Activist Virgie Tovar On Embracing Aging and Our Bodies

By Leslie Price

Virgie Tovar is an author, lecturer, and activist on weight-based discrimination and body image. I spoke with her about her career, the lessons from fat positivity that might also apply to aging, and advice she’d give to women just starting out on the path to body acceptance. Her new book, The Body Positive Journal, is available now for pre-order.

Aging presents its own kind of mindfuck when it comes to our body. We can see it changing, and we can feel how it behaves differently. People who might not have felt any fragility before may start feeling it now. Are there any lessons you have learned that you think could help women who are struggling with facing the aging process? 

I’m turning 40 this year and I very much intend to be an #oldpositive influencer once I turn 50! I’ve literally already been plotting it in my head. I look forward to it.

I think there are a lot of lessons from body positivity and fat positivity that can be applied to the aging process. First, we can forgive ourselves for having a body, we can stop being so freaking afraid of our bodies, and we can approach our bodies with curiosity and affection. We live in a culture that hates real, actual human bodies, in all their complexity and lovely flaws. We have the right not to be afraid of our own bodies. Spend some time with the scariest bits: photograph them, draw them, talk to a trusted friend about them, doodle on them, spend a little extra time touching them in the shower, get a tattoo on them.

Second, don’t accept the cultural narrative on aging (or most things, to be honest). Our culture is built on a whole lot of colonialism, violence, patriarchal mythology, trauma, and a bunch of other really gross stuff. It’s not the most trustworthy source of information on how we should feel about and treat ourselves and each other. Imagine something different. What if embracing aging was interesting, worthwhile, powerful, countercultural, revolutionary? What if what we believe now is all horseshit? I spend every single day of my life making meaning and joy of being a fat person in a culture that actively tells me I should be dead by now — that wants me to be dead. Contemplating mortality is not just a part of aging, it’s part of being a marginalized person because the culture has created no path for us to thrive. I defy cultural beliefs and “science” every day, just like bumble bees, who are so fat compared to their wing size they’re actually not supposed to be able to fly according to the laws of physics. Be a bumble bee.

Third, wear what you want, be who you want. This is a really big lesson from body positivity. The culture says “people like you dress and act like this.” You don’t have to follow the rules. Create your own rules. Expect people to be scandandalized, but also expect to change minds and make new friends.

Fourth, fiercely self-advocate at the doctor, at work, in your relationships, and beyond. As a fat woman, I’ve had to learn that I have to be willing to get very assertive in moments when someone is treating me like I don’t know what’s best for my own life or like I’m subhuman. I think this lesson can be applied to aging.

Fifth, we have to make room to grieve. As a fat woman I’ve had to learn how to grieve the loss of the fantasy of a thin body — a body that is loved by this culture. I think as we age, we also have to grieve loss: the loss of mobility, or a younger body, or the fact that we maybe never had the body we’d hoped for, the loss of time, the loss of ease or speed or bladder control. Grief is a big experience, but we don’t have to be scared of it. Our bodies know how to do it if we just allow them.

Sixth, mine for the power in your experience. I’ve learned to look to nature to see my fat body mirrored in things like the big stones of Joshua Tree. Aging brings us closer to the oldest elements on the planet. There is incredible power in that. There is incredible power in the knowledge you’ve gained over the years, just like there is incredible power in learning how to navigate the world in a non-normative body. The culture says that this knowledge is useless, but we can imagine ourselves as these incredible mines full of gems. These precious gems — our wisdom, the tools we’ve gained, the things we’ve seen, our unique contribution to the planet — are our power source.

Finally, meet yourself where you’re at. Instead of striving or fighting things, go to elaborate lengths to care for yourself and your body as it ages. Take the extra time. Approach yourself lovingly.   

Are there any sneaky things we do to ourselves that undermine our relationships with our bodies? (I’m thinking about, like, wearing pants with a high waistband that kind of hurts my waist. Maybe that’s a bad example.)

Yes, living with discomfort is a great example of how we undermine our relationships with our bodies. This might be the discomfort of feeling hungry or not allowing ourselves to eat until we’re full, [and] it includes not having things in our home that make us feel affirmed in our bodies (like clothes or furniture). In my new book, The Body Positive Journal, I have an activity called a Comfort Audit, where I ask people to go through their home and rate the spaces where they spend the most time on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being minimal comfort, 10 being the most comfortable), and encourage them to get rid of things that are below a 5. I think you can take the Comfort Audit beyond your home, and ask that of your wardrobe, your relationships, etc. Other sneaky ways include: not sticking up for ourselves when others say hurtful things about our bodies, dating people who judge how we eat or look, only taking “slimming” selfies or selfies that edit out our necks, gray hair, bellies, or double chins. 

Can you tell me how you built your career, and also what your path looked like to get to this relationship you have now with your body?

The path to my career has been paved with a combination of trial and error, intuition, excitement, and being very confused and demoralized at times. To be honest, I think I started working for myself because I faced weight discrimination while trying to get hired in the traditional business sector. I had moved to San Francisco after college, and hoped I’d be able to leverage my degree from a good college to get a job in the financial district. That is absolutely not what happened. I didn’t “fit” into that mold, and so I decided to stop trying to fit and forge my own path. For a long time I was just taking gigs here and there and making enough money that I could take off and travel abroad for a few months every year. As I was approaching 30, I decided to go to grad school. I was very, very unsure that was the right path for me, but like a lot of people, I turned to academia for a sense of purpose and cultural validation. It was during grad school that I discovered I had an interest in researching fat bodies, gender, and race. I was interested in how weight discrimination impacted gender representation and identity in plus-size women of color. I guess I had hit on something that was brewing in the cultural consciousness because before I even finished grad school I was being offered speaking opportunities at local colleges and universities. I edited an anthology about unapologetic fat women, and things took off from there. I’ve been doing this work for about a decade now. 

That research from grad school — and the subsequent career that’s emerged from that — has played a major role in my relationship to my body. It’s important to point out that when I was a very little kid, I had an amazing relationship to my body (like many of us did). I learned fatphobia at around the age of five, like most American kids. That really set me on a path of self-destruction and self-loathing through diet culture, weight gain and weight loss, obsessive exercise, and food restriction. I was told that my body wasn’t “healthy” and that in order for it to be healthy, I basically had to eat a lot less food and do a lot of exercise. For a person who is naturally larger (like me), that’s basically a recipe for clinical or subclinical anorexia. My relationship started to shift, honestly, the first time someone told me they were attracted to me at age 17.

After years of being told I was a hideous monster, that tiny moment was enough to push me to question all the things I’d been taught about myself and my body. It inspired me to question the culture at large, actually. So I became an anti-racist first, then a feminist. My activist mentors taught me to question the narratives we’re told about who we are and what is possible for people and the culture. That foundation helped me step into a sense of confidence that I brought with me to graduate school. When I learned what fatphobia was, it all clicked into place. Then I met unapologetic fat people who told me nothing was wrong with me, it felt like my entire life’s purpose was laid out before me: live my best life as a fat babe! 

It’s taken years and years — of photographing my body, looking at myself in the mirror, watching videos of myself, learning fat liberation ideology, grief, dating people who worship my body, getting casts made of my belly, making friends with other fat women, crying, talking about my feelings, protecting myself from other people’s fatphobia, eating foods I love, getting rid of clothes that don’t fit, buying clothes that do fit, buying a car so that I never had to deal with a fat-shaming commuter train incident again — to make peace and to find affection for my belly, my upper arms and my double chin. Each time I change how I see myself, the world and other people click into focus a little more. As we change our relationship to ourselves we change the culture, we change the world.   

Do you have any advice for women who are starting this process?

Follow your instincts, your desire and your values. If something in you tells you to start this process through making art, do it. If something in you tells you to start this process through cooking meals from your childhood, or throwing out everything in your closet that pinches your stomach, or finding the most comfortable chair in the world, or getting a pet, or crying, or journaling, or writing a letter to your former bully, or going to therapy, or reading 15 books on the topic, or not talking to your parents for three years, or divorcing your asshole partner who constantly shames you, or gardening, or going on a trip, or buying yourself something special — whatever it is, do that. Each time we heed our desire, it creates a new stepping stone for this path. Trust the unfolding process. Trust that the stones will be there to catch you as you take each new step.