Before she was hired, Tovar received tens of thousands of dollars in grants from the city to defend obesity.
Virgie Tovar, the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, has been hired as a “consultant on weight stigma and weight neutrality” by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
“[I]t’s my biggest hope and belief that weight neutrality will be the future of public health,” Tovar wrote on social media when announcing her new position. The San Francisco Department of Public Health’s “Health Eating and Active Living” program hired Tovar to work through June 30, 2025 and educate staff about weight stigma and body positivity, per the San Francisco Chronicle. Tovar will be paid $12,000.
Tovar is a self-described “plus-size Latina author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity with over a decade of experience.” Tovar has spoken at universities, including Yale, Stanford, Brown, and Georgetown.
In 2013, Tovar led the #LoseHateNotWeight campaign, and later delivered a TedxTalk about her work. In 2023, a New York Times article about “plus-size travelers” featured Tovar and her “Camp Thunder Thighs” initiative, which is a retreat she describes as “for people of all sizes who feel drawn to doing the work of radical self-acceptance and body justice in a fat positive environment.” (According to Tovar’s personal website, Camp Thunder Thighs is “on hiatus until it’s safer to gather without high risk of COVID transmission.”)
The city of San Francisco has previously financially supported Tovar. In 2015, Tovar received an “Individual Artist Commissions” grant from the city totaling $7,500. Under her full name “Virginia Zolala-Tovar,” she was awarded an “Individual Artist Commissions” grant of $15,000 in 2019. Then, in 2021, Tovar was approved to receive a “San Francisco Artist” grant from the city totaling $20,000. For her 2021 project, Tovar held a two-week series of virtual gatherings during which she prepared a meal of personal or cultural significance.
“For the first half, everyone will be able to see each other and eat together for 30 minutes,” reads the San Francisco Arts Commission website describing Tovar’s project that received $20,000. “Then participants will be encouraged to ‘meet’ one another in virtual breakout rooms and share their meals and stories for the second half.”
Tovar has also participated in projects that received federal funding. Tovar is a co-author of the paper titled “Experiences of Youth in the Sex Trade in the Bay Area,” which was one project of seven supported by a $1,275,000 grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Tovar has been a longstanding critic of “our diet-obsessed culture.”
“[D]ieting wasn’t just about looking for love from boys or men; it was also about deeply craving a sense of belonging in the broader white culture of the United States,” Tovar wrote in 2022. “Dieting was a way to adopt white beauty ideals by starving my brown body.”
This year, Tovar suggested that the popularity of Moo Deng, a cute pygmy hippopotamus that went viral, represents “our collective longing to escape fatphobia.”
“I think one part of the Moo Deng Conundrum is that we as a culture have vastly different attitudes toward fat babies (whether animal or human) than we do toward fat adult humans. Babies are considered cute when they’re fat. However, at a certain age, fatness transforms from something endearing and non-threatening to something that is reviled and judged,” Tovar stated. “I think the other part of the Moo Deng Conundrum is that we long for the freedom of being a fat baby animal: you get to be bouncy and have rolls, and — hey — everyone still loves you.”
In her 2017 article titled “Take The Cake: No, I Won’t Cut You A Smaller Slice Of Cake,” Tovar wrote about “a Cake Related Fatphobic Incident,” which she defined as “that moment when it’s time to eat delicious cake, and an otherwise joyous experience gets ruined by a moralizing impulse.” Tovar suggested that women become an “agent of patriarchy” when they attempt to establish being “a good woman” and “moral superiority” by asking for a smaller portion of cake. Tovar further claimed that asking for a smaller slice of cake is “a public practice of fatphobia” and a way “to keep other people in check through food moralizing, surveillance and policing.”
“There was a very expensive and very gorgeous cake. Chocolate. I was ready for that cake. I was pretty sure that there was ganache inside of it. Sure, there was buttercream on the outside, but I could sense the sneaky ganache,” Tovar wrote. “In the midst of my ganache reverie, I was interrupted by a woman who felt it very important to convey that the slices of cake that my friend was making were too large. She really, really needed to have a paper-thin slice of cake, and she felt that it was her right to ask that my friend perform an extra level of labor to the already pre-existing, previously detailed difficulties of cake cutting.”
Neither Tovar nor the San Francisco Department of Public Health responded to a request for comment.