Can You Learn To Love Your Fat?

Can body confidence be taught? Marisa Meltzer, who’s been dieting since she was five, goes on a quest to make peace with her size.

- Marisa Meltzer

The first time I went to Tucson, Arizona it was to lose weight at Canyon Ranch. The second time it’s for something very different. “Change your world. Love your body!” reads the movie theatre-size screen looming over the second annual Body Love conference. Three hundred people spent $25 dollars to attend, mostly women: suburban-mom types, pierced-septum alt-college students, and what appears to be a handful of walk-of-shamers in miniskirts at 9am. I imagine many of the other attendees wouldn’t mind being called chubby. I can’t count myself among them.

Jes Baker, the 29-year-old founder of the conference, stands to begin her keynote speech on “the social impact of body love”. She has numerous tattoos and, today, dyed black hair (she has since cycled through lavender and blond). Baker is a blogger, activist, and, as of this past November, the author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living. To the crowd, she proclaims: “I’m the reason people obsessively count calories, go to the gym, create thinspiration… But I chose to love my body. How many of you feel comfortable looking me in the eye and calling yourself beautiful?”