When I was growing up I always loved reading books.
But there was never people like me.
Fat people are always portrayed in a comical way.
Or they were evil really took me as a child that, 'Oh, I can't be the hero because I'm fat.'
I haven't had luck with boyfriends before
and finally there’s this guy who fancies me as much as I fancy him.
As a child, I realized like how fat phobic media is.
Eddie Murphy, he made a series of films with his family where he wore fat suits.
And I remember running out of the living room crying my eyes out because they made fun of fat people.
The entire family was fat and they were just laughed at by everyone.
And I was the only one in that room in my family that was fat.
I remember, little six year old me sitting in a chair crying my eyes out because fat people are just funny.
They are just there to be laughed at.
I've always been fat since I was two years old.
Really, my mom took me to the doctors
because I was gaining a lot of weight.
And of course, that comes with a lot of bullying and a lot of picking on.
I was an active kid. I loved swimming,
I loved playing around outside.
I was always bulky
But I was always fatter than everyone else.
And it affected me really badly.
I developed an eating disorder.
Binge eating, I started self harming.
And I just had a really horrible self-image.
I hated looking in the mirror.
I hated picking out clothes because nothing would fit me.
I remember I wished that I could find the zipper to take off the fat suit, I thought I was wearing.
Like weird like delusion of how my body was but I wanted to be thin so badly.
And it was not until I was early adulthood that I started accepting that this is how my body is.
I saw this beautiful little pendant of a fat woman.
That I learned was called Venus of Willendorf, a fertility goddess.
And I don't know what clicked.
That kind of led to finding body positive Instagrams with fat people.
So seeing these people align themselves with this self-love just sparked something wonderful.
Like, yeah, I can work on loving myself too.
Now I’ll have days where don't want to look at myself.
But it's more acknowledging.
It's not, I have a bad body.
It's just it's a bad day today.
Sean and I, we met 11 years ago,
on a game on the PlayStation.
To think about like online relationships, you get to know a person in a different way.
Of course, we had seen pictures of each other.
But it was like he didn't care anyway.
You can see how fat I was in the pictures.
But he kept talking to me, so we became best friends really fast.
And it actually took a while before
we realized we were in love with each other.
Then we started long-distance relationship.
He came the year after we confessed our love.
And he loved me and my body for how my body is.
Yeah, we got married two years ago.
Was it me that put the ring on the wrong finger?
I gave you the wrong hand, yes.
Yeah, you gave me the wrong hand.
And you just went with it. Yeah.
Yeah, oops!
Oh, that's the disposable camera man.
That’s why they're so blurry.
Yeah, and one was like focused on my mother, not me.
You're cute though.
On our wedding day, I think you looked perfect, as you ever do.
I would say I'm generally attracted to larger women.
I'm attracted to people that I love really.
So it just happened.
It's never been like a fat fetish thing.
No.
Because if it's a thing it has a fetish for but you haven't like obsessively like,
'Oh, I love your fat stomach and stuff like that.'
I mean, maybe in my head before we met, it wouldn't have been someone as large.
But it just happened to be and it's not I find her any less attractive, necessarily.
The combination of everything that makes her Amalie is what I love.
I don’t think there is one thing I could single out.
Not my feet, Not your feet.
My ears.
You have really nice ears. Thank you.
Thing with like weight differences in relationships is
there’ll always be people who like comment.
Like, why would you be with them?
Why would you be with that kind of person?
Because there’s this image that a fat person has to be with a fat person.
And a thin person has to be with a thin person.
Why are there these expectations for who someone should be with?
My dad, we’ve kind of cut contact a bit more with. He is more judgmental towards larger people.
But at the same time, he wasn't discouraging me from being with Amalie.
That's just his way of thinking.
You could go to any shop and buy clothes, it's straight size.
And then you have like various different
fat people. There are small fat, then there is the mid fat,
and then the super fats, which I see myself as because I need to go to special boutique shops.
We started to own the word 'fat', just like people are starting to own the word 'queer.'
It's not a slur anymore.
And it's not associated with something bad.
We need fat to be just a neutral body description.
I never tried so much clothes in my life.
It's a fat body. It's not good.
It's not bad. It's just how the body is.
That's quite nice as well.
So in terms of Amalie’s health, the doctors say that you're in surprisingly good health, for your size.
So I think, I mean in the future, there’d be issues that could arise.
But for now, I think it's mostly fine.
Good.
This is quite nice.
I think that maybe one day, I would like to lose a tiny bit of weight.
But right now, I dont, I don't care.
And I don't want to fall into the pressure of having to lose weight to be accepted by everyone else.
This is how my body is.
Right now I'm just, I'm just happy to be in my skin.