I Do It with the Lights On

by Whitney Way Thore

  Was it possible to find a man who valued me wholly and completely, while wanting to have sex with me, too? One whose affections for me wouldn’t fluctuate with each pound lost or gained? I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to find out.

  I was slowly starting to love my body, and I knew my body deserved to be loved. Both my outlook and my goals had begun to shift. I’d spoken so much about my struggles on the radio that identifying myself as a fat woman started to become less scary and shameful. I no longer wanted to achieve my goal weight of 130 pounds. I didn’t want my entire life to amount to a weight-loss success story. Losing weight didn’t eliminate my anxiety, my self-loathing, or even the way other people treated me. Even after losing 100 pounds, I was still nowhere near what society deemed acceptable.

  So if my life wasn’t going to be a weight-loss story, what was it going to be?

  I was desperate to know. I wanted to know what it would feel like to look at myself naked for five minutes and not cry. I wanted to feel love that wasn’t conditional.

  One day, I was feeling particularly ballsy. I pulled up my T-shirt and tucked it into my sports bra, leaving my stomach exposed. I posted it on my Facebook page with the hashtag #nobodyshamecampaign (which has now been shortened to #nobodyshame) and was bombarded with likes and comments from other people with words of praise, confusion, and even envy. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I excitedly asked my father if he’d seen the post. His answer broke my heart. He made a strange noise and said, “Well, I don’t think that’s a very flattering picture.”

  What ensued was the worst argument I’ve ever had with my dad. I yelled at him and told him he was like every asshole guy I’d ever met. The next day, when I sat down with him to patch things up, he explained to me that he ultimately wanted me to be happy, but he was worried that if I never lost weight there would be no way to avoid the shitstorm from society.

  “I want two things for you: for you to be healthy and live a long life and for you to be happy while you’re living it. That’s it,” he said. “I know you’re beautiful. I know you’re intelligent. I know how hard you had to work to lose any weight. I know how incredible you are. You’re strong; you’re a leader; you’re capable of accomplishing anything. I’ve known these things my whole life. But I also know that trying to get the rest of the world to see that isn’t going to be easy, and thinking about you being miserable because people are so stupid kills me. “You’re not going to be able to change the world, but you can change yourself,” he told me.

  Having this conversation with my dad was cathartic. I realized that he didn’t necessarily care that I was fat—he cared that it was the cause of so much pain and grief in my life, and he just wanted that to be over for me. I understood that he thought changing myself to assimilate into a culture that was unforgiving to fat women would be easier than weathering fat phobia my whole life or somehow single-handedly eradicating it myself. But as much as I understood where he was coming from, I was done changing for other people. My father and I both cried, and I promised him that I was going to be fine—that I was feeling stronger than I ever had in my life and that I didn’t want him to worry about me. Then I made myself a promise: I would stop caring what people thought about my body and start living in it. I didn’t want to waste any more time waiting until I was thin to do things, fall in love, or be happy. I told myself that “I’m fat” could no longer be an excuse to not do something. This resolution to live my life the way I wanted, regardless of my weight, was nothing short of revolutionary for me.

  Not only was I starting to love my body, but I was finally starting to love myself. I loved my brain, which mentally corrected every grammatical error in the newspaper and kept me up at night ruminating on existential questions. I loved my personality, which earned me childhood nicknames like the “Energizer Bunny” and got me in trouble for talking too much. I loved my curious spirit that wondered at what was on the other side of the universe. Most important, I also started to accept—and value—my past. I could weep for the one hundred-ninety-pound, fifth-grade Whitney who dodged the “Baby Beluga” song, the middle school Whitney who started throwing up her food, and the college Whitney who battled depression only to be hit with a PCOS diagnosis. I could also let those Whitneys go a little—not completely, as they will always be tethered to me, but I could let them float away on loose strings instead of allowing them to anchor me in shame.

  A path had unfolded in front of me and I was sprinting toward it. A better life was waiting for me—I could see it glimmering in my mind like a tiny house on a steep hill—and only I could take the journey there. My life was coming into focus.

  My mom was right. Something good was going to happen.

  9

  I DO IT WITH THE LIGHTS ON

  Back in the early spring of 2013, before that huge talk with my dad, before I’d coined “No Body Shame,” before I’d been thrust into the online fetish community, and before my mom had given me the pendant on my twenty-ninth birthday, a local photographer named Misty had contacted me to tell me that she was a bigger woman and a radio listener, and that hearing me in the mornings had really helped her build her confidence. As a thank-you, she had offered to give me a free photo shoot. I had never done a legit photo shoot before, and I wasn’t entirely certain it was something I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to turn down such a nice gift, so I convinced Donna to go with me and we drove out to her studio.

  Misty and her crew (made up of her family and friends) were warm and welcoming, but still, purposefully positioning my huge body in front of a camera lens felt uncomfortable. This is exactly what fat women were supposed to avoid, right? With Misty’s coaching, I struck a few poses in my pinup-style attire, and when I got the photos back, I didn’t hate them, but my immediate thought was: God, I’ve gotten so fat.

  Donna and me at the first photo shoot (2013).

  Fast-forward several months to the fall of 2013, and now Misty had offered to do a second photo shoot for me, this time boudoir-style. Coincidentally, I had just made the promise to myself about not using hating my body as an excuse to avoid uncomfortable things, so I went through with it. I loved the resulting photos (as you may remember, “Sarah Lynn” hated them). This, of course, was when I fired off that open letter to “Sarah Lynn.” I felt more empowered than I ever had in my life. Not only could I see past how fat I was to appreciate the boudoir photos (that’s not to say that I didn’t see my fat, because, believe me, I did), but the shift in my perspective had finally clicked into place. I felt a strange, buzzing energy.

  “I feel like I’m on the cusp of something,” I told my mom. The holidays came and went, and at the end of January, I was still living my daily radio grind, fantasizing about the day when I would be able to afford rent again and could move out of my parents’ house.

  I was driving around downtown when I heard a snippet of a new song on the radio that I loved. I hadn’t caught much of the lyrics, but the beat was infectious. When I got to work, I searched the daily log to find out what song it was, then went to my office to Google it. It was called “Talk Dirty” by Jason Derulo, and when I popped the title into my Web browser, a dance tutorial came up. The choreographer was an Australian dancer named Jasmin Meakin, and she was fabulous. Then I saw that an in-depth tutorial was available for purchase online. I thought it would make a great Fat Girl Dancing video, so I downloaded it and began learning it right then and there in my cramped office.

  The choreography was fast and too difficult for me in spots. By the time I called Todd and asked him to meet me at the Y, I’d already modified it, “fat girl style,” to suit me. Todd was in town only for a couple days, and he hadn’t yet made an official Fat Girl Dancing appearance since I’d started making the videos for the radio station. I taught him the choreography over two days, and on the second, I brought my laptop in to record it. Because we were pressed for time (Todd was about to head back to NYC, where he lived at the time) and not at all performance-ready, we danced the chor
eography over and over, always messing up so badly that it couldn’t be used from start to finish. When I got home later that evening, sweaty and exhausted, I had multiple videos to choose from, so I spliced the best two routines together and called it a night.

  The next day, like I had done with all my Fat Girl Dancing videos before, I uploaded it to our station’s Facebook page. But I soon noticed that something was different. The video was getting more shares and comments than anything we’d ever posted. Every time I logged in to social media, I saw it posted somewhere else, and the most surprising thing was that every person who reposted it did so in a congratulatory way—I never saw people sharing it to make fun of me (that, of course, is what comment sections are for). After a few days, I had collected over 100K followers.

  I was at work over the weekend, sitting in my office, and every time I refreshed the video, I could see the views jumping by tens of thousands. I called my dad and asked him to come over. I showed him the video, the views, and some of the feedback I was getting. He seemed marginally interested, but I don’t think he thought it was that wild.

  “Dad, seriously, something is happening,” I told him, showing him how the views kept piling up. “What is happening?”

  It’s a strange feeling to describe, but at that moment, something was set into motion. I could feel, almost tangibly, my life changing from minute to minute. It’s a sensation I’ve never felt before and probably will never feel again.

  The next day I got an email from The Huffington Post, saying they wanted to publish a story about the video. I was shocked and honored, and I believed, hands-down, that this was the biggest thing that would ever happen to me in my entire life.

  But it didn’t stop with The Huffington Post. They asked me to post the video on YouTube so that they would have an embeddable link, and I did so. That YouTube video immediately attracted millions of views and now has almost nine million. After the HuffPo piece ran, I got a phone call from a strange number on my cellphone. It was a producer from Inside Edition who said they wanted to fly out to North Carolina to shoot an interview with me. I said yes, but the next day when the interview was scheduled, I got a call saying they had to cancel it. I was a little disappointed but, wow, what a fun ride, I thought. I thought this would forever be the pinnacle of my life.

  The next day, I was at a stoplight checking my email. I had a message from a producer on the Steve Harvey show, asking me if I wanted to be a guest. I had to pull over on the side of the road. The day after, the Today show called. An hour after that, Good Morning America. An hour after that, I had a panic attack.

  A friend of mine, who witnessed my anxiety, told me she knew a great agent in town named Michael and that I should call him. I dialed his number and he asked me what was going on, and so I told him. Not just that I had a viral video and some national press requests, but I told him everything.

  Speaking quickly and excitedly, I tried to explain this crazy, surreal, wonderful thing that was coming together. It was more than a dance video; it was the culmination of my entire life. It was the decades of strife and self-hate. It was the realization that fat-hate was universal. It was the difficult truth that losing weight hadn’t fixed my problems. It was the way dance had wrapped me back up in its arms, without punishing me for leaving for so long. It was the joy of meeting my soul sister, Donna; the comfort of my oldest friend, Heather; and the steadfast companionship of Todd, Tal, Buddy, and Ashley, who’d loved me through thick and thin. It was the sneak peek into the fetish world and a glimpse into territory I didn’t know existed—a place where fat women were beautiful. It was me choosing to have my picture taken without cropping my body out, and even more, the impulsive decision to hashtag a photo in which I’m baring my entire belly and feeling good about it with #nobodyshame. It was fighting through loneliness and depression when I felt like my life was going nowhere, and ultimately deciding that I never had to be skinny again to be okay. It was the absolute unconditional love of parents who never failed me, and the ease with which I trusted Misty to photograph me without a shirt on. And mostly, it was the strength I found somewhere inside me to respond to criticism, because I finally felt like I had become the author of my own story. It was my voice that I was finally unafraid to use—and that I demanded be heard.

  If Michael was overwhelmed by our two-hour phone conversation, he didn’t let on. Instead, he got right to work for me, negotiating appearances and booking meetings. I jumped on a plane to Chicago to film a segment for Steve Harvey that would air two weeks later. My appearance would include a sit-down interview with Steve followed by a dance performance that, unbeknownst to him, would transform into a flash mob with the studio audience. When I walked into the hair and makeup room, the stylist shrieked.

  “Oh my God! I just saw you on the Internet! You’re the dancer, right?”

  “Yes,” I replied, breaking out into a smile. Then I gave myself permission to say it: “I’m the dancer.”

  Minutes before I met Steve, I called my parents backstage, and my dad echoed the message he’d instilled in me since childhood: “You’re gonna do it, girl. You can do anything you put your mind to.” Twenty minutes later, during a pause in the filming, Steve leaned over the arm of his white leather chair and locked eyes with me. “You’ve got good energy,” he said. “Real good energy.”

  An hour later, with the interview, dance, and flash mob all done, I was whisked out of a loading-dock door and into a limo with fluorescent, strobing lights. On the way to the airport a hard rain began to fall. I pulled out my cellphone and wrote a text to my brother with shaky fingers. Steve Harvey said I had good energy!!!!!!!

  When I got back to Greensboro, I barely had time to think before I prepared for my next appearance. This one was for the Today show, and it would be live, so it would be the first time a national audience would see me on TV. My mom, dad, and my manager, Michael, all flew up to New York with me. I sat in my hotel room that evening, scrolling through hundreds of posts on Facebook. I had solicited for people to send me their selfies using #nobodyshame and I was speechless at the hundreds that had poured in. As I clicked through them, I saw colorful photos of women, men, and children of different races, shapes, sizes, and ages—all of them proud to use the hashtag. The viral Fat Girl Dancing video had led to all this new media attention, but everyone kept asking: what is No Body Shame? To put it simply, I decided that the message of No Body Shame was this: Love yourself. Live fully. No excuses. No shame. It was a lifestyle I had just begun living when my dance video serendipitously went viral, and here I was, about to go on live national television to talk about a concept, “body-positivity,” that I’d never even heard of a month before. The fortuitous nature of it all was almost too much to handle.

  I woke up early the next morning filled with jitters. When I got outside to the street, I called my parents and asked them to come meet me. A few minutes later I saw not only Mom and Dad, but my brother, too! He’d been living in New York since 2005, but I didn’t expect him to accompany us to the Today show appearance. We hugged tighter than we ever had before. “You’re such a bad-ass,” he whispered in my ear. I was so overwhelmed with love and excitement and nerves that I could hardly stand it. A couple hours later, when my interview began, I could see my parents, my brother, and Michael standing offstage just feet away from where I was sitting with Kathie Lee and Hoda. After the interview, I did a dance segment in the Orange Room, walked in a fashion show segment, and met American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, who was dating Jason Derulo (the artist who sang the song I danced to in my viral video). “Ahhh!” she’d yelled. “I shared that video!” When the thrilling morning was over, Mom, Dad, Hunter, Michael, and I took the short walk back to our hotel. My mom was so caught up in the excitement of the day and so proud of me that after covering me in kisses, she almost passed out (Michael caught her). Before we headed upstairs to our room, my dad pulled me aside, squinting in the midmorning sunlight.

  “I couldn’t believe it, girl,” he started.
“You were incredible. Unbelievable. I was watching you up there thinking, ‘Is this my daughter? Can this really be my daughter?’ ” Then his voice broke, and I saw tears wet his eyes. “I know I told you that you couldn’t change the world,” he said, “but, by God, if you aren’t changing it.” Then he paused. “I was wrong.”

  Within a couple months, I’d appeared live on Steve Harvey, Today, Good Morning America, Huffington Post Live, Inside Edition, CNN Headline News, and Right This Minute, as well as given dozens of phone and Skype interviews here and abroad. There had been articles in Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair Italia. Woman’s Day named me one of “Ten Women Who Are Changing the Face of Beauty.”

  As soon as I got back from my press tour, I contemplated what I would do next. I was still holding down my radio job, but I was majorly distracted. No Body Shame wasn’t something I could keep leaving work for—I strongly felt that it was my work.