“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” – Shakespeare
Unlike Shakespeare, we think what something is named is important to what it is and how it’s represented.
When we were creating Big Couple Big World, we threw out a lot of names and ideas, but none of them felt like they really conveyed who we are and what we wanted to be about.
We have always been two people who have lived in bigger bodies. And we can remember from our youngest times, people commenting on those bodies and wanting us to change, either under the guise of health or because really our bodies didn’t fit into people’s beauty ideals.
When we met, Breanne was a few years into a journey to stop dieting, to live life freely, and embrace her body. She brought these concepts to our relationship, and quickly Dave realized in a lot of way he was already living that way, but still harbored the guilt of being a bigger person.
Over time, we realized that our bigger bodies were just who we were. And that we could and did live just as full lives as any of the smaller people we knew. More and more we embraced living full lives without the constant worry of body size, dieting, and other people’s opinions.
When we started looking into RV life, we realized very quickly that there was not a lot of fat representation in this area. Probably because of many of the same fears we had: will we fit in the RV (how will we fit in showers? Beds? Dinettes?), the concerns about judgement, and the worry about facing fatphobia. But we realized we face fatphobia everyday, sometimes from strangers and sometimes even from friends and family. And we realized we couldn’t let that fear or worry guide our lives.
The reality is we only get one life and we want to use it to live life to the fullest in whatever bodies we have. And we don’t want to use the space and energy to worry about those bodies when we could instead be using our energy to hike waterfalls, bird watch, see sunsets & sunrises, travel, and hopefully inspire others.
And so Big Couple Big World was born- the concept of representing fat people living their lives with bigger bodies despite fat phobia, societal beauty standards, and the diet industry.
The concept still makes people not on this journey to health at every size, anti-dieting, and body acceptance uncomfortable. But we think that’s a good thing.
Let’s challenge the status quo, especially each of our own’s internalized and externalized fat phobia. Let’s normalize fat people just doing stuff: regular stuff, fun stuff, extraordinary stuff, and all the stuff in-between.
