About this item
Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it -- and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she's been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture's greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.
About the Author
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 is a contributor for Forbes and pens a weekly column called Take the Cake on Ravishly.com. Tovar edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and The Feminist Press published her manifesto, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018) . Her new book, FLAWLESS: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color, comes out in March 2020 from New Harbinger. 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 a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission as well as 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. Tovar was named one of the top 50 most influential feminists of 2018 by Bitch Magazine. She lives in San Francisco.
