Fat Chicks Rule

ASDAH Conference Call for Proposals

No Blog Post this week as I am very busy. But please participate in the ASDAH conference which will be in Boston Next Year (And I hope to be there).

 

2015 ASDAH Educational Conference Theme & Call for Proposals

With the 2015 ASDAH Educational Conference set to take place July 17-19 in the heart of downtown Boston at the Boston Park Plaza hotel, the Association for Size Diversity and Health is excited to announce its conference theme:

Difficult Conversations:

Building Relationships in the HAES® Community and Beyond

With an increasing number of challenges facing the HAES community, both internally and externally, it’s time to remove the barriers that hinder the conversations that will strengthen ASDAH’s work, resolve and mission of spreading the Health At Every Size® message. Therefore, the entire conference will be devoted to discussions around the difficult conversations ASDAH and the HAES community needs to have.

ASDAH is seeking proposals for presentations and workshops at the conference. For the first time ever, and to ensure that crucial voices are not silenced, presenters are not required to be ASDAH members.

 

Please visit the ASDAH website (http://bit.ly/asdah-2015) to learn about the different kinds of topics and areas that the ASDAH Conference is hoping to cover, though, remember that presentations are welcome in subjects not on the list. All presentations should include consideration of relevant elements of diversity for wider application in multiple environments – one of the difficult challenges already facing the HAES community. See the website for the different elements submissions should include.

Please email submissions to Dr. Jenny Copeland ([email protected]) for review no later than December 15, 2014. Please contact Dr. Copeland with any questions.

ASDAH looks forward to seeing you at the conference!

All Fat is Acceptable Fat.

Stacey Bias recently put out a rad comic about Fatty Archetypes. Including such fatty types as healthy fatties, rad fatties, fat athlete, work in progress (i.e dieting fatties), etc. These are fat people are “acceptable fat.” The point of the comic is to leave no one behind and communicate that we shouldn’t have to squeeze into an archetype.  

 

I talk a lot about health in my blog. Mainly because I think a lot of us fatties are denied health because we live in a fat hating world that preaches “Get thin or else”. We are penalized at the doctors where our fat is treated rather than our ailments, our insurance tries to charge us more for being fat, even at the clothing store we can’t get the sizes, styles, and quantity available to a thinner person. All  because we don’t fit into an arcane BMI number.  

This to me is more important than eating right and exercise. I believe that people of all sizes need to do their best to eat right and exercise. I believe we have the right to exercise without being harassed like Ragen Chastain was while she was running.  (I doubt something like this would happen to a thin person).

However not every fat person fits in the acceptable archetype. Some people are fat and don’t eat right or exercise. They are not a rad fattie, they don’t have a disease that makes them fat, they don’t shop at Whole Foods (Granted, no one should) or do Zumba and they’re not a fat unicorn (Which would be awesome). They are just fat. Guess what? They should have all the same rights and privileges as any other fattie.

This comes on the heels of research that I've been saying in my blog for 9 years. Long term weight loss is nearly impossible. Sure you go on a diet (or lifestyle change) and lose 20 pounds, but for most people that weight will creep back usually bringing the friend of additional weight gain.

 As incredible as it sounds, that's what the evidence is showing. For psychologist Traci Mann, who has spent 20 years running an eating lab at the University of Minnesota, the evidence is clear. "It couldn't be easier to see," she says. "Long-term weight loss happens to only the smallest minority of people."

So no matter what kind of fattie you are, there is no proof that you make it into the arcane number. 

Zero Steps Forward and Eight Steps Back

Living in New York City, I climb stairs. In my house, in the subway, at my job, and in random  places you wouldn’t think would have stairs. Two months ago I climbed the Manitou incline which was like a giant staircase. I admit when I sometimes climb to the subway (I often take an elevated train), I get winded and going up the incline I thought my heart was going to explode.

 

Every day I take some kind of stairs, an while the exercise has done wonders for my legs, it has not made me thin. Riding my exercise bike 15-30 minutes a day has not made me thin, walking at least a mile or more a day had not made me thin, my daily stretches, my yoga, my summer swimming, my walks around the office has not made me thin.

 

There is a slogan: "Nothing about us, without us." which is often used among marginalized groups. It essentially means one group decides the fate/treatment of a marginalized group without their input. Fat activists see this all the time. "Obesity" organizations which decide on policy on how to make fat people thin don't seek input from actual fat people.

 

Case in point, this:#‎ICO2014‬

I have mentioned before that there is a constant assumption that if you are fat because you stuff your face and sit on the couch all day. Some organizations try to be gentle by saying “It’s not your fault you stuff your face.” Every single treatment for fatness is always the same: eat less calories than your body needs (aka a diet). It is the same treatment used in the last forty years and still hasn’t been proved to work in the long run.

 

If the people running this International Congress of Obesity would talk to an actual fat person (and not just try to treat them), they might figure out that taking the stairs will not make us thin.

 

Ragen Chastain says it best:

When organizations pull stunts like this, the only thing at which they can possibly succeed is creating an environment that prevents people from, and shames people for, navigating the world in the way that’s best for them and their situation.

 

 

And shame on this Amanda Sainsbury who decided fat people must become thin or they will die and Health at Every Size is bad for encourage people to stay fat. But what can you expect from a person who writes diet books? (Even worse this quack is the editor in chief of the Journal of Eating Disorders).

 

While I certainly agree that it is possible to have healthy behaviours that provide health benefits at a wide variety of body sizes, I disagree that it is possible to be or to stay truly healthy at every size.

 

This is the second time I've seen someone add a Y to the end of health when referring to Health at Every Size. This, to me, changes the meaning. Even though HAES is more geared to fat people because of the discrimination we face in health care, HAES is meant for all body types. Healthy is an abstraction. You can't really define it because everyone has different ranges. My husband can get to the top of a mountain but put him in a lake, and I’m going to zoom past him. Are we both “Healthy” or “Unhealthy”?

  

It is thus not surprising that people frequently put off doing anything about excess weight until better conditions arise (e.g. when the children start school or leave home, when a better financial position or home is attained, after retirement, etcetera). The health at every size concept implies putting off doing anything about excess weight indefinitely, instead accepting a higher BMI and focusing on healthy behaviours.

 

Ironically here she accidently points out how HAES is better than dieting. People put off Dieting. They wait until January or when they have money. HAES you do every day, no putting off. No need for money. It's learning to be as healthy as you can in the body you have whether it be too fat, too thin, disabled, or suffering from a disease. You can do HAES if you walk the stairs, take the escalator, or jump up and down. 

 

Related articles

Take the stairs. Or don't.

 

Guess what really still doesn't work? Stigma

I'm not sure why I have to keep pointing out that stigmatizing a fat person does not make them lose weight. You see, no matter which avenue the "Obesity researcher" is coming from, they always come to the same conclusion: fat people need to eat less. Some of them try to be kind, saying its not the fat person's fault they stuff their face, they are just too stupid to understand healthy eating.

Then there are doctors who think its perfectly okay to shame a fat person.

“It happens all the time,” wrote Dr Pemberton, who also has a column in The Telegraph. “Patients who are not interested in changing their diet in any way, demand to have their cake, eat it…and then pop a pill so that the calories never touch their waistline.

As a veteran of countless diets, lifestyle changes, "healthy" eating and OTC diet pills, that resulted in weight loss, followed by massive weight gain, I can say Dr. Pemberton is full of shit. And considering that no weight loss drug has ever worked in the long run while some have been deadly, diet pills are not the easy way to lose weight. 

It goes back to the same argument that all fat people overeat and if they stop they will suddenly become thin. I don't deny that sometimes when you stop eating junk food, you might drop a little weight or none at all. But that weight loss rarely makes a fat person thin. (And until we drop BMI as a primary health indicator, all healthy habits become pointless unless the person gets to the magic "normal" number.)

The people who come to your practice Dr. Pemberton, you might find out something if you listen to their words instead of looking at their fat. Chances are that by the time they meet you, they've already tried all kinds of diets and lifestyle changes and now they are getting desperate.

Last week I reviewed the book Shadows on a Tightrope. In it was an essay about a woman who got weight loss surgery (back when the death rates were 6-8%) purely because she couldn't deal with the stigma.

A good doctor would look at the entire health of the patient, listen to their stories. You might be surprised to find how good they were on their diet until the feelings of starvation took over and how willing they might be to be healthy if their doctor didn't try to shame them.

Parallel Lives

Shadows on a Tightrope has the distinction of being one of the earliest fat activist/liberation books. It was a collaboration of works by different fat feminists over a decade, of essays, narratives and poems all about standing up to the diet industry and reclaiming fat bodies. Many of the authors had body re-awakenings and learned to love, accept, and cherish their fat bodies while rejecting mainstream objectification. Others are hoping to reach that path, while some were just telling their story about how hard it was to live in a fat body.

"We know what they mean they say "attractive"-- It's not us."

When the book came out in 1983, I was 12. At the same time some of the writers were already on their fat path, already fighting against the Hollywood, medical and diet industry cookie cutter, I was at the beginning of my body hating journey that wouldn't end for 20 years.

I got fat when I was 9. I ate the same junk food as my peers, but when I got fat, the teasing and the "well-meaning" lectures began. Somehow I resisted dieting and body hatred until I was 12. Even though Shadows on the Tightrope was out, it was not part of my world. At 12, I wanted nothing more than to be accepted by my peers. I believed that "dieting worked" because that was no discourse. At 12, you went on a diet, you got thin, the end. There was nothing in the mainstream media, from my doctor or my parents that mentioned anything about the high failure rate, the dangers of weight cycling or the fact that I would completely destroy my self-esteem. I always assumed I was overeating. If someone had just handed me Vivian Mayer's essay on the fat illusion where she points out that fat people are assumed to be overeating when more often they are eating normally, my life might have been different.

Today this book is still relevant especially with the pressure now on children to be thin or else. Some of this has changed since Shadows on the Tightrope.  Many of the writers wrote about dealing with doctors who gave them pills and/or screamed insults at them. Women talked about being fat as a child and having to become bullies so they wouldn’t be picked on. One personal by Lynn Mabel-Lois "We'll Worry About That When You're Thin" taked about how she became addicted to diet pills and first getting access to them when she was 10. We would never think of giving our children amphetamines now, but we are still willing allow growing teens and children to have weight loss surgery. And it would be socially unacceptable for a doctor to scream at a child, yet it’s perfectly okay to scare children into thinking they are dying like the ads in Atlanta.

Reading the stories in the book sometimes made me sad because I saw my story from the 1980’s in the narratives that took place in the fifties and sixties. The only change was doctors went from pills and screaming to diet sheets and lectures.

But things have changed because of what Shadows on a Tightrope started. It influenced countless fat authors who then influenced hundreds more. I didn’t have Shadows on a Tightrope at 12, but when I finally decided to stop hating my body at 30, it had created a loving fat positive environment.

Today we have more than just this book that tells us to resist the message of hatred. We have countless books such as Fat? So! By Marilyn Wann, Taking Up Space by Pattie Thomas, Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon, Hot & Heavy by Virgie Tovar, my own book Fat Chick Rules and so many others I don't have space to name. We have activist groups, blogs, websites, e-groups, and Facebook groups which project the same message: You are perfect just the way you are.

Those blogs today will all be giving thanks on how Shadows on a Tightrope changed everything for the better.

 

 

Related articles

Out of the Shadows

Nothing About Us, Without Us

Still not a disease

As I talked about a few months before, the American Medical Association decided that fatness is a disease, whether you're healthy or not. They are ignoring all logic and science. Some fat people are metabolically healthy while in some people fat is a symptom of disease. The gist is they want to try to impose same solution "Make the fat person eat less" that has never worked in the long run.

Why would the AMA do that? Could it be that the Affordable Health Care allows treatment of fatness that includes paying for diets, diet pills, and surgery.

Defining obesity as a disease should encourage more doctors to offer treatments like surgery and medication, Hamdy says. Two new obesity drugs, Qsymia and Belviq, were recently approved by the FDA

Qsymia is an appetite suppressor. It goes back to same fucking "cure" of eating less. And it has a mile long list of side effects. Of course you can say all meds have side effects. They do. However, why take a drug with terrible side effects that won't work? 

And Belvig was proved to not work even before it was released. 

The AMA's classifying the fatness as a disease opens up a lot of money to the diet industry. It will continue to work on the faulty assumption that we must make fat people eat less. The weight loss/gain cycle will continue. 

Even this doctor in this TED video who is  not being fat positive agrees that the issue isn't EATING TOO MUCH but metabolic issues that cause fatness in SOME but not all people.

Essentially stop trying to cure the fatness, instead cure the actual disease.  

Stigma Hurts

This week is Weight Stigma Awareness Week. Weight Stigma often comes from assumptions. The strongest stigma is if fat people just eat less they will be become thin and healthy. It is at the bottom of every cure for fatness: diet pills, surgery, low calorie diets, lifestyle changes are all to make a fat person eat less. Bullies claim that fat people are lazy and lack willpower, the well-intentioned think it's not fat people's fault. Food is everywhere. Except that why don't thin people have the same problem?

Everywhere we are bombarded with hateful messages: (Trigger warning ahead.)

The second? Costco as much as anything else is why the land of the free and the home of the brave is also the trough of the tub o’ lard, our exceptionalism measurable by not only our G.D.P. but also our B.M.I. That’s body mass index, and our bodies are indeed massive.

So says Frank Bruni who has suffered from eating disorders and should know better.

Even when Fat people say enough, we are okay with our size, that no matter what our eating habits are, we don't deserve to be treated like shit, that some of us are healthy and fat, that many of us eat no more than thin people do, we are told we are delusional or making things worse.

Obesity is a class issue, like tobacco. People in every class used to smoke, rich and poor, educated and non-educated alike. But when tobacco was conclusively linked to disease, more and more educated people stopped, until the image of smokers reached a tipping point, and went from “cool” to “loser.”

Yes people with a lower SES are more fat, but it's more likely to do with bias in society rather than poor people eat too much. Being fat is not like smoking. Smoking is a HABIT, being fat is hugely genetic. And if the fat is a habit why do so many people fail to lose weight?

Even "Doctors" think it's okay to shame fat people. In Katz, D. L., Murimi, M., Pretlow, R. A. & Sears, W. (2012). Exploring Effectiveness of Messaging in Childhood Obesity Campaigns. Childhood Obesity 8(2): 97-105 (The article unfortunately is not available unless you subscribe) is filled with praise for programs who shame fat children. Many of the quotes are disgusting but I will share one.

Sears: Good medicine means encouraging children and giving them the tools to get lean. An occasional child might be pushed over into anorexia, but I think the situation that you mention in Seattle is an overreaction and represents unwarranted fear.

Guess what? Teenagers who were formerly fat were found to suffer from eating disorders.

These problems may not be diagnosed quickly, because parents and doctors "think it's a good thing that these teens have lost so much weight," said lead researcher Leslie Sim, an assistant professor of psychology and an eating disorders expert at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Rochester, Minn.

I have mentioned before that some of the worst habits I've ever picked up came from dieting. The worst being the dieting/binge cycle. Thankfully I never do less than at 12oo cal diet but I did a lot of crazy things to lose weight. I think of all the people who starve themselves or have weight loss surgery and consume less calories than a normal person needs. Why isn't this considered anorexia? Just because they are fat?

Stigma also affects health greatly. Not just from the stress of being bombarded with messages that you are less than human if you are fat, but bias in even getting your health care.

Obese people are less likely to survive cancer, and one reason may be a surprising inequality: The overweight are undertreated.

Doctors often short them on chemotherapy by not basing the dose on size, as they should. They use ideal weight or cap the dose out of fear about how much treatment an obese patient can bear. Yet research shows that bigger people handle chemo better than smaller people do.

I have written before about doctors refusing to treat fat people or giving them surgery and treatments needed. I even spoke once to a supersized woman whose doctor refused to give her an lifesaving operation (the story has a happy ending, another doctor did the surgery).

When are "Doctors" and "Journalist" going to listen? Stigma against fat is stigma against the fat person. It will lead to poor health care, eating disorders and stress.

Maybe we're just normal.

I remember when Leptin was touted as the hormone that would cure fatness forever. There would be drugs to fix fat and you would become slim, trim, and be able to live like a first class citizen. 

When it turned out that Leptin wasn't the fat hormone but the starvation hormone, and  only worked in a small amount of people it, vanished as a miracle cure. Although if you search Leptin in Google, you'll find a bunch of leptin diets.

Now the new leptin is gut bacteria. Researchers took gut bacteria from two twins, one thin, one fat and injected it into lab mice . 

Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

The thin mice were then adored about their mouse peers as being healthy despite all the cheese they ate. 

The next step, transferring thin people's shit into fat people.

“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.

I had to double check to make sure the article wasn't the Onion. New York Times? Check. Written by Gina Kolata check. Based on a study in Science, check. 

Zoe Williams of the Guardian points out the crazed obsession  with "curing" fatness as a moral issue:

Other people's weight became all our problem when we started a) calling it an "epidemic" and b) totting up how much it costs the NHS. This is illogical.Malnutrition costs the NHS significantly more and yet no moral judgment accrues around people who are too thin or, for reasons of incapacity, aren't being fed properly by the people who should be caring for them...

 

Except there is one more issue. The mice with the thin bacteria were put on diets. 

The team also showed that a “lean” microbial community could infiltrate and displace an “obese” one, preventing mice from gaining weight so long as they were on a healthy diet.

Diets usually work in the short term. This is no different than diet pills. All of them require you to also do a low calorie diet and pills will help you lose a little more weight. But none have proved to work in the long run.

Sometimes it gets tiring to be experimented on. To be given pills, surgery and shit in hopes that I conform. Instead of treating all disease as  weight loss, why not look into actually curing the disease?

Different Worlds

No Blog post next week. Second vacation coming up!

 

While doing research on plus size shopping for my book, I walked into a store looked at the outrageous prices, saw the look the sales woman gave me, the What the fuck is this fat woman without trimmed eyebrows doing in my store? and walked out. I hadn't been savvy yet of recognizing places by sight that don't have plus sizes. I'm sure if I had been buying something for a thin friend the sales clerk would have rather listened to nails on a chalk board than serve me.

 

Recently Oprah Winfrey,, who most of the planet knows, for some reason was not recognized in a store in Zurich. Oprah was looking at handbags, asked for a pricy one, when a clerk insisted she look at cheaper items. 

 

If I was ever mega wealthy, I wouldn't shop in stores that wouldn't have given me the time of day now and I would never buy a $38,000 dollar handbag unless it was an actual Bag of Holding (For non-gamers the bag of holding can hold large amounts of heavy items including swords, foods, mounts, potions, gold etc,).

 

Oprah felt that this slight was racial bias; Heidi Moore of the Guardian felt it was also due to her size.

Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman's size and her socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours, lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors that may affect food choice and metabolism.

 

I think that these attitudes towards fat people aren’t necessarily poor food. If I was looking for a retail job, who do you think would hire me? The high end boutique or Walmart? Oprah’s talented, smart, beautiful, sand avvy, but she cannot be the only fat  black American woman who is. (She is the only black face in Forbes' Richest Americans list coming in at 152.)  As Moore points out:

 

Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique, all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight.

Loser's Club

While researching my book, I did some reviews of national stores on the local level. This included dragging my friends to many mall trips. Mostly I looked at the bigger department stores and the smaller plus size stores. I already knew that most of the smaller stores especially the trendy/chic ones didn’t carry plus sizes or like H&M carried had them in microscopic ghettos. One place I went into, I looked at the high prices and the tiny sweaters and walked out without a word.

On one mall trip, my friend dragged me over to the very good looking male model in front of Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F). The model was a sweet young man who was nice to me the fat girl and my friend with a thin body and nerdy glasses.

I didn’t go into A&F because I didn't have to ask if they had plus sizes. The buff men and thin women adored on the store made me realize this store was for thin people only especially thin women. I’ve many times been dragged into thin people only stores where I noticed women’s clothes rarely go to large and men can go to XXL meaning these stores cater to fat men by accident because they really want muscular ones.

The CEO of A&F has said they don’t make clothes for fat people because they make clothes for cool people and fat people are not cool. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."



Believe it or not I admire his honesty. Almost all of these stores aimed at the young and trendy carry small sizes and I don’t mean just Junior Miss sizes, I mean small sizes. Even stores with sizes up to 16, such as the Gap are a rare animal with an abundant amount of extra smalls. These stores fear that if fat people wore their clothes it would no longer be considered trendy except forgetting that 2/3 of the people of the US are considered fat. I assume the inflated prices marketed to niche stereotypes is enough to keep them afloat.  

But I was talking about A&F. I could point out all the terrible things they have done : the sweatshops, Discrimination, the Sexualization of pre-teens  and their refusal to donate excess clothes to poor people. 

Instead I will talk about not being in the cool club. At no time in my life was I ever in the "cool" club. I don't have styled hair, do my eye brows, get regularly mani-pedis, I barely shave, I don't wear trendy clothes (I wear clothes because I like them), only occasionally wearing some freakier outfits because I need a change. My worst offense is refusing to try to lose weight.

You see, being trendy, the fitting in into a tiny cookie cutter, is something I have always refused to do. I refused to be told what to like or wear. Sure clothing shopping has become a disaster and I'm certain I've lost getting a job being a hairy fat-ass, but I despise the idea of being someone I'm not. I've gotten several troll comments that I play sour grapes, that I really want to be thin but it isn't true.

Not only A&F is labeling the "uncool" kids but the people who wear their clothes as vapid, mean bullies which I am sure they are not. I don’t believe it of the nice male model outside the store. He is not vapid, I am not a label.

Of course just because this fool has no power over me, doesn't mean he can say mean things without consequences.

But (Robin, author of the A&F book the quote comes from ) Lewis says it's a model that may not fit the future. Plus-sized shoppers now make up 67 percent of consumers.

"I think the young people today want cool, but as they define it themselves," Lewis said.

From Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign - highlighting real women - to H&M's inclusion of plus-sized swimsuit model Jennie Runk, many other brands are embracing that individualism and making their clothes more accessible. For example, rival retailers H&M and American Eagle both carry sizes up to 16 and 18. The largest at Abercrombie & Fitch is a 10.

I urge people of all sizes not to buy anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, no clothes, no accessories, nothing. And if you have A&F clothes, be sure to donate them to the poor or a fat chick. I might wear one of these tiny tee shirts as a tank tube.