I’ve received literally hundreds of e-mails and Facebook message about a new study.  The study looked at questionnaires given four years apart and found that fat people who reported that they had experienced weight-based discrimination were more  likely to be obese than those who didn’t report such discrimination. Other types of discrimination showed no effect on weight.

Some people are using this to forward the message that people shouldn’t shame fat people because it will make us fatter.  Some are saying that the self-reporting used by the study is too weak to support any conclusions – so, I guess, shame away is their message?

As my regular readers know, I’m a very outcome-based activist, and so if this study leads to some people stop shaming fat people because they don’t want us to get fatter, then I’m glad they’ve stopped shaming fat people.  Obviously those who hate fat people for fun, profit, or self-esteem will be unlikely to be swayed by this at all.

But at the end of the day, the fact that shaming us might make us fatter doesn’t matter at all. Shaming fat people is wrong.  It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.  It’s not wrong because it will make us fatter, it would not be right if it made us thinner.  it’s wrong because it’s wrong.  WRONG!.

There is no outcome that justifies shaming fat people.  Fat people have the right to exist in fat bodies regardless of how we got fat, what being fat means, or if we could be thin through some means – however easy or difficult. There are no other valid opinions on this – we have the right to exist without shaming, bullying or stigmatization, period.

If I am being fat shamed then – well intentioned or not – someone is fucking up and I let them know  – well intentioned or not – that they need to stop right the hell now, not because it might make me fatter but because they’re not meeting the level of respect that I require.  You must be this respectful to ride this ride.

How about you don’t worry about whether your shaming us will make us fatter – stop shaming fat people because our bodies aren’t your business. Stop shaming fat people because it’s a shitty thing to do.  How about you take a second from wondering if your fat shaming will affect us – and think about how if affects you.  Is that who you want to be in the world – someone who tries to make someone else hate the body that they live in all the time?  Someone who tries to defend the practice of shaming people “for their own good?”  Someone who puts other people down to make themselves feel better?  Are you proud of yourself?   If not, then stop doing it.  If so, then maybe it’s better if you’re just not around people – at any rate, I’m going to need you to stay away from me.

As fat people we are not obligated to buy into the idea that we owe the world something – weight loss attempts, exercise, wearing dark clothes, lemon juice as salad dressing, hiding our bodies, dating only other fat people etc. – in order to deserve basic human respect.  It’s just not true – that belief is rooted entirely in bigotry and nothing else.  If people are shaming us I think the most important thing is to remember that there is nothing wrong with us and something very wrong with those people.

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I have been going back and forth deciding if I should even post about this here but I’ve figured it was worth talking about at least once, I’ll be back to my normal blog topics tomorrow!

I mentioned on the blog that I had a freak accident that resulted in a very serious neck injury – I lost the use of my right arm for over two months and am still not back to where I was with strength and flexibility.  The neck is better but while it was healing I had almost three months of seriously restricted movement and I felt like I needed a goal – and preferably something at which I have no natural talent.

Then one day I got bored and restless which lead to me Googling terms like 300 pound marathon.  What I found were a bunch of blogs where people had done marathons to lose weight and were devastated to have accomplished neither, and then a blog from a doctor who said that you should never attempt a marathon unless you are within 20% of your “ideal weight”  Thirty minutes later I was committed to the Seattle Marathon, 31 minutes later my best friend, Kel, responded to me e-mail with “I’m in”  and we were off to the races.

The question that people ask most is “You seriously want to do a marathon?!” My answer is that no, I really in no way want to do a marathon, but I want to be someone who has done a marathon and I’m not willing to buy a medal in a thrift store and lie my ass off, so let’s get to training for this bad boy. I’ve given up most of my plyometrics, HIIT, and normal workout routine for a program designed to allow me to walk a marathon in 20 weeks.  I decided to walk it because my first commitment is to More Cabaret and so it is more important to do everything I can to avoid injury than to run a marathon – so I decided to walk.  I’ve posted some things on Facebook and I’m already getting some questions and some crap so I thought I would use this opportunity to clear some things up:

What I am doing:

Attempting to walk 26.2 miles, cross a finish line, receive a medal and a shirt that doesn’t fit, and be able to say that I completed a marathon.  This is really pretty simple.

What I’m not doing:

Trying to prove something to my haters –  there is no point to this, these people are aggressively poor at reading comprehension, and have shown repeatedly that no matter what I write they’ll just make up whatever they want. I would not cross the street for my haters, I definitely wouldn’t walk 26.2 miles for them.

Trying to show that if I can do it, anybody can!  This is never true.  First of all, we don’t yet have proof that I can do it, and when I cross the finish line we will have proof that I can do it once under specific circumstances.  I’m not trying to inspire anyone to do a marathon, or suggesting that I should be an example of anything – I bitch constantly about the training to anyone who will listen, and I once postponed a 6 mile training walk for two days because my ipod stopped working and I was completely unwilling to go that far without music.  (So what I’m saying here is that you may want to pick a different role model.)

Trying to challenge stereotypes.  I am not responsible for people’s stereotypes, bigotry or if they choose to question them in the face of evidence to the contrary.  This is about crossing the finish line, getting the medal and ill-fitting t-shirt and that’s all, if someone chooses to dismantle some of their bigotry along the way it’s a bonus.

Trying to be a good fatty.  The good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy is bullshit, we must stop perpetuating it.  I like doing athletic stuff so that’s what I do – I get to do it and I get to talk about it, but it certainly doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else.  If I liked to crochet or write fiction (instead of being abhorrently bad at them, as I am in reality) I’d do that and write about it and it would be no more or less deserving of praise than finishing a marathon.

Telling everyone so that they can hold me accountable.  I keep seeing this as a recommendation “tell everyone you know that you are running a marathon, tell them to ask you if you are making your training goals.” Maybe it works great for some people but it sounds like a great way to make me want to punch my friends in the face.   I’m fine, I’m not looking for anyone to “hold me accountable.”

A final note – a number of people have suggested that choosing 20 weeks of hell followed by a single day of consolidated hell just to get a medal and too-small shirt is not in keeping with my message that those who are interested in movement should consider doing things that they love.  I want to be super extra crystal transparently clear that NOBODY is ever obligated to do any exercise, and certainly not exercise that they hate, and certainly not this much exercise.  This goes way beyond what I need to do to be healthy – it’s about accomplishing something that I used to think was impossible for me:  finish line, medal, shirt, bragging rights, the end. Wish me luck!

Spoiler alert – I finished it! Read the full race day story here:

My Big Fat Finished Marathon

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I got an e-mail from a blog reader today who was really upset at how often she sees rude, mean, and even abusive behavior used against someone who is arguing for fat acceptance or Health at Every Size.

I certainly get tired of people who’ve, somewhat inexplicably, chosen to spend their time online trying to make sure that no fat person stops hating themselves for even a moment. How did this become their lives?  Did these people wake up one day and say “Oh my god, my Spidey sense is tingling, it must mean fat people are considering not putting up with my bullshit – I must take to the comments section and abuse them before they get all uppity and think they deserve to be treated with basic human respect!”  I’m tired of people who call me profanity laced strings of names and made up animals “Kill yourself you fucking stupid lazy cunt landwhale!”  In the words of DancesWithFat celebrity commenter Yorkie “Hello”? Who the f*ck raised them to speak like that, Andrew Dice Clay?”

I get tired of people who answer my citing of research by calling me names, who substitute ALL CAPS for reasoned logical thought, who act like “everybody knows’ is the same as “scientifically proven”, and who are trying to build themselves up by stepping on me.  I get tired of the people who will argue to the death against the idea that fat people have a right to exist in a fat body, be treated with basic human respect, or make our own choices about our health and well being.  The concern trolls, the regular trolls, the haters, etc.

It helps me to remember that these people are just the latest in a long line of losers.  For example when someone argues vehemently for the idea that you can tell someone’s health by their body size, I remind myself that people used to argue just as vehemently for the idea that the size and shape of someone’s skull could predict personality and character.  We laugh at phrenology now but it sure as hell wasn’t funny to the people being accused being criminals because of their skull shape.

Don’t forget that at various times in history people argued just as voraciously that the sun revolves around the Earth, that heroin was a non-addictive substitute for morphine, that Lysol is a fantastic douche, and being gay was a mental illness and that gay kids shouldn’t be allowed in boy scouts.  Some people are STILL arguing for those things – there are always people who plant their roots deep and wide on the wrong side of history and push as hard as they can against progress.  But progress marches on – past them, over them, or dragging them along.  Sometimes slowly, sometimes in great leaps, but forward nonetheless.

When I get frustrated I remind myself that history is on my side, that civil rights activists are a long line of winners, and that the only thing that I see for me to do is keep pushing forward and never give up.

A while ago I discussed NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance)’s discussion about changing their name to eliminate the word fat.  I recently came across an interview about this with NAAFA’s board chair in which he said something that I found to be highly problematic:

The reason the word ‘fat’ was kept in the structure of our communications was it was an attempt to reclaim the word so it wasn’t seen as a bad word. Unfortunately, that part of the media war has been lost.

We choose to use the word fat to describe ourselves in order to remove the negative connotations normally associated with larger-than-average body size.

I was out for a walk tonight and two  guys were walking toward me conversing about, of all things, the weather.  I smiled and said “hey,” as is my custom, and one of the guys stepped in really close to me blocking my path, stopped, opened his mouth really wide, looked me in the eye and said

FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!

So I stepped toward him, maintained eye contact and said

RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE!

Fair warning – today is a serious swearing day on this blog. If you want to skip it you are totally welcome to come back for tomorrow’s post and we’ll see how that one goes.  Otherwise, read the fuck on…

So anyway, the guy’s friend who had stepped well back, never said a word and we walked our separate ways, them picking up their conversation where it left off, me walking alone which gave me the chance to contemplate the situation. The best I could come up with was – What the fucking fuck was that about?

Was he one of those people who insist that fat people need to exercise but that we must, somehow, not look fat while we do it?

Was he just a run-of-the-mill fat bigot?

What could I have done to make it into a teachable moment?

Then I remembered something that I sometimes forget – It is not my job to make every awful fat bashing moment into a teachable moment.  That person’s behavior was just messed up and my reaction was totally reasonable.  In retrospect I wish I would have said DUUUUUUUUH! Oh well, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

If you are fat in this fatphobic, war on obesity, body shaming, body hating, weight bullying world, there is an excellent chance that something fucked up (or many fucked up things) will happen to you.  Maybe you’ll come up with a snappy retort, maybe you’ll make it into a teachable moment, maybe you’ll stumble over your words or stand there not able to think of anything to say.  All of those are perfectly valid responses to total bullshit, and let’s be clear that these incidences – whether it’s some stranger yelling FAAAAAT! or your Aunt Gertie telling you that you don’t need that second helping of mashed potatoes – are  total, complete and utter bullshit.

It is absolutely not your fault, you do not deserve it, you should not have to experience it ever.  Make no mistake – the fact that something happens all the time, that it has become normalized in our society, does not mean that it isn’t some completely fucked up bullshit.  Seriously.

Perhaps this mantra can help, trying saying it a few times (modified in any way that works for you of course):  The world is fucked up, I am fine.

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Mayor Bloomberg is at it again.  This time he issued an executive order requiring city agencies to promote the use of stairways instead of elevators because “exercise is good for you.”

It may seem completely innocuous, but I don’t think it is.  First of all, this can quickly become ableist – there are people who can’t climb the stairs and if we make stair climbing “good” and elevator riding “bad” we can end up stigmatizing people living with disabilities.  This can be magnified for those whose disabilities are invisible or not immediately apparent.  It can be extra horrible for fat people, especially those with invisible disabilities, since there is added social stigma heaped on fat people who are seen as being “lazy” in public.

Everybody has the right to choose how highly they prioritize their health and the path they take to get there.  Though there are a number of studies that show that physical activity is one of the things that people might choose to help improve the odds of health (though health is never guaranteed and not entirely within our control), there are no studies that say that the movement has to be, or even should be, stairs.

Stairs can actually be a pretty difficult way to get movement in – they can be hard on the knees, hard on the back, hard on the hips, and you can fall down them so there are plenty of people who are interested in doing movement who would be well within reason and common sense to choose some other kind of movement.

I am certain that people should have free access to true information about things that can affect their health.  I am certain that providing a wide variety of movement options that are safe (both physically and psychologically safe) is a positive thing.

After that I think it becomes, at best, a grey area and I believe that “encouraging” movement – in particular a specific kind of movement, or movement that can be observed and judged by others – can end up doing more harm than good, especially among populations who have been shamed for not doing movement, or not being good at movement, in the past. This is exactly why “take the stairs” has no business being an executive order.

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Far too often the world is not built to accommodate fat people. And asking for accommodations can bring up a lot of emotions – stress, embarrassment, shame, fear, anger, guilt. I think that one massive problem is that we’ve been told that asking for accommodations is asking for some kind of favor or special treatment above and beyond what everyone else gets

So often those being asked to accommodate us, and sometimes even those asking for accommodations, feel like this is a request for something “special.”  So when someone needs an armless chair, or extra room on a plane, or clothes in a size that fits them, or whatever, there can be a thought that the person is asking for some kind of special treatment.

That’s just not true.  When a fat person asks for furniture that accommodates us or enough room to sit on a plane or plus sizes (or, as I like to call them, sizes) this is not asking for something special – it’s asking for what others already have.  If the other patients at your doctor’s office walk into the office and sit down, but you can’t because the chairs all have arms and don’t work for you, then when you ask for an armless chair you’re not asking for something special – you’re asking for what the other patients already have.

The problem isn’t that you are asking for a chair that works for you, the problem is that your doctor’s office didn’t think to order some armless chairs in the first place.  I believe that people who are designing spaces – especially spaces like public transportation and healthcare – should constantly ask themselves “How can I accommodate everyone who might want this service?”  That includes people with disabilities,people of all sizes/heights, people with cultural and language differences, people who are left handed, everyone they can possibly think of.

Let’s be clear that we aren’t saying “hey, I need this special thing” we’re saying “I’m going to do you the courtesy of asking you for something that you should have already provided but didn’t.” How about instead of saying “damn these people and their ‘special requests’ to be provided with what we’ve already given to the people it’s cheapest and easiest for us to accommodate”  people start asking “How can we become radically hospitable? Who can we better accommodate?”

As a queer woman I’ve often heard people try to recast gay civil rights activism as a request for “special rights.”  For example the argument (if you can call something this irrational and clearly bigoted an argument) goes that straight couples getting married is a regular right, but gay couples getting married is a “special right” because it’s a right that has been successfully stolen and kept from us thus far by an inappropriate use of power and privilege. As if being successful at bigotry justifies its continuation. Having a chair that I can fit into if I’m thin is a regular request, having a chair that I can fit into if I’m a fat person is a special request because the people who bought the chairs did so while pretending that fat people don’t exist, or while being so bigoted against us that they decided we shouldn’t have a place to sit down.

When a fat person says “I need a seat on the plane that I can fit into” or “I need a chair that works for me” or “I want some clothes that fit” they aren’t saying “I need something special” they’re pointing to the person beside them who can walk onto the plane and fit into a seat, sit easily in the chairs provided, and shop at more than 3 online stores, and saying “I’ll have what she’s having.”

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Dear Fat Kid,

I hope that you are surrounded by people who understand that you and your fat body are amazing. If you’re not, then my first thought is to tell you that your body is amazing and that bullies are just people who are insecure or desperate to feel important. You are and they are but, if you’re anything like me, that won’t comfort you very much.  I want to tell you that “it gets better” and in my experience it does get better when you have the opportunity to choose who you hang around.  But the truth is that we live in a fatphobic society and I would rather give you tools to maybe make some things better now and maybe change the world in the future than suggest that you just hope things will be less crappy later (even though they likely will.)

This is what I wish someone had told me when I was a fat kid:

First of all, don’t believe everything you hear. There is not a single study where a majority of fat people lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off long term. There are plenty of studies where people improved their health through healthy habits without losing weight at all.  Almost everyone who diets ends up as fat or fatter than when they started.  “Weight Loss is possible for everyone” is to today what “The sun revolves around the Earth” was in Galileo’s time.  Something that people, including “experts” and high ranking government officials, believe fervently to be true, suggest that it’s heresy to disagree with, and for which they have absolutely no evidence basis.

Don’t take my word for it, read the research yourself – try to find a study where, five years after dieting, fat people were thinner and healthier than when they started. Research from the University of Minnesota found that “None of the behaviors being used by adolescents (in 1999) for weight-control purposes predicted weight loss[in 2006]…Of greater concern were the negative outcomes associated with dieting and the use of unhealthful weight-control behaviors, including significant weight gain.

It helps me to remember that people are basically brainwashed when it comes to this and will often defend it with religious fervor.  How much you want to educate other people around this or work on changing it is entirely up to you, to me it’s helpful to remember that I’m not the first person to have to weather the storm of “everybody knows.”

But here’s the thing, the way that fat people are treated by our society is abhorrent and wrong.  Even if I’m wrong and everyone can become thin, the way that fat people are treated is still abhorrent and wrong.  There is no rational argument that says “Those people could look different than they do, and until they choose to do that it’s perfectly cool for me to treat them like crap.”

Suggesting that fat people should lose weight to avoid this treatment is totally and completely wrong on every level – the problem is not fat people, the problem is people who stigmatize fat people, and the solution to social stigma is ending social stigma, not weight loss.  You deserve to be treated with basic human respect. You have the same right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness that thin people do, and that should include the ability to grow up without the First Lady of the United States waging war on you for your body size, and the Boy Scouts keeping you out of the Jamboree.

In short, the world is screwed up, you are fine.

I don’t know about you, but people lied to me when I was younger.  They told me that if I cared about my health I would diet to get thin, they told me that diet behaviors were the same as healthy behaviors and that thin is the same thing as healthy, they told me that exercise should be miserable or it didn’t count.

If you are interested in being healthy, then you are in luck because you can pursue health outside of weight loss (though the diet companies who make $60 Billion a year in profits may not want you to know.)  It turns out that, though health is multi-dimensional, not entirely within our control and never guaranteed, the best way that we can help our odds for health is to pursue healthy habits.  Things like getting enough sleep, trying not to be super stressed, moving out bodies, and eating around the intersection of what nourishes our bodies and tastes good to us, and the situation that we’re in.

It turns out that movement tends to be great for most people’s health- even if we really enjoy it.  You can try out lots of different stuff – I know people who hated exercise and thought that they were totally un-athletic until they found their “thing”  – hoopdance, Olympic powerlifing, skateboarding etc.  I also know people who just don’t like exercise and that’s cool to – some choose to still do it for the possible health benefits and some don’t and both choices are valid.  At any rate, gym class is not the end all and be all of exercise and may actually be the worst possible example.

If you want my advice (and it’s cool if you don’t) I would suggest being really grateful to your body for everything that it does for you (blinking, heartbeat, breathing, waving, smiling, pushing your wheelchair, hugging people whatever.)  I would suggest doing what you want to do now, and not putting it off until you’ve changed our body size.  And I would suggest being angry at people who suggest that the path to health starts with hating your body, or who don’t treat you or your body with the respect you deserve. I would suggest searching on the internet for Health at Every Size and Size Acceptance and looking for places to connect.

People come in lots of different sizes for lots of different reasons and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you.

So that’s it for now, except to say good luck, I’m here for you if I can help.

~Ragen

Sometimes I just need to put into perspective the whackadoodle stuff that people tell me would make me healthier.  For today’s blog I thought we would play a little game of “what’s really healthier”. It’s sort of like the S.A.T.s…maybe we should call it the H.A.Ts:  two choices, you decide which one is truly unhealthy:

Seeking out movement that I love doing or thinking of exercise as a punishment for not being thin

Mindful eating based on internal cues or eating 500 calories a day and being injected with hormones extracted from urine

Feeling like a success because I did my healthy habits or feeling like a failure because those habits didn’t lead to weight loss

Eating whole foods or eating low-fat and non-fat versions that are full of a chemical shitstorm of replacements for whole foods

Eating to nourish my body or eating to starve it in the hope that it eats itself and becomes smaller

Doing the best I can with the body that I have now or getting my stomach amputated in an effort to make my body do what it will not do naturally

Appreciating my body for how amazing it is or hating my body because it doesn’t meet a culturally arbitrary standard of beauty

Here’s my perspective: Health is not a moral, social, or personal obligation.  People can choose to prioritize and pursue health at whatever level they want but that neither guarantees it nor makes them better than people who don’t choose to prioritize or pursue health. Health has both physical and mental components.  Hating ourselves is not healthy.  Most of what gets sold to us by the diet industry is the exact opposite of healthy. Weight loss isn’t the same as healthy habits, thin isn’t the same as healthy, and appreciating your body is never a bad thing.

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The Boy Scouts of America have decided to discriminate against Scouts based on BMI.  If your BMI is deemed too high, you aren’t allowed to participate in their Jamboree because they assume you’re not physically fit enough.  The policy is seriously screwed up and not, in any way, based in evidence, science, or logic.

First their explanation of why to use BMI as a screening tool:

The CDC suggests using a body mass index as a screening tool for obesity; it is easy and only requires knowing your height and weight. The BMI is a governmental calculation based on nationwide statistics that take into account variables that include geography, age, and sex.

It’s easy – if you know someone’s height and weight then you know exactly how physically fit they are.  Wait – no, you really don’t – all you know is their height and weight which are not the same as health or physical fitness.  Also – it is a governmental calculation?  Shouldn’t we be using something that we can at least pretend is a medical calculation? As the brilliant Jon Robison said at a talk I was at, it’s not that BMI is a poor indicator of health, it’s that BMI is not an indicator of health.   If they are using the exact same BMI ranges for scouts of all ages and adult staff and from all over the country, how is it possible that it takes into account age and geography?

So here’s the policy:

The Jamboree Medical Staff will review all applicants with a BMI of 32.0–39.9 and consider jamboree participation based on  1) health history, 2) submitted health data, and 3) recommendation of the applicant’s personal health care provider. For applicants with a BMI >31.9, a recommendation of “no contraindications for participation” by the applicant’s personal health care provider does not necessarily guarantee full jamboree participation. The jamboree medical staff will have final determination of full jamboree participation.

The national jamboree cannot accept for participation any applicant with a BMI of 40.0 or higher. (emphasis theirs)

Why are they doing this?

Anyone who is obese and has multiple risk factors for cardiovascular/cardiopulmonary disease would be at much greater risk of an acute cardiovascular/cardiopulmonary event imposed on them by the environmental stresses of the Summit. Our goal is to prevent any serious health-related event from occurring, and ensuring that all of our participants and staff are “physically strong.”

So based on a ratio of weight and height the Boy Scouts can tell if an applicant is “physically strong.”  and if they have multiple risk factors for cardiovascular/cardiopulmonary disease.  My BMI is 48.7 so thank god I have the Boy Scouts to tell me that I dropped dead of a heart attack in my dance rehearsal this morning. Come to think of it, maybe I should ask the Boy Scouts if blogging is too strenuous for me?  At 48.7 it sounds like they think I should just lie down.

Note that there is no action to be taken for underweight applicants, even though eating disorders among boys and men are increasing – if they’re going to make sweeping generalizations about health and physical fitness based on weight and height, shouldn’t they at least do it across the board?  Never mind that BMI doesn’t take muscle mass into account, so using it as a measure of “physical strength” seems questionable. Never mind the mountain of evidence that shows that fitness is a much better determinant of health risks than body size.  Never mind that:

I seriously hope that a scout who lives in a city or state that prohibits weight-based discrimination is able to sue, or that fat scouts get some activism together.  This is so, so wrong.  This is why, though I am adamant that nobody is obligated to pursue fitness in any way, I think it’s important for fat athletes to tell our stories, so that fat little Boy Scouts and fat adult Scout leaders who want to go on hikes or be athletic aren’t discouraged by the bigotry that they face in an organization that’s supposed to empower them.

If you’re interested in talking about fitness without weight loss talk or weight stigma, or checking out awesome pictures and videos of fat athletes, you can always check out the Fit Fatties Forum – it’s a place for people of all sizes, shapes and abilities to talk about fitness from a weight-neutral perspective, it’s totally free to join!  www.fitfatties.com

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