Being fat isn’t a vice and everyone deserves to have clothes to wear. And besides all of that, it just isn’t any of our business. A lot of poor people are disabled or have chronic medical conditions, which is how they got to be poor in the first place. It’s hard to work out when you live in a small apartment in a dangerous neighborhood and you’re never at home because you have to work. It’s hard to meal plan when you work three jobs. And poverty makes all the obstacles you can imagine to losing weight even harder: it’s harder to buy health food when you’re low income and might live in a food desert. This happens to far more people than you think. I’ve shared my story about struggling with an invisible illness that jacked up my weight even when I was on strict diets and exercising all the time. So I want to remind my readers that you cannot possibly guess someone’s lifestyle based on their size. When you talk about plus-size clothing, somebody always chimes in in a cruel judgmental way that those people ought to just change their lifestyle to lose weight. If you can manage to get to a nicer store that does carry plus sizes, they’re often more expensive. If you go to a store in a poor neighborhood that sells cheap clothing, such as a Dollar General, they usually don’t carry extended sizes at all. People on the larger end often can’t find a thing. And I was always on the smaller end of the plus sizes, so I was lucky. Lately, due to my PCOS being in treatment, I’m down into straight sizes and immediately found it way easier to shop. There weren’t a lot of choices for anyone, but the plus size section was especially small and picked over. I remembered how much trouble I’d had getting clothes at the thrift store when I was poor and also in plus sizes due to my undiagnosed poly-cystic ovary syndrome. My friend called every thrift store and agency in town and they had nothing she ended up driving all the way up to Wal Mart on the far side of town to buy clothes for them. This person was a size 4x, and plus size clothes are expensive, and they’re sometimes not available at the dollar stores that people can walk to in poor neighborhoods. They didn’t have any warm clothes to wear and they didn’t have a coat. A social worker friend mentioned that awhile ago, one of the people she was helping came to her in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of winter. I didn’t realize how bad this was until recently. Now, here’s something you might not know: hardly anybody donates plus sized clothing.
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January 2023
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