Fat Chicks Rule

Vampires and scarier stories

First off, Happy Halloween!!

Halloween is my favorite holiday. It tends to start what is referred to as "eating season." Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner (and OMG leftovers), Christmas dinners, Hanukah Latkes, holiday parties and drinking at New Year's. Weight Watchers (WW) meetings are as desolate as Shirley Jackson's Hill House. (And just as creepy.) Weight Watchers loves this time of year, not that they are getting much business but they are guilting new and returning customers to return to WW in January to refill their coffers. 

This Halloween, I will have chocolate. This Thanksgiving I will have my Turkey dinner. I will eat anthing I darned well please at holiday parties. I will continue to exercise, I will continue to eat normally (perhaps a little more than usual at social occassions) between festivities, and in January I will not return to Weight Watchers. I will continue to exercise and eat as healthy as possible as I do every day of the year, and I won't beat myself up for it. 

What does this have to do with vampires? Bad vampires are none other but fad diets created by the diet industry. They suck not our blood but 60 Billion dollars from Americans' pockets by promising us false hopes of a thinner better life.

Better vampires appear in Lynne Murray's Falstaff Vampire Files. Murray always has fat main characters in her novels no matter what the genre (mystery, supernatural, romance). Although I am not a big fan of the vampire genre as it seems everything is a rip off of Angel, Blade, and the most icky Twilight. I find the drama overly emo. I like Buffy/Angel for the humor included but I am also a fan of the classic vampire, Dracula. Murray's book pays homage to Dracula (including naming her her characters, Mina, Lucy and Van Helsing) and also with humor of the main vampire character:  fat and charming John "Jack" Falstaff (yes, based on Shakespeare's Falstaff). She also pokes at the emo vampire genre with three people so desparate to become vampires that they call upon the "Others", mysterious life stealing formless vampires who seek only to kill. Unlike Falstaff and his friends who feed and leave their victims alive. The book is narrated through a series of notes, and recorded messages (similar to the Dracula novel) both giving insight to the characters and moves the story along. 

So if you are looking for a good supernatural read with many fat main characters, check out this book.

And if you want to read something even more scary, check out this story of a woman purposely gaining weight to qualify for weight loss surgery. The lady Stephany Sears has the same height as me and originally weighed about 35lbs less than I do. She's at the lower end of "the BMI obese" scale and part of a clinical trial to see if lower weight fatties should qualify for the surgery. I'm less scared for her (I really hope she doesn't have the major side effects, or additonal surgeries, or death) than I am that the surgery will become a normal standard for weight loss for people of every sizes.

Again Happy Halloween. Do not fear the candy bucket!

A movie we all need to see

I saw the premiere of America the Beautiful 2, the Thin Commandments. If it is playing in a theater near you, go see it. If it isn't, email your local theater asking to show it and spread the word. 

In his previous movie, director Daryl Roberts investigated American's obsession with beauty, and the industry that obsession supports. (That movie is available as a DVD or online purchase through Amazon etc., and Netflix has it as an instant play feature).

This film, Roberts' second, is about American's obsession with thinness and dieting. Over the course of 85 minutes Roberts shows his personal experience concerning food, eating disorders, HAES, weight related issues, politics of dieting, and his own habits. 

The movie starts with Roberts getting a doctors appointment (the first in 10 years) where he is diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, and was at risk for diabetes. After refusing medication due to his lack of health insurance and learning that possible side effects include erectile dysfunction, Daryl searches for weight loss solutions. The obvious first stop involves looking into a gimmicky diet, then raw foods. Then in a montage of shots, he tries Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and the Cookie Diet. All of which cause him to lose weight and gain it back. Then instead of dieting, he starts exercising regularly.

He touches on issues of weight bias, including his sister, unable to get IVF unless she loses weight, a good friend obsessed with what she eats and how much she exercises, a woman who swings back and forth between anorexia and bulimia, Plus size model Anansa Sims (daughter of model Beverly Johnson), and dancer and blogger Ragen Chastain who explained that her doctor wanted her to "walk more" after which she had to explained she danced about 20 hours a week. Sims' journey is particularly harrowing: a big girl who desperately wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps, she lost weight consistently at the orders of her coaches. No matter how much she lost, it was never good enough for the modeling world. Her answer:  she regained all the weight and found success as a plus size model.

When Roberts returns to his doctor after taking up biking (he was at our screening and said he is still riding) he hadn't lost much weight but he had no trace of his diagonsed illnesses and had perfect blood pressure. Ragen Chastain who she claimed is at the top of the obese scale is also metabolically healthy.

While this doesn't prove anything because it is only two people who happened to be both healthy and moving regularly. I don't know what Ragen eats but Daryl still eats junk food although he supplements with more vegetables, but here are two people where exercise, not dieting, made them healthier. Shouldn't be looking more to encourage movement rather than losing weight? Shouldn't we stop labeling people by their size?

And here is a not so great picture of me with the director.

Love your body in more ways than one.

In honor of NOW's Love your Body blog Carnival, I'm posting today instead of my usual Monday about ways to love your body.

I've decided to do something difference in this post. I spent my 20's loving a thin body that wasn't mine. In my thirties, I worked on loving the body I have, fat and all. But now as I enter my forties, I face another body challenge: I have to learn to love my middle aged body.

As I get older, I find that I can't eat, sleep, or even move as I once did. Normal aches and pains from strenuous movement don't go away as quickly as they used to. Sometimes my arm hurts when I sleep on it wrong. And staying up late no longer means 3am but midnight.

Mid-life means foods you used to eat no longer agrees with you. The coffee you needed to get you through the day causes indigestion, energy drinks give you the jitters, and tea makes you pee fifty times a day. It means finding gray or white hairs on your head and freaking out over each one.

For advertisers, it's a cash cow because  nothing is worthwhile unless you are young and thin. Since science hasn't found the fountain of youth, the goal for the middle aged is to try to LOOK young using plastic surgery, hair dyes, and of course no middle age weight gain.

If you already love and accept your fat (or thin) body, accepting middle age may be easier than you think. I have posted on this blog on occasion, that I have "Fat days". Days where the diet voice is louder than usual and fat is not the positive word I've come to love. I don't get many "Fat days" anymore. But now to add to this I have "old days." Of course I'm getting older every second, but when I say "Old days" it means failing to love my body for changing, a body that may one day die, something I didn't think about in my youth.  Even in my darkest dieting day I was never one to prefer death over fat. 

I will be honest here. Worrying about new tests for diseases considered rare in my youth are freaking me out. Cancer and heart attacks and menopause and retirement and long term care are freaking me out. Forgetting things I used to recall effortlessly is freaking me out.

In the beginning I plucked one or two white hairs but more came. I didn't run to get hair dye. My boobs are beginning to sag, but I won't get surgery. I have some creases in my face but I won't by age defying cream. There is nothing age defying in that cream. The cream, like dieting, is purely superficial. Dieting won't make you healthy and putting cream on your face won't make you young.

You just have accept age. Accept what it gives you, something more important-- Wisdom. The wisdom to know what is good for yourself. Wisdom to still love your body even though it no longer tolerates dairy, hurts when it rains, or forgets a name. Love your body no matter what it's size, age or disability.  It is what you have and it needs you to love it because it will love you back. Loving and appreciating it will work better than any age defying cream.

Hi all, no blog post tonight but Wednesday instead for Love My Body day. In the meantime, go see America the Beautiful 2 The Thin Commandments in area theaters.

Is WLS the only Health care for fat bodies?

Short post today as life has been more hectic than usual.

I wanted to point out the inequalities fat people face in health care. It seems that when it comes to providing weight loss surgery, there doesn't seem to be a lot of roadblocks. Weight Loss ads tout these surgeries as a quick and easy way to lose weight. The billboards don't mention the anesthisia risk or that the stomach is a major organ or that if you have follow up surgeries, good luck getting your insurance to pay for it or to be harassed to join a "not-for-profit" to sue the insurance company to regroup their loses as this poor WLS victim was pressured to do. (Especially since the Non-for-Profit is affliated with the the same clinic who did the WLS, sure they want their 78K for the follow up operation).

He was right to be surprised. PALG isn't just merely a "nonprofit law group" that "assists patients … in obtaining the benefits they are lawfully entitled to receive," as the letter stated. The two attorneys who incorporated PALG — Edmond DeFrank and Robert Silverman — have both done legal work for 1-800-GET-THIN.

At least one place in California realizes that fat people have the right to health care. 

Since obese patients often have special needs in terms of respiratory support, positioning and handling, such advance notification is critical in preparing for and delivering patient care. For a quality improvement project published in the October issue of AORN Journal, Ms. Graham and colleagues formed a "High BMI Task Force" that aimed to boost safety through staff education, interdepartmental communication, equipment upgrades and attention to respiratory care.

 Not so much for this woman trying to get an abortion. Knowing how hard it is get a legal abortion in certain areas of the US, this woman had to deal with an anesthelogists who possibly didn't know about fat bodies.

Whether you agree or not that fat people are responsible for their weight, everyone has a right to quality of health care not just to make you thin.

Following up to Loving my body, Lapband and New Jersey.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called How Loving My Body Saved My Life about the bad reaction I had to my very last diet, the Atkins diet.  One of the comments I got made me laugh. They could not believe that doing Atkins' induction would cause arrhythmias. And I obviously consumed too much coffee or caffeine pills. Because as a fat person, it is generally assumed we do not know our own bodies. I often refer to this as the victimization mentality. I have mentioned my theory before in this blog how fat people are either villains or victims. Obviously I was too stupid to know the difference between caffeine jitters and and something wrong with my heart. But I  did do something stupid at the time and it wasn't drinking coffee (caffeine was no-no on Atkins, btw) and that wasn't listening to my body.

Speaking of not listening to your body, I previously wrote about deaths from the Lapband in California in regards to ads that made the lapband sound like a simple and easy surgery (and has so far killed about five people). Katie Hodges from CA has a petition up for better Regulations for Lap Band Surgery Centers.

State Senator Curren Price Jr. (D-Inglewood) has proposed a bill which would give these private accreditation agencies new authority to stop unsafe centers from jumping from one agency to another with no documentation of their poor safety record. The state medical board would be obligated to document unsafe centers and this information would be available to the public.

I suggest you all sign her petition and if you live in California, email or write Governor Jerry Brown.

And about another Governor, Chris Christie. I am not a fan but I don't care if he's fat. This article points out:

...Christie handled the issue with deft humor, pointing out that the fact he’s fat isn’t exactly a secret, and mocking Corzine in return for being desperate enough to make an issue of it.

If you attack someone by how they look, you lose the argument. It means you have run out of ideas.