"If you are a big girl like me, you can either destroy your spirit, which I tried - believe me, I tried; I tried to kill myself, basically, and wasn't able to do it - or you can accept and love yourself just the way you are," she said.

"Face it, more women look like me than Julia Roberts. Why can't the fat girl end up with the prince?"

"I'm the only fat younger actress right now, I get mail and it breaks my heart - the amount of self-loathing out there; the amount of pain, simply because people are fat."

"Kathy Smith is a fitness guru, who took it upon herself to write about my acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards in a newspaper column headlined 'If Fat Becomes Hip, We Are In Extreme Trouble.'

Really? How so? What kind of trouble? I'm just trying to figure out what kind of chaos the world would be thrown into if fat became hip and hips became fat. Would there be chocolate rationing? Would Wall Street buckle under heavier brokers? Would all the pork in the federal budget actually be appropriated for pork? It's hard to imagine exactly what this 'extreme trouble' might be" (Manheim, 227).

The article Ms. Smith wrote included the quote "the desire to look good and be sexy is usually the most powerful motivator to keep extra weight off....but if the motivation were eliminated by the growing acceptance of fat as desirable or even just ordinary, we'd lose vanity as a weapon in the health wars."

"I have hypothesized that fat acceptance would cripple the industries that rely on the beauty myth for their billions. Which would be just fine with me, but we know that that is not what Kathy Smith is worried about. Of course, one thing would surely happen is that people like Ms. Smith, who write fitness columns and books and sell millions of exercise videos, would be out of work. Maybe that's what she means by 'extreme trouble' " (Manheim, 227).

-Camryn Manheim, size 24 Actor, Author

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