Fat Chicks Rule

Change the world, not yourself, unless you're fat.

The "documentary" Supersize Me features a scene where Jared from Subway tells an impressionable girl that: "The world doesn't change. So you gotta change for the world."

All I could think is what utter bullshit. First off, just because you are in the minority, doesn't mean the majority is right.  (Of course fat people are the majority in the US). Second, really? If you don't like injustices in the world, you should just join them?

Case in point is this study that discovered fat kids were likely to do worse on math tests. The study's lead author couldn't discover why this was, but theorized that is had to do with stress and anxiety. 

"We know, in general, that children who have poor peer relationships don't do as well at school," she said. "And we also know that children with internalizing behaviors don't do as well. Internalizing behaviors are anxiety, worry, not feeling as if they have a lot of friends and feeling sad. 

 Children with weight problems tend to feel internalizing behaviors and not have good interpersonal skills," she added.

The response to this? Not trying to improving the stigma, not trying to reduce the fat hatred in school, but weight loss.  According to a doctor at North Shore Hospital.

"Obesity isn't just a cosmetic problem," she said. "It has impacts that go from chronic disease to mental achievement, and ultimately to income and a happy, successful, well-adjusted life."

Weight loss, weight loss. The cure for anything. Cancer? Weight loss. Don't know how to change a light bulb? Weight loss. Have anxiety? Weight loss. Can't decide where to wear? Weight loss. 

And it's not getting better. The American Medical Association which is against bullying  except for fat kids is recommending that all schools have obesity classes:

The nation's largest physicians group agreed to support legislation that would require classes in causes, consequences and prevention of obesity for first through 12th graders. Doctors will be encouraged to volunteer their time to help with that under the new policy adopted on the final day of the AMA's annual policymaking meeting.

I'm sure fat kids would love taking the obesity class. It's obvious that all fat people, kids included, don't know they are fat. 

All I can think is our schools are suffering horrific financial crisis and many of them don't offer gym.  Instead of these stupid stigmatizing obesity classes, everything school in the country gets funding for gym. 

Or stop trying to answer everything with weight loss. 

Event at Sarah Lawrence this Tuesday.

I won't be able to make it, but it looks awesome!!

Advocacy, Activism, and Women's History:
A Women's History Salon

Join the conversation! Please join us for a discussion of how the study of women’s history applies to activism and advocacy outside of the academy.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012
6-8 p.m.

Slonim Living Room
Sarah Lawrence College
1 Mead Way
Bronxville, NY

Conveniently located 25 minutes from Times Square via Metro North

How does the study of women’s history apply to activism and advocacy outside of the academy? Be a part of the discussion at a Salon hosted by the Sarah Lawrence Graduate Program in Women’s History. Meet with current and former students and faculty to hear about their scholarly work and interests. Together, we can discuss the relationship between scholarship, work, and life after graduation.

Established in 1972, Sarah Lawrence's Women's History graduate program is the first of its kind in the United States, and its diverse student body proves year in and year out that scholarship in the area of women’s history is alive and well.

contact grad@sarahlawrence.edu

Are we just dollar signs?

There are many excellent life saving and life improving medications out there, drugs that save lives and dramatically improve quality of life. I have many people in my life where drugs have saved their lives. 

Then there are diet drugs. No diet drug has ever worked in the long run and some of them have been proved to be deadly. 

This new drug  lorcaserin seems like it is the same shit different day. The most important point is that it sucks as weight loss drug. 3,200 fat people were randomly given the drug or placebo for a whole year. After the year 55% of the placebo and 45% of those given the drugs dropped out, either because it wasn't working or of they couldn't take the side effects. 

The average weight loss during the first year was about 12 pounds in the lorcaserin group and 5 pounds in the placebo group. During the second year of the study, 68% of people who continued to take the weight loss drug maintained the loss vs. 50% of people switched to placebo.

So your average weight loss is about a pound a month. Congratulations, if you weighed 300 pounds before the study, you now weight 288 which by the way will not end the stigma against you in the doctor's office, the job, the gym, the health insurance companies and you aren't thin.

The second issue of course is the side effects. 

The same safety signals– in particular, lingering concerns about heart valve problems– remain. It is unclear whether new, previously unpublicized data submitted by Arena on the effect of lorcaserin on the serotonin receptor (the source of previous heart valve problems with phen/fen) will move the dial on this issue. One important note of caution here: although no statistically significant increase in risk of valve disease was found by the FDA (relative risk 1.16, 95% CI 0.81-1.67), the reviewer noted that the “upper bound exceeds the 1.5 upper bound requested by FDA to rule out an excess risk of VHD.”

What essentially you have here is diet drug that barely works that works on the serotonin receptor the same as phen/fen . In case you don't remember what phen/fen did, here is a description of PPH

Primary pulmonary hypertension has no cure. If left untreated, the right side of the heart becomes overworked and eventually fails, leading to death. One study showed that 30% of untreated PPH patients died within 3 years of diagnosis. 

So why would Arena Pharmaceuticals push a diet drug that doesn't work and has potientially deadly side effects?

Why? Because of the money that's why. With an FDA advisory panel saying a-okay on approving it, stocks in Arena have gone up about 12 percent. 

Now I hope those who bought stocks in Arena know when to sell. Because my crystal balls sees another fen-phen disaster if this drug is approved. 

One size fits all?

The Great American Obesity Epidemic tends to want force people into a narrow cookie cutter. Every single human being must have a BMI of 18.5 to 24.5. If you dare be at 25, you will die of a combo heart stroke cancer attack! And if your BMI is 30, you are already dead. Except that humans tend to have different numbers, some of them lower than 18.5 and some of them higher and methods to force people into an unnatural number have high failure rates. 

Airbus, in their infinite wisdom finally realized that fat people exist and some of them actually want to fly in seats made for human beings  (Not just fat people) and are making some bigger seats on their planes. Now will the airline industry come to the same conclusion and actually buy the planes? 

Airbus said that if U.S. airlines charged extra for the roomier seats, they could make as much as $3 million extra during a 15-year period.

See this is what's called doing good business. I hear horror stories (usually from Southwest) of fat passengers forced to buy a second seat even after they can buckle up and put the arm rests down or being forced to buy a seat on a connecting or returning flight. I'm sure many fat people will be put off by flying. Now in this case, they can pay a little extra for the room. Which I'm sure is cheaper than buying an entire second seat and also less humiliating than when a fat hating gate agent or flight attendant arbitrary decides you're too fat for your seat.

Remember two weeks ago when I posted about movement and how I wasn't athletic? Well it turns out not everyone benefits from exercise. In fact in some cases, it makes things worse. 

By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.

The good news is this: one, it was only small percentage of the group and two, they mentioned people did rigorous exercise. I have to wonder if the percentages would change if they did low impact movement. 

But this study goes to show that you can't put everyone into the same cookie cutter. 

Stigma using racism doesn't work either.

Last week, a blogger for Tosh 2.0 put up a picture of a fat woman wearing a gold bikini trying to hail a cab in the rain. The person who posted it invited comments. And since Tosh 2.0 is "supposed" to be a comedy, I'm fairly certain the poster Blogger Mike Pomranz meant to put it up for people to make funny captions.

Except for one problem, the picture he used is copyrighted and belongs to the Adopositivity Project, a site by Substantia Jones of her photography that is meant to be show fat women positively.

Within a few hours the blog post was down. No word on Comedy Central about why. I suspect it had nothing to do the intent to not ridicule someone and everything to do with the words: "Copyright infridgement, legal action, lawyers."

From Jezebel

"Folks sharing Adipositivity photos," Jones says, "as is regularly done all over Facebook and Tumblr, aids in the purpose of getting body positive images in front of as many eyes as possible. We dig that. But to steal someone else's copyrighted material in order to use it in purveying bigotry and hate for profit? Not cool." The woman in the photo—who, to everyone's surprise, is an actual human being—is actress/model Janie Martinez. Jones describes the image as "conveying the bliss of being completely happy with your physical self, and boldly so, even in a world filled with ridicule."

There are many sites out where photos of people are put up to be made fun off. Someone caught in an unflattering picture, or doing something stupid. I don't know if this means they should be put up for ridicule. The difference is the Adopositivity Project did not put its lovely photos up for ridicule. They were put up to be positive pictures of fat women.

This article in Everyday Health points out another site meant purely to stigmatize fat people and added racism into the mix. The twitter feed Fat girl. (I'm not going to link it, you can get it from the site) is apparently a somewhat illiterate fat black woman who tweets about what she eats (apparently everything.) The site isn't very funny (BTW I can deal with offensive comedy as long as it's funny). Oh and fat girl isn't a real person but a 10 year old-- I mean 17 year old boy. (Gonna be a while before I'm willing to call him a man or even a guy). 

But Fat Girl is not a she. The real person behind this Twitter handle is a 17-year-old boy from Virginia, a 5-foot-5-inch, 123-pound high school teenager of Asian background who aspires to be a body builder. (Everyday Health has withheld his name because he is a minor.)

First off, I'm not surprised this boy is an aspiring bodybuilder. Every time I do a post against dieting I sometimes get a bunch of commenters from bodybuilders about how I'm the Anti-Christ. Although I still don't get their logic of how my anti-dieting message is somehow anti-body building. 

The stigma here boggles the mind because not only does it create hostility towards fat people by portraying them as beyond the stereotype of out of control eater that if left to our own devices we will eat everything in sight (One of the tweets is “I ate Precious”) but it also creates hostility towards black women.  The Fat girl isn’t just fat, she happens to be black. She happens to have all the stereotypical qualities of a fat black women, i.e., lazy, loud, and stupid.

In the end The Fat Girl may not cause that much stigma because I hope that people see it for what it is, a stupid site done by a dumb kid who doesn’t know any better.  I doubt it will make any fat person look at the site say, “Hey this idiot is right.”