I refuse to be weighed in at the doctor’s office.  There is no medical reason to weigh me in – I haven’t had unexplained weight changes, I don’t need medicine that is prescribed per body weight, so I don’t need to be weighed.

While I don’t think that weighing people is a medical intervention, the doctor does and therefore, like any medical intervention, I’m well within my right to refuse. If they had a good reason (ie: we have to dose this medication by weight) I would consider it. But since they just want to weigh me so that the can suggest that I try to change my weight – which is asking me to do something that nobody can prove is possible, for a reason that nobody can prove is valid, I’m out. For years this has been no problem, they say “step on the scale” and I, politely and firmly, say “no thank you” while I keep walking, slowing slightly to let them catch up after I pass them so that they can lead me to the exam room.

But recently something weird has started happening. When I refuse to be weighed the person asks me something like “do my mind if I make my best guess.” The first time it happened I was so surprised that I said the first thing that came into my head which was “This is not the State Fair…no you may not guess my weight.” She was taken aback and she immediately dropped it.

It was so weird that I did some digging. It turns out that insurance companies and Medicare have started to pay for something called “Intensive Behavioral Therapy for Obesity” In order to charge you, you must have a BMI over 30. BMI (Body Mass Index) is nothing more than a ratio of weight and height. Though it’s become misused as one, it’s not – and never has been –  a health measurement of any kind. It’s just your weight in pounds, times 703, divided by your height in inches squared.

Here’s where the guessing comes in. In order for doctors to get paid for “obesity counseling” they have to have your BMI on file. So if you refuse to be weighed, they simply guess the weight that they need to get paid.

Obviously this is crap, and not just because guessing people’s weight like you’re guessing  the number of jelly beans in a jar is exactly as medically relevant as it sounds. But more to the point, these doctors don’t have any idea how to create long-term weight loss. There isn’t a single study of any intervention that they could prescribe, that has been shown to lead to long-term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of participants, and that weight loss is often less than 10 pounds. Once again, they would be better off just giving all fat people ponies (with the possible exception of those who are allergic.)

So what do we do? Every fat person gets to decide how to deal with this each time it happens. We shouldn’t have to deal with it at all, and we get to do whatever we have to do to get the medical care we need. That may include educating our doctors, lying to them, or placating them by letting them make up a weight to make a bullshit math calculation that they will use to get paid for giving us information that is useless at best, and most likely harmful.

Here’s some scripting that you might use. By way of a disclaimer, we have the right to refuse treatment, but doctors in most cases have the right to refuse us as patients. Unfortunately, there can definitely be consequences to fighting for our rights to be treated without weight stigma, so we have to take that into account when we decide how to respond.

Here are some options:

Per my rights to refuse a medical intervention, I refuse to be weighed, I refuse to allow you to guess my weight, I refuse to have a BMI calculation made, and I refuse any type of obesity counseling. Let’s focus on what I came in here for.

No, you may not guess my weight. Please just write “patient refused to be weighed and refused to allow me to guess their weight.” I’m happy to sign something if you need me to.

You can try asking them “why do you want to weight me?” or “Is this so you can bill my insurance for obesity counseling?” if they say yes, consider saying something like “I’ll submit to this if you can show me a study where this counseling has led to significant long-term weight loss for a majority of participants.” (Remember, no such study exists, so this might take awhile.)

Just continue to say “No thank you,” while walking past the scale.

If you decline, or don’t receive, “obesity counseling” it might be interesting to check and see if your doctor charged your insurance for it, and if they do then promptly report them.

Again, this shouldn’t be happening. People of all sizes should be able to receive competent, unbiased medical care. Nobody should have to prep for a doctor’s appointment like they are memorizing lines for a (literally life or death) audition. Unfortunately, that’s not something that fat people can always access, so we have to do way more to get even close to the same level of care. Fatphobia kills, fat activism is the cure for fatphobia.

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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

 

 

Recently I witnessed a conversation where two people were bonding over their hatred of their own bodies. I said nothing, because nobody asked my opinion and it was over immediately (so I didn’t need to remove myself from the situation or create a boundary.) But luckily I have the blog where I can write about it.

Bonding over body shaming. I’m not talking about bonding over body shaming other people (that’s for sure bullshit, it’s just bullshit for a different post,) I’m talking about bonding over body shaming ourselves. I’m sure we’ve all heard it, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely been a part of it in days past. It goes like this:

“I hate [insert body part]”
“Ugh, me too…and my [body part] is way worse than yours for [bullshit beautystereotype reasons]

Sometimes more body parts get brought into the mix.

“Ugh, my [body part] is so [negative thing]!
“At least your [body part] is better than my [different body part.]
“Ugh I hate my [that new body part you just mentioned] too! It’s just so [quality that is supposed to be negative.]

Before someone freaks out in the comments – you are allowed to do whatever you want with your body – including hating it, talking negatively about it, and bonding with other people about the hating via the use of negative talk. My goal here isn’t to be the boss of you, but to make the case that we might want to knock this the fuck off. Also, I want to acknowledge that this can be made more complicated for those dealing with intersectional marginalization related to things like disabilities, chronic illnesses and/or pain, body dysmorphia, Trans and Non-binary experience, racism, ageism and more.

We all live in a society where the diet and beauty industries work hard to steal our self-esteem, and sell it back to us at a profit. (With eternal thanks to the brilliant Courtney Hanneman for that phrasing!) In a world where the stereotype of beauty is completely digitized (where not just almost every photo but even videos and movies are retouched – frame by frame – so that the people in the photos and films don’t look like the final versions of the photos and films,) this is an extremely profitable business model.

From the youngest of ages, we’re told to spend tons of time, energy, and money to climb the hill of beauty and thinness. But it is, by design, a Sisyphean task. You know that, right? You know that, no matter what we do, no matter how many times we say “I just want to fix [this one thing] and then I’ll be happy,” the diet and beauty industries will try to make sure that never actually happens. They want us to be climbing that mountain our whole lives – trying to look older while we’re young, trying to look younger while we’re older, trying to be thin not just our whole lives, but worried about leaving a thin corpse. Meanwhile they keep raking in mountains of money.

Now, you are free to believe that trying to render yourself as close as possible to the stereotype of beauty is “self-improvement.” In fact, you’re allowed to do it for whatever reason you want to. But we don’t have to. And we certainly don’t have to do it out loud in a way that perpetuates dangerous diet culture.  If we want to move away from buying into beauty stereotypes and then disparaging the only body we have, we have some options. I try not to be too hard on people, because we all live in a world that constantly encourages us to hate our bodies, so in this case (where someone is using body shame as self-deprecation,) I try to be gentle, but also set boundaries, and make sure that they know that there are, in fact, options here.

Someone says: “I have a big ass.” You can insert whatever body negative is happening
You say:
“I know, right! Big asses are so awesome!”
or
“Me too, I love having a big ass.”
or
“I think asses of all sizes are fantastic.”

Someone says: “Blah blah blah body hatred blah blah blah.”
You say:”Sorry, I’m doing a thing where I don’t talk badly about my body or anybody else’s.”
or
“Of course you can talk about whatever you want, but I just don’t do negative body talk. I’m happy to talk about something else though.”
or
“I wish we lived in a world that didn’t teach us to hate our amazing bodies.”

Sometimes people will push back and I’ll combine the two:
Them: I hate my big ass.
Me: I think asses of all sizes are fantastic.
Them: Oh, other people’s asses are ok, I just wish mine was smaller.
Me: I wish we lived in a world that didn’t teach us to hate our amazing bodies.

Again, people are allowed to think and say whatever they want about their bodies. How we respond will depend on our relationship with the person involved, and if we don’t know them we have to realize that telling them to feel differently about their bodies may be unwanted (and may be coming from a place of privilege if their feelings about their bodies are affected by things we don’t experience such as chronic pain, chronic illness, disability/ableism, and/or Trans and Non-binary experience/transphobia.)

Body love is never an obligation, but is ALWAYS an option and we do have the right to set boundaries around what they say to us, and how we engage with people who engage in negative body talk. The way we feel about our bodies affects every area of our lives, and so we can give our bodies our full-throated support, and refuse to engage in any conversation that questions the value of bodies.

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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

 

We are all living in a culture where fatphobia and weight stigma are the norm. Many of us live in countries where our governments spend millions, even billions of dollars to wage war on fat people, a huge part of which is to convince everyone (including fat people) to stereotype, stigmatize, and oppress fat people. So if we have negative views about larger bodies, that wouldn’t exactly be a galloping shock.

In order to counteract this, we need to always be doing our own work around weight stigma (internalized or otherwise.) It’s important to mention here that the more privilege we have, the more responsibility we have to do this work, and when it comes to weight, privilege is relative. I have less privilege than someone who weighs less than me, and more privilege than someone who weighs more than me. This includes privilege in terms of everyday interactions (like how likely it is that a doctor will want me to amputate my stomach to address a problem that thinner people would be given a far less risky intervention for) as well as things like whether the airline or movie theater will try to charge me double for the same product, or if I’ll be able to fit in the roller coast etc.

Here are three questions to help you get started:

Do I engage in negative body talk?

If so, stop. Stop engaging in negative body talk of any kind – whether it’s overt (“she’s way too thin, she needs to eat a sandwich” or “at that weight he’s obviously not healthy”) or subtle and said as if it’s a “compliment” (“She has the perfect body, we hate he,” or “you lost weight- you look so good”) We can choose to never put someone else down to make us feel better: Even if they’ll never know,  it still usually ends up effecting us negatively in the end. Talking badly about someone else’s body is just never the way to go. No, not even in the situation you’re thinking of right now.

Here are some tips to stop engaging in negative talk around your own body.

Here is a way to address negative talk around other people’s bodies. 

How do I feel about bodies of different sizes?

This can start by asking yourself something like “What assumptions do I make about people based on their body size?” but we weight stigma is intersectional so we can use this opportunity to also address things like healthism, ableism, racism.

Racism is structural and underlies everything in our society, and Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size have always had issues with racism and lack of representation, so these intersections are everywhere. If you are not a Person of Color, seek out and read what People of Color are writing on the subject. Some places to start are this piece by Sonya Renee Taylor (and The Body Is Not An Apology in general,) this one by Ashleigh Shackelford, and this one by Donyae Coles.

Ableism is something like feeling more judgment or negativity about a fat person using a mobility device than a fat person who runs 5ks. Or judging a fat person who uses the escalator or elevator instead of the stairs. Again, please seek out and read what disabled people/people with disabilities are writing about this. You can start with this post from ThisIsAbleism and this piece by Renee Martin.

Healthism can look like feeling differently about a fat person who doesn’t engage in what you consider “healthy habits” than about a fat person who does. (Beware good fatty/bad fatty thinking.)

If you find yourself saying “It’s ok to be fat as long as…” stop talking and click here immediately.

It’s also helpful to look at other cultural issues – do you think a thin woman who can eat a ton of food is awesome and sexy, but a fat woman who eats the same food is disgusting and lacks self-control. Do you see a thin man in sweats as “laid back” but a fat man dressed the same as a “slob?”

It’s ok to be fat, period.

Become aware of your thoughts. Again, we live in a society that is sizeist, ableist, healthist, racist and more, so if you have these thoughts it’s not surprising, it’s also no excuse. Resist the urge to get caught up in feeling guilty about it (since that doesn’t help anyone) and move right on to fixing the problem.

Again, the first step here is to become aware of your thoughts. Then challenge them – ask yourself where you got this idea, recognize that other people’s bodies are yours for the judging. Consider creating a slideshow for yourself with pictures of bodies about which you currently have judgments. Go through this slideshow at least once a day and challenge your judgments, preconceived notions and prejudices.

How do I feel about the concept of weight gain for myself?

I was once in a conversation with a therapist who works in eating disorder treatment. It went like this:

Her: I really appreciate your work. Teaching my higher weight clients to love their bodies is such an important part of my work and I recommend your blog all the time.

Me: Thanks, I’m really happy to be able to support the work that you are doing.

Her: And I have to say, I’m so impressed by you. I don’t think I could ever be happy at your size.

Y’all, I literally heard a record scratch in my head.  This is complicated. On the surface, it can be difficult to be excited about the idea of joining an oppressed group, but the problem with fatphobia is fatphobia – and not fat bodies, and so the idea that someone doesn’t want to be fat(ter) than they are is still an element of fatphobia (with possible shades of ableism and healthism) It’s something that we need to work on if we are truly doing self-work around our own fatphobia (including and especially if you are a thin person, especially if you are doing Size Acceptance and/or Health at Every Size work.) Not to mention that body sizes can change over time for lots of different reasons.

Here again, the exercises above – like the slideshow – can help you to get over some of your issues with fatphobia. Then just spend some time meditating on the idea of living your best life in a fat body – as negative ideas come up, challenge them and if they are rooted in fatphobia, ableism, healthism or other marginalizations let that help you get even more angry that these oppressions exist, and more committed to dismantling them.

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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

Those who mistreat us often try to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions by trying to create a false equivalence between their mistreatment of us, and our speaking out against that mistreatment. So when someone says “Stop oppressing me. You are harming me.” the bigot will try to respond with something like  “Why are you shaming me? What about my beliefs? Where’s your tolerance, huh?”

This is patently ridiculous, but it can still trip up otherwise rational critical thinkers because they DO want to be tolerant, and they DO want to be better people than their bigots. So let me be perfectly clear – “I want to oppress you”  and “I don’t want to be oppressed”  are not two reasonable sides of the same coin. They are not both legitimate viewpoints. Trying to oppress someone is not a viewpoint, it’s an act that harms someone.

Do not let some troll tell you that calling out bullies makes you a bully. Calling out people for harming others is not remotely the same as perpetuating shame, stigma, bigotry, bullying or oppression. Calling out bullies makes you a hero.

This comes up in professional situations as well. I’m commonly asked how to call out fat oppression that happens at conferences, online spaces etc. without shaming the person doing the oppressing. While I’m often willing to give the benefit of the doubt that the person doing the harm is doing it unintentionally, I believe that our primary concern MUST be the well being of the people they are harming, and not the feelings of the person doing the harming.

So the first time I see someone engaging in oppressive behavior – if it’s not blatant and I feel they should get the benefit of the doubt – I’ll take that person aside or shoot them a private e-mail. But if their behavior doesn’t stop, then neither will mine, because they are harming people and I’m not going to sit idly by while that happens. So I’ll continue to insist that they stop harming people, I may enlist other people to do the same, I may start a petition or a letter-writing campaign. The difference between activism and bullying is intent  – bullies intend to harm people. Activists intend to stop bullies from harming others.

This is summed up pretty neatly in something called The Paradox of Tolerance, coined by philosopher Karl Popper in 1945:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

There is a beautiful article by Parker Malloy that further explains the concept and shows how it applies to the current situation in the US.

Basically, the assertion that we have to tolerate people who are actively trying to harm us is best stated as “Please participate in your own (and other people’s) oppression by allowing me to oppress you (and other people) with absolutely no pushback.” That’s bullshit and you don’t have to prove your tolerance by allowing someone to harm you or others. People are allowed to believe whatever they want. But when they try to turn their personal beliefs into actions that harm you and/or harm others, you have every right to speak up and fight back.

If you’d like some help dealing with trolls – you can check out the Complete Guide to Dealing with Online Trolls.

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

 Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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

 

Fat people have a right to exist in our fat bodies.  We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and those rights are inalienable – they are not size, health, or healthy habit dependent.  Those rights include not living under ceaseless institutional stigma, bullying and oppression, or being made combatants in a war waged upon us by our government, which is also trying to recruit our friends, family, co-workers, companies and anyone else they can get to engage in combat against us for how we look.

You cannot have a war on obesity without having a war against obese people.  You cannot have a war on childhood obesity without having a war on fat kids.  Wars have casualties.  So when you use words like “war” and “eradicate”, when you say that you want to eliminate obesity and suggest that fat people should do extremely dangerous things like have our stomachs amputated, or eating 500 calories a day and getting injected with  urine, all in the pursuit of thinness, it starts to sound like “eliminate obesity” means that they want us either thin or dead, and they don’t much care which.

The research about weight and health upon which this goal of eradicating fat people for the good of society is built does not meet the basic criteria for competent research.

The methods used to calculate the “cost” of obese people are at best incredibly poorly done and, at worst biased and profit-driven,

Even if the studies did meet basic requirements for competent research, it is not ok to choose a group of people who are identifiable by a single visible physical characteristic, attempt to calculate their cost on society, and based on those numbers suggest that they should be eradicated to make things cheaper for everyone else.

If you are fat, you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without shame, stigma, bullying or oppression, in the body you have now.  It doesn’t matter why you’re fat, what the “consequences” of being fat might be, or if it’s possible to become thin. You have the right to stand up and say that the war being fought against you is not only based on faulty intel, but is unjust in every way. Those are basic civil rights. LIke every fight for civil rights (none of which should be necessary) you have the right to fight back, to say that if they want a war, you will damn well give them one.

UPCOMING WEBINAR  – Size Acceptance and Eating Disorders – A Critical, Crucial, Core Conversation.
June 5th, 11am Pacific

If you’re interested in the use of the Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size paradigms in Eating Disorder treatment, then check out my webinar with EDRDPro. The webinar is June 5th from 11am-12pm Pacific time, and there are CEUs for RDs!
Get all the details here (scroll down to find me)
If you’re ready to register, click here!

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

 Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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

 

 

 

 

I got an e-mail from a blog reader who prefers to remain anonymous who said “My mom just told me that studies show that dust makes you fat. I’m freaking out and I’m too scared to Google – do you know anything about this? Is this really a thing?  WTF?”

I did some Googling and found that the source is likely an article posted on a diet site that claims it can help people lose weight by showing them pictures of things they could eat instead of other things. The article (which I’m not linking to – if you want to give them traffic you can Google it,) was called “The Weird Way Your Dirty House Is Making You Fat.” After spending the first two -thirds of the article suggesting that this is based on research and evidence, they admit that the research team has, in fact, no idea if it’s true. Further, if it is true they don’t have any idea how much dust exposure might cause what amount of weight gain. The research team themselves say is it is only “a potential novel threat.”  This article does not smack of scientific rigor.

This is incredibly common. When it comes to weight and health – whether it’s a discussion of what makes people fat, or a discussion of what might make us thin, or if fat makes us “unhealthy” by some definition, scientific method seems to fly (or, perhaps more accurately, be thrown) right out the window. Sometimes it’s studies that are embarrassingly poorly designed (often for profit.) Sometimes it’s research that isn’t so much research as it is finding commonalities among outliers. So-called research on the efficacy of weight loss is even worse – as Lucy Aphramor clearly showed,

My point here is that a combination of scientific illiteracy among reporters, a 24-hour news cycle that too often cares more about eyeballs than getting to the truth of the story, and the profitability of anything and everything anti-fat, it can be absolutely impossible to get any kind of true information about weight and health. So we have to be smart about this. In the case of the fat and dust article they eventually came right out and said that their claim was ridiculous, but it’s not always that easy. We need to ask questions about things like who funded the research and how they are using it., how the study was designed. Regardless, we should start with the knowledge that there is every possibility that these studies are bullshit.

UPCOMING WEBINAR  – Size Acceptance and Eating Disorders – A Critical, Crucial, Core Conversation.
June 5th, 11am Pacific

If you’re interested in the use of the Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size paradigms in Eating Disorder treatment, then check out my webinar with EDRDPro. The webinar is June 5th from 11am-12pm Pacific time, and there are CEUs for RDs!
Get all the details here (scroll down to find me)
If you’re ready to register, click here!

If you value my work, you can support my ability to do more of it with a one-time contribution or by becoming a member.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

 Wellness for All Bodies Program: A simple, step-by-step, super efficient guide to setting and reaching your health goals from a weight-neutral perspective.  This program can be used by individuals, or by groups, including as a workplace wellness program!
Price: $25.00 ($10 for DancesWithFat members)
Click here for all the details and to register!

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com or on Instagram.

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