I’m often asked what I think the first steps are to pursue health.  First, to be clear, I don’t think that anyone is obligated to pursue health or healthy habits.  I think that the decision of how highly to prioritize health and the path to take is an intensely personal one.  I am also aware that, while there are things that are shown to help us play the odds when it comes to our health, there are never any guarantees.

Still, many fat people have been mislead to believe that dieting is the only path to health and that weight loss behaviors are the only type of healthy behaviors if you’re fat.  Once they learn that weight loss hardly ever works and, even when it does it isn’t shown to lead to better health, people can feel completely lost.  I remember being really scared in the time between learning the truth about dieting but before I learned about Health at Every Size that there was nothing I could do to help my health odds.  Even when I learned about HAES I wasn’t sure where to start.

I’ve noticed that with a diet mentality the focus is often on what we are going to give up (I’m giving up this type of food, this drink, this food group etc.),  and doing what we hate (Not a morning person?  You are now!  Not a runner?  You are now!)

I’ve seen people be much more successful doing the exact opposite – making it an additive process and going after the “low hanging fruit” first.

There are any number of things that have been shown to improve our health – more sleep, less stress, fruits and vegetables, movement, water, and that’s just a start.  We are never going to be able to do all of them all of the time.

So if you want to put more focus  on your health and you aren’t sure where to start, consider adding more of something that you already like.  If you love veggies, add a couple more servings in a day.  If you hate veggies, leave that alone for now and pick something you do like/can do – get an extra hour of sleep, do some movement that you like, drink some water, hit a pillow with a tennis racket to relieve some stress.  Consider laying off the sweeping declarations for now (I’m going to drink x ounces of water every day for the rest of my life! Five servings of fruits and vegetables each day or BUST!) and just make a decision in this moment to have some water or eat an apple. Celebrate every victory and have a ton of compassion for yourself.

Obviously this isn’t the only way, but for me part of rejecting the diet mentality was rejecting the idea that the path to health was paved with giving things up and doing things that I hated. I think there’s absolutely a better way and I think it’s worth it to find it.

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There’s a picture going around Facebook that suggests that the world is unfair because fat people get medical care but same sex couples can’t get married.  Even if I wasn’t a fat queer woman who can’t get insurance or get married, this would royally piss me off.  I’ve been looking for some response more eloquent than “fuck this bullshit” and this is the best I’ve got:

They are our bodies.

They are not a representation of greed or capitalism.  They are our bodies.

They are not pictures without heads to accompany yet another OMGDEATHFAT article.  They are our bodies.

They are not stand-ins for our health and well being.  They are our bodies.

They are not for you to judge. They are our bodies.

Do you get it?  They are our bodies. So back off.

Our bodies are far too valuable to be treated like a car whose worth is lowered because of some wear and tear.  They are far too astounding to be a metaphor or a political statement.  They are far too complicated to run on the same formula used to fuel a lawn mower. They are far too profound to be reduced to a ratio of weight and height.  And they are far too amazing to be judged by anyone.

Because they are our bodies..

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Prospect High School has created a new PE program wherein students are tested on their physical fitness twice a year.  Those who get a “high” score get to pick which activities and sports they want to do in gym class.  Those who get a “low score” are forced to into separate classes where they do mandatory cardio, like running laps, three times a week.

Some of the students have called the lower class “Fat Gym.’  The stigmatizing of fat kids in is horrible, and is just the tip of the iceberg of horrible on this one.

Unless their goal is to make sure that some kids develop a lasting hatred of exercise, I submit that this program is a terrible idea.  I am not against movement programs in schools.  I do think that they should be created with primary goals of fostering high self-esteem, body confidence, and creating something on the spectrum of not being driven completely away from the entire concept of movement, to developing a lifelong love of movement by the time they get out of school.  Where on that spectrum any kid lands will depend on the kid. 

Of course to do that we would have to accept some basic truths:

• Not every kid is going to excel in gym class and that’s ok.
• Not every kid is going to be interested in gym class and that’s ok.
• It’s very possible that the kids who don’t score well on the fitness test fall into one or both of the above categories, and forcing them do cardio while their friends play games isn’t likely to move them out of either category (which isn’t necessarily a worthy goal to begin with.)
• As history is written by the winners, so gym class is often taught.  Many gym teachers are people who were/are naturally athletic and they can fall prey to the dangers of confusing their experience to everyone’s experience.

We also have to avoid making the mistake of believing that if most of the fat kids are in lower gym, that means that their fat is to blame.  Remember that fat kids are given the message from a very early age that they are lazy and un-athletic.  They may not be asked to play by their peers, they may not be chosen for teams by adults, when they are on teams they may be automatically placed in the least athletic role without being given a chance to develop athleticism.  In this way prejudice can be made into reality.  Looking at a kid’s body size tells you nothing about their athletic ability or how much they like or dislike athletics, and all kids should be given every opportunity to find movement they enjoy while scrupulously avoiding shame or stigma around the concept of movement.

I’ve seen the argument that if you struggle with reading you are put in remedial reading, and so if you struggle at gym class you should be put into remedial gym class.  Here’s the issue with that:  Reading and movement are not equivalent.  Reading is a specific skill, movement/exercise is a concept.  To get the benefit of reading 6th grade books, you typically have to read at a 6th grade level.  To get the benefit of movement kids simply need to raise their heart rates for a suggested 60 minutes a day. How they do that or how “good” they are at it compared to others their age is completely immaterial.   Winning at dodgeball, hell, being any good at all at dodgeball, is not a requirement for kids to gain health benefits from movement.

My suggestion is this:  Create several options for kids that change every six weeks, with walking being a constant.  So this 6 weeks it might be basketball, dancing, dodgeball, and walking the track.  Next 6 weeks it might be lifting weights, yoga, soccer, and walking the track etc.  I’d love to see two sets of sports – one competitive and one that is just about participating and having fun (maybe we could redirect some of that $60 Billion that we give to the diet industry every year to pay for it?) 

Even if one argues that none of those changes are possible, we can do WAY better than punishing kids who don’t score well on a fitness test by making them run laps while their friends play games.  Any school that has created a PE program which kids are calling “Fat Gym” needs to go back to the drawing board, very quickly.

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Those who have the audacity to suggest that fat people are human beings who deserve to be treated with basic human respect tend to be the recipients of  plenty o’ hatemail.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I often feel like my haters aren’t reaching their full potential, so I thought I’d help out.  Here are 5 quick and basic tips to improve your online fat hating:

1.  Lose and Loose – learn the difference.  Lose is a verb that means to suffer the loss of.  Loose is an adjective that means the opposite of tight or constrained.  They are not interchangeable.   Here’s a sentence to help you out:  If one more person e-mails to tell me I need to loose weight, I’m going to seriously lose my temper.

2.  Speaking of spelling, cunt is spelled C-U-N-T.  The number of times I’ve been called a fat cnut is absolutely staggering. Apparently I’m not the only one, Clever Pie covered this issue in their fabulous song ‘Thank You Hater.”  I’m just saying that if you’re going to use your precious, limited time on earth to send me an e-mail calling me names, at least take the extra three seconds to spell check that shit.

For the record I don’t feel any need to apply my grammar/spelling criticism consistently. I make plenty of grammar and spelling errors myself. If someone is trying to engage in actual conversation then I don’t care at all about their grammar and spelling.  If someone is writing me for the purpose of spreading hate or attempting to make me hate myself, then I reserve the right to be offended that they didn’t at least take the time to use the spelling and grammar check.

3.  Calling me a landwhale.  I don’t mind this per se, I’ve even seen some pretty decent photo shop combinations with my body and a whale’s head, I am always impressed that someone took that kind of time on me.  The thing is, there are fat animals that live on land and I feel like they’re not getting their due.   There is just no need to make up animals when you could call me an elephant, hippo, or rhino.  Or, go the extra mile and do some research (I mean, do you want to be just an adequate hater or do you want to really excel?)  Did you know that the Formicium giganteum was an ant that was HUGE by ant standards – larger than a hummingbird. So you could call me Formicium giganteum or, since we know that spelling isn’t your strong suit, just call me Formi!

4.  If you are going to make an impassioned and/or indignant assertion that you are just doing this to help me (incidentally I think that I’ll know when you’re being helpful because I’ll actually feel helped, but that’s a blog for another day), if you want to try to make the claim that you are somehow doing this for my own good, you might want to take a pass on mocking me for doing the very things you say I need to do – find a way to keep yourself from photo shopping a whale’s head onto a picture of me exercising, somehow find the restraint not to post videos of me dancing and then mock them.  I’m only telling you this for your own good, since otherwise people are going to assume that you are a massive jackass.

5.  Finally, the way that you are able to e-mail me and say “Ragen, You are a fat landwhale cnut who needs to loose weight,” attaching that picture you spent so much time photo shopping, is because I put my e-mail, picture, and name on this blog.  Even knowing that I’m going to suffer abuse from bigots, I put my name on what I write.  So if you’re going to sign that e-mail swolebro or whatever anonymous thing you use, then you are a coward.  You can fuck right the hell off, at the very least until you locate your guts.

So there it is, a little dose of fat hater community service from danceswithfat.  Those of you with your own haters know that there are many more areas for hater improvement, but I thought we’d start with the basics today and leave the rest for another time.

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We’ve started watching a television show called “I’m Alive” about people who have survived wild animal  attacks.  It’s the kind of show where they mix interviews with re-enactments.  I became aware of something super cool – in the re-enactments they really work to use actors who look like the actual people including their weight.  So if someone in the actual situation was fat, so is the actor who plays them.  I’m seriously excited about this, since I rarely see people who look like me represented on television.  I even e-mailed Animal Planet to thank them (comments@animalplanet.ca).

While I’m excited and I celebrate the victory, it also brings the issue of fat representation into sharp relief for me. I read a quote today from Junot Diaz: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” That is exactly what is happening to fat people right now.

Fat people rarely see ourselves represented in the media as anything other than a body without a head meant as a cautionary tale.  Fat people are as different as any group of people who share only one characteristic and yet we see almost no evidence of that in popular culture, and in many cases we see the exact opposite.

First and foremost is the War on Obesity.  I think the clearest way to see the issues with the war on obesity is to notice that a common and popular way for politicians to gain favor among voters is by promising to eradicate everyone who looks like us.  There are major problems with the way that the “cost” of fat people is calculated but the biggest problem is that the cost is calculated at all.  There is nothing ok about finding a group of people who can be identified by sight, calculating their supposed cost on society, and using those calculations to call for the eradication of everyone who shares that single physical characteristic.

Then there is the myth that showing fat people being successful at anything other than weight loss is “promoting obesity.”  This is among the most ridiculous things that I’ve ever heard.  As if someone will see me dancing and think “I wish I could dance like that.  I guess I’ll gain up to 300 pounds and then go from there.”  It’s insulting to my years of hard work and training, and it’s insulting to others’ intelligence. Like it’s the new V8 commercial:  millions of thin people, who see the same 386,170 negative messages a year about fat people, will see one of us being successful in some way, smack their foreheads and say “I coulda been fat!” The end result of this is that fat people are robbed of both representation and role models.

And so we are made monsters – blamed by shocking shoddy research for everything from workplace costs, to healthcare costs, to fuel usage; unwilling combatants in a war by which the government seeks our eradication, preyed upon by a $60 Billion industry that sells snake oil in the promise of weight loss that will cure our social stigma by working the wrong end of the problem.

I think it’s fantastic when someone outside the fat community reads my work and gets something out of it, sometimes I get e-mails from people who tell me that my blog has helped them identify their own fat bigotry and I’m always happy about that.  My focus, though, is that fat people knowing and remembering that we have the right to exist, that hating our bodies is not compulsory, that we are not required to be complicit in our own eradication, that we are the best witnesses to our experience and that we can demand to be treated with respect.

Sometimes I wish that I could put on some sort of fatty tent revival,  I’d call it Fat, Fat, Fat Fest and travel from city to city and set up a huge tent, gather all the fatties that I can and have speakers, poets, and all manner of fat performers who help fat people know they have options, to let them see people who look like them being happy and successful (with their heads attached), to see people who look like them who love and appreciate their bodies and reject our culture’s fat bigotry and claim and own their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  You know, if I start now it could be my project for next summer….

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I got an e-mail today about the blogher Fat Talk survey results.  I would first like to say that I wish they would say “negative body talk” instead of fat talk so as to avoid piling more stigma onto people who are fat.  But that’s another blog.  For now, I’m just going to refer to it as negative body talk.

I wish I were more surprised by the results.  Seventy-four percent of women, across all age groups, engage in negative body talk.  When asked why women engage in fat talk, answers included:

Because most women are not happy with their bodies.

In some ways, it’s bonding over a common interest. We all have things we don’t like about our bodies.

It’s the social norm. Sadly, it’s just part of life.

That reminded me of the blogger who is supposedly a health and beauty expert who, discussing her feelings toward her body said “And I’m female so I’m never happy!”

While a case could be made that negative body talk  is currently a part of life, let me suggest something:

It doesn’t have to be a part of life.  We do not have to talk badly about our bodies.  Ever.  We can simply stop.  Maybe we’re not in a place where we love our bodies yet, maybe we aren’t interested in the concept of loving our bodies.  But our bodies push air in and out of our lungs, blink our eyes, beat our hearts, and we do not have to talk badly about them as part of some horrible social norm.  Many of the functions of our body are autonomic, but the way we talk about them is not.

We are each absolutely allowed to speak poorly of our bodies if we choose. But when we buy into the belief that negative body talk is some sort of unavoidable part of life, we are buying into a lie that has been foisted upon us and perpetuated by those who profit from it, whether it’s monetarily, socially, or emotionally.   They are asking us to hate ourselves for their benefit.  We do not have to oblige.

Of course this is easier said than done.  We have been and continue to be absolutely indoctrinated with the idea that engaging in negative body talk is natural and normal, and that sucks and it’s not fair.  But we are each the only person who can decide how we talk about our bodies.  Women have everything that we need to end negative body talk- we can simply refuse to do it.  We can refuse to talk badly about our own bodies, and we can refuse to talk badly about other people’s bodies. Nobody is obligated to do this, but it is an option that is available to all of us.

Of course it may take some, perhaps a lot, of work to kick the negative body talk habit- especially if its become ingrained.  But I submit that it may be well worth the effort.   I understand that for some people positive body talk feels like bragging so I’m not even suggesting that – that’s a blog for another day.

All I’m suggesting is we simply stop talking badly about our bodies.  I’m suggesting that we can become conscious of our thoughts and words about our bodies and interrupt and redirect them. In the beginner version you just stop yourself and start thinking or talking about something else.  In the intermediate version you might replace them with a simple thank you to your body.  In the advanced version you state your intentions and then do either the beginner or intermediate version.

Here are sample scripts to get you started:

Beginner Version:

Ugh, I just feel so ugl….how about that local and/or college sporting team?

Tell me about it Pam, my stomach..Hey I meant to ask, did you see Michelle Chamuel on The Voice last night?

God I totally hate my… hey look, bundt cake! (Points for the knowing the movie reference)

Intermediate Version

Ugh, I just feel so ugl… hey body, thanks for breathing, you are kicking ass at breathing and I really appreciate it!

Tell me about it Pam, my stomach… Wait, have you ever thought about how much our bodies do for us?  I think they deserve some love.

God I totally hate my…actually, I really appreciate my butt because if I didn’t have a butt where my butt is supposed to be, that would be very inconvenient.  So thanks body, for having a butt where my butt’s supposed to be, rock on.

Advanced Version

Ugh, I just feel so ugl… No, I’m not doing this anymore.  How about that local and/or college sporting team?

Tell me about it Pam, my stomach…actually, I’m going to interrupt myself because I’ve decided that I don’t want to talk badly about my body anymore – it deserves some love.

God I totally hate my…fuck this body hating bullshit, rock on body.

Seriously, you could make the decision, right now – right this second – that you are done with negative body talk. And then you can make it happen.

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The rules about workplace wellness programs under the Affordable Care Act were released jointly by the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury. The include provisions to charge employees up to a 30% penalty (sometimes couched as an “incentive”) if they fail to meet a” specified health-related goal such as a specified cholesterol level, weight, or body mass index.”

There are a couple of obvious issues.  BMI and weight are body size measures, not health measures (there are healthy and unhealthy people of every weight and size); and, body size, cholesterol and other measures are multi-dimensional and not entirely within our control.

And it’s not like they don’t know.  At a briefing sponsored by the Alliance for Health Reform and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, panelists were refreshingly honest that there is no proof of the financial or health improvement value of these wellness programs.  In fact, a Rand Corporation study on wellness programs that was  actually requested by HHS found:

• No significant reductions in levels of total cholesterol
• Insignificant cost savings
• People typically quit smoking for the short term only
• Almost no reduction in emergency rooms or hospital cost or use
• Participants lost an average of only 3 pounds in 3 years

So, employees are going to be penalized for failing at programs that have been shown to fail in a study that was requested by the people who created the penalty structure.  Charming.  I wish for the good old days when the government was just going to give every fat person a pony.

But the absolutely most ridiculous bit for me was the quote by Troyen Brennan.  He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of pharmacy chain/pharmacy benefits manager for CVS Caremark. He said “We’re not sure what works. There’s got to be peer-reviewed data and it’s simply not there…[CVS Caremark is] embedding experiments in all of our wellness programs…The annals of health care are full of things that seem like a good idea but show no effect.”

I know you’re thinking “that makes a lot of sense Ragen, why would that upset you?”  It’s because CVS Carmark bragged about implementing a so-called wellness program in which employees must go to a doctor to get their weight, body fat, glucose, cholesterol, and blood pressure measured, and submit those measurements to a third party healthcare company. They are required to sign a form saying that they are giving this information voluntarily, but if they don’t “volunteer” they are charged an extra $600 a year by CVS. The CVS policy states “Going forward, you’ll be expected not just to know your numbers – but also to take action to manage them.”  If Troyen Brennan knows that “peer reviewed data” is necessary, why in the hell is he bragging that they are conducting poorly controlled, non peer-reviewed “experiments” that are funded by the subjects (also known as typically lower income workers.)

When I did a piece for iVillage on Michelin’s corporate wellness program that fines employees up to $1,000, I contacted the Employment Equal Opportunity Commission to see if this is even legal.  Justine Lisser, Senior Attorney-Advisor for the EEOC informed me that  “While normally the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] would prohibit an employer with 15 or more employees from asking questions about disabilities or requiring a medical exam (like a blood test to measure cholesterol), an exception is made for voluntary wellness programs…[But] if an employee fell outside some of the metrics imposed by the employer due to an underlying disability — for example, if a person needed to take medication for a psychiatric disability that caused weight gain — it might violate the ADA for the employer to penalize that individual for not meeting certain benchmarks.”

According to the HHS,  “The final rules also protect consumers by requiring that health-contingent wellness programs be reasonably designed, be uniformly available to all similarly situated individuals, and accommodate recommendations made at any time by an individual’s physician based on medical appropriateness.”

Which might help in a world where fat people aren’t prescribed weight loss to cure everything from strep throat to broken bones by doctors who don’t know the difference between body size and health and often carry a serious personal prejudice against us.  But I’m sure they’ll be super happy to sign our “Please don’t charge me more money for existing” permission slip.

Penalizing people for their body size sets a precedent that it’s ok to charge people more because they share a single physical characteristic.  Penalizing people for their health ignores the complexities of health, and since their tends to be a strong link between lower socioeconomic status and lower income, the burden of these programs is likely to be shifted to those who are least able to afford it.  Also, and this can’t be said enough, it doesn’t work.

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You may have already heard about Kelly Gneiting.  He is a 400 pound trained sumo wrestler who just finished his second LA marathon in 9 hours, 48 minutes.  This was an improvement of more than 2 hours over his previous time. And it was no ordinary marathon – according to reports it was extremely cold and the rain has been described by some of the participants as “torrential”.  He is also a hero of mine and so, with all the talk about fat athletes going around, I thought I would re-post a piece.

I was searching for stories about him today, and I came upon a runners forum discussion about him (WARNING:  reading this may make you want to reach for the brain bleach).  Maybe I’m naive, but I was honestly shocked to find the comments largely unsupportive.  Since I have a rule about not seeking out people who disagree with me and commenting on their blogs, I thought I’d respond here:

“At his size, this just doesn’t seem like any activity is healthy.”

You have to love a lose/lose scenario.  “I think you’re too fat, but I don’t believe that you should move your body because of your epic fatness”.  Seriously?  To me this always sounds a whole lot like “I like feeling superior to fat people, so stay where you are fatty and I’ll keep putting you down to make myself feel better”.

“I guess it’s hard for me to comprehend how a body in that shape could PHYSICALLY handle the stress when it has to deal with the stress of keeping his body going on a normal day.” and “is running in that poor of physical condition dangerous?”

You don’t know what shape he is in.  You only know how much he weighs.  THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.  Since you’re writing this comment after the marathon, you could certainly have chosen to respect the fact that he is an athlete of the same caliber as anyone who finishes a marathon.

“At 405 lbs he probably has a very difficult time just walking”

Not that difficult – since he just finished a 26.2 miles race.  The truth is right in front of you, how are you missing it? Please re-evaluate your assumptions or, you know, fuck right the hell off.

“The energy expended in his bid to have others qualify/validate him would be better spent improving his circumstances and his physical health.”

He ran a freaking marathon – why do you think that you should judge his circumstances or health?  Also, let’s be clear – I won’t speak for other fat athletes but when I use my platform to point out that I don’t fit people’s stereotypes, it’s not a bid for their validation.  It’s a courtesy to them.  I’m not asking for their approval,  I am doing them the favor of providing them with an opportunity to rethink their stereotypes.

A blog by Rick Chandler at NBC Sports said “But taking half a day to finish a marathon, and walking the great majority of it, is not really a sports accomplishment, is it? It’s just kind of a long walk to the store.”

He.  Finished.  A.  Marathon.  How dare anyone think that they have the right to dole out the title of “athlete” or try to belittle his accomplishment?  According to several sources I looked at, only 0 .1% – 1% of people in the US have ever completed a marathon.  I don’t care how much he weighs, or how long it took him – he is in ELITE company and Rick Chandler can go straight to hell.

Of course, nobody is obligated to be an athlete, but I hope that these kinds of attitudes don’t discourage people from pursuing movement options that they love or want to try. And if you identify as an athlete then I believe you and I support you –   athlete to athlete!

If you are interested in a weight-neutral discussion about fitness (for people of all sizes and abilities) you can check out the Fit Fatties Forum at www.fitfatties.com.

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I discussed before my love for Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”.  One of the stanzas has come back to me recently as I’ve been dealing with some trolling.

Something that I’ve found in my experience with trolls is that people who revel in their bigotry will stoop to any level to keep the people they are oppressing down.  I’ve dealt with this in many ways but most recently I’ve seen it around a piece I wrote about doing a 5k with my dance team.  As usual, many of my haters experienced a failure of reading comprehension.

The piece was about being an athlete, doing an athletic endeavor unathletically.  Specifically I wrote “I struggled with not being “good” at the 5k.  I benefit from a tremendous amount of athletic privilege, and the athletic things that I do are typically things at which I am naturally talented and have put many, many hours of hard work so I’m used to being among the best.  I’m not naturally good at this type of running and I didn’t train hard so of course it’s not a shocker that I wasn’t very good.”

In the hands of the haters it became “This fat bitch claims that she is an athlete because she walked a 5k.”  There are now, literally, entire forums online devoted to repeating and commenting on the “fact” that I claim to be an athlete because I walked a 5k.  Since I have no insecurities about being an athlete, I also have no need to try to make it an exclusive club, so I think it’s absolutely fine for people to claim to be an athlete for walking a 5k.

The issue here is that the point of the article was that I am an athlete (national champion dancer) who was doing something out of my realm and, because of outside circumstances, not even to the most athletic of my ability. These people’s sense of self is so frail that they are just desperate to discredit me,  to make sure that I don’t upset their bigoted world view, even if they have to twist my words or make things up to do it.  Which bring us to the Kipling that’s been running through my head:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools

Fat people face tremendous stigma in our society and those of us who choose to fight back against the onslaught of bullying and oppression will almost certainly face a backlash from those who are benefiting from the situation.  Among those things will be having our words twisted by those who are willing to do whatever it takes to keep us down.  The only solution I know is to just keep rising up.

I think that fat people, whether or not they consider themselves fat activists, are truly underestimated.  In the face of a tremendous amount of bullying and stigma, in the face of the government recruiting our friends, families, and employers to fight a war against us, in spite of the intense oppression that tries its best to crush us, that we keep living our lives is a testament to our incredible strength.

In a world where waking up as a fat person and not hating yourself is considered an act of rebellion, I’m proud to be a rebel.  In a world where refusing to feed my body less food than it needs to survive in the hopes that it will eat itself and become smaller is considered a crime against society, I’m proud to be a criminal.  In a world where loving my body is an act of revolution, I’m proud to be a revolutionary.  They can say what they want, they can twist my words as they will, but they will not keep me down.

Like the blog?  Here’s more of my stuff:

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The 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

In a recently blog I discussed how Julianne and I were planning to use a trip to Austin to test Southwest Airline’s new policy which is that people who “need two seats” can purchase both of them in advance and then they will refund the extra seat after travel, but that “Customers of size who prefer not to purchase an additional seat in advance have the option of purchasing just one seat and then discussing their seating needs with the Customer Service Agent at their departure gate. If it is determined that a second (or third) seat is needed, they will be accommodated with a complimentary additional seat(s).”

We decided to test the second half of the policy and not buy the extra seat in advance because we don’t believe that fat people should have to have twice as much money as thin people at the time of ticketing for many reasons.  Several commenters asked that I let everyone know how it went so here it is:

Julianne is recovering from a knee injury and when we got to LAX they hurried to find a plus-sized wheelchair while I checked us both in.  They proactively offered us a second seat and pre-boarding and we were on our way.

It was all good until we got to Austin.  They did not have the proper size wheelchair for us and the head of Southwest Customer Service said “We don’t have a bigger wheelchair” with a finality that suggested that this declaration would somehow make Julianne suddenly able to sprint through the airport to baggage claim with her injured knee.  We explained that they needed to do something – check with the wheelchair vendors for the other airlines, call durable medical equipment rental companies etc. because we needed a plus-sized wheelchair, we requested a plus-sized wheelchair, we were promised a plus-sized wheelchair, and we were not about to spend our vacation on the Southwest Airlines Jetway.

While the representative worked to find a solution a member of airport staff walked by us with a plus-sized wheelchair.  I ran to catch up with him and he said that he couldn’t help us because he contracted with a different airline. After more confusion and more work by the customer service representative we had a chair that worked.

We had a great time in Austin (thanks to CJ and Josh for the incredible hospitality) and when we got to the airport for our return trip, Southwest had someone waiting for us with the proper wheelchair and a Julianne’s ticket said “Handle with care.”  The extra seat and pre-boarding were as easy as they had been on the trip out.

Every flight attendant and Southwest employee was polite, professional, and kind.

I have had people criticize me or using Southwest and suggest that I should never use them again because of the massive mistakes they made in the past.  I can certainly understand the sentiment and support whatever decisions people make as they are the boss of their flying underpants.  The reason I decided to give them another try is what I blogged about in depth a couple of days ago:  that they responded to the criticism and worked to improve their policy and service.  If I don’t let go of their past transgressions and patronize them when they make changes, then what incentive do they have to respond to complaints? And what message does that send to the next business whose policies and practices we challenge?

I will admit that I have some envy of people for whom the hassles of flying are limited to flight delays and lost luggage, and not whether they’ll be left clinging to the last shreds of their dignity by their connecting flight.  It also makes me aware of, and grateful for, the luck that I have in that I do fit in a single seat (primarily a function of the fact that my fat goes forward and back instead of to the sides.) Still, I feel like we’re making progress and the more the airlines know that fat flyers are here and not going away, the more progress we can make.

Like the blog?  Here’s more of my stuff:

Become a member: Keep this blog ad-free, support the activism work I do, and get deals from cool businesses Click here for details

The 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