Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation’s leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture. She started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight and in 2018 gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign. She is a contributor for Forbes and pens a weekly column called “Take the Cake” on Ravishly.com. Tovar edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and in 2018 The Feminist Press published her manifesto, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018). She holds a Master’s degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching “Female Sexuality” at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host “The Virgie Show” (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is a former plus size style writer for BuzzFeed and has been the recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission as well as the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, Marie Claire and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco and offers workshops and lectures nationwide. Find her online at www.virgietovar.com.