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Stop obsessing about your Covid weight gains. Love your body and have a hot (fat) girl summer.

We survived a global pandemic and now you're worried about the size of your jeans? Let's just refuse to ever be ashamed of our bodies again.
Photo illustration: Mangoes and peaches form the curves of a woman in a painting wearing white sneakers, lying over clouds with an ice-cream sundae.
It’s time to tip the scales in our favor and have ourselves a hot fat girl summer. Anjali Nair / NBC News; Getty Images

Americans got fatter during the pandemic. Experts have speculated that many of our lifestyle changes — not being able to go to the gym, moving to a sedentary work-from-home life, and, oh, the stress of a life-threatening, infectious virus having a go at everyone in the world — account for that.

They could be right. Or — like me — maybe a lot of people just stopped caring as much about the external standards by which our bodies are judged to focus on a much more pressing issue: survival.

Going to the gym was, in fact, a widely identified health risk — and so was going to the grocery store and going to work and going to the doctor and going anywhere, really, especially after public health professionals told us that just being overweight constituted an extra risk factor for catching a serious case of Covid-19. For the better part of a year, all we could do was wait, hope, try to find moments of joy and stay alive.

It’s time to tip the scales in our favor and have ourselves a hot fat girl summer.

And now that those of us left have managed to live through one of the most harrowing moments in global history — a pandemic that took over half a million lives from us in the United States and millions globally — now that we are seemingly lucky enough, if we are in the United States, to have made it through to the other side of this nightmare, there seems to be less of a shortage of PPE and more a shortage of kindness and common sense.

Why are we torturing ourselves and other people with the pre-pandemic pressure to lose weight?

There is no scarcity right now of jokes, memes and advice on how to lose the “pandemic 15” or shame around pandemic weight gain. But pushing ourselves to get back to the life we had before, for better or for worse, seems counterintuitive to the opportunity we have as we re-enter society, as they say, “vaxxed and waxed” to offer ourselves the radical self-acceptance of our bodies.

On the other side of this nightmare, there seems to be less of a shortage of PPE and more a shortage of kindness and common sense.

Why not take this moment to reset our barometers for self-love? Why not just reject the unfair, external standards that have always kept us all — but especially women — in a cycle of self-hate, fighting to get or keep our weight down, cycling through juice cleanses and fad diets and overly aggressive exercise classes?

I’m talking to myself as much as I’m talking to you: Stop trying to lose weight because you think you need to in order to "get back out there." Talia Lavin wrote recently that “there's a secret legion of grieving and unimproved femmes who have tried and failed to enter the halls of a kind of womanhood that is locked off to us.” But enough is enough.

It’s time to tip the scales in our favor and have ourselves a hot fat girl summer.

Yes, that’s right. Take a lesson from Gen Z and wear that crop top that's in style right now. Embrace your bulge. Wear a bikini; all bodies are beach bodies on a beach. Buy a bigger pair of jeans — your old skinny ones are out of style now anyway, honey. Feel good in your body. Feel grateful that you survived something that threatened your health and your life. Celebrate being alive. We've put too much unnecessary pressure on ourselves and on each other to come out of this pandemic "perfect," as though there is some objective standard for that.

The endless cycle of weight loss, self-scolding and shame coupled with the hoops we are expected to jump through are a type of torture — and they mostly don’t work.

I’m specifically not talking about "being healthy" or telling you to "take care of yourself" — those sound like good pieces of advice, but they're also diet industry code words. The correlation between weight (or, more specifically, body mass index) and health is complicated and personal: We should listen to our bodies and what they need and we should all talk to our doctors before embarking on any drastic changes to our diets or exercise regimens. But fat activists and doctors alike have long decried how the diet industry has, rather than lead to a healthier society, led people to have major weight fluctuations, and thus ruined their metabolisms, their appetites and made them very, very unhappy.

I know; I am one of these people!

I’m not preaching from the mountaintop as someone who just gained a lot of weight during the pandemic, either: Spoiler alert, I was already fat. I say this as someone who is also on the path to self acceptance, and who knows firsthand how hard it is to embrace your body as is. I am a woman in modern society and, as I said, I was already fat.

I stopped thinking about my body as divorced from myself — or maybe I stopped divorcing myself from a body I had conditioned myself to hate.

But I’m working on loving myself — and allowing that love to include my body. I have found that forcing myself to focus less on my exterior and more on my interior has actually been revelatory. It's allowed me to think about why I have wanted to be thin so badly, and to fit into a mold I’ll never be thin enough for (not that almost anybody can). It's forced me to really assess the extent to which I have internalized the belief that my worth as a person is inversely proportional to my size — which it is not. And it has made me realize how much time and space I spent worrying about what I look like rather than focusing on my mental health and well-being — both of which are far more important to my overall health long term and to grappling with this tumultuous time in history.

And it was when I truly committed to that work of seeing myself as a person with this body, rather than a person stuck in this body, that I actually started to see change. I became more aware of my physicality, my health and how I feel, because I stopped thinking about my body as divorced from myself — or maybe I stopped divorcing myself from a body I had conditioned myself to hate.

I am not saying this to incentivize you to dive deeper into a system that demands you always be thinking about losing weight; I’m sharing this to point out that the endless cycle of weight loss, self-scolding and shame coupled with the hoops we are expected to jump through to keep our bodies taut and tight are a type of torture — and that they mostly don’t work.

What I’m asking for isn’t easy; I know that. I have had my own pangs of wanting to “lose more” before I “got back out there” after this year of being in here. But then I started to daydream about the radical alternative — a world in which we embrace and give gratitude for what we have, full of excitement to see the people we love, and to hug them safely. But I also saw it as a world in which we liberate ourselves from the toxic and dangerous myths about weight loss, and in which we fight bigotry and fat discrimination while we rejoice and give gratitude. If we all refuse to be ashamed of being fat together, they can’t really stop us!

It's kind of wild to think that just wearing crop tops before we meet our dubious weight loss goals might have the power to do that. And maybe it won't. But it'll be fun to try.