Being a BBW
This blog is my journey to loving myself when the whole world told me not to.
When I became a companion I was a dress size 20, a smaller end BBW. I didn’t quite view myself as such though, it wasn’t until a few years later and a couple of pounds later when I embraced the title that I truly felt like a BBW.
I want to explain what being a BBW companion meant to me and the experiences one faces when stepping into a world where beauty standards are very much taken into account. It can be hard as a plus size woman to see the beauty you possess. To value your existence and champion it on a public stage. Growing up in the 90’s the UK was in it’s ‘heroin chic’ era. Being thin was in and that’s never really not been the case has it? I’ve always been curvy, I was a fat child that grew into a chubby teen whose final form would be a full bodied bodacious woman. I have no idea what it feels like to be viewed as conventionally attractive. The world I grew up in there was no relatable image being championed that I could look to for confidence. I had to find it myself and the journey would be a unique one.
When I entered this delicious world of ours I didn’t step into it with an ounce of confidence. I was shy, reserved and couldn’t see myself as a beauty. It was these feelings which played a part in my choice to enter a profession so utterly focused on them. My thought process was one which cultivated from many years as a thespian in training. To submerge oneself in the character, then absorb from the environment the traits, emotions and actions of the intended portrayal. I believed the fake it until you make it mantra, if I could go in to this space where I am viewed and treated as a beautiful creature that some of that would manifest itself within me. Truth be told, it did.
I remember a moment a few months into my new clandestine life where I looked into a mirror and the reflection I saw was one I had never seen before. Stood before me in just her underwear was a confident, attractive and sexy as hell young woman. That feeling was almost like a drug. Addictive. Maddening. Consuming. There was no way in hell I could ever give it up. Time passess as it does and with it the views I once held about myself I thought where long dead. All I could see now was beauty. I placed myself and those who looked like me on the pedestal alongside all the other wonderous forms that the female body can be. One year as a companion had eradicated the indoctrination of the 90’s beauty standards and allowed me to become who I had always dreamt to be, without shedding a pound.
As they tend to do my body changed over the years, it grew and at times my weight gain was hard for me to live with. The echoes of my youth still knocking at the door of my subconscious. It was hard for me to love myself. It was hard for me to accept my heaviest weight. By this point I was on social media and sometimes I would see my post sandwiched between two legitimate goddesses and the little voice would whisper ‘not worthy’ when my eyes stopped on the image of me. I needed another way, another answer I could scream over these whispers and drown them out. Thinking back to my beginnings an idea came to me. My confidence has not come easy and it very much wavers in front of my peers. I can stand naked before a man without a second thought as I know that he finds me attractive but all those years growing up and being weight shamed by women is still something I struggle with. Those echoes aren’t quiet and make me terrified around other women. Sometimes I wish the ground would just open up and I could just disappear into it than even attempt to put myself out there. So the time came for me to move from selfies and get some quality photographs. But how? Well I had to learn to take them myself. Still shackled in some way but with an eagerness to find my beauty again. The moment I took my first photograph and went to take a look on the camera screen I was taken back to that moment in front of the mirror. I was a different shape now, larger and unmistakably fabulous. There it was, that hit, that high, lifting me back to the place I have been chasing my entire life. Within those images I got it. I had it, again. Stepping back out and readily submitting myself back to the virtual vixen hall of fame.
You can see how I became addicted to taking new photos of myself. Constantly chasing the fuel that kept me in the space of Bad Ass BBW who is hot, confident and worthy. But like most things you have to chase, all you are really doing is running from something. I was running from past trauma. I was running from childhood nicknames and growing up in an environment where being someone like me wasn’t beautiful. That’s the thing though isn’t it. The world hates women. Not specific types. Women. You are told all the time how you should be, how you should talk, act, walk and breathe yet if you are doing those already… they’ll just find something else wrong with you. This is what our world does. My experience as a BBW could easily be flipped to any woman’s experience of life as a woman in the modern age. You are never good enough and this is what we are taught from birth. (Yes the barbie movie really resonated with me)
In the last few years I have gone through A LOT. Very publicly in some instances. My relationship with my image has never been more up and down. At the start of this year my weight reached the heaviest it has ever been. My body image hit the seabed and at times I thought Damn! that things never coming back up. In that moment, with the storm raging, my mental health barely hanging on and the violent swells threatening to drown me… I found something.
I stopped viewing my beauty as the body or the face I reside within. Beauty is in connections, deep conversations and thoughtful actions. It is going on an adventure and laughing until your ribs hurt. It's the touch of someone’s hand in yours as they show you a thing they love or something ‘you just have to see’. Beauty is a dirty mind but open heart. Beauty is making someone laugh just to see them smile. Beauty is talking for hours until the sun appears and you are reminded you aren’t 21 anymore. People are beautiful. All of them. Every last one. I could always see this in others, it was how I viewed the world. Why did it take me so long to reverse it back and look at me. I found true acceptance at my lowest. I used to look at the BBW in my title and think, one day i’m going to remove that. Like it was a black mark against my name. Now, I don’t see it at all anymore. Yes I am a BBW escort and marketing is marketing. But now i’m just another beautiful escort in a really warm lovely sea of beautiful escorts. And to me, that is everything.
So if you are wondering why i’ve never spoken about my experience as a BBW before, this is why. The best part of the last decade I have railed against it in my mind. Always wishing I could just not be one. Thinking i’d be truly happy if I could just not be a BBW anymore. It was all I viewed wrong about me yet it was the thing I had to focus on professionally. Existing as a BBW in a world where visual beauty standards are everywhere, imposing and unavoidable. I blamed my weight for my own unhappiness and had a really unhealthy relationship with it. It would feed my misery and then I would feed it creating a prison I couldn’t escape from. Of my own making. Isn’t it funny how when I broke out that and finally found my own beauty… the weight started falling off. I’m really happy as a BBW, if I stay one or not I genuinely don’t care anymore. I don’t spend entire days thinking about ‘how happy I would be if I was thinner’ or ‘how confident I would be if I was an acceptable shape’. My shape is more than acceptable, it’s bloody wonderful and thin or BBW who cares, both are STUNNING. Isn’t it funny how I never thought negatively about other plus size women, quite the opposite. I would see so many beautiful BBW’s and acknowledge that in my mind but for some reason I never applied that to myself.
BBW is just another subheading in all the different forms a gorgeous woman can take. And all women are gorgeous. I decided to write this blog post as since my weightloss i’ve had a few messages from men begging me not to lose the weight (but also quite a few congratulating me for it). Neither are bad. But implying that my body changing in some way removes my attractiveness or alters it is bullshit. It is this that created the mental hell I once was locked in. Putting so much weight on my weight all but broke me.
Moving forward in this wonderful life of Winter Woods, I have no idea what she looks like. But I know she’s fucking gorgeous and so are you!
All my love as always,
Winter x
