Fat Chicks Rule

Food waste, Let's move and Environmental justice

This week I want to talk about food waste. I recently read a book called Greenwashed, which, while the author had no problem with CSAs, local or organic, her primary concern was food waste. (Of course according to stereotypes if you're fat no food goes to waste.)   April Herndon of Psychology Today criticizes Let's Move for the same reasons I have. We need to encourage healthy eating and movement for all children (not just fat ones) and have access to food.

Given that we can all probably agree that children deserve access to a variety of foods and the ability to play and be active, why the focus on obesity? Because obesity has become a convenient means of motivating people to care about issues like nutritious food and safe neighborhoods and playgrounds for children who are members of marginalized groups, groups that mainstream America may not care about otherwise.

Let's say in 30 years Let's Move had increased fitness and access to nutritious food but we still have fatties. The program will be a failure. Exactly as 1994 version of "Let's Move" Called "Shape Up America" which is almost 20 years old and yes, there are still fatties.

Two recent studies have shown that Food deserts may be a myth. 

But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

What does this have to do with food waste? I have also mentioned before that starvation kills more people than obesity ever will.  The United States has high rates of food insecurity (i.e. we aren't starving to death but we aren't getting enough food). Many of the states with high food insecurity also have high rates of fatness.  Most of those who have dieted know you lose weight then gain it all back plus more. (I'm fairly certain I weight about 50 lbs more than I should because of dieting.)  Could it be possibly that people in food insecure households are technically suffering from the dieting/binge cycle? We also waste food, up to 30% in the USA and up to 50% worldwide which is a travesty.

We again view fatness in simplistic terms. No matter what, fat is always going to be labeled as eating too much, that's it end of story. No one looks at other issues, for example  food insecurity, and say other things such as poor medical care or how about pollution? Poor neighborhoods often find themselves near pollution sources.  Parts of the Bronx have high asthma rates because they are near expressways.  There are now links between pollution and diabetes AND air pollution and fatness. (Oh and Diabetes and stress as well.)  We don't really look at medical care, food insecurity and pollution because these are complex situations that require actually hard work. It isn't easy compared to telling the nation to stop being so fat.

Cake, Clothes, and Consumption

When I wrote my essay for the Fat Studies Reader one of my source materials spoke about the book Jermina Jby Jane Green. In the book the main character is fat and to impress a man she never met she drops 80 pounds through crash dieting then buys a whole new wardrobe.  The essay spoke about the issue of consumption. Fat people are often the examples of consumption gone wild. We obviously steal food from hungry babies while driving our gas guzzling automobiles.  However the essay points out the Jermina consumes much more after she becomes thin. When Jerminia is fat, she consumes less clothes, when she is thin, she buys a new wardrobe. She consumes way more materialistic things than she did when she was fat. (And btw, I am not saying thin people consume more or less than fat people. It's Clothing and fashion industry consumption, and they happen to make mostly thin people's clothes.)

Fat people, being shunned by the mainstream fashion industry, consume less clothes. I barely buy new clothes, instead chose to get most of my selection at Big Fat Flea (formerly the Fat Girl's Flea Market) (May 13 btw, you better be there) and keeping my old clothes in good repair. 

*

Oh look it's me and the fabulous Lesley Kinzel of fatshionistas  who also wrote a fabulous book based on her blog: Two whole cakes. Leslie is a self described "clothes horse" but she laments in her book what many other fat people can share with her, unable to find clothes in her size. Another book I happened to be reading at the same time Greenwashed talks about the immense amount of clothes waste (clothes only have  ten wear lifes span. I have a skirt from high school still in my closet.) 

Getting back to Leslie's book. It's a short but intense read of vignettes and most fat people could share stories almost to the same as hers.  If you are unfamiliar with where the term Two Whole Cakes comes from. On Fatshionistas, there was a troll who on another board said that all fat people eat Two whole cakes a day (at my worst binging (i.e. not eating normally), I only managed to get most of one and I got really sick afterwards). One particular story I shared with Leslie was about going to Jenny Craig (in my case Nutrisystem) eating the gross food, losing weight in the beginning than tapering off. For me and for Leslie, both the tapering off and the hungry were the reasons we "gave" up (or our bodies did.) In Leslie's case she walked away, in mine Nutrisystem went "out of business". I got a whole refund of $89.  

So recommend this Earth day that you buy Leslie's book (available as an ebook) and fat people tell the fashion industry to stick it, you are consuming less of their crappy badly made clothes. 

 *(Note: purple shirt, Fat girl's flea market,  Pink Jacket, Re/Dress)

Diabetes, Autism and Pepsi oh my!

This starts with two facts,

1. Just because you are diabetic doesn't mean you are fat;

2. Just because you are fat doesn't mean you will get diabetes. 

I felt the need for these two facts to be fresh in people's minds for the two infuriating stories I am covering today. 

No one knows for sure what causes autism. It could be anything, genetics, low birth rates, later in life pregnancies and better diagnosis (autism may have been diagnosed differently in the past as retardation or bad behavior). Now comes a new study saying fat mothers are bad because they are giving their children autism. After all every single autistic child has a fat momma right? Right?  

 

As far as fat women and autism, there could a host of reasons for the increased rate including: dieting, weight loss surgery, poor prenatal care (Fat women often do not get the best of care), and the high rates at which doctors perform C-sections on fat women.

 

Or could it be that the study itself was based on fat women with metabolic disorders? Not healthy fat women. The gist is women with metabolic diseases might have a higher rate of autism but that doesn't mean fat mothers have more kids with autism (or even that MD have more autistic kids; the sample size was 1000 from California only and self reported). It is the false assumption that all fat women have or will get diabetes and hypertension. Diabetes is a complex disease. Merely simplifying it down to weight loss creates a horrific risk for thin people who have it in their family. 

 

And it is our irresponsible media that ran with "all the fat mother's fault", because in reality what they really want is fat women to stop breeding. After all fat parents are more likely to make more fat people and we wouldn't want that. 

I've spoken before on soda. It's a tax that doesn't affect me because I don't drink soda. I'm now perfectly willing to have a tax on soda as long as it's on Pepsi. Pepsico, yes the soda maker is now charging it's smoking and fat bottlers and drivers $50 more per month for health coverage. Yes,

Pepsico the makers of Pepsi, 7up, Mountain Dew, Lipton, Lays potato chips wants to charge "unhealthy" employees $50 more a month. What next? Is Marlboro going to charge more for smokers? (Also all these employees are unionized but union busting is another story for another blog.)

And when they talk about fat, they actually mean "Obesity related diseases" which at this rate is diabetes, hypertension, cancer, global warming, autism, plane crashes, stroke, car accidents, and plumber's crack. Now if you have one of these diseases, but are thin do you get $50 charge and if you are fat and healthy do you still get that charge? Targeting diseases is a horrific slippery slope that will lead to employers hiring only perceived healthy people, and firing anyone who gets a disease. It also faults diseases on those who got them. We need to learn that it's very rare that someone brings a disease on to themselves. 

So now I'm for a soda tax. $50 tax on all pepsi products to go into a fund to cover the employees forced to pay this ridiculousness. 

Fatties need not apply.

Forgive the fact that I might curse, and completely rant in this post but I've come across three stories that are really pissing me off. 

Let's start with the first one, namely Michelle Obama on the Biggest Loser. Biggest Loser is an irresponsible show that makes contestants lose as much weight as possible through starvation and over exercising. This contradicts the the National Institute of Health tips on safe weight loss which they recommend 1/2 to 2 pounds a week. (You know the NIH which is a government agency whose big boss would be the President) As I wrote in March 2010, a contestant lost 34 pounds in a week.

That's not even pissing me off as much as this story:

So after showing that the great American Obesity Epidemic is finally dying down and while we might not be getting thinner, we aren't getting fatter. There may be different reasons for this trend. The money spent on the diet industry is still high but people may be doing less crash diets or people may also be trying to get healthy and in the process losing some or no weight but not becoming skinny.

So because of that there is more this push on this new trend of "skinny fat." Skinny fat means your BMI while still valuable and defining your entire life and that if your number is 25, you better get on to that treadmill, you are pre-obese. Some scientists are questioning the value of BMI, because you see some people who have an "obese" BMI are athletes, so they are starting to look at body fat. You'll need 25% body fat to be normal but banal as athletes are now super normal. 

So while I don't agree on body fat being an indicator of health, does this mean we really can say bye to BMI.

Not according to New York State Health Commissioner Nirav Shah.

Based on their findings, Braverman and his coauthor, New York State Commissioner of Health Nirav Shah, M.D., say the BMI threshold for obesity, which now stands at 30, should be lowered to 24 for women and 28 for men.

So congrads women who are 24.1, you're obese. And congratulations Nirav Shah who if anyone adapts your guidelines, this country will have an epidemic of eating disorders beyond imagination which would be fine for this hospital: 

Overweight? Then don’t bother applying for a job at Citizens Medical Center, a Victoria, Texas hospital whose hiring policy prohibits the hiring of people who are obese.

The Texas Tribune reports that the hospital’s hiring policy was implemented a year ago, and does not permit the hiring of anyone with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 35. BMI is a common way of measuring body fat; a person with a BMI of 30 or greater is considered obese.

So if you're a doctor, nurse, PA, orderly etc and you go on an interview at Citizens Medical Center. Surely with a name like that, they are good and fair people who treat their staff as nicely as their patients. You dazzle them with impressive resume, intuitive and people skills. Everyone likes you but they have one more test,

The scale.

Sorry you have a BMI of 37, you cannot work at Citizen's hospital. We don't care that you don't have any health problems, we don't care if you're Dr. House, you are a big fat fattie fat and we only want you here if we can perform dangerous weight loss surgery on you.

Tell them that something stinks on their facebook or email them [email protected] And if you live in that area of Texas be sure to let them know you will never consider Citizens Hospital as your health center.

I don't want to leave you with stories that will piss you off, so here's a good one about learning to stop putting down your body.

I have a very strange allergy. Some people are allergic to wheat, others are allergic to cats. I'm allergic to hearing women put down their appearance. I use the word allergy because something truly visceral happens to me: my toes curl, my hair stands on end, and I stumble over my words as I try to come up with the appropriate, scripted-yet-sincere response.

No fat vegans? And another traumatic day at the shopping mall.

Physicians for "responsible medicine" have unveiled an ad campaignwhose only purpose seems to insult fat people, blonds, and vegans. The campaign is for eating less or no meat but you wouldn't know it from the ad they use. One man has to sit next to a rude fattie who carelessly forgets to say excuse me and deliberately barrels through to his window seat. (Quite possibly because what we didn't see was the thin man deliberately not moving his legs so the larger man can get through.) The thin man on the other aisle adverts disaster when a fattie with a ticket for that seat is turned away because this thin man is the king of the plane with the power move those horrible fatties to the back of the plane (Did PFRM forget plane seats are assigned?) He could do this because TA-DAH he has spent a whole 10 bucks to humiliate a fat person and be able to sit next to a hot blond thin vegan.  (Personally I would like to sit next to the original guy who looks like he's cool and laid back).  The ad ends with the slender woman yakking on about the evils of meat.

What any of this has to do with the fact that airlines like to crush as many people together as possible per flight to compensate for crappy business pratcices is beyond me. For some reason this "option" has been pushed on American Airlines. I mean does American have an all you can eat meat buffet? If they offer bacon, I may very well drop my boycott of them.

Anyway, this seems to be the intended message:

Fat people are fat because they eat meat and are too stupid to realize that meat makes you fat. I'm sure all the fat vegans and vegetarians out there might have something else to say about that.

Vegans are all thin, slender and blond and will talk your ear off. Absolutely no vegans are non-white. They especially aren't Asian or Indian.

The ad is confusing about what they are trying to push and it seems to go out of its way to stigmatized fat people.

Write them a new asshole:[email protected]. 

Speaking of stigmatized: Unfortunately this economy has claimed a fat positive causality, namely the wonderful store Re/Dress. The physical store closed in November, but the owner still has chic clothes available online.

For me this is bad because I have a body that fits no cookie cutter. For the most part I have to try on everything.  I was in need for a dress shirt and my only option (which I thought at the time was a good one) was the Avenue. I don't have any problem admitting I've gained some middle age weight and that I'm creeping closer to size 22 (although some 20's still fit). I went to the Avenue, grabbed two blouses both 2x and 3x. I was surprised to find the 3x was tight. All the 2x and 3x clothes in my closet fit, so while I got pissed off that the Avenue was making sizes too small, I was at least used to that (another store Rainbow did the same thing).  Surely they had a 4x, 24 I could wear?

No, not a one. I couldn't find a single fucking dress shirt in 4x or 24. I walked out of a store with a frilly tank top to wear under a jacket, annoyed at how even  a plus size store was "sizing" me out.

What am I getting to?

Ah yeah. The fat girl's flea market, now known as the Big Fat Flea. Why the name change because guess what big handsome men? They'll be carrying men's clothes this year.

I'm fairly certain that at the flea I will find a nice dress shirt, whether it be 2x, 3x, or 4x. 

So Sunday May 13th, if you live in the Tri-state area, come to the flea. If you don't, this might be a good time to visit New York City. I won't say it's a fabulous place, but on May 13 at the Big Fat Flea it will be.