I was having a meeting with a publicist to talk about the possibility of a Dances with Fat World Tour (which nobody knows about yet because it’s super secret, shhhhhh!) and she asked me who I would like to debate in public appearances.  I said that while I was open to that I would prefer to have the opportunity to tell my story.  She thought that was odd and asked me why.

Well, it has a lot to do with Harvey Milk.

Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to a major office (San Francisco City Supervisor) and he was assassinated in his first year. His story was told recently in the movie “Milk” which I highly recommend.  In the special features one of the men closest to him in his campaigning years said “He was a regular guy.  His personal life was often in disarray, he wasn’t a genius and he died penniless.  But he changed the world.”  I think that’s real power.  He understood that the work he did wasn’t about him or his ego, but was about the movement.

While in office he brought together women, unions, senior citizens and the GLBT communities in San Francisco.  After his assassination over 10,000 people held a candlelight vigil for him.  In my favorite of his speeches he said:

Without hope the us’s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.

Harvey Milk is absolutely one of my life heroes and, as a bisexual woman, he is a reminder that people died for the rights that I enjoy today.  But Harvey’s main work wasn’t what he did to change the minds of those who disagreed with him – it was what he did to galvanize the community.  He made people realize that they had the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to which their adversaries laid claim.  He helped people realize that the treatment that they were receiving was not ok and that they deserved better and could fight for what they deserved. He gave them hope that their situation would be better someday.

I get e-mails from readers saying that it seems so hopeless that they’ll ever know a life lived outside of constant cultural stigmatization.  It gets hard sometimes for me too, some days I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel and then I get a bunch of death threat e-mails and suddenly it seems that the light is probably an oncoming train.

This is why, while I love a good debate, it’s not my first choice for a public appearance.  Because I’m not so concerned that Meme Roth or Jamie Oliver or internet trolls think fat people deserve to be treated well; and I’m much more concerned that fat people know that they deserve to be treated well.  It’s tough to lead a civil rights movement of people who aren’t sure that they deserve civil rights. And my goal is to let as many people as possible know that Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size are options so that they can make an informed choice.

You deserve to be treated well right now, whether or not you are trying to conform to the cultural stereotype of beauty.  You deserve respect, and you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Right now. In the body in which you currently reside.  Even if you want to eat differently or move more or whatever, I’m asking that you consider the possibility that your body is amazing and deserving of love and respect right this minute.  Remember that no matter what your body looks like, there’s an extremely decent chance that you are the standard of beauty in some culture somewhere.  Consider that the cure for social stigma is not weight loss, it’s ending social stigma.

One of Harvey Milk’s main political tools was getting people to come out of the closet to their friends and family.  It turns out the more out gay people someone knows, the more likely they are to see us as humans, deserving of equal eights. Obviously there’s no need for us to come out as fat, but I think that there is another coming out that we can do.  We can come out as fat and happy.  Allow me to demonstrate:

My name is Ragen Chastain and I am fat and happy.  I love my life, and I love my body.  I eat to nourish my body a lot of the time, and sometimes I eat because I like orange sherbet.  I went to the gym tonight for the pure joy of moving my body and I didn’t even consider weighing myself because I don’t care.  If you don’t like my body and/or want to make unsolicited suggestions about how I should treat it, then may I suggest you practice the ancient art of looking in another direction while keeping your mouth shut.  ~Ragen Chastain, Happy Fatty

I believe that in my lifetime I’ll know what it’s like to live in my body, in this culture, without constant societal stigmatization. But even if I don’t, I believe in doing whatever I can to move us as far down the path as possible in the time that I have.  I was 2 years old when Harvey Milk was shot and killed and I’ll bet he wouldn’t believe all the progress that has been made in queer rights.  So even if it looks bleak now, we have no idea what the landscape will look like 20 or 30 years from now.

There are people out there who hate their bodies solely because they don’t think that there’s another choice. They think that their shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness starts 50 pounds from now.  Somewhere there’s an 8 year old girl about to start her first diet because Michelle Obama is waging a War on her.

Those of us who have made it to the other side of all the hate and stigma can help.  We can let people know about the Health at Every Size (r) option.  We can debunk ridiculous studies that try to say that obesity costs the US elebenty gabillion dollars every two minutes. We can be an example of standing up for ourselves. We can let them know that if you are struggling with your relationship with your body it can get better.  There are options that will allow you to love your body more right now.  (Might as well try, if you find that you don’t enjoy loving your body you can always go back to hating it if you want.)

We gotta give them hope.  We gotta give each other hope. There’s a light at the end of this crazy cultural stigma and shame tunnel it’s NOT a train!

Here’s a video of the entire Harvey Milk speech. I can’t put into words how grateful I am for this man’s courage and what it has done for my life:

At some point last week is seeped through to my conscious mind that my gym was PLASTERED with weight loss propaganda. There’s a huge scale in the ladies locker room and several times a year they try to get me to buy personal training to help “jump start my weight loss”.

At first I assumed that every gym is probably this way, but I decided to look into it just to be sure. Enter Planet Fitness (no, they aren’t giving me anything for saying this).

There are no scales.  There are no weight loss mantras.

There are tootsie rolls at the front counter

There’s Mountain Dew and Rockstar with the Gatorade

There’s a Lunk Alarm in the free weight area

There are pizza nights once a month.

Above the front desk is a sign that says that they are creating a space where “anyone and we mean anyone can be comfortable working out”.

It’s also really cheap, my old gym was almost $300 initiation fee and $40 per month.  This place has memberships from 10-20 per month some of which have no initiation fee.

This is what I’m talking about when I talk about giving everyone access to healthy options.  This gym is focused on health, not weight, and is trying to remove economic barriers as well as challenging stereotypes about a gym and modeling a balanced lifestyle where health is not about being obsessive, hating ones current body, or trying to achieve a specific height/weight ratio.  How kick ass is that? The gym is populated by an amazingly diverse group of people and everyone so far has been super friendly.

This gives me tremendous hope!  I think that we need more of exactly this.  What if every gym, every Zumba class, every yoga class tried to be as accessible as possible and modeled health as balanced choices (not a body size) that can include tootsie rolls and squats and pizza and treadmills and fun?  To me, this is what Health at Every Size is about.  Health is multi-dimensional – it includes behaviors, genetics, stress, environment and access.  Obviously some of those things are partially or completely out of our control and health is never guaranteed.  Access is even trickier because it’s not always within our control.  Some people only have access to gyms  that are clinging to the antiquated paradigm that thin and healthy are the same thing.  Some people only have access to gyms that aren’t affordable.  Some people, for whatever reason, don’t have access to a gym at all. Or to whatever movement option they enjoy.  So I think that a gym that tries to remove as many barriers as possible is a huge step in the right direction!

I was talking to a friend of mine who had asked permission to ask me a question that would “probably piss me off”.  This is always a good time.  I actually don’t mind at all, I’d rather people ask me their fat people questions than just wonder.

Sure, what’s on your mind…

“I eat ok but I have dessert and french fries.  And I exercise sometimes but not a lot. I’ve never dieted but I stay within the recommended BMI, so it seems like most fat people would just have to eat a little better and exercise a little more and they would be thin.”

There are about a hundred things wrong with this and I’ll break it down in a second but I think that it’s indicative of the way that some naturally thin people feel about fat people.

There’s a saying “Born on third, thinks he hit a triple”.  It refers to someone who has made the mistake of thinking that their behaviors are completely  responsible for where they are in life, especially if it’s obvious that person had distinct advantages.  I think that this is what happens with a lot of naturally thin people.  Often they don’t mean it intentionally – they don’t even realize that they are doing it, but they make the assumption that what keeps them thin would keep everyone thin.  And that brings us to our quote breakdown:

“I eat ok but I have dessert and french fries sometimes.  And I exercise sometimes but not a lot. I’ve never dieted and I stay within the recommended BMI, so it seems like most fat people would just have to eat a little better and exercise a little more and they would be thin.”

First, she is assuming that all bodies react to foods the same, and that anyone bigger than she is must be eating more and exercising less than she does.  It’s just not true.  Two people can have the same diet and very different body sizes.  Two other people can have vastly different diets and the same body size.

Second, even if it was true that all people bigger than her are eating more and exercising less, it assumes that eating less and exercising more will result in long-term weight loss.  Based on all the available science, intentional weight loss based on caloric restriction and increased activity has an abysmal long-term success rate.

This kind of attitude also assumes that fat people haven’t tried these things already. That always kills me – people who suggest that I add exercise as if there’s no way I could have heard of it before.  Most of the fat people I know have spent a huge portion of their lives dieting.  Which brings me to my final point:  I think that the key sentence here is “I’ve never dieted”.  We know that food deprivation (aka dieting) changes people psychologically and physically. And it appears that the earlier it starts, the more it affects us. Since this woman’s parents didn’t put her on diets at 8, she probably had a better chance at being whatever size her body is meant to be naturally – in her case thin.

If being thin comes easily to you you might want to consider that you were born on third, not that the rest of us haven’t swung that bat.  Regardless, it doesn’t matter what behaviors someone credits with their body size – that doesn’t obligate anyone else to do the same thing.  Personal responsibility doesn’t mean that I’m personally responsible to do what someone else thinks I should do or to look like someone else thinks I should look.

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

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I had coffee yesterday with the amazing Jenni Schaefer.  She wrote the books Life Without ED and Goodbye Ed, Hello Me (both about overcoming Eating Disorders). She is a hero to many of the women with eating disorders who I’ve  worked with (and therefore a hero of mine) and I remember how much buzz there was that she was going to be moving here.  I was so excited to sit down with her and she was just as awesome as you might imagine.  We got onto the subject of online dating.  (If you’re a long-time reader you already know about some of my misadventures in dating, and with online dating in particular.)

This conversation focused on the “check the box body type” box that is typically required when setting up a profile (ie:  thin, average, athletic, voluptuous, curvy, BBW).

The one I want to talk about is “athletic”.  My understanding of the perception of athletic (as verified by two of my heterosexual male friends)  is “thin, possibly with muscles, definitely small boobs”.   But the idea is obviously problematic.  I’m an athlete but if I checked the box for “athletic body”, the person I ended up on a date with would likely feel that I had been disingenuous.

Cheryl Haworth is an Olympic medal-winning heavyweight weightlifter. In a typical workout she lifts as much as 25 tons – the weight of an F-15 fighter jet. Cheryl holds a record for clean and jerk of 355 pounds.  That means that I could hold a 71 pound weight and then Cheryl could push me and the weight OVER HER HEAD.  Who would like to tell Cheryl Haworth that she does not have an athletic body, please step forward…

That’s what I thought.

Then there’s my BMI double Refrigerator Perry,  and my hero Po from Kung Fu Panda.

When did being an athlete become more about how a body looks and less about what it can do?  And who gets to dole out the title of athlete.  I’ve met plenty of people who thinks it’s their right, but none of them had a sash or a gavel or anything. These are probably the same idiots who say that I don’t have a dancer’s body. Bite me.

Why are there requirements to call yourself an athlete?  Why does the title of athlete need to be protected?  If every person in the world thought of themselves as an athlete, what bad thing would happen?  It doesn’t make anyone’s work less valuable because other people are doing different work.  If you feel that you lose something because someone else gets to identify as an athlete too, then you’ve missed the point.

If you haven’t seen it, check out the Athletes of Every Size Flickr account and add your pictures if you are so moved!

I believe that you are an athlete if you believe you are, and your body is athletic if you say it is.  Athletes come in every shape and size.

I am often asked if it’s ever ok for people to want to diet, or get plastic surgery, or change their bodies.

The short answer is that it’s none of my business. I respect the decisions that other people make about their bodies just like I want mine to be respected.

But I understand that the question is deeper than that.

Weight loss is a good example – no matter how much we love our bodies, we are still stigmatized for our size and would get much more approval from society if we were thin.  I wonder sometimes:  If this stigma/approval situation didn’t exist, would people still try and fail at dieting many times?

At any rate, I can understand the desire to want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons – I just think it’s important for people to have access to information not paid for my the diet industry.  Information regarding their odds so that if their attempts fail it softens the self-esteem blow.  And information about the health issues linked to weight cycling. I don’t think that they are required to do the research or justify their choices, I just think that they should have access to the information.

Plastic surgery is the same way: The more we conform to society’s standard of beauty, the more approval that we get from society. But people should be able to easily ascertain both safety data and efficacy for previous clients who wanted to make a change for a similar reason.

Another example would be people who believe that being thin is the key to health, and feel that they need to lose weight for health reasons. They should have access to true and correct data about health and weight.

No matter what change you’re considering making, my suggestion would be to consider why you want to make the change, and then make sure that’s really ok with you.  So let’s say that you decide that you want to have botox so your co-worker stops talking about your wrinkles.  Is that ok with you? What if once you’ve filled your wrinkles she starts in on your nose?  You’ll have to decide how far you want to go.  It’s always your choice. I do think that no matter what you choose it will work better if you start from a platform of loving yourself as you are.

Social change is more important to me that societal approval.  I think that the cure for stigmatization is to change culture and end stigma, not to insist that members of the stigmatized group change themselves so that they can get the approval of the stigmatizing group.  If they offered me a pill that would make me into the perfect stereotypical beauty I wouldn’t take it.  I’m happy with my body and my health and I see no reason to change.  That doesn’t make me worse or better than those who make different choices. Our bodies – our choices.  I don’t see how we can ask for our choices to be respected unless with we respect the choices of others.

So maybe our new motto could be:  I love me, I’m perfect, now choose…

Study finds Fat Acceptance Blogs Can Improve Health Outcomes, or so says the headline.  The study looked at a sample of 44 fatosphere bloggers and sought to determine how their involvement in the FA movement had affected them. (Just to clarify – I was not one of the bloggers studied. But the very awesome Fat Heffalump was and her beautiful picture is on the article – double awesome!)

This study has its limitations –  44 people do not a statistically significant sample size make, there doesn’t appear to have been a control group etc.  Still, I’m quite happy that people are studying this, as one of the researchers pointed out that “We saw there was a lot of opinion about the movement but very few people had actually studied it.”

I think that’s a significant thing to realize, that the backlash against the FA movement is not based in research or science. So what is it based on?

Why is there so much push back against a movement that simply says we won’t hate ourselves?  Is it that people have been inundated by the message of the diet industry that they have to be thin to be healthy; so they are starving themselves, restricting food and working their asses off trying to be thin and most of them are failing and blaming themselves and trying again repeatedly. Thus when a community that says “we won’t buy into this cycle”, there is a backlash?

Maybe it’s because people have allowed themselves to be fooled by marketing that says that fat is the same is lazy, unhealthy, unattractive, unloveable etc. and so they think that fat people should believe that drivel about ourselves?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m not surprised that the study found that people who took part in a movement that supports them overcoming stigma and liking themselves had better health.  Among all of the ridiculous diet headlines I’ve never seen a single headline that reads “Self-loathing Proven to be Key to Health” or “Five Quick ways to Hate Yourself Healthy” or “Study Shows That Constant Stigmatization Leads to Better Health Outcomes”.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m believe the word that we’re looking for here is DUH.  I’m incredibly glad that people are studying this because somehow we’ve lost whatever bit of common sense would tell us that people have better health outcomes when they don’t hate themselves.  My guess would also be that people take better care of things that they like, so liking our bodies probably gives us a better chance of taking care of them at any size.

So, Dr. Danceswithfat says “take two blog posts and call me in the morning”!

I’m completely frustrated with the idea that anyone who doesn’t try to make fat people hate themselves and their bodies is somehow “encouraging obesity” or “promoting obesity”

Showing a fat person being successful at anything other than weight loss.

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 your intelligence. Like’s it 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 representation and role models.

Suggesting anything other than weight loss as a valid life choice

Take my word on this. If, for example, you suggest that people who want to be healthy have the best chance of doing so (although obviously not a guaranteed chance) by eating nourishing food and moving their bodies- you better brace yourselves for a whole lot of ugly coming at you from a never ending parade of stupid (bonus points if you get the movie reference)   People will freak out on you. When you calmly ask them “So are you suggesting that I tell people to eat non-nourishing foods and not move their bodies?” in my experience they will suggest that you are too stupid to understand or just call you a “fat bitch”. Okie dokie then.

Asking that mental health be considered as part of overall health

Whenever someone suggests that shame and health do not go hand in hand, that people are unlikely to hate themselves healthy, or that living under constant stigma is not part of a healthy life, they seem to get accused of encouraging obesity.  I must have missed the study data that shows that self-loathing is causally (or even correlationally) related to good health.  I must also have missed the logical argument that suggests that telling people not to hate themselves is tantamount to telling them that they should attempt to be obese.

Making anything that accommodates fat people

If a business does anything to accommodate people of size – larger chairs, seat belt extenders, a policy of non-shaming, etc. people will say that it’s promoting obesity.  Because apparently creating a world where fat people can’t leave our houses is the beeline to a healthy nation.

Making attractive plus-sized clothes

A subcategory of the above – apparently making attractive clothes in larger sizes will cause thin women to say “Hey, that dress isn’t completely hideous and it only costs 3 times as much as what I usually buy. I’m going to try to be a size 26 so I give up shopping at almost any store I want with access to a multitude of styles and price ranges to choose from so that I can wear that one not-totally-ugly dress”. As if, since the size of my body doesn’t garner enough unfounded hatred and vitriol, I must wear ugly mumus like a Scarlet F to show my ultimate sin of having a body that others don’t approve of.  I simply can’t believe that wearing pants that actually fit me is going to make people think that it’s all fuzzy bunnies and unicorns on this side of the BMI chart and start guzzling whey protein weight gainer.

I believe that bodies come in lots of different sizes for lots of different reasons.  So I don’t think that making beautiful plus-sized clothing is encouraging obesity any more than selling petite clothes encourages shortness.   The only thing that discouraging obesity does is make people feel like they are less because there is more of them (thanks to reader Mari’s comment for that line).  The cure for social stigma is not weight loss, it’s ending social stigma. So stop hand-wringing and banshee wailing about encouraging obesity as if you know better than everyone else what their body should look like, and let fat people live in peace and clothes that fit us.

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

I was picked up on a “fat hate’ board again and somebody said, for the millionth time, that Health at Every Size (r) is just “taking the easy way out…”  Dude, are you serious?

Does anybody remember the movie The Truman Show?  Where a guy finds out that his entire life has been a TV show and that everyone except him knew it? In the show he leads a fairly ordinary life but what if the script was different?  What if, from the time he was born, the world was set up to tell him that he was unhealthy and unattractive? What if his whole life people, magazines, television shows and commercials told him that he was unhealthy and ugly.  What if doctors ignored his actual issues and said that just by looking at him they knew that he was unhealthy? What if the media reported stories that everyone who looked like him was sick and ruining the world?  If he was conditioned like this from early childhood, what kind of man do you think he would grow up to be?

That’s the show of my life.  And sometimes is just sucks, sometimes I get tired of it.  I never try to tell anyone else how to live but I find that I am rarely extended the same courtesy.  I’m more than confident in my decision that my best (but certainly not guaranteed) chance for health is healthy behaviors and not a smaller body. I’m also prepared and comfortable with the consequences if I’m wrong.  But my very own Truman Show (sponsored by the weight loss industry as it turns out) is set up to tell me every day in every way that the only path to a happy, healthy life is to change the size and shape of my body, no matter how unhealthy I have to be to get it done.   And the diet industry has done a great job of making other people into little marketing machines – running around telling the fatties that they know what’s best for us.

It’s difficult to buck that mainstream.  It can be terrifying to be the person who points to the evidence and says “you can excommunicate me if you want but the Earth moves around the sun and that’s a fact”.  It’s not easy to wake up in your own version of the Truman show and tell everyone that they can do whatever they want but you’re going off script.

So today I just wanted to take a minute to celebrate those of us who choose a Health at Every Size (r) model in a thin=healthy world.  Of course it’s not the only valid choice and it’s not better or worse than anyone else’s choice.  But you can’t really deny that it requires some serious guts. And today as I reflect on my amazing friends on this blog and in the HAES community I just wanted to give a hip-hip-hooray-kick-ass-and-yay for standing up for our truth in the face of a bunch of people who can’t seem to stop reading to us from an old script.

The August newsletter is out (hey, at least I got it out before September right?).  I’ve got someone’s awesome blog to recommend, more thoughts on the idea of one beautiful thing (thanks again to reader Emlys!), one of my favorite YouTube videos ever, and some other stuff.

Check it out here!

Tomorrow I’ll be back with your regularly scheduled blog!

One of my Facebook friends posted about her intentional weight loss.  Someone commented saying “You’re looking so great! Congratulations, keep working at it. And did I mention that you’re looking great!?”

I immediately fast forwarded to five years from now when there is a 95% chance that she will have re-gained the weight.  Then what is she to take from all of these compliments for her now former body size and shape?  How will she feel? Also, “keep working at it” seems to say “what you’ve done is not good enough”.  Yikes.

I have had friends and blog readers who’ve lost weight because they were sick, or stressed, who’ve said that this kind of compliment makes them cringe.   They couldn’t help but wonder how the person thought that they  looked like before.  And it made it awkward when they regained the weight.

I recently saw someone I know who had lost a huge amount of weight in a very short time.  She looked gaunt and her color was off.  I thought that perhaps she had been sick but I didn’t want to assume anything so I just asked how she was doing.  It turns out she lost the weight on purpose and is super happy with the results.  That’s absolutely her right, my goal is to compliment her in a way that will be supportive whether or not she keeps the weight off.  So when she said “I’ve been losing weight, don’t I look great!”  I went with “You’ve always been beautiful, I’m glad that you are happy.”

So compliments can be a minefield.  But they’re also awesome.  So what’s a girl to do?

Come up with a compliment guide, that’s what:

No Body Comparisons

Bodies are beautiful all the time.  Some people’s body size changes because they want it to, some people’s size changes because of extraneous, even undesired, circumstances.  Either way, it’s impossible to tell people that they look better without telling them that they looked worse, and that’s no good.  So, don’t do it. Try this:

• You’ve always been beautiful and I’m glad that you are happy.
• You are beautiful at every size

No backhanded compliments

This should be a “no duh” kind of thing but you’d be surprised. A compliment should never include:

• “For a” as in “You’re really athletic for a fat girl”
• “I guess”  as in “That dress is great I guess”
• “such, but” as in “You have such a pretty face, but you need to do something about your weight.”
• “brave” as in “You’re so brave to wear a sleeveless shirt”.

Drop the “for a” and “I guess”. Drop “such”, “but” and everything after, consider adding an adjective.

• That dress is great.
• You have a very pretty face.

Any mention of “brave” that is not followed by “for fighting off those wild animals” is a bad call.  Try “You look great in that shirt.”

Ah, that’s better.

No putting yourself down as part of a compliment

• You look great, I wish I had legs like that
• wow, great job, I could never press that much weight
• I love your hair, I could never pull that look off

It ruins the compliment the person feels like they have to make you feel better at the end of it.  Just drop the part about you:

• You look great.
• Wow, great job.
• I love your hair.

Easy squeezy.

So go forth and compliment fearlessly!