I learned as a child that I shouldn’t be ‘moti’ – the Hindi/Urdu word for ‘fat’. When I graduated from high school, my aunt visited us from India and whispered to my mother “yeh tho moti ho gayi” – “this one has become fat” – because over four years I had put on 15 pounds. For years thereafter, I obsessively asked my parents and relatives “main moti lag rahi hoon?” – “am I looking fat?”
I have tried to stop asking this question since becoming a mother. I don’t want my children to hear me doubt myself and my body – the same body that birthed them. I don’t want them to think ‘fat’ means ‘bad’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘unattractive’, or any of the negative messages imposed by our culture. I started countering that narrative within myself by reading and following body-positive and fat liberation influencers such as Sonya Renee Taylor, Virgie Tovar, Katie Sturino, Meg Boggs, and yoga practitioner Jessamyn Stanley. I have learned so much from studying fat liberation, including the fact that fatphobia is very much rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy.
Another way I work on loving and accepting myself is by writing children’s books. My first book, Laxmi’s Mooch, which came out in March 2021, is about a little Indian-American girl embracing her budding young moustache. As a hairy South Asian girl growing up in the US, I was teased for my mooch and felt unattractive because of my hairiness. When I wrote my latest picture book I Love My Body Because, with my long-time friend and boudoir photographer, Nomi Ellenson, it made me consider my own anxieties and the fears I still struggle with about my body. I thought about how I wanted to teach my two children that all bodies are worthy, that all bodies are good bodies. No matter their size, colour or ability. These are messages I wished I had heard growing up, and I hope children (and adults) today can internalise them in their own path of self-love and happiness.
Shelly Anand is a civil and human rights attorney fighting for immigrants and workers from marginalised communities, and a children’s book author
