The Fat Girl's Guide to Living

Who you callin’ fat by Jamie Bates

Choosing this month’s photo challenge winner was tough because so many new and colorful photos landed in our FGG Girls photo group. Jamie’s image (above) is December’s winning photo because of her distinctive, electrifying, and inspiring self portraiture style. Congrats, Jamie! Send us your mailing address and we’ll send you a prize.

If you can’t relate to the sentiment expressed in this photo, we might have to revoke your honorary fat girl card and boot you from the clubhouse. Okay, we’re kidding, but we know that struggles with the scale can be epic for women of every size, and that’s what made this photo as evocative as it is funny. And while not everyone worries about this issue, however you feel about weighing yourself (or not), it’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s so much more to us than our waist size or weight. Taking racy, playful, or soft self portraits – or having a friend or professional photographer take quality photos of us – is a great way to capture and celebrate who we are now.

If you saw our Mid-Week Mini Challenge from last week, we’re extending it by 24 hours, because 01.01.10 is such a tantalizing kick-off date for a creative self portraiture challenge.

Here’s the scoop:

Join a Flickr self-portrait project group like 52 Weeks or 365 Days, upload your first self-portrait, then commit to at least one self-portrait each week for a year. When you’ve joined the group and added your photo (which should be taken just for this project), come back here and link to that photo in comments, which then enters you to win the mini-challenge mystery prize. Deadline: 11:59 p.m. (PST) on January 1, 2010, and the winner will be chosen at random on January 2.

I’m having another go at 365 Days of self portraits (my first 365 was in 2007), but of course *I* can’t enter to win the prize. We welcome other takers, however, so show us what you’ve got, girls!