I just read the story of Andi Viveros.  Andi won the title of prom queen in her school.  What makes an already special story more special is that Andi is, according to the story, the first ever transgender prom queen. Despite the fact that she clearly identifies as female and obviously goes to great lengths to present as a female, the article referred to her using male pronouns.  The comments were worse and I got progressively more angry until I read a comment that said “You are a man. Deal with it.”.

I lost it.  I started yelling alone in my house.

Who are these people?  How dare they?  Gender is such an intensely personal thing and who do they think they are to say that they know better than Andi what gender she is? As if she needs strangers on the internet feeding their over-exaggerated senses of self-importance by acting as if they are better witnesses to her experience than she is.

Then it dawned on me: These are probably the same people who call me a liar when I talk about my workouts or what I eat.  The same people who assert, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, that all fat people could lose weight if they just tried hard enough, and are, in fact, obligated to do so or deserve the penalty of constant stigmatization and shaming.

Who appointed these people as the body judges?  Was there a ceremony?  Was it nice?

I call shananigans.  Our bodies do not exist for other people to pass judgment on them.  Our bodies are amazing and they exist for whatever we decide to do with them. We are each in charge of how we feel about our body and what we do with it. We can decide to give that power away and choose to accept someone else’s feelings about our body as true and correct, but it’s always our choice to do so.

You don’t have to understand what it means to be transgendered, but it doesn’t hurt you to respect transgendered people and their right to be witnesses to their own experience.  If you think that being transgendered is wrong then you should probably not seek out sexual reassignment but beyond that it’s not really your business and what is there to be gained by telling someone that you know more about their gender than they do, except to sound like an over officious idiot?

Likewise, the fact that you don’t understand how I can be fat and healthy, or fat and happy with my body, or a fat athlete or whatever doesn’t matter.  You don’t have to understand – luckily for you, it’s not your job to make decisions about my body, decide whether or not I’m a competent witness to my experience, or tell me what is best for me.  You get to make those choices for you, and I’m here to support you.  I’m all about giving options and respecting people’s choices.  You are the boss of your underpants and I am the boss of mine and never the underpants-twain shall meet.

So please feel free to make decisions about your body and leave Andi Viveros and me, and everyone else who is not you, alone.

Today’s post is just for fun.  This has nothing to do with self-esteem, body image, or health at every size. It has to do with how I FREAKING HATE when people text in the theater. There is a local group of theaters in Austin called “Alamo Drafthouse”.  In addition to showing new releases and serving food and alcohol they do all kinds of cool kitschy things.  For example, they do a Lord of the Rings butt-numb-a-thon wherein they play all of them in a row and serve all the hobbit meals.  They do Spaghetti Westerns with all you can eat spaghetti. They are just a cool place and what makes them cooler is that they also have a very strict no talking or texting during the movie policy.  They do a whole PSA about it before every movie.  Their most recent one was created using a voicemail from a customer who got thrown out for texting.  It makes me so happy, I’m sharing it with you all.  They are playing this before all of their R rated movies this weekend.  Just another reason that I love Austin. (Just for the record, I am not affiliated with Alamo in any way, except that I like going to the movies there!)

Possibly NSFW  due to language:

If you want to read more about it, here is the post in their blog.

I’m going to learn Spanish. My plan is to start by berating myself as often as possible for not already speaking Spanish. I’m going to hang up pictures of people who speak Spanish and every time I look at them I’m going to tell myself how much better they are than I am. As I learn Spanish I’ll constantly focus on the things that are difficult for me and use that inner voice that is now trained to berate me at every possible opportunity to remind me that I’m not good enough at speaking Spanish and probably never will be.

Sound like a good plan? How do you think that’s going to go?

Then why do we do that when we try to get healthier?

If you read this blog regularly then you know that Health at Every Size is my thing. My path to health is to practice healthy habits and not pay attention to the scale. I chose this for a lot of reasons that I outlined here already. But I understand that there are a lot of people who want to try to change the size and shape of their bodies and I respect that choice. This isn’t about whose is right or wrong, it’s actually about our shared experience.

Consider that if you want your body to be smaller, or healthier, or stronger, or more flexible, or whatever, you could start by appreciating where you are now.  I’m guessing that your heart is beating and you are breathing.  That’s a nice place to start. Thank your body for that, appreciate it for a minute. You don’t even have ask, your body just does that for you all day every day.

If you want to be stronger, how about starting by appreciating the strength that you have now.  Can you lift a gallon of milk?  Great!  Did you just move up from 5lb to 10lb dumbells?  Kick ass!  Now what do you want to do?

Maybe stop comparing yourself to other people.  How is this helpful? Your body is your own, nobody else has a body that’s exactly like yours.  That, in and of itself, is incredible.  We’re not cookie-cutter chairs from Ikea, we are completely unique.  One of a kind.  I’m staring to sound a little bit “after school special” right now but seriously, so many things in the world are mass produced and you are a complete original.  That’s something that truly is special and worthy of appreciation.

Notice the messages that can seep into your subconscious.  When you started to read the title of this post did you automatically think I was going to say “Shed those unhealthy pounds”?  That’s not accidental.  The messages that come at us about our bodies are often crafted to create fear and self-loathing.  Then the message creator will try to make us believe that buying their product will cure the fear and self-loathing that they created.  If someone is trying to make you feel bad about yourself, ask yourself if they are trying to sell you something (or just trying to put you down to feel better about themselves) and then you can make your decisions consciously.

I believe that success breeds success so anytime I have any little bit of success I will not hesitate to do a butt shaking happy dance. If I accomplished this thing or that thing, then it makes it that much easier to tackle the next goal on my path.  When I fail, I remind myself that it’s a temporary state and promptly learn the lesson and forget about the rest as soon as possible. That works so much better for me than hating myself and reminding myself about what I haven’t accomplished yet.

Does anybody remember the movie Cool Runnings?  It was based on the first Jamaican Olympic Bobsled Team. In it one of the characters is asked what Cool Runnings means and he says that it means “Peace be the journey”.  Since they are a bobsled team I take that not to mean that things will be smooth, slow and easy, but that you can still be at peace through the difficult parts.  Anytime we want to change or improve it involves a journey, there’s no getting around that.  You can be happy or miserable on the way, that’s your choice.  For me it’s definitely Cool Runnings!

I hate to be a cliche but I’m going to start with a dictionary definition today.  Diagnosis – the act or process of identifying or determining the nature and cause of a disease or injury through evaluation of patient history, examination, and review of laboratory data.

That’s because that would obviously be a terrible idea.  Except it’s exactly what modern medicine does now.  They take a ratio of weight and height and then start making guesses about people’s health or lack thereof, eating habits, physical fitness,  etc.  Many fat people, including me, have even had doctors prescribe medication that we didn’t need based on just our size.

Maybe that could be justified in 1832, but considering the actual diagnostic tools available to us now, looking at someone’s body and making guesses is just completely unnecessary.  This isn’t just about fat people either.  Obviously if we gave every fat person medication for type 2 diabetes that would be incredibly bad medicine since we know that every fat person doesn’t have Type 2 Diabetes and therefore obesity is not an automatic affirmative diagnosis for the disease  What we often forget in our hurry to assign medical conditions to fat people is the tremendous disservice we are doing to all of the thin people who do have type 2 diabetes but aren’t being tested for it because their doctor thinks that their body size indicates that it’s impossible.

To be clear, health not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, entirely within our control, or guaranteed under any circumstances. The prioritization and path to health that we choose is an intensely personal decision and public health should be about making health options available to the public, not making fat people’s bodies the public’s business.

Confusing body size with actual health issues: bad idea when lay people do it, worse idea when reporters do it, worst idea ever when trained medical professionals do it. Don’t do it.

Check out the Fat Activism Conference, it’s going to be epic! Three days, 40 speakers, 30 workshops, teleconference style so that you can listen on the phone or computer from wherever you are, recordings so you can listen live or on your own time, only $39 with a pay-what-you-can-afford option to make it accessible to as many people as possible.  Check it out!

Book Me!  I give talks all across the country about self-esteem, body image, health and wellness for people of size and more, and I’d love to speak to your organization. (I’ll be in Northern New York and Central Pennsylvania in the next couple of months if you are in those areas and would like to add an event to those trips.) You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

Like this blog? Consider supporting my work with a donation or by  becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do (like answering hundreds of request for help and support every day) isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (THANK YOU to my members, I couldn’t do this without you and I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

Thanks to reader Holly for the suggestion for this blog.

You may have heard about the drug trial of giving fat pregnant women the drug Metaformin to see if it keeps babies from being fat. Or something.

According to Pharmaceutical National News:

Women who are overweight give growing babies too much food and, as a result, both can experiences subsequent health issues. Those involved in the metformin research trial will examine whether the drug can control these food transfer levels.

What with the who now? I’m definitely not an expert in this but that’s not how I remember infant nourishment working.  So I googled “How does a fetus get fed?”  The answer from http://www.laboroflove.com was:

While the baby is in the womb he receives his food and nutrients from his mother. The baby is connected to the placenta by the umbilical cord. This cord carries nutrients straight to the baby and nourishes him for the time he is in the womb.

That’s what I remember.  So when they say “Women who are overweight give growing babies too much food” does that mean that they assume that every overweight woman overeats?  If the problem is that mothers who overeat give their fetuses too much food then, even if the intervention works, it should be prescribed to women who “overeat” by whatever definition they are using – not women of a certain size.  If I’m following this correctly then once again the lazy medicine of substituting weight for health or behavior means that some large women will receive the medication even though they eat “normally” and some thin women who “overeat” will not be given the medication, thus exposing their babies to all of the “risk” that this treatment is supposed to “solve.”

But The Imperfect Parent elaborates:

Metformin reduces blood-sugar levels, which is passed on to the baby

Ok.  So this is for women who have high blood sugar levels? Problematically, not all fat women have high blood sugar levels, and plenty of thin women do. Once again, if the treatment is indicated for pregnant women with high blood sugar levels, then shouldn’t we be testing their blood sugar instead of their height/weight ratio?

I’m also very concerned about how this will give additional momentum to the trend of putting babies on diets.  You read that right.  Babies. On. Diets.

Britainny and Sam Labberton were convicted of starving their baby out of fear she would become fat, because her father is fat. After the baby gained only 1 pound in her first two months of life and her bottle was found to contain traces of laxatives they faced criminal mistreatment charges. According to court documents after the infant was placed in foster care and gained weight, her mother’s reaction was, “Oh my God, she’s fat … I have a fat baby.” Hopefully somebody ELSE has that fat baby and this lady has a long jail term.

Parents are putting their kids on low-carb diets, low calorie diets, highly restricted diets, gluten free diets despite no sign of gluten intolerance.  They are putting water and skim milk in their baby’s bottles instead of formula. They are electing not to breastfeed because breastfeeding is known to cause weight gain in babies.

We keep hearing that in the last 20 years rates of childhood fatness doubled.  Well, between 1999 and 2006 the number of children under 12 years old hospitalized for eating disorders doubled.

Children under 12.  Under Twelve.  UNDER TWELVE.  With Eating Disorders.  If we’re going to do the “won’t somebody think of the children” thing then can we please think of these children too?

I’m also concerned that our obsession with childhood thinness (not health, thinness) is not only causing kids to have a lifetime of issues with their own body image and with food, but is also producing a generation of kids who erroneously conflate weight and health and are judgmental and inappropriate and going to end up getting a smack down in this blog someday.

I remember when kids would talk innocently about fat people:  “Mommy, that is the fattest lady I’ve ever seen”.  Just like a little kid to make a plain true statement.  Not a value judgment, just statement. The kid could have just as easily said “Mommy, that flower is blue”.

But now, with Michello Obama encouraging kids to wage war on their fat peers, it seems that the tides may have turned:

A commenter on another post here wrote:

When I was volunteering in my kindergartner’s classroom, and a little boy said, “Your belly is proof that you’ve eaten too many sweets.” The first time was when a kindergarten-age Girl Scout said, “Miss L? I think that when you were young, maybe you didn’t play sports or eat the right kinds of foods.”

The commenter asked me what I would say and my response was “Nope.  People just come in different sizes.  Just like in nature there are big dogs and little dogs, big cats and little cats, big tress and small trees, there are people who are bigger and people who are smaller.  I’m a big person”.

But what I want to say is “Where are you getting this from? Go find whoever told you it was ok to speak to someone like that and bring them to me so that we can have a little come to deity meeting.”

Let’s be honest:  Even if the statistic about childhood ob*sity is true (and there is a lot of controversy about that), nobody knows why.  A hundred years from now we could find out that it was due to something in the air and nothing could be done to stop it.  We could find ourselves in another ice age and discover that the fat people are the ones who survive.  Nobody knows.

So before we start starving babies, maybe we could take a step back and consider the idea that health is both mental and physical.  So not only does a Health at Every Size approach of focusing on healthy food and behaviors make a ton more sense than medicating a fetus, it also has the benefit of creating children with a healthy relationship to food, exercise and their bodes.  There is plenty of research that shows that starting to diet early and dieting repeatedly can cause irreparable harm and changes to the body.  I haven’t seen research on it but  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think dieting in the womb is just a bad call.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again (and again, and again):

Weight and Health are two different things and cannot be freely substituted for one another.  Health is multi-dimensional and includes things in our control and things out of our control such as genetics, environment, access, stress and behaviors, and being healthy is not the same as being thin. There are healthy and unhealthy people of every shape and size.  Therefore, if you want to be healthy doesn’t it make much more sense to focus on healthy behaviors instead of making our bodies smaller? I say yes, including and especially for children, babies, and fetuses.

Book Me!  I give talks all across the country and I’d love to give one to your organization. (I’ll be in Northern New York and Central Pennsylvania in the next couple of months if you are in those areas and would like to add an event to those trips.) You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and even testimonials here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

Like this blog? Consider supporting my work with a donation or by  becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do (like answering hundreds of request for help and support every day) isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (THANK YOU to my members, I couldn’t do this without you and I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

Fat Activism Conference.  Three days, 40 speakers, 30 workshops, teleconference style so that you can listen on the phone or computer from wherever you are, recorded so you can listen live or on your own time, only $39 with a pay-what-you-can option to make it accessible to as many people as possible.  Check it out!

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

As the argument goes, the Law of Thermodynamics proves that if you burn more calories than you consume you will lose weight.  I blogged about this in a general, non-science-y way here.  Today I’ll give you the exciting science to prove my point.  Stick with me though, I promise to make this interesting.

That’s the argument that I hear most often when I tell people that I eat well and workout a lot and am still fat. They call me a liar  because the science behind the law of thermodynamics, they say, is simple, complete and irrefutable.

First things first, there isn’t a “Law of Thermodynamics”. There are four of them (the first one is actually called the zeroth law which you gotta love).   Since these people aren’t concerning themselves with the entropy of a crystal at absolute zero, I’m going to assume they are referring to the first law.  Actually I assume that they are phonetically parroting something they heard from someone else and that they wouldn’t know one of the laws of thermodynamics if it bit them in the ass but I digress.

The first law states that in a thermodynamic process the increment in the internal energy of a system is equal to the increment ofheat supplied to the system, minus the increment of work done by the system on its surroundings. It is often simplified to “energy can neither be created nor destroyed”.

I do not disagree with the law.  But, note the first four words “In a thermodynamic process..” What I disagree with the gross misrepresentation of the human body as a perfect thermodynamic process.  I have four issues with this:

Issue 1:  It assumes that there is no option for calories other than to be burned or stored

Carbohydrates work in basically that manner. Fats and proteins don’t because they have other things to do in the body.   Protein does everything from building muscle cells to repairing cell membranes.  Fat transports non-water-soluble nutrients around, insulates neurons, and can also be used to repair cell membranes.  Fat and protein can also be broken down and recombined into whatever the body needs.  Eat a steak and your body might use it to make a cell membrane. That delicious alfredo sauce might be used to produce insulate neurons in your brain.    I don’t know why I remember this, but my physics teacher told us that fat and protein are to the body what wood is to us.  You can burn it for fuel, but you can also build a house with it or make it into a piece of paper.  At any rate, the calories in the proteins and fats used in this manner are neither burned nor stored. So we have our first hole in the calories in/calories out equation.

Issue 2:  It asserts that Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is Easily Predictable and Stable

Your BMR is the number of calories that you would need to stay alive for 24 hours if you spent the day still and in bed – just what would be required for breathing, heart rate, etc.

It is typically calculated using the Harris-Benedict equation.  James Harris was a botanist who freely admitted that his equation failed to take into account large amounts of muscle mass or the additional calories provided by excess body fat and that it was thus much more effective for individuals at, or very close to, an ideal body weight.

It is well documented that BMR responds to decreased caloric intake by slowing down.  So if two friends have the exact same  Harris-Benedict score, but one has been dieting;  then the dieter will actually burn less calories at rest than his friend.  Said another way, if these two friends eat the same number of calories in excess of their BMR score, the dieter will gain more weight than the non-dieter. Again, in this case calories in/calories out just doesn’t hold up.

Issue 3:  It requires that the body be a perfectly efficient calorie burning machine

Not so much. The Second Law of Thermodynamics explains about entropy and how systems are never 100% efficient. [Edit:  As a commenter pointed out entropy only applies in a closed system which the human body is not for the reasons mentioned below.  What I meant to say and didn’t was that the first law also applies to a closed system and as such people who think that the first law applies to the human body would have a difficult time weaseling out of saying that the second law applies.]  Regardless, the human body is even more complicated because it’s ability to burn/store/use nutrients affected by things like genetics, environment, hormones, previous caloric restriction and subsequent reduction in BMR, hydration level, environment, chemicals etc.

Issue 4:  If we wanted long term weight loss using this theory then we’d have to eventually turn to starvation

If we wanted to use calories in/calories out effectively, knowing what we now know about entropy and how decrease in caloric intake causes decreased basal metabolic rate, we would just have to keep decreasing our calories and increasing our exercise until eventually we would be following disordered eating patterns.  It would be the only way to stay under our ever plummeting BMR and eat less than we burn. Perhaps this is why 95% of intentional weight loss efforts fail.  The body releases weight at first but then the damn science catches up to us and not matter how hard the people who’ve attended a physics amateur hour try to yell to the contrary, they will never be able to out-science the actual laws of thermodynamics and the complicated human body which is, I swear to god, not a lawnmower.

Bonus Issue:  Your friend who eats everything in sight and never gains weight.

Everyone knows somebody like this.  I have a number of friends who eat way more than I do, exercise less and stay rail thin. Why do these people get to credit their metabolism but I’m just fat lazy excuse-making slob if I suggest that my metabolism may be as slow as theirs is fast?

So next time somebody tells you that it’s just calories in/calories out, consider telling them that you’ll be happy to talk to them about it once they have recited the laws of thermodynamics, defined the Harris-Benedict Equation and discussed its specific limitations, and explained your friend who eats a ton and doesn’t gain weight.

Shape Magazine has just become hip to the studies that show that fat women have a more difficult time getting hired and are paid less than their thin counterparts.  They point out that this doesn’t happen to men and they acknowledge that it’s not fair.  But then they start doling out advice:

“It’s okay to enjoy a doughnut, just don’t do it at work.”

Oh noes – call the food police we have an PDF EWF (Public Display of Fatness:  Eating While Fat)

Simply ask yourself: What can I do to make tomorrow healthier than today?”

This won’t help – I’m already very healthy and I’m still fat.  So what you mean is:  what can I do to make tomorrow thinner than today?  While I’m at it, what else can I do that has no bearing on my job performance that will make my picture fit your frame?  Get a nose job?  Change my hair color?  My skin color? How can I help support your bigotry and change myself to suit you? Just say the word, it’s all for you baby.

“Just say, ‘I’m concerned. Is this is a factor? I know my weight is an issue and I’m working on it.’ “

Unless I’m applying for a job that actually has something to do with the size of my body my weight is NOT an issue, social stigma is the issue.  So how about this instead:  “I’m concerned because studies show that fat women aren’t hired as often as their thin counterparts and are paid less if they are hired.  I know that bigotry and stigma can be an issue and I know it’s something people have to work on. Obviously I would never want to bring my talent and creativity to a bigoted, short-sited, aesthetics-obsessed, unethical company.  This company would never do that, right? Of course you’re hiring based on ability to to the job and not skin color, body size, or other superficial things, correct?

As I say all the time, I believe that people’s choices about their bodies should be respected so if you want to lose weight I’m here to support your choice.  I also know that not having a job is scary and I would never, in any way, cast disparagement on anyone who does whatever they believe they need to do to provide for themselves or their family. That’s not what this blog is about.

However, I also acknowledge that if we want change where this is concerned, somebody has to stand up to this.

If you are in a position to hire people obviously I’m looking at you. I hope to god that you wouldn’t turn someone down because of their skin color or because you didn’t think they were pretty or handsome.  By the same token I hope that you wouldn’t pass on a qualified candidate because of the shape of their body.

If you are looking for a job consider bringing this up in the job interview.  Obviously my scripting above is over the top but I think that some of the weight bias might be subconscious and bringing it to light may be just the thing to destroy it.

No matter what you decide, understand that IT IS NOT YOU!

Remember that the people who are spreading nasty rumors about fat people being poor employees or costing the workplace billions are people who stand to profit from spreading these untruths.

Your size doesn’t say anything more about your work ability than the color or your skin or the style of your hair. This in incredibly bigoted and unfair.  The word I’m looking for here is bullshit and we deserve better.