An Edmonton woman was fired from a plus-size clothing retailer after she posted a comment online using the words "well-dressed fat lady."

Connie Levitsky, who started working at Addition Elle in the West Edmonton Mall last week, said she was fired within days due to a Facebook post she made about the store's clientele.

Her Facebook post read: "Conquering the world, one well-dressed fat lady at a time."

Levitsky said her boss told her that the language was unacceptable.

"My manager specifically said 'fat' isn't a word that the company wants to associate themselves with," she told CTV Edmonton, noting that her manager said the company preferred words like "curvy" and "shapely."

But Levitsky said those words are often associated with a certain highly-sexualized image of plus-sized women, like the ones featured in the company's lingerie ads.

"If you go into any Addition Elle or Penningtons or Reitmans, you know that's not how all fat women look," she said. "So to use words like 'curvy' or 'shapely,' where you're essentially talking about a very specific type of fat woman, I think that's doing a disservice to the clientele that you were afraid I'm going to drive away."

Roslyn Griner, the vice-president of marketing for Reitmans, Addition Elle's parent company, told CTV Edmonton that Levitsky should not have been fired. However, using the word 'fat' is a slippery slope, she warned.

"Taken out of context, it could be offensive to use the word fat for some of our customers and employees. And for others, they see it as empowering," she said. "We don't have this filter to understand people's perception of the word."

Griner said the retailer is willing to re-hire Levitsky, but Levitsky said she's not sure she wants to work there anymore.

Instead, she said she hopes her story will open up a wider discussion about how the world views plus-sized people.

"I think the real change I would like to see is a conversation being had about how we see fat people and what we as a society can do to erase that stigma," she said.

With a report from CTV Edmonton's Shanelle Kaul