by Savannah Cottingham
FLAB ALERT!
(RED CIRCLE. ARROW. ZOOM.)
During the first decade of the 2000s, magazines trained girls like me how to look at women, and how to look at ourselves. The covers were ruthless: Who Wore It Worst, Beach Body Fail, stomachs circled that were flat by any reasonable measure. Women in the public eye were dragged for weights that, by today’s standards, would barely register as bodies at all. Is your waist smaller than a piece of paper?
FROM HOT TO NOT
Slim girls were labeled the “big ones.” A visible hip bone was success. A soft stomach was scandal.
TOO THIN? TOO FAT? YOU DECIDE!
This was the era of body shaming. Nicole Miller introduced the 00, and suddenly absence had a number. Reality bent. Girls with digits in their pants size were considered failures. I remember staring at photos of celebrities the media insisted were “huge,” trying to see it. I never could. They had flat stomachs. Long legs. Narrow waists. But the headline told me otherwise, and I believed the headline. I learned early that truth was negotiable if a font was bold enough.
The constant shift forced women to push their bodies beyond their natural boundaries to meet subjective ideas of beauty. That disconnect lodged itself somewhere deep and became a voice I mistook for my own. At some point, I labeled myself the DUFF: The Designated Ugly Fat Friend. I didn’t need anyone to say it out loud. Culture had already done the math for me. Someone had to be the comparison point. Someone had to make the thin girls look thinner. Just as the brainy girl couldn’t be pretty, the fat girl could never be anything but cute.
At home, the message echoed differently but landed the same.
I had three sisters, all skinny as twigs. My sister Katelyn used to suck in her stomach until her ribs protruded, then laugh like it was a party trick. I watched closely, weighted down by jealousy and envy; when I sucked in, nothing happened. My sister Sassion was five years older than me, yet when I secretly tried on her clothes while she wasn’t home, I couldn’t fit into them. My mother dressed me in outfits that hid my ten-year-old figure, as if the tabloids were outside the door, ready to red-circle my hips and call me brave for showing my body in public.
My mother carried on her own complicated negotiation with her body. Weight Watchers materials teetered on the counter. The Biggest Loser brayed in the background. Trends and fabrics cycled through her closet. She never seemed fully comfortable in her skin, yet she was magnetic. A seductress in motion. Desired, but never at ease. That contradiction confused me. I didn’t yet know a woman could be desired and still disappear from herself.
When it came to me, she softened the truth with excuses. She just hasn’t lost her baby fat yet. That yet kept me hopeful. Still, she made me do Insanity workout videos in the living room, sweating onto the carpet, and weighed me weekly. Five dollars if I lost five pounds. My body turned into a project. A gamble. An “after” photo waiting to happen.
After my parents divorced when I was ten, control took a different shape. My dad cooked dinners that contradicted the essence of health. Frozen bean burritos and oven-baked french fries, then limited how much I could eat. One burrito only, even if there were leftovers. Even if I was twelve and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with growth.
Sometimes I ate the second burrito anyway.
He’d pull me into the garage afterward, the air thick with oil and dust, and tell me he saw me. That eating my feelings wasn’t the answer. As if I had language for feelings yet. As if hunger required therapy. I learned quickly that wanting was dangerous. That fullness was something to confess.
When I turned thirteen and started menstruating, the weight finally dropped right on schedule, like my body had been listening to everyone else. I wasn’t skinny, though. My jeans weren’t tiny. Compared to my friends, I was still the fat one. I wasn’t the Monica wearing a fat suit in the Friends flashback episode, but I was the Kelly Clarkson–curvy that was scandalized on every teen tabloid circulating the halls of seventh grade. I worked out every day. Five hundred sit-ups every morning before school, counting a form of devotion. I didn’t purge like some girls did. Throwing up burned my throat and left me feeling disgusted for hours afterward, but I believed discipline, in the form of daily sticky notes with workout tasks, could override biology. Why did my sisters get to be skinny and I overweight when we were cut from the same cloth?
When I got pregnant, I gained eighty pounds, and my body never returned to what it had been before, no matter how much I waited or worked out. Pregnancy justified weight. No more sucking in Tina the Talking Tummy, because pregnancy bellies were cute; socially acceptable. But I didn’t bounce back like the articles said I would. My jeans jumped to double digits, and not the good kind. A size ten is a long way from a double zero, even though it’s the American standard size. America’s Next Top Model told me anything above a size two was plus-size. The Devil Wears Prada told me, “Two became the new four, and zero became the new two.” And a size six? “The new fourteen.”
I was fat. Fifteen. A teen mom. Isolated from everyone, labels stacked until I could barely see myself beneath them.
I wore baggy shirts to hide my stomach, and the judgment felt constant. My father praised my sister’s thinness like it was a family achievement I’d somehow failed to unlock. At dinners, I learned to portion myself carefully. To leave food behind. To eat like someone who didn’t want to be noticed because there is always a resurgence in people’s obsession with thinness, and with what’s on the fat one’s plate. Never mind my sisters ate twice what I did and walked away unscathed.
I didn’t love my body. I didn’t even know how to dress it. Clothing was either camouflage or punishment. I cried in fitting rooms while the things I wanted refused to slide over my thighs, clung too tightly to my stomach, my arms. Nothing ever felt like mine.
I hated my body. I cataloged every fold, every dimple in my back, the weight of my arms. Toxic Tabloid Culture handed me a mirror before I had language and taught me how to flinch. After showers, I stood naked in front of my full-length reflection and cried, asking myself what I could do differently. I didn’t want perfection. I just wanted to be beautiful.
Life went on anyway. Marriage. More children. The years kept moving whether I approved of myself or not. My body did extraordinary things—it grew humans, fed them, kept them alive—and I treated it like a problem to be solved.
I learned how to disappear in photographs, angling myself sideways, folding my arms across my stomach, hugging myself smaller. I threw away the scale because it felt toxic, but the numbers followed me anyway. I avoided doctors’ offices like a plague, because women’s pain is negotiable, dismissible, and every complaint seemed to have the same cure.
Seizures? You should lose weight.
EXPERTS SAY: SHEDDING POUNDS COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING
Chronic migraines? You should lose weight.
BEFORE & AFTER: HER BIGGEST TRANSFORMATION YET
Chronic uterine pain? Obviously, it would all resolve if you weren’t fat.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
I was twenty-two, trapped in a toxic marriage, ashamed of my body, living beside a man who told me I’d be more attractive if I were thinner. Never mind that he outweighed me. Never mind that I was already carrying the weight of survival. What was the point of living an entire life at war with myself?
I had confused endurance for virtue.
The shape of my body was not a measure of my worth. It did not dull my intelligence or drain my beauty no matter what doctors, magazines, or my husband insisted, I was beautiful. I carried a heart of gold and a hunger for the wild. I was empathetic, intuitive, drawn to homeopathic remedies and soft truths, utterly singular, impossible to replicate.
My breasts were full and heavy, teardrop-shaped because three babies had latched onto them and lived. My stomach was mapped in silver and red, stretched wide as a sky, marked by the passage of bodies that once called me home. I was a woman shaped by earth and stardust, magnificent in the way only originality can be.
Why should I despise the softness that clung to me when it had never defined me? How could I ask the world to love me, how could I demand beauty be seen, if I refused to offer it to myself first?
Finally, I decided I was done hating my body. Done waiting to earn comfort. Done postponing confidence until some imaginary future version of me arrived. I dressed how I wanted, not because I was thin enough, but because confidence wasn’t conditional.
I wasn’t in denial about my size. Obsession with women’s bodies never really left. Not from my family and not from the media. But with self-assurance came understanding: my body wasn’t broken, it was specific. Hormone imbalance. Polycystic ovarian syndrome. Insulin resistance. My body didn’t respond to restriction the way it was “supposed” to. I could barely eat and still didn’t lose weight. The promise that effort equals outcome collapsed under science.
So instead of hiding, I let clothes speak. Crop tops. Form-fitting dresses. Fabric that told the truth. I felt most powerful wearing the things I’d been warned against, and others began to see.
That’s when I started mirror work.
At first, it felt absurd standing in front of myself, meeting my own eyes, saying it out loud: I love my body. I love myself. My voice wavered. I didn’t believe it yet. But belief wasn’t the requirement. Repetition was.
I noticed how vicious my inner dialogue had become. How quickly I reduced myself to size and surface. The intrusive thoughts didn’t disappear, but I learned to interrupt them. To answer back.
Mirror work wasn’t about pretending I loved everything. It was about refusing to participate in my own disappearance.
I still don’t love every photograph. People still judge. Some days the old noise gets loud. Women’s bodies, like fashion, seem to follow trends. And so did my mindset. But loving yourself isn’t silence. It’s authority.
I began noticing things I’d never allowed myself to claim. How the brown of my eyes shimmered gold in the sun. How the side dimples came out in my smile when I’m truly happy. The strength in my legs. How my hips accentuate my waist in a form fitting dress. I admired the curve of my body as fact. Not a flaw. Not worship.
Recognition.
I spent years trying to outrun the fat trend of the early 2000s without realizing that’s exactly what it was: a trend. A cultural glitch dressed up as morality, discipline, and health. It convinced an entire generation of girls that normal bodies were wrong. I was the black sheep for a long time. Too soft. Too much. Now I understand the truth that took decades to reach me: my body was never the problem. It was evidence—of a life lived, of breath, of presence, of beauty.
And it is worthy of my love as every size and every shape.