Lose Hate not Weight – Meet Body Positive Activist Virgie Tovar
Virgie Tovar is a dynamic, multi-talented woman who is overtly passionate about pushing back against the discrimination that the plus size community receives. She holds a Master’s Degree in Human Sexuality and contributes to many outlets such as BuzzFeed and CBS Radio. She has been featured in The New York Times, MTV and Cosmopolitan. Her blog – “Lose hate, not weight” has also become an outlet and a wellspring of knowledge for all things body-positive.
Virgie Tovar was born into a family that is mostly plus size, but she never felt an issue with it growing up. That is until at the age of eleven, when she became conscious of the difference between big and small. At times, she starved herself to lose weight to try and fit in. As she was exposed to women who were fat but happy with who they were, her mindset shifted. She realized that she didn’t have to conform to a certain image to live an amazing life.
Virgie founded Babecamp, a four-week online course aimed to teach people some of the things she herself had learned when it came to loving one’s body and encourage its students to “break up with the diet culture”. She uses her program to get people together and heal themselves from the attitudes of others. One of her mantras is “put on your big girl panties and deal with it”, which immediately resonated with her audience. Virgie Tovar wants more shame to be attached to the bigots who try to offend fat people than the fat people themselves.
Virgie has taken this message to the world via mainstream media and uses her platform to teach the message of self-love. Social media has created a network where people can be who they want to be and then take this confidence into the real world.
Virgie Tovar has a new book on the way based on the stories of people she has met. It covers a wide range of topics like gender, mental health, citizenship and the shifting socio-political meaning of the body. FabUPlus magazine can’t wait for it to be released and applauds the way that Virgie goes about challenging the norms.
