#I want a burkini in size US 28

[drafty-castle]

I’m fat and for not-fat related reasons I don’t like showing skin. Completely covered from neck to ankles and wrists most days. A t-shirt in the summer is the closest thing to bowing to the heart I ever do.

I’d like to swim but full cover swimsuits are never available for non-standard sizes and swimming in my clothes would ruin them with all the chlorine in a pool or salt in the sea.

Like, making sure fat folk never show up at the pool is a many faceted pile of social shit that attacks from all sides.

It's honestly such a shame that we've made such a huge thing out of swimming and swimsuits and looking good in swimsuits and fat people not looking good in swimsuits. Swimming is actually the perfect exercise for fat people because it puts zero pressure on the joints, which is a much bigger concern for us than it is for skinny people, and lets you exercise basically every muscle group without straining too much and risking injury. Yet somehow this is one of the least accessible exercises to fat people due to nothing more than a culture of body shaming. The work to unlearn all the shame to be comfortable in a bathing suit in front of strangers is huge even for conventionally attractive people, but I could probably count on one hand the number of fat people I've met who were confident enough to get in a bathing suit and go swimming in public.

And what is the exercise that somehow everyone thinks they should do instead? Jogging. It's more accessible, sure, it's easy and costs nothing to go outside and run. But I need you to understand telling a fat person to go running is basically telling them to go destroy their knees. Not to mention it's probably one of the most physically uncomfortable exercises to do when you have a body that jiggles even with compression garments.

Imagine a world where everyone had the ability and equal access to whatever exercise fit them best and helped them be happy and healthiest. Imagine a world where fat people go swimming.