Fat Chicks Rule

HAES, the win-win way of life

Harriet Brown recently wrote a fabulous blog post about the "Obesity Paradox" which is a term coined to explain why fat people (obviously already on death's door) have better survival rates of chronic diseases. She also mentions a study about mortality going up with weight loss after age 50. Showing that perhaps we are a bit hasty in labeling fat=unhealthy.

This why we need to adopt HAES for healthy living. HAES encourages people of all sizes to eat well and move. Removing a weight-based paradigm allows people to enjoy health more.  Fat people are pressured to lose weight and often engage in dangerous dieting or surgery. Thin people think they are immune to "Fat diseases"  like diabetes and worry less about healthy living. The one thing that thin people do obsess about of course is gaining weight.  

Speaking of dangerous dieting fellow Blogger Golda Poretsky has a three part interviewwith a Biggest Loser challenger. Kai Hibbard who talks about the horror of being a contestant on the show:  How contestants were dehydrated, treated as less than human (under the guise of help) and caused Kai to develop eating disorders.

So let's see:
HAES: eating healthy whole foods, moving with fun exercise, and loving my body.
Biggest Loser: Dehydration, starvation, overexercise, weight regain, humiliation.

Which do you think is healthier?

Thinnfer's mall

I just had a very active weekend and I can barely think enough to put today a comprehensive post, so I decided to repost a Igigi column

The New York Times talks to Gwen DeVoe about the state of Plus Size fashion and how slow retaliers realize that fat people have money and will buy clothes.  A few years ago, I went with a thin friend and tried to see the mall from her perspective:

I recently went to the mall with a thin friend (Who I love more than anything).  I find the mall a great source of inspiration.  Unfortunately this inspiration is usually anger about how many shops in the mall don’t care about fat people or their money.  My friend who can fit into small sizes (or medium ones depending on the day) needed sweatpants.  I didn’t need anything.  Not that I could find much.  This particular mall had a Lane Bryant in the basement, a Hot Topic with a few selected 2x t-shirts, and a Macy's and JC Penney's that put their plus size sections in caves. 

Anyway, on that day I got to visit an ostensibly thin person’s mall from the perspective of a thin person.  Thin women often complain about sizes and fit, so I thought I would put this little outing to a test.   We hit four stores.  The “hipster” store took tremendous leaps and bounds towards the goal of universally accessible fashion by having one women’s XL t-shirt hiding among the XS (let’s say it together, now: “Big Deal!)  Normally they only carried size XS to Large for women, but if you were chubby you might be able to fit into an XL guys’ t-shirt (because guys can be big and buff and women must be as petite).   “Generic Jeans” store had jeans with legs just barely big enough for me to get my arms through.  So if I ever decided to start walking on my hands and need jeans I know exactly where to go.  “Fly by Night High Volume Dance music Store” was next.   They had chic clothes for Barbie dolls (I mean actual Barbie dolls).

So after all that we got to the only store I will mention by name, Victoria’s Secret.  I could write a book about how much I hate Victoria’s secret (and one day I might).  Forget about the fact they can convince women that skimpy uncomfortable underwear is what they want.  Let’s just talk about size and the fact that I never buy something from them.  My thin friend might complain about sizes, how sometimes a small doesn’t fit and she has to get a medium.   My sympathy for her is genuine, but limited. The thing is if I can’t fit into Victoria’s Secret’s largest size (which I don’t), there is no bigger size for me to try!

So thin women can complain that sometimes stores make available clothing in smaller sizes than they should, that (gasp) they may have to buy the next size up. But think of this, YOU HAVE A NEXT SIZE UP.I can’t even get anything in these stores in my size at all.

Maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist but sometimes I think stores keep smaller sizes not only to keep the “non-beautiful people” out of their stores but to make women want to diet, lose weight, buy their clothes.  Then they regain the weight, get rid of their thin clothes, go shopping, get frustrated, go on a diet and buy all new thin clothes.  When I was 14 I went on a diet purely because I could only wear old lady bathing suits.

Or maybe fat people (especially women) aren’t buying the clothes because they hope one day the magic pill will come along and they can buy thin clothes.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  Maybe this is the reason they don’t cater to us.  Maybe we aren’t buying? While I myself don’t follow fashion trends (choosing to march to my own fashion drummer), wear gently used clothes, and keep clothes until I can no longer wear them, I do it for sustainability but never because I’m fat.  I know it’s hard for some women to accept the fact that they will never wear something from Victoria’s Secret or any of these chic stores.  Just remember they shouldn’t be so important in your life that you have to change who you are.

The failure of the Binge/diet cycle.

I recently finished Angry Fat Girlz by Frances Kuffel. The book is about five women and how over a year they attempt to lose weight, gain weight and tried to stop emotional eating (with gaining weight as their only success). I spoke to the author while she wrote the book and she reminded me of myself 10 years ago. At the time, I got that it was okay to be fat (although not too fat)  but I was still dieting and binging, still blaming myself if I "cheated". Food was no longer fuel for my body, it instead became a vice. Something to give into when I was stressed.

One of the stories that stood out to me was a woman who had been "abstinent" (that's a code word for strict dieter) for almost two years, went on a binge when she found out a friend was dying of cancer. Instead of returning to healthy habits, she continued to binge (not that what you eat should matter in the situation she was in.)  Any healthy habits she'd accumulated went out the window because this is the dieting/binge cycle. You learn no healthy habits. Because now you are binging and nothing positive has stuck.  There is no middle ground. You are either perfect or a failure.

The only way I stopped bingeing, using food as a vice or eating when I was stressed was to stop dieting and to stop focusing my life so much on food. Sure I have dietary restrictions: Corn Syrup, Gluten, Nuts, Soy are all no-nos and I tried to avoid fast foods, packaged, canned, etc. But guess what, every once in a while I have them. I'm not a failure for doing so.

Call for Study.

Call for Participants

Hi, my name is Michaela A. Null, and I am a doctoral student in Sociology at
Purdue University. I am doing a study about the embodiment of size-accepting fat
women, with attention to the ways in which gender, race, sexual orientation, and
body size intersect. 

I am currently looking for individuals who are interested in volunteering to
participate in my study. If you are interested in volunteering to participate in
an interview, I ask that take an electronic informational survey, which will
take approximately 5 minutes. Please go here
[http://purdue.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_etvIKJ1LFV0gFNi] and complete the
informational survey. After all survey data has been collected, participants
will be selected for interviews, which will be conducted in-person, by phone, or
via internet chat, and will last between an hour and an hour and a half.

Participation is voluntary and participants must be at least 18 years old. 

This project has been approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board,
which protects human subjects of research. I will provide confidentiality to all
volunteers and participants will be referred to by a pseudonym in all research
documents.

If you have any questions regarding this study, you can contact me at
[email protected]. For more information on me, you can access my university
profile here [http://www.cla.purdue.edu/sociology/directory/?p=Michaela_Null].
You can also contact Professor Eugene Jackson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
at Purdue University, at [email protected].


Sincerely,

Michaela A. Null, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, Purdue University

Won't someone please think of the children?

This week blogger Harriet Brown writes a terrific piece in the Huffington Post about how trying to make fat kids thin will only result in disordered eating. She talks about her own daughter's descent into anorexia started with a "Wellness class."  She and I are on the same page regarding Mrs. Obama's "Let's Move": No one is against more physical activity and better foods but the problem comes when its sole goal is to make fat children thin which is what the Let's Move campaign is all about.

It won't work, it never works, and hasn't ever for adults in the long run. There will always be fat children. Instead there will be an increase of in eating disorders and lower self-esteem. A recent study has stated fat girls have sex earlier possibly due to low self-esteem. I don't think it has changed much since I was that age. I remember the thin girls had boyfriends and the fat girls had sex. And I can tell you: my big boobs brought a lot of unwanted and nasty attention. And even though I had low self-esteem, I was smart enough not have sex or fool around for attention. 

The worse part is there might be some evidence suggesting that being fat as a young adult doesn't affect your health as you get older. I wonder if that's the same for children. I also think a lot of kids, especially girls are fat as kids, hit a growth spurt and become thinner. I know that if I had been left alone as a child, I'd probably still be fat but weigh less.