Hey, welcome to Truth Be Told. I'm Tanya Mosley. Everybody is unbig in their back lately. I just wanted to say that phrase. But really, honestly, the popularity of Ozympic and other weight loss drugs has opened up a new conversation about our nation's obsession with thinness. This episode from 2022 delves into

our nation's refusal to acknowledge that the ideal, at its core, is racist. How do we get

beyond the belief that bigger black bodies are a problem and instead allow ourselves, no matter what

size, to take up space.

Thank you for listening and please like, share, and leave a review.

Santa Claus's lap is where I first learned that my body was a problem.

Oh, whoa, you're a big girl.

The year before, when I turned six, I barely hung off of Santa's knee.

But now this word chubby had become synonymous with my name.

And Santa, this magical man responsible for making all of my Christmas dreams come true,

was telling me I was too heavy to sit on his lap.

My body was already taking up too much space.

My earliest memories are of having a lot of problems with my body.

Writer Carvel Wallace began to understand the world's view of his body around seven or eight, too.

Recently, he wrote about the different ways his black body has stood in the way of his happiness.

I was like as a kid, like I'm chubby,

and then I went through this like phase. When I looked back at it in my early 20s where I was very slim and muscular, then I lost a bunch of weight. Then I gained a bunch of way back.

When Carvel was in eighth grade, he held a knife to his stomach, contemplating the ways

he could surgically cut off the rolls of fat from his body to fit the ideal.

This kid from your fourth grade class can run fast. This kid's good at basketball. This kid's good

at football. This kid can fight. You don't have a body thing that you can do. It was in the way

of my freedom and

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