Fat Chicks Rule

Movement for thin people only.

I love to swim. It is hands down my favorite exercise. Floating almost weightless is the closest I will ever come to being in space. Not to mention that I am a strong swimmer. 

Am I graceful in the pool? No. I've been fat since I was nine but even before that I was a girl with almost no coordination and two left feet. I swim laps and  I don't do anything fancy. I am there for movement and to enjoy myself.  I'm not an athlete and I never will be. I could never hit a ball, I barely got the ball over the net playing volleyball. However I find that if I don't regularly exercise I got tired and depressed. 

Dancer Ragen Chastain recently posted how her body was put up to ridicule in a fat hate forum.

They took the heel pull picture that you see on the left and put it beside a thin person doing a similar move – they claimed that because we looked different mine was wrong.  They said that I lumbered and waddled and that I lacked grace, which is interesting because the most common compliment I receive is about how graceful I am.

Attacking Ragen's dancing boggles my mind. Ragen is a a fat person and she is dancing, doing exercise and movement. This is a woman who regularly wins international dance competitions. Fat haters scream how we should just put down that doughnut and go for a run but when we do, we are told we look stupid. We can't win. 

And that stigma about fat people exercising is causing them to exercise less.

“Some stated they were unwilling to participate in exercise because they “expected” that people would “laugh at”, “ridicule” “stare at” or “abuse” them. One participant (a 34 year old female) said that she rarely participated in physical activity, because she felt constantly “on display”.

This was a study in Social Science and Medicine of 141 fat people and found that that about 2/3 of them suffered from stigma. 

As I mentioned before I am Queen of the Klutzes. I don't like to dance. My wedding dance consisted of my husband and I rocking back and forth because I lose count during waltzes. 

However everytime Ragen comes to New York to teach a dance class, I am there. Why? Because Ragen is a fantastic teacher. Not only does she make the room comfortable and fun because there is no judgement or stigma but she makes the moves so easy that I don't lose count. 

But if fat haters had their way, she wouldn't dance anymore. I know Ragen is a strong, very self assured woman who is unapologetic about her fat. I don't see her giving up her life to appease the fat haters any time soon. And she is a damn good dancer.

But what about the other fat people who are not good dancers but love to dance? Should they give it up because they don't look graceful or should enjoy the movement?

Fat haters seem to think we should quit.

So I say fuck fat haters. I will dance like an idiot and swim like whale. 

 

5 percent, lapband investigations and fail.

As I've mentioned many times before, dieting and other weight loss methods don't work for most people in the long run. Some of them are downright dangerous for health and self-esteem.

Case in point: investigations on Allergan's lapband surgery are moving forward. This time it's federal rather than just in California.  

In January, House Democratic lawmakers called for hearings on medical devices including Lap-Band, following a study in the medical journal Archives of Surgery, that found almost half of patients with a gastric band had no weight loss or needed the device removed after six years. More than 40 percent had long- term complications.

While Lapband is being investigated, a few people at the FDA finally got their bribes-- I mean incentatives-- because the panel approved the diet drug Lorcaserin despite previously rejecting it.

The drug works to control the appetite through receptors in the brain, and a study showed it helped nearly half of participants lose up to five percent of their body weight 

So the FDA wants to put people at risk for heart valve and psychological problems so that 38% rather than 16% could lose 5% of their body weight over a year (most people could lose that during a bad stomach flu.)

Concerns about heart valve problems helped spur the advisory panel to vote 9-5 against recommending approval of lorcaserin in September 2010. Committee members' other safety concerns included psychiatric problems such as psychosis and breast and brain tumors seen in rats given the drug. Meanwhile, patients who took lorcaserin lost only a bit more weight than those given a placebo.

So let's repeat the mantra, no diet drug has ever worked in the long run and some of them are dangerous. 

Meanwhile in Australia Doctors are shocked when fat teenage girls pressured to diet, exercise and lose weight don't retain healthy habits or weight loss after a year. One reason it failed was because the girls didn't care.

Participation in some of those activities was less than ideal. For example, the girls went to only one-quarter of optional lunchtime exercise sessions, and less than one in ten completed at-home physical activity or nutrition challenges, the researchers reported in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The researchers thought they would try again with something more fun probably not realizing that 13 year old girls are vulnerable to weight loss peer pressure, and it is the age of being self-conscious. They will have it bad enough from their peers, they don't need it from adults, too. Here's an easy solution. Make sure there is enough funding for fun gym classes, after school sports, and healthy lunches, then let kid's weights fall into whatever range is normal for them. 

 

Stigma never works

I don't really want to give a lot of time to the HBO series Weight of the Nation, the 8o million part series (Okay, it's actually four parts) about poor stupid fat people who will only get better if they learn to put down the doughnut and run 5 miles. Looking  at their web site, it looks like the same shit different day because the first thing it does was start us off with a fat joke. As you can see we fat people are so heavy we are putting cracks into the United States. My only hope is no one will watch it. I don't want have to go into detail about it because ASDAH has given us ten reasons to be concerned about it and a viewer's guide. Plus Dr. Deah Schwartz also weighs in.

And this Jezebel article sums it up nicely:

I know this is a terribly uncool, bleeding-heart thing to say, but language like "crush the United States into oblivion" hurts people. It sets up fat people—in case you forgot, fat people are people—as not just the adversaries of our own health or some lady's airplane elbow room or your boner (the usual crimes), but as the future downfall of humanity itself.

Oh and Michele Simon won't watch it either.

How many years has it been since we got serious about the "weight" problem in this country? Yet despite pushing for dieting, removing treats from schools, taking fat kids away from their parents, victimizing the poor, and stigmatizing, we are still fat. Despite that our weight is leveling off, we are living longer (BTW living longer is the biggest drain on our health care system. It's just easier to blame fat people). The answer to every ailment has become weight loss. It's an easy out, far easier that looking at the complex issues of health including genetics, the environment (Not just food but pollution) and yo-yo dieting (I say my fatness is about 50% genetic, 40% dieting and 10% other). No matter what the issue a person has, if they are fat the answer is always weight loss. 

However weight loss doesn't work for the majority of people.  We've been dieting, doing lifesysle changes, drugs and surgery and we are still fat. We are also being made fun off a lot and it is considered perfectly acceptable. For example a NYTimes article covered whether plane travel is safe for fat people since the seats and safety belts aren't made for big people (Let's ignore the fact that is still safer to fly than to drive), an article in gizmodo picks up this story and instead of chastaise the lack of safety in the airline industry, makes fun of fat people. 

That's right, obese air travel could kill you. Standard seats are a legacy of old airplane design, and as people get plumper, they haven't been rethought. 

First off what is "Obese air travel." Is that a travel agency or finally our own airlines where seats are made for us? 

Second getting plumper is wrong, we've apparently been getting plump for about 30 years. Yet despite 30 years of dieting, we are still fat.

 The hysteria of Weight of the Nation will do nothing to make people healthy, it will make continue the fear mongering and stereotypes about fat people. It will make fat people the villains, the victims and will continue to marginized them. 

An article in Reuters show prejudice affects behaviors. 

The stigma also hurts the efforts of America's 73 million obese adults and 12 million obese children to get back to a healthy weight: Targets of stigma often fall into depression or withdraw socially. Both make overeating, binge eating, and a sedentary existence more likely, studies show.

It's funny because a similar article about stigma has a picture of a women's back with fat rolls who is wearing an exercise bra. 

 I don't find this unattractive but others might find this humiliating, a headless fattie with rolls of fat. To me this underhanded hatred is more dangerous than the outright stigma because it's ingrained. This woman is wearing an exercise bra. She is being healthy, she's exercising, just like her fucking doctor told her to but seeing this picture she might be embarrassed by it. Maybe even humiliated enough to not exercise anymore. 

Stigma is far worse because the often those who create stigma either don't think they are doing it or don't realize they are. The person who choose this photo, did they think they were creating stigma? Or groups like the Rudd center who always get quoted when talking abut how horrible stigma is don't think they are the cause of it. The truth is this, they can't ever end stigma until they also realize that fat people are people who exists, good or bad. Overeating or listening to body ques and that being fat is as just a normal state as being thin. 

What if a picture like this was used instead?

 

Dieting, HAES, Doctors and the Flea

Happy (one day belated) International No Dieting Day! Today (or any day you want) is when we cast off the dieting shackles and learn to eat and move normally. I started my blog in 2005 with the same advice I have now: Diets. Don't. Work. This includes non-diet diets such as Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers. They have a high failure/ low success rate (especially among their spokespersons). Eightly million people in the USA are currently on diets and most will not succeed because they are often fighting against biology. Dieting can cause disordered eating, binge eating, body dysmorphic disorder, low self-esteem, health issues from yo-yo dieting and a hit to your wallet. Most dieting plans are fewer calories than your body needs to function. Instead of fighting against your body, listen to it. Feed it when it's hungry, and put food that it likes in it. 

To me something like HAES (TM) is a good outlook on health for people of all sizes who want to incorporate healthy habits without being dictated by the scale. I have mentioned before when I was dieting everything was black and white. On the diet, everything had to be perfect in what I ate, and how I moved. If was good, my self worth was high.  Off the diet was binging on unhealthy food, no movement and self loathing. Today I try to eat a "diet" of mostly fruits and vegatables and move every day. I don't stop doing one healthy habit because I didn't do the other.

This is something doctors in the UK might want to take notice of. Apparently a survey of some UK doctors found that 54% of them don't think smokers or fatties deserve treatment for non-emergency care. (Good thing it was a small sample.) 

Bedfordshire PCT, for example, decided to withhold hip and knee surgery from obese patients until they had slimmed down by 10% or had a body mass index of under 35. Similarly, North Essex PCT obliged obese people to lose 5% of their bodyweight and keep the pounds shed for at least six months before receiving treatment.

So imagine you are fat and while walking, you trip on something and hurt your knee. You aren't dead or have a life threatening condition. You can still walk but boy does your knee hurt. You go to the doctor who tells you he won't fix your knee unless you lose 25 pounds. Where does that leave you? Even if you believed in the myth that fatness is 100% to do with eating too much and not exercising, how are you supposed to exercise on a bum knee? What might  happen is you end up lying around and eating more. What the doctor needs to do is FIX YOUR FUCKING KNEE.

This is has very little to do with Healthcare and more to do with nickle and diming to save money. We are moving into a scary place where are casting those who are sick or preseived to be sick to just let them die. And in the case of fat people these aren't actually health judgements but moral ones. 

Ragen Chastain on her blog sums it up pretty well.

I will say it again: My life is not worth less than a thin person’s life. My health is not less important than a thin person’s health.  I do not need to do anything to “deserve” the same healthcare that people with a lower BMI receive.

And to go completely off topic, to escape fat hatred for one day, if you are in the New York Metro area, get yourself to the Big Fat Flea. I took about 10 bags over to their storage unit yesterday, so I expect a lot of awesome clothes.