Fat Chicks Rule

Run, Climb, and Swim to Your Top

In two weeks I will be on my annual vacation in Vermont. I call it my week to live my life on my terms. I get in plenty of movement, eat whole local foods (i.e. local food co-op and farmer's markets), writing, read, and have significant alone time with my husband.

A few times I have attempted to climb Camel's Hump mountain which is a four mile trek going up. I'm not a big hiker and I don't have much practice. In previous years I've made it halfway which is a trek by itself.

 

My big exercise is swimming. I'll take the four mile swim over a four mile climb. However I feel it's necessary to make to get as far as I can on Camel's hump because I no longer want to be told I can't do it.

 

Fat people get a double standard when it comes to exercise. We are yelled at for not doing exercise and when we do, we’re told we are slow and clumsy. We essentially are told to lose weight before we dare exercise in public.

 

Julie Creffield, a UK blogger, wants to get more fat women running not to lose weight but to get fit but even she’s finding the double standard.

 

But after years of training, she still faces skepticism. She recently wrote for the Huffington Post about a visit to the doctor. She'd pulled a muscle, but he basically told her she was too fat to run. Now, medical pros generally advise working your way up to really intense exercise if you're heavier, but Creffield wasn't exactly a newbie. It's a handy illustration of how even somebody well-meaning can derail exercisers.

 

Of course no thin people ever suffer from sports injuries.

 

Her site: a Fat Girl's Guide to Running

 

We are not here to shame people into losing weight, no instead we are on a mission to simply get 1 million FAT women running.

 

So whatever your exercise: Walking, running, hiking, swimming. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't so it. Listen to your body, know your real limits and soar to whatever your top may be.

 

Related articles

Here's Proof That There's No Such Thing as Too Fat to Run

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.

 

Movement, the News Media, and Another Lie.

A study in the Mayo Clinic indicated that fat women only do about an hour of exercise every year. This was the headline at Time:

Obese Women Get Only One Hour Of Exercise in a Whole Year

That isn't true. The hour was only for vigorous exercise. All the headlines, in the rush to make fun of fat neglected to mention this is vigorous exercise. CBS News was the only one who remembered to add vigorous.
 
Activities that fall under this category include jogging, running, swimming laps, riding a bike fast on hills, playing singles tennis or playing basketball.
 
People can also opt to participate in 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise weekly in lieu of the more vigorous activities, per the recommendations. Those activities include walking fast, doing water aerobics, riding a bike on flat ground, playing doubles tennis or pushing a lawn mower.
 
(Not sure why water aerobics is here. I found it harder to do than swimming laps.)
 
First off the data is from eight years ago. Trends change. Deb Burgard of ASDAH (Her quotes in italics) mentioned on the ASDAH email list some issues she with the study.

1. How it was measured. They used accelerometers which only can detect a subset of human body movements (and the body movements accelerometers measure are most accessible to lower-weight, younger and less disabled people)
 
2. People of other weights didn't get that much exercise either. It's true that fat women did 11-36 seconds of vigorous exercise per day compared to "normal" women who got 108 seconds which means that normal women did something like 3-10 times as much. Which means that at most normal weight women got 10 hours of vigorous exercise a year. Which is less than what I do (I'm on an exercise bike everyday 10-30 minutes and swim 30 - 60 minutes a day 5x a week in the summer). And I don't consider myself as active as I want. I think this study shows that we all need to exercise more. But of all the headlines about this study, only the Huffington Post pointed out that we all needed to exercise more, not just thin people (This goes back to the discrimination where it’s okay for a thin person not to eat right or exercise).
 
So using the same logic as the headlines, people in the "normal weight" category who are not being mentioned in this discussion would have accumulated 11 hours of vigorous activity in a year.  Running half an hour a day, that would be two weeks of running.  Is anyone seriously proposing that running for two weeks is what determines whether a person is in the "normal" weight category or the "obese" category?
 
3. Once moderate exercise was put in the mix, each body type was about equal.
 
However the lower amount of vigorous exercise among fat women does perhaps proves something. I have mentioned on this blog the stigma of being fat and getting exercise. We’re made fun of when we exercise and even rental bikes can’t support our weight. Not to mention that a lot of fat people have a lower socioeconomic status and tend to have less time for movement. (I’ve written before that I do more exercise when I have more free time.) Instead of the news media chastising fat women for not exercising enough, perhaps they should do their job and found out why they don’t.

Nope, still not a disease.

Every once in a while, I get an email asking if I would host  a guest blogger or if I would be interested in this infographic. Usually the blogger or infographic is completely inappropriate for my blog such as the evils of obesity, or has nothing to do with fatness at all. Depending on mood I will ignore or engage. When I engage, my response is usually "Have you even read my blog?" or "Why would I want your fat hating infographic?" Usually I never hear anything again and I assume this was spam. A mass email hoping that a few bloggers will post whatever product they are selling. When I got the last one (from a plastic surgeon service no less) I wrote back "Are you a spammer or an idiot?" expecting not to hear anything back.

 

I got a message not three hours later.

 I am a spammer nor an idiot… (I think this was a Freudian slip.)

Obviously you are bitter though and not as optimistic about your disease as your blog leaves one to believe.

Best of luck with that shining attitude in the future.

The issue here is not this idiot or spammer (or both). But this damage the AMA just did to fat people by labeling all fatness as a disease. Even this moron thinks I have a disease. There is nothing wrong with getting help to fat people with diseases, but to just tell someone they have a disease when they are perfectly healthy is ridiculous.

The New York Times seems to think this is a good idea because it "supposedly" reduces body shame.

On the positive side, we found that the obesity-as-disease message increased body satisfaction among obese individuals, probably because it removed the shame of obesity as a moral failing.

However...

 Suggesting that one’s weight is a fixed state — like a long-term disease — made attempts at weight management seem futile, and thus undermined the importance that obese individuals placed on health-focused dieting and concern for weight.

The gist is, calling fatness a disease meant that people felt less ashamed because they had a disease rather than a moral failing. However since the cure for this disease is the same shit they've been touting for 50 years, people give up on any kind of weight management.

I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist but since "Obesity experts" use correlation with causality, let's try it with the diet industry. Even though the diet industry still makes a good 20 billion, that shift is moving away from commercial dieting to Do it Yourself. DIY breaks up that massive pie in to tiny pieces. Meaning the big companies are not getting the money they once did. Weight Loss Drugs have been failing miserably for the last 10 years. Weight Loss Surgery is making a lot of doctors wealthy. So calling Fatness a disease means new money comes into these "Cures". Cures that I might add don't work for most people in the long wrong and can cause more harm than good.

Health at Every Size has no real profit margin and helped try to improve quality of life. It works to help people of all sizes enjoy eating, moving, and loving their body again. Nothing in HAES calls you a disease or says you have a moral failing if you didn't get a chance to exercise.

The best thing I ever did to reduce body shame and to work on my health was to stop trying to be thin.

And if any young fat activist wants to do a guest blog, I’m okay with that. If you want to sell your “Fat is bad product”.  Go fuck yourself.

Further than before

I have written multiple times about the stigma fat people face when they try to exercise. They feel uncomfortable with stares and ridicule. Recently dancer Ragen Chastain completed a 26 mile marathon because she was slower than the rest, she was ridiculed. Including a comment such as this:

This is ridiculous. The author wasn't trained to do a marathon and wallowed through the course at 28min/mile pace. How is doing any physical activity at barely over TWO MILES PER HOUR anything other than just sad?

I recently came back from Colorado. On vacation I'm often move more because I have the time. On the second day I was there we went to the hot springs where I swam as much as possible in bath-like water.

The next day we did the Mantiou Incline. The incline is a railroad track with the steel beams removed and the wooden tracks used as steps. There are three points up. The half-way point (More like 60%), the false summit, and the actual summit. I knew we were planning to do it and even though I'd rather swim three miles than walk up one, I had planned to at least do it part of the way. Because it was later in the day, we planned to just go to the halfway point.

It was extremely difficult. About half-way there, I thought my heart was going to fall out of my chest. I had my friend screaming at me to get moving because the sun was going down and we were all going to freeze to death (we weren't) while I had my husband quietly assuring me I could make it because I was the strongest woman he knew.

This was my response to my friend.

Feeling bad about my body has always lowered my self-esteem and made me think I was incapable of finishing anything that meant success for me. I wasn't surprised as I got closer to the end, I stopped more and more frequently. A fat person was not allowed to make this feat. After all, fat people aren't supposed to be athletic, they are supposed to be lazy slobs.

Coming down off the mountain, I got a lot of kudos from people who passed me as I huffed and puffed up the mountain. Part of me felt this was condescention, that yes a fat person made it to the halfway point, but instead I thought they were just being supportive and didn't want me to give up.

The point here is not that you have to make it up the Manitou incline but that fat people not only deserve movement without stigma and that we cannot allow stigma to block our way to the top.

Next year I will get to the summit.

 

 

Workplace wellness, the new diet industry?

As I have mentioned before I have no problem with workplace wellness if it's a voluntary incentive based program such as discounts on gyms, smoking cessation programs, vitamins, and even useless diet programs. I have on occasion taken advantage of some of these programs. The problem arises when the program becomes mandatory or penalty based. I have already mentioned in past posts that stigma never works. I personally know that when I dieted and the weight loss stopped then came back on, it sent me into a depressive spiral where I would eat only junkfood and not move. And I have previously mentioned my biggest obstacle to full wellness has been the amount of time I work. If I just had an extra 2 hours a day I could have time to prepare meals and to exercise more. I've been swimming more this summer and often I have to choose between swimming and making lunch for tomorrow.

The Rand company recently put out a report that workplace wellness is a failure on all parts. Not just reducing weight, smoking and cholesterol but savings. The journal Health Affairs put out a similar study and found that workplace wellness did cut some hospitalizations but did not save money in the long run. 

According to a report by researchers at the RAND Corp, programs that try to get employees to become healthier and reduce medical costs have only a modest effect. Those findings run contrary to claims by the mostly small firms that sell workplace wellness to companies ranging from corporate titans to mom-and-pop operations.

Workplace wellness is a 6 billion dollar industry and growing. Like the diet industry it makes a lot of money with poor results. And like the diet industry I see it growing despite evidence it doesn't work. (I'm still waiting for blaming to fat people for being non-compliant.)

 It's hard to push back against this. Saying no to dieting doesn't hurt you financially (If anything you save money by not doing these programs that almost always end in failure) but saying no at work might mean a penalty. There is also a huge issue because the poor are often the ones who suffer more health issues and a penalty would affect them even more. I know people who ration their health care because they can't afford it. Asking them to pay extra would result in their health getting worse not better.

Again I am not against incentives. I would like to see those continue. I would love if my job had a yoga class.

5000 steps to the new diet scam

I recently found out there are talks to change my health care provider and to introduce penalty based incentives to prove you are healthy enough for health care.  (A plan similar to needing to be thin to use the gym.) One of the penalty incentives floating around was that the person had to prove they exercised.

I had to snicker about that one. I do most of my exercise on my own and I wondered how I could prove it. Have my husband follow me around with a camera? 

 

What they really mean is the increasing costs of providing health care are cutting into profits. If we can get rid of people who may potentially get sick and have to use more health care, that increases profits. It's the sort of logic only an MBA can love. 

When people had to choose between paying up to 20 percent more for health insurance or exercising more, the majority of enrollees met fitness goals one step at a time via an Internet-tracked walking program... 

In other words, your job owns your life if you want affordable health insurance from them. If you are deemed "unhealthy" (i.e. fat or a smoker)  your life will be looked into even after you punch out. 

Blue Care Network created a buzz when it implemented one of the largest-scaled financial incentive programs in the country by requiring adults who were obese and in the Healthy Blue Living program to enroll in a fitness program to qualify for lower out-of-pocket health care costs. Enrollees could choose between several programs, including Weight Watchers and WalkingSpree, which uses a digital pedometer to upload walking data on a wellness tracking web site.

Transation: if you're a thin person who eats poorly and doesn't exercise, you won't lose your free time or your right to privacy and you don't have to pay anything extra. And if you are a smoker who lies, then you do can enjoy the affordable medical benefits of being thin. Sorry to say I can't pass for thin. And all the healthy habits I incorporated into my life after I stopped dieting will be meaningless because I am still fat. 

This has nothing at all to do with health. These companies don't care if you get healthy, they care about making money. They want to make sure they have cheap labor that won't get sick.

And Weight Watchers. That's what they consider healthy? A DIET program that has an average weight loss of 6 pounds. Where are the long term studies proving Weight watchers and WalkingSpree will make people thin in the long run? (Hint, there aren't any.)

These workplace wellness programs save such small amounts of money, it's better to just keep things they way they were. There's no privacy or penality issues in offering discounts on gym memberships, offering fitness class and so on. I don't care if you can get a discount on Weight Watchers, I just don't want to be forced to join it to keep my health insurance premiums from skyrocketing. 

The report's conclusions about the financial benefits of workplace wellness programs are also grim. In theory, the programs should reduce medical spending as employees become healthier and thereby avoid expensive conditions such as heart disease, cancer and stroke.

In fact, workers who participated in a wellness program had healthcare costs averaging $2.38 less per month than non-participants in the first year of the program and $3.46 less in the fifth year. Those modest savings were not statistically significant, meaning they could have been due to chance and not to the program.

The issue here isn't making employees healthy, this is a continuation of the dieting scam. For the last 30 years Americans have been dieting and gaining more weight. And they are starting to get to the point that people are becoming more accepting that not everyone belongs in the 19.5 - 24.5 BMI cookie cutter. Even thought dieting is still a 60 billion industry, most of it is DIY dieting which means that people just might be looking at dietary changes rather than weight loss.

So if people are no longer dieting, then I guess we'll have to be forced to. 

Knees please

Fat and thin people can get knee issues that require surgery, either repairs or total replacement. Many fat people have been turned down for knee surgery. Fat activist Nancy Goddess had to have gastric bypass surgery in order to fix her knee. 

A recent study from New York's Hospital For Special Surgery has said that fat people have the same outcomes as thin people when it comes to knee surgery. 

"As long as they are medically appropriate for surgery, even obese people can have excellent results from joint replacement. Obesity, in and of itself, should not be viewed as an absolute contraindication to joint replacement," said Lisa Mandl, M.D., M.P.H.., a rheumatologist at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), in New York City, who was involved with the study.

I find it very disturbing to be denied a quality of life surgery. And guess what? Even fat people need their knees because the majority of us exercise and have to walk around day to day.

Her finding: 29% had been exercising for six months, 39% regularly exercised and 25% thought about exercising. Only 12% said they had no intention to work out. (Yes, those numbers add up to 105%. We're assuming they rounded up.)

I don't know how doctors think that fat people will lose weight if they don't have working knees. 

 

Fat, Happy and Fly like the Wind!

Scientists in Canada have discovered that those with the dreaded horrible obesity gene have yet another added benefit of being protected from depression.

But the genetic findings challenge that thinking, Meyre said, since those with the genetic mutation predisposing to obesity were protected from depression.

I don't like to be called a mutant. Just because a gene makes you undesirable from the mainstream doesn't mean it's a mutation.  On the other hand, without genetic mutations, we'd still be unicellar beasties living in slime pools, so I guess I can live with it.

Here is yet another benefit of being fat. Of course if you're depressed don't gain weight. This just means that if you have genetic disposition to be fat, you may also have protection against depression. 

Speaking of depression, exercise has also been proved to help with depression. It release happy fun endorphins. Just because you are fat does not mean you don't deserve it.  

In Denmark, a racer is doing a 132 mile trek. Jarmo Pitkanen also happens to be fat and he wanted to do the race to show a he can be fat and finish it. 

But by completing the multiple-day competitions as an obese athlete, he is doing a small part in changing the perception of overweight athletes, doctors said, although most physicians have long warned that obesity can lead to an array of health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

One thing mentioned in the article is that Pitkanen tries to gain weight before doing competitions so he'll be fat when he finishes. I don't agree with that, because I've always been an advocate of eat well and move and let your weight fall where it should. However, it show that body size shouldn't matter when it comes to fitness. 

“Fat doesn’t play as much of a role in fitness as people think,” said Dr. Linda Bacon, a physiologist and member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “Some people who are really fat exercise regularly. We see top athletes perform well in fat bodies. Times are changing. The population has gotten bigger, so we’re going to see more fat athletes out there.”

Not everyone can do a 132 mile trek or in my case the mile swim race I hope to do in the summer, the most important thing is we listen to our genes and be as happy as we can. 

 

Ten Ways to Love your Body.

October 17th is Love Your Body Day

Do you love what you see when you look in the mirror?

Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work hard to make us believe that our bodies are unacceptable and need constant improvement. Advertisements reduce us to body parts -- lips, legs, breasts -- airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards. The media tell women and girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that 80% of U.S. women are dissatisfied with their appearance?

10 ways to love your body

1 Do not ever disparage your body. Don't tell it it's inadequate, ugly, not the right size, old, blemished, or not worth of love. Your body is the only one get. treat it with respect, no matter what condition it's in. 

 2. Give your body the nourishment it needs. Too often the diet industry and "Obesity" experts assume all fat people eat junk foods and drink soda. They ignore dangerous dieting practices and under-eating. They seem to care more that a teen has a burger for lunch than another one who has only carrot sticks. Eat what your body needs to function at its best. 

 3. Compliment your body in the mirror, even the "flawed" part. love your big nose, your c-section scar, your flabby jelly rolls. 

4. Whenever you say something bad about your body, immediately apologize and give it a compliment. There is no excuse for rudeness.

5. If a friend or loved one complains about their "flaws", let them know that they are beautiful.  

6. Give your body the physical activity it needs. For the most part your body needs some exercise. This could mean just a walk around the block or a marathon run. Learn your body's limits and don't hurt it.

7. Make a body positive website, blog, facebook, Tumblr or Twitter. Share this list. or make one of your own. Think of other suggestions to love your body. Engage in body positive activities. Start or go to a body positive group. 

8. Don't let anyone else disparage your body. We can tell strangers to fuck off, but maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea for grandma. Tell loved ones gently that you don't like that kind of talk and don't want to hear it again.

9. Don't wear make up or clothes to cover your flaws. Wear them proudly. Even models are heavily made up before shoots. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Change your perfection to realism. 

 10. Give your body a big hug and say that you love it.