Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

Some links which may enlighten or entertain:

Harriet Brown explains why she likes her doctor, and comments on a recent report about obesity by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Plus Size Clothing Scoop provides a list of the many, many plus-size clothing stores with sales going on right now!

Big Fat Deal shares a news story about the fattest state in America, and comes up with a slogan for large women which made Francesca laugh.

What should Style Spy do when the gorgeous, retro winter coat she craves is by a label which she considers, usually, to be too “Jessica Simpson”?

Pretty Pear directs us to a site where you can build outfits. Thanks to Pretty Pear, Francesca is now procrastinating from her work by building outfits instead of playing Diamond Mine.

If you have a Fat Blog and would like us to know about it, please provide a link in the comments or write to francesca@shoeblogs.com

Happy internet surfing!

xoxo, Francesca

I’m not a poetry girl, but when a poem makes me want to spike a football at the end even though I’ve never voluntarily touched a football in my life, I gotta share.  Your red dress doesn’t need to be red, but every woman needs a dress like this:

What Do Women Want?

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.

I want it flimsy and cheap,

I want it too tight, I want to wear it

until someone tears it off me.

I want it sleeveless and backless,

this dress, so no one has to guess

what’s underneath. I want to walk down

the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store

with all those keys glittering in the window,

past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old

donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers

slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,

hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.

I want to walk like I’m the only

woman on earth and I can have my pick.

I want that red dress bad.

I want it to confirm

your worst fears about me,

to show you how little I care about you

or anything except what

I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment

from its hanger like I’m choosing a body

to carry me into this world, through

the birth-cries and the love-cries too,

and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,

it’ll be the goddamned

dress they bury me in.

A little inspiration from IGIGI

That’s what I overheard Sunday night as I walked my dog down Austin’s famed Sixth Street, a row of tacky bars and live music joints catering to the never-ending crop of University of Texas students where the girls wear last season’s Juicy Couture knock-offs and the guys puke on your shoes.

I wish I could say I hadn’t heard it before.

I wish I could say it was completely untrue.

Now, before you jump all over me, of course it isn’t true. Fat chicks don’t “always” do anything and if we did, I can imagine a lot of things that would come before bumping uglies with some déclassé spray gel enthusiast whose parents may, strictly speaking, share more genetic material than usually considered acceptable in polite society.

I get it. I do. I know that positive male attention can be hard to come by when you’re a big girl, and I know that we can have some pretty serious self-esteem issues. It’s easy to get beaten down when everywhere you look you’re being told you are unworthy. Unworthy of wearing these clothes, of dating that man, of getting what you want out of life. See, only people who work hard deserve good things, and if you really worked hard, you wouldn’t still be fat, would you?

So you go out looking cute –or as cute as you’re going to get– and you meet a guy. Maybe he tells you he likes a girl “with a little meat on her bones” and maybe he trash talks skinny chicks –an ex-girlfriend who was “like a skeleton”– just enough to make you feel a little better about the way your butt spreads across the barstool. And even though you suspect he’s a player and not really your type, you sigh and remind yourself how long it’s been since a man has shown interest in you and made you feel really desirable.

So what happens next?

If you’re me at 22, you end up in the back of a classic Coupe DeVille (black with kid grey interior) doing the sort of disreputable but impressively acrobatic activities that cause you to think “hmm, if I ever want to run for office I’ll probably need to get this guy killed” and when you get home you feel great because even though he’s not Prince Charming, he’s a guy! and he likes you! Not just for your brains or your personality, but for your body, too, and it’s so damn NICE.

Until it isn’t.

Because he doesn’t call, and when you call him he tells you that he’s “not really ready for a relationship” and then slyly suggests some sort of friends-with-benefits situation. “Let’s just see where it goes” he says, and now you’re back at zero.

Or maybe a little worse than zero, because you’ve been delivered that “unworthy” message, loud and clear again and so a little more self-esteem gets chipped away again and it starts all over again.

Listen. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your lady parts. I figure you grew ’em, you can manage ’em, but if there’s one bit of wisdom that I can impart it’s this: you cannot screw your way to self-worth. We’re always going to be told we’re not good enough. Either because we’re fat or because we’re women or because we just live in a culture where –at least at the time of writing– being a marketing executive is not punishable by death.

So let’s refocus. Let’s learn to love our own bodies, to seduce our own senses, the book at the bottom of the page can show you some tricks, others you’ll learn in your own time. There are a million cures for low self-esteem but –I promise– none of them are delivered by injection.

Mama Gena’s guide to the Womanly Arts.