Instagrammer Highlights The Stigma Plus-Size Women Face While Travelling

"Travelling while fat" unfortunately still often carries a stigma. Women with bigger bodies face discrimination both at home and abroad, get body-shamed on flights, and many tend to shy away from the camera instead of taking all the travel selfies. Annette Richmond hopes that her project #FatGirlsTraveling will make more fat girls comfortable taking photos of themselves — and comfortable with the word 'fat'.

“I rarely see girls that look like me — fat girls — featured on [major travel profiles]. But when I travel I see fat girls travelling,” Richmond, a senior stylist for Stitch Fix, told Mic. “I’m out here travelling and I’m seeing the world — I know we’re out here. But I feel like these bigger profiles or companies don’t feature curvy or fat girls.”

Richmond hopes to change this by featuring plus-size women in incredible locations worldwide on her Instagram account. She's also created a Fat Girls Traveling private Facebook group where women discuss their anxieties about travel and offer each other support. They talk about everything from the way different cultures perceive larger women to being worried about taking up space on flights.

She said one of her main goals is to help women overcome their anxieties about making themselves seen. "So many of these women go on these beautiful vacations and all they’ll take is these landscape photos because they don’t feel confident enough to get in front of the camera," she told Mic. "I feel like once we have more representation and more women that look like us getting in front of the camera and getting attention for that, then more people will feel comfortable doing it."

And the word 'fat' itself? “I wanted to take the stigma out of the word,” she said when she first heard negative responses to the name of the group.