If Elita Loresca is “taba” then there is no hope for the rest of us.

I don’t speak tagalog… I’m not even Filipina, but that’s what the good ol’ Tagalog Dictionary is for, right?

taba
tab´a’ adj. stout, fat · tumaba’ (-um-) v. to become stout

I was reading my friend Darleene’s blog and she had a post entitled: Even NBC’s Elita Loresca gets the ‘taba’ comments from her relatives. She’s referencing a recent L.A. Weekly article about local newscasters and there is a section which goes:

Yet at the family baby shower she went to this weekend, the prevailing comment was, “Oh my gosh, you look so skinny in person. On TV you are so taba,” which means “fat” in Tagalog.

“I was blessed with a full moon,” she countered with a happy sigh. “A little round face. You have to love what the Lord gave you. If I look 10 pounds heavier on television than I do in person, so be it.”

“But why you diet?” said the aunts, imploring her, in that Filipino way of saying hello, to eat, eat.

“Thank you,” said Loresca, yielding to yet another photo with the relatives, who love to take pictures. “But I can only have one fried chicken, not 10.”

Have you heard of Elita Loresca? She was only voted FHM’s sexiest newscaster in 2006 and was photographed wearing a rain-soaked negligee. She even had a blog devoted to following her fashion choices.

And her family thinks she looks fat on TV?!

Dang. I’ll be her kind of taba anyday.

Which brings me to a another point. I’ve had my share of (legitimate) fat comments from my family, but then again, I’m also clearly the fattest of all my cousins. I have four girl cousins who are roughly my age. Three of them modeled professionally or semi-professionally. The fourth one was a television news anchor. (This is emotional baggage I could use lots of therapy on at another time. The point is my four cousins were all pretty and skinny, and I decidedly was not.) A couple of these very skinny cousins used to get “fat” comments from my aunties from time to time… and they were no where near fat! (To my Mom’s credit, since her daughter was the “real” fat one, she never commented on the supposed “fatness” of my cousins.)

One of my cousins has a very nicely “filled out” butt compared her her “flat butted” sister. My grandmother and aunties would frequently comment about her “big butt” when she was trying on clothes. Because of these comments, she began to get self-conscious about her perfectly nice butt. And by the time she was a teenager, she was really, really embarrassed about it and truly believed she had a huge ass when in reality, it was perfectly proportioned for her body.

WTF, Aunties! We already have the freakin’ television and movies and magazines telling us that a size zero is normal and America’s Next Top Model telling us that a girl who is a size 10 is “plus sized.”

And another thing… does you Mom do this to you, too?

“Ai-yahh! You so fat! Why you so fat?!” and then in the next breath you get “Here! Eat this cha-shu bao! I just made it! Have two or three!!!”* What is up with the “You’re fat!” comments followed by the “Eat! Eat!” comments!? Talk about mixed messages!

*Credit for this line given to Andrea Apuy, who wrote and delivered a line similar to this last month at Chinese American Stories: My Mother

Image of Elita Loresca from FHM