The F Word is a series celebrating what it means to be fat — from destigmatizing the word to taking stock of the discrimination fat people face. In this essay, Teen Vogue executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay reflects on learning to be comfortable with calling herself fat.

I was recently searching the internet for a photo of myself from a few years ago when I found one I hadn’t seen before. Clicking it led me to a website that had a few more pictures of me that spanned about a decade, some video — and an extensive list of comments about my body. I quickly realized it was a fat “appreciation” (or fetish) site and a group of people had taken the time to collect pictures of me, essentially documenting my weight gain over the last 10 years.

I gasped. This is bananas, I thought. Furious, I started sending it to friends, asking what I should do. They, too, were horrified. There were numbers of downloads next to the images — people weren’t just collecting pictures and videos of me on the website, they were storing them for personal use. I felt objectified, humiliated, and violated. I also felt a little flattered. Does this mean I’m famous?, I thought.

As I processed the roller coaster of emotions I felt upon finding this website, one feeling seemed to be the strongest and hardest to accept: I had gotten fat. Yes, in this moment of intense personal violation, I believed I had done something wrong.

We already know “fat” is not a dirty word. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about being fat, nor should you accept unequal treatment because of it. Fat discrimination is unacceptable and so is the scientifically debunked diet industry that continues to ridicule, pathologize, and obsess about fat people.

But this knowledge didn’t change that I have had a hard time accepting, and even embracing, my own body.

I didn’t spend most of my life fat, but I always felt (and was often told) I was not the right weight. Whether my mom obsessed over me losing weight or because I was a curvier woman who had trouble finding clothes that fit, I internalized the message that something was wrong with my body and that being fat was bad.

If I accepted that I was fat, was I also accepting that I’m a failure? That I couldn’t keep my weight off and, as a result, I was out of control in my life? If I accepted that I was fat, would that explain why I’m single? Would that mean that I wasn’t attractive? If I accepted that I was fat, would I have to start buying plus-size clothing? Would I have to accept that it wasn’t just my skin color that made me deviate from what we consider beautiful, but that I was the polar opposite: fat and brown?

Fat acceptance is a profoundly radical act. To accept yourself as you are, in your body (no matter what you look like), is often going against everything we have been taught about how we should feel about ourselves. It’s saying no to the emotional harm done by those close to us and by strangers. It’s sometimes going against our parents or our siblings. It’s flying in the face of a world that ridicules, shames, and hates fat people and saying to ourselves that I will love myself anyway.

Because fat acceptance is so radical, it’s also hard. Or at least it has been for me. In the last few years, I have started to have health problems that my doctors have said are partially weight-related. My blood pressure has gone up and so has my blood sugar. Accepting my body as it is could be the key to an internal sense of liberation. But it could just as easily raise the alarm of my doctors, and my mother. Accepting I am fat could get in the way of all the torture rituals fat people are expected to put themselves through to prove to everyone around them they are trying (always trying) to lose weight.