'The Fat One' Confronts The 'F-Word' We Need To Talk About

Chubby, chunky, thick, plus-size -- all are vague euphemisms for a word society likes to avoid.

Fat.

For writer and director Katherine Alyse and co-director Carr Rundle, "fat" is the other f-word.

In a web series titled "The Fat One" that debuted on YouTube this month, Alyse "set out to talk about the experience of being fat in a frank way," she told HuffPost

Among those experiences can be the feeling that one must politely avoid any reference to their weight, or make a joke about it to put others at ease. With humor and truth, "The Fat One" shows what can happen when that social contract is violated. In the pilot episode called "The F Word," Alyse's character becomes uncomfortable when one of her friends, Maggie, speaks candidly about being fat.

"I am not thick," Maggie says, "I am fat." The use of the other f-word makes everyone at the dinner table cringe. Clearly more uncomfortable with the term than Maggie is herself, her friends attempt to diffuse Maggie's declaration with responses like, "You're not fat" and "You’re a curvaceous, lovely woman."

Since debuting the pilot on June 4, Alyse has posted four episodes of the short-form series to YouTube.

Though Alyse says being fat "not something I think about that much in my daily life," she recalls that "growing up, everyone was so afraid of being called fat, because once you were labelled that word it was the only word that would define you."

Alyse told HuffPost that she hopes the series "reminds people that they are more than just one word. Whatever that word is for them."