people still would have been angry at her for "coming for" a black person.

So long story short, know your place on the oppression hierarchy and only attack those who fall below you on it.
 
Source: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2022/03/10885680/american-diet-culture-latinx-community
Archive: https://archive.ph/q7kbz
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As the Fat Daughter of Immigrants, Dieting was a Toxic Component of Assimilation​

VIRGIE TOVAR
LAST UPDATED MARCH 29, 2022, 6:10 AM


When I was around eight years old, I had a pink and purple diary with scalloped pages. On its hard-plastic cover, there was an anthropomorphic bear dressed like a ballerina balancing on a single chubby toe. In it, I often wrote about my grandmother’s cooking. I loved her food and that it was inspired by where she grew up in Monterrey, Mexico. I loved how it smelled, how it tasted, and how proud she was of her culinary skills. And I hated myself for that.

I believed her delicious food — and the love I had for it — kept me fat. I blamed her for “tempting” me with her aromatic tamales and enchiladas. How was I going to stop getting tortured at school if she kept serving us meals that were irresistible? How would I ever get anyone to love me if I couldn’t stop eating? I would learn later that dieting wasn’t just about looking for love from boys or men; it was also about deeply craving a sense of belonging in the broader white culture of the United States. Dieting was a way to adopt white beauty ideals by starving my brown body. I believed that if I could just sacrifice the right amount of my grandmother’s cooking (and the joy, affirmation, and memory that came with it), then I could finally unlock the American Dream, finally have it all.

I was born in 1982: a chubby, brown, giggly Mexican nerd par excellence. I didn’t exactly learn fatphobia — the culturally accepted form of bigotry against higher weight people — at home. My fat mom, grandma, and grandpa taught me to love myself. They saw no flaw in me, and so I lived for almost five whole years with the innocent belief that I was perfect. Then I was introduced to fatphobia at school. The speed and virulence with which it stole my innocence still humbles me. Fatphobia took something from me that is bigger than I can comprehend — even now, almost 35 years later — and it made me ashamed that I’d lost it.

1648660640431.png I was told that the reason I was getting psychologically abused for my body was because I was fat, and I was fat because I ate too much food. I started restricting in hopes that I could finally be liked, be accepted, and feel OK. I never ever would have called it an eating disorder (ED). I just thought I was trying to be pretty, normal, and “healthy.” Since culture contends that beauty, normalcy, and “health” are synonymous with thinness, I skipped meals often and waited for the day when I would emerge from the cocoon of my fatness and finally become the “real” thin me. At the age of 10 or 11, I started starving myself for the first time, while also doing two to three hours of exercise a day. This type of behavior continued for another decade. My ED was never detected because doctors rarely suspect fat people struggle with this illness and because emaciation (and whiteness, it seemed) was part of ED diagnostic criteria — things I never was and never would be.

Even though I didn’t learn fatphobia at home, once I’d adopted it I began to see how it touched my family’s lives. My mother had (and might still have) bulimia. My grandmother restricts and binges. My grandfather was always on a diet. And everyone in the house uses the word “fat” as an epithet. As an adult, I began to understand that this maybe wasn’t as much about losing weight, which didn’t really happen, as it was about us playing out a role that had already been written for us: one where we acted in line with a white colonial legacy of restriction, morality, and bootstrapping in hopes of finally becoming “real Americans.”

Diet culture, the pervasive belief that appearance and body shape are more important than our wellbeing, is rooted in the otherness and demorality of non-white bodies. In the 1800s and 1900s, influential white men developed the ubiquitous reality in which we find ourselves, one where we’re told that food is dangerous and that fat is death. Men like Reverend Sylvester Graham, the dude after whom the graham cracker is named, started The Dietary Reform Movement, an early ancestor of diet culture. He and his followers believed that morality was an individual issue and that it could be controlled through food. He recommended that people not eat spiced foods or yeast because he believed these foods led to sexual excitation and moral decay. Spiced foods? Yeah, it’s one of the earliest documented instances of coded Mexiphobia. He also suggested that parents pour pure carbolic acid on their kids’ genitals if they were caught masturbating. Clearly, he wasn’t someone anyone should be taking advice from.

Graham and men like him believed that Black and brown people were savages, that land was a resource (not a home), and that the body was a criminal that must be vigilantly surveilled day and night. These were the kinds of men who were afraid of their own flesh because it held the truth of their mortality and, therefore, their connection to the planet, the land, and to the melanated humans they both feared and desired. The more flesh, the more dangerous and unruly the body became.

1648660707206.png These men set the stage for my hatred of enchiladas, which were of course an extension of me, my fat family, and the place where we come from. Through diet culture, we see our bodies the way they saw the world: through the lens of domination, punishment, and anxiety, a commodity to be trained and traded, a place where there’s no room for love or delicious things.

The American Dream is one of rag to riches. It’s a transformation story — so is every weight loss tale ever told. Weight loss stories are bombastic, absurd, and extreme: she was a nerd no one liked, and now everyone wants to be her; he could never find love, and now he finds himself in the middle of a competition for his attention. My family and I deeply understood that weight loss was a path to redemption, a path to being loved by a culture that was never supposed to feel like home for us.

Dieting — that is, using food as a way to overcome oppression and adversity — is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. that was pioneered by white people and preserved by colonial thought. Immigrant families like mine see a path to acceptance, opportunities, and safety through the adoption of the traditions of the place that is their new home. I’m not saying fatphobia doesn’t exist in Mexico, but I am saying that dieting became an avenue through which my family and I could perform our willingness to assimilate.

Smallness, in every sense of the word, is demanded of people of color and immigrants in this country. We’re encouraged to “fit in,” which is itself a demand to shrink. Dieting became a way that my family and I could perform the act of making ourselves smaller. Contracting fulfilled the culture’s notion of health, but it also fulfilled the culture’s demand that we make everything that made us, us — the selves that loved spice and enchiladas and the selves who saw food as a gesture of hospitality, care, and love — disappear. The shame of our fat bodies was not separate from the shame of our brownness or our otherness.

Now, I’m grown up. I know the data on weight loss and what it does to mental health. I know first-hand that it eats away at the spirit and the body in equal measure. I know that you can’t become a better or worse person through food. I know that all food is good food, especially the food you grew up with. I know I don’t want to make myself disappear. As an adult, I do not carry on my family’s tradition of dieting, but I do carry on the legacy of my grandmother’s enchiladas.


DIETING IS A TOXIC COMPONENT OF AMERICAN ASSIMILATION
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 29, 2022, 2:10 AM
THE LATESTSOMOSWELLNESS
WRITER BYVIRGIE TOVAR
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAYARA MARQUES DIAS
 
Another fat fuck who "starved" themselves and "exercised hours per day" yet never lost a fuckin' pound. Quelle surprise. Not to mention I'm pretty sure Mexico wasn't a notorious fat country until recently and only is now because of shifts away from their traditional cuisine due to American influence, so complaining about Americans being bigots for not accepting fat as an intrinsic trait of non-white immigrants is a head scratcher. Would make more sense to whine about how American corporations exporting mass-produced empty calorie slop is making Mexicans fat, wouldn't it?
 
I genuinely didn't know Virgie was Mexican, I thought she was some kind of asian mutt half breed. La Goblina de Americanas, Dios mio!

She really roasts the fuck outta Mexicans here, all in an attempt to spread her fatness onto her whole race.
I blamed her for “tempting” me with her aromatic tamales and enchiladas. How was I going to stop getting tortured at school if she kept serving us meals that were irresistible? How would I ever get anyone to love me if I couldn’t stop eating?
Dieting was a way to adopt white beauty ideals by starving my brown body.
I skipped meals often and waited for the day when I would emerge from the cocoon of my fatness
He recommended that people not eat spiced foods or yeast because he believed these foods led to sexual excitation and moral decay. Spiced foods? Yeah, it’s one of the earliest documented instances of coded Mexiphobia.
These men set the stage for my hatred of enchiladas, which were of course an extension of me
My family and I deeply understood that weight loss was a path to redemption, a path to being loved by a culture that was never supposed to feel like home for us.
The shame of our fat bodies was not separate from the shame of our brownness or our otherness.
I do carry on the legacy of my grandmother’s enchiladas.
I can say all this much quicker and easier with a picture:
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HUWYTE CULCHA, BAYBIEEEE
 
Holy fuck that whole entry is so self aggrandizing I wouldn't be surprised if she enjoyed the stink of her own queefs at this point.


These whales are so narcissistic that any criticism of their behaviours is immediately a criticism of them as people and an attack on their character. It's easier to automatically shut off critical thought and self reflection and make yourself the victim of everything because it lets you get away with doing jackshit and stagnating as a human being. Like Tess Holliday and the rest, they'll live a perpetual cycle feeding and complaining until their organs eventually give out.

And the reason they're so into tarot and new-age bullshit is because it again absolves them of personal responsibility.

"I cast a spell for wealth, I'll run into money soon hopefully." - proceeds to splurge.

"The tarot reading X did for me said I'll be coming into health soon." - proceeds to eat fast food three times a day.
 
Sucks in my breath.

FUCK OFF TO MESSICO.

God-fucking-DAMN... Gotta get dem oppresshunz pointz--or get as adjacent as you can--when you live in a world of no problems and plenty. You know, years ago, Virgie wouldn't even get an op-ed rant in the Thrifty Nickel weekly shopper. This is just how petty, nit-picky, stupid and fucking UNGRATEFUL and BITTER this Mack Truck is.
She's an American...but she's gotta somehow RIDE that oppression train ON HER PARENT'S and GRANDPARENT'S backs. She's like a bust-down CEO patting herself on the back because she BULLIED and SCAMMED enough low level employees at her corporation to dig deep and give to United Way so she could get that biiiig invite to the United Way black tie shindig that the people who ACKTUALLEHHH donated to, are not invited.

All because she has a face that can stop Father Time hisself, and probably a body odor that would make Nurgle blush...and no man--not even Ginblossom Gene on an all weekend Stoli bender--would fuck.

Welp, add Refinery 29 or whatever to the circular file. (I did anyway after the Ryan Hooves piece)
 
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