BUTT SERIOUSLY
TIME TO START LOVING YOUR CABOOSE!
By RAAKHEE MIRCHANDANI
June 3, 2008 --
JUICY doubles. Badonkadonk. Derrière.
Whatever you call it, chances are if you're a girl, you've spent plenty of time worrying about your rearview.
Turns out, you're not the only one.
Meet Laura Banks and Janette Barber, co-authors of "Embracing Your Big Fat Ass." While some people will tell you never to look back, these ladies - and their tremendous new tush tome - encourage it. They want you to take a long look back and love it.
The bootylicious babes - Barber says she's struggled with weight her whole life, and Banks says she was often rejected for movie and TV roles because of her ample assets - are all ass-appreciation, all the time.
"This is about accepting yourself the way you are. It doesn't mean you never want to go on a diet. Or that you never want to lose weight. It just means you don't beat yourself up for the way you are now," says Barber.
"This is about self-esteem. So go ahead and look at the number on the scale. But just don't call yourself a fat pig."
Barber weighed 114 at 7 years old, 200 pounds at 12, 250 at 14, and was her all-time heaviest - 275 pounds - in her early 20s. These days Barber is sitting pretty on her posterior at 5-foot-3 and 171.3 pounds - she lost nearly 100 pounds more than 20 years ago and has kept it off.
For her BFF and fellow BFAB (big fat-ass babe) Laura Banks, the caboose conundrum was an issue she felt she'd been sitting on for too long.
"You can have a button butt or a bubble butt, but you have to self-qualify. Or you know, if you knock over a freestanding display in a store. Identify it, accept it and get over it," she says.
"You're a BFAB if you think about your ass all the time."
Banks says she's learned to butt out of the self-loathing she was once consumed with. But like most women, she constantly thinks about dieting and ditching those last 10 pounds. The difference is, she doesn't cry herself to sleep over it. Or believe that the extra weight should get in the way of her life.
Plus, after dating men who dumped her because of a weight gain and having an anorexic mother, these days she's made her peace with the way she looks, complete with a little extra junk in her trunk.
"It's the fat-acceptance movement. Find your peeps you can talk about this with. Whatever comes next is next. We don't encourage staying home and eating bacon or staying home because you don't fit in to jeans you fit in six months ago," she says. "Women don't need our help to feel bad, they do that already.But just like skinny doesn't mean you're healthy, fat doesn't mean you're one burger away from a heart attack. Although, if that's the case, teeny tiny tuchus or giant honking hiney, it's not about your shape or size.
"The size of your butt doesn't matter in terms of health. It's all about a healthy lifestyle. But there is something about accepting your body as it is now and accepting the fact that your body is the way that it is," says Sunny Csea Gold, health articles editor at Glamour magazine.
Gold says butt implants are one of the fastest-growing plastic surgery procedures. And while she believes in ad campaigns like Dove's real women movement and curvy celebrities appearing in mainstream magazines, she stresses that it's not necessarily just the shape of a person's body that makes the best statement about their health.
"If the sort of pushing-the-envelope title gets people to buy a book and believe that acceptance and self-love method, I say why not," she says. "But the most important thing is fitness, no matter what size you are. And know that you can have the best body for you - but you can't have Angelina's best body."
