Scarleteen

i feel like because of the way i look and my weight makes nobody attracted to me.
im 15, 5'8.5 and 250 ish pounds. ive struggled with my weight all my life and all of my friends were smaller and prettier than me, so ive felt like the so-called D.U.F.F (designated ugly fat friend) since i was a little kid. all of my friends have had several partners or people crushing on them throughout me knowing them and i feel incredibly left out. ive havent even had my first kiss yet. i feel like its all due to my body. how should i fix this? should i lose weight? does anybody else feel like this, too? am i just hopeless? or will i actually find someone before i graduate highschool?

anything helps, thanks

Your ask is breaking my heart. Being fat doesn't make you ugly or undesireable. It just makes you fat, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

ScarleTeen has at least two great starting resources on how to navigate being fat in this thin-obsessed world that I would highly suggest you check out.

First is Navigating Sexuality as a Fat Teen.

It goes through mythbusting, such as:

1. Being Fat Means You’re Unattractive

This entire idea is based in the problematic idea that fat people are somehow inferior to their thin counterparts, which is basically the definition of fatphobia. People also tend to assume that their personal preferences dictate the preferences of humanity as a collective, which just isn’t true. People are attracted to people of all body types, shapes, and sizes. The media does a poor job of representing this, but they’re lying to you - not everyone finds thin people sexy and not all fat people are found to be undesirable.

as well as how to cope with all the negative messages you've been taking in about your body, such as:

2) Get Rid of As Many Negative Messages as Possible: There are so many messages out there that tell you that you need to be thin in order to be attractive or desirable. You’ve probably been told inadvertently at some point that if you lose weight, your peers will look at you in a whole different light. This is all based on the idea that being thin is always better than being fat and that you can change your body at will. But in reality, 95% of diets fail. Trying to force your body to become a size that it isn’t is probably not going to work and in fact, may cause you to gain more weight (or stay the same weight and become unhealthy). So get rid of (or limit your exposure to) the unhealthy people, magazines, TV shows, and influences that are telling you that your fatness is a problem.

and how to navigate unsupportive family as well as self-discovery regarding your identity.

The second is Seven Ways to Love Your Body.

Just as it sounds, the article goes over suggestions on how to start improving your relationship to your body and develop healthier thinking towards yourself. It is focused on women, but the suggestions themselves are gender neutral, and applicable to how you seem to feel about your body, imo.

ScarleTeen isn't the only place you can go to learn about body positivity either! VolUp2 is a great resource to start taking in positive images about body diversity. They are focused on displaying models you won't see in most other magazines and advertisements, and they're available on multiple social media networks, so you can follow them on your preferred medium. The Militant Baker has an awesome masterpost of several body positivity resources, including various websites, fashion blogs, social media accounts, and book recommendations on loving yourself as you are. Big Fat Science is a cool resource for mythbusting with science(!) and learning about health and loving your body.

Look, kissing and dating - especially in high school - honestly isn't everything. It can be a lot of pressure and drama. There is also plenty of time to get out there and explore and meet people and have Dating Experiences(TM). Honestly, I think a lot of times for a lot of these things, they really are better to do after high school, when you've got more freedom of expression and experience and have had some time to figure out what you want and how to advocate for yourself.

But, just for reference, my group of friends were mostly queer (and mostly didn't realize it until late high school) and mostly fat. None of us kissed in high school. All of my friends from high school are now happily married before 30; one has a kid and another is trying for a kid.

You are certainly not alone in these feelings! But dieting is more likely to cause more problems than bring you any peace. Dieting is really a form of disordered eating and can cause a host of issues, including worsening your self-esteem and tying your self-worth to an unattainable body image.

The best thing you can do is work on taking in more positive messages about your body and do some cool things in the meantime. There's so many experiences out there waiting for you beyond just dating. Let yourself dream and don't forget to live your life regardless of dating status. <3

thank you so much. those articles were very helpful and hearing about you and your friends personal experiences gives me much more hope for myself. again, thank you <3

I'm so glad some of those resources helped, and you are feeling a bit better! Please let us know if you have any more questions or would like any more resources about any subject. <3

I want to just quickly add in here that I feel very strongly that thinking this way -- in other words, having the idea that your body shape or size has anything to do with your ability to love and be loved -- is absolutely a barrier to finding love and having loving relationships.

But your body being the body that it is? Is not a barrier. We don't even need to go deep into census reports or any other kind of data. It sounds like maybe you don't yet, but most of us with people of size in our lives (or who are those people) know full well that fat people have love relationships just like everyone else. On the other hands, it's much harder for people with low self-esteem to find relationships, and when they do, to be in healthy ones, with low self-esteem.

Your body and how it looks is probably mostly out of your control: genetics determine much of how our bodies are, and that's just that. We can modify them somewhat, but by and large, we're going to look how we do. And that's okay, because, as my longtime friend Hanne Blank has famously said, and as is absolutely true, there is no right way to have a body. I promise. Anyone who tells you different is literally trying to sell you something or has bought into what the people trying to sell everyone everything has said.

Your self-esteem, however, is something that is far more in your control, and that you can change and improve. So, instead of trying to lose weight, I vote for trying to lose the idea you have to and putting your focus instead on learning to accept and affirm yourself, very much including your body just as it is. <3

Hey, I just want to add my own experience here... I am a bigger woman. I was a big girl all through high school, but thankfully my friends were either curvy or body positive and didn't care about my size as much as I did. I'm now 33 (yikes! lol) but I'm still a bigger woman! In high school, I had guys that wanted to date me - but I was so hung up on how I looked, and so full of self-doubt instead of confidence, that I didn't see it. I had my son just before I was 18 and then met my amazing husband 3 months later. He loves me for me - and I've gained weight over the years. I now also have a daughter, and I'm trying to teach her the things that I wish my mom would have taught to me (body positivity, for example) so that she is comfortable in her body. I can honestly tell you, that even though I am married, I still get plenty of men in my DMs. I think it has a lot to do with me being confident in myself. That is something I did NOT have as a teenager, at all. I love that there are people out there like Lizzo showing folks that she will take up space and doesn't care what anyone else thinks. As I said, I'm 33. I just started having that mentality a few years ago! I wear two-piece swimsuits (not necessarily bikini's, but flounce tops and high waist bottoms from Torrid) to the pool/beach. I wear shorts, dresses, all the things I want to wear but I was too afraid to earlier. I have cellulite on my legs, and my arms jiggle, I have fat thighs and a belly. And guess what - no one cares what I wear more than me.

So, what I tell my friends to do is stand in front of the mirror. Naked. I know your first thoughts will be the things you don't like. But look at what you DO like. Say them out loud. Even if it's small, like your hair or the shape of your eyes, etc. Do this every day. Look at your strong legs. Look at how they carry you through the day. Look at how they help you get up every day, for example. You'll start seeing all the amazingness of your body.

Once you start changing your thinking about your body, it really will radiate outwards. You're not the ugly fat friend. Your friends should be so lucky to have a curvy, vivacious, beautiful person as a friend!

Hey jennyt,

Thanks for adding this in here. I love what you said about thinking about all the things that your body does for you and showing appreciation for them. I think that in a culture that focuses a lot on external appearance and size, we sometimes forget about all the other aspects of having a physical body, and how amazing it is that we have consciousness and functional movement (of whatever kind) at all. Sometimes I find myself doing the exact same thing - looking at legs that others might see as too big or too hairy, that have carried me to where I am, or arms that have blemishes and scars on them that have held the people and animals I love with kindness and warmth. It gets a little more complicated when I'm having a pain flareup and my body doesn't let me do the things I'd like to, but even then I still marvel at the fact that I'm living, breathing, talking, remembering, laughing, crying, and all the other things that I am able to do.

I also love love love what you said about creating an environment of comfort and positivity for your daughter. I think that being honest about the ways that others can make us feel bad about ourselves, and focusing on the things that we can do to practice radical self-love makes all the difference. She's a lucky kiddo. <3

I remember what it was like to be a young teen, constantly faced with negative messaging about my body and wondering when love would find me, if it would find me at all. Full disclosure: I'm 21, 5'4, and my weight fluctuates around 350-370 lbs. I'm a bit of a self-love realist: when people make lofty, well-meaning statements about radical self-love, I want to tell them that the idea of even regular self-love, seems unattainable some days to me as a 21-year-old. At 15, I certainly thought of it as something that would happen 'someday,' and not something I could just make happen on my own. The concept of self-love is intimidating, and I just wanted a boyfriend or someone to like me, and that might have been enough. The thing is, I think if you asked your friends how dating affected their self-perception, their answers would vary greatly from person to person. Why? Because the development of your self-esteem is largely dependant on where you are in your self-love journey, and whether you feel as happy by yourself as you do boo'd up.
I want you to know a couple things: first, that human desire is one of the most abundant resources in the universe, and if you want to pursue someone, the first step to forming an intimate connection is to let them know. Second, that the idea of a DUFF is high-key misogynistic YA lit fodder, and that when you graduate from high school and move on to greener pastures, you won't have to deal with the petty, stereotyping messaging that's pushed on to young people, because no one cares about DUFFS or any of that insulting crap. And third, that if you're having trouble loving your body, it would maybe be an easier start to try respecting your body first. Loaded phrasing, I know. When I say respect your body, I don't mean to evoke the misogynistic messaging about women who aren't "respectable;" rather, I mean giving respect to yourself the way you would to another person, regarding them as human. Ultimately your body belongs to you, not to anyone else, and deserves a level of care and consciousness. When you start having negative thoughts about being "ugly," grant yourself the fact that you are a human being, and you deserve to exist as you are. You deserve some peace of mind to be yourself. There's nothing ugly about that.

Thanks so much for adding all of this, mt13. What wonderful, real, affirming additions. <3