Biscuit the Pug and I wish happy, Body Positive, holidays to all who are celebrating (and a happy, body positive, week to those who aren’t!)
One of the most frequent questions I get during the holidays is about how to deal with people – especially family – who are behaving badly: food policing, fat shaming, diet and weight loss talk and more.
For me the secret is boundaries. I think it’s best to start by deciding what constitutes behavior that you will put up with. If it’s anything other than “anything goes” then I would consider setting some boundaries with consequences that you can follow through with. So, for example “It is not ok to talk about my weight or eating. If anyone says one more thing about my weight or eating I’m going to leave and we’ll try this again next year.” and then, if they fail to respect your boundaries, it’s time to invoke the consequences.
I’ve done this, and I’ve heard from a number of people who have done this and the common thread seems to be that we only had to do it one time and then our families started respecting their boundaries. Of course your mileage may vary. I’ve written about dealing with the Family and Friends Food Police and Combating Holiday Weight Shame, but in another danceswithfat annual tradition, today we’re going to do this in song.
I’ve re-written the lyrics to “Oh Christmas Tree” to be an ode to boundary setting.
Note 1: In order for this to work, it helps to pronounce boundaries as a three syllable word (BOUND-ah-rees) I also play with the rhythms within the phrases (I had what felt like 27 semesters of music theory in college, this is what I’m doing with it.) If this is an affront to your sense of poetic license I completely understand, I’ll be back tomorrow with a post sans song.
Note 2: At the bottom you’ll find two amazing renditions of this song by Jeanette DePatie (aka The Fat Chick) and Nadja. Please also feel free to add your own verses in the comments, and/or post a video with your own rendition and it will become a part of this annual tradition.
And with that I give you:
Oh Boundaries (to the tune of Oh Christmas Tree)
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Don’t talk about my weight or food.
Why can’t you see it’s hella rude?
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
You know I love my family
But I will leave if you fat-shame me.
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Don’t say a word to my fat kid
Or I’ll leave so fast, my tires will skid
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Yes I do “need” that second plate
It’s not your business what I ate
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Quit saying someday I’ll get sick
Last time I checked you were not psychic
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
The holidays are great family time
If you don’t shame, food-police or whine
Oh Boundaries! Oh Boundaries! You help me deal with family.
Two Readers (so far – hint, hint) have taken up the challenge of recording this piece, enjoy!
Jeanette DePatie (aka The Fat Chick) gave us an amazing opera/jazz rendition:
and Nadja killed it a capella in the middle of the night in her PJs:
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
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Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group.
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!
Activist Harry Minot let me know about a terrible program being promoted in the UK that they are calling a “whole systems approach to obesity.” The tagline is “making obesity everybody’s business.” Ugh.
I will not be linking to it but this certainly isn’t the only suggestion that governments should create programs that purport to create health by encouraging literally everyone to shame, stigmatize, harass and oppress fat people. The fact that anyone outside of a 4chan group full of unsettled fatphobes would suggest something like this shows how totally off the rails we are when it comes to fat people and health.
There are two major issues here – the most often discussed is whether or not appearance-based bigotry constitutes an appropriate, evidence-based health intervention. It does not – there is no research to suggest that convincing every person that a fat person comes in contact with to try to make that fat person hate the body they live in 100% of the time leads to people becoming healthier or thinner (which are, of course, two different things.) In fact, Peter Muennig from Columbia found in his research, just living in a society where one is stigmatized is correlated with many of the same health issues that are used to judge “unhealthiness.” So it’s not just that this approach lacks any kind of research basis, but that this approach is contraindicated by the research.
But in the grand scheme of what’s important, that’s not why this is so terrible. The reason that these “everybody get involved in fatphobia” programs are abhorrent is that they suggest that bullying based on healthism is something that is not just ok, but should receive government support. And that’s bullshit. Even if someone believes that they can tell by looking at someone that they are unhealthy (they can’t), and even if they believe that giving them unsolicited advice and treating them poorly will make them healthier (it won’t), it’s still an absolutely unacceptable thing to do.
First because health is not an obligation, a barometer of worthiness, entirely within our control, or guaranteed under any circumstances. Our health (and how it may or may not be tied to how we look) is not anybody else’s business unless we ask them to make it their business. I also want to point out, again, that these so-called interventions aren’t actually about health, they are about appearance. Nobody can tell how healthy someone is by what size they are as there are “healthy” and “unhealthy” people – by whatever definition – of every size (and even if they could, it still wouldn’t be any of their damn business.)
The other major problem is that it increases the weight-based oppression that already affects every area of the lives of fat people who are hired less and paid less than thin people, have extreme difficulty accessing actual evidence-based healthcare (in no small part because doctors are so busy engaging in fatphobia that they forget to give us actual, you know, healthcare,) and are regularly subjected to street harassment.
AsI’ve said before, my fat body is not a representation of my failures, sins, or mistakes. My fat body is not an indication of my level of health or fitness, neither of which is anyone else’s business anyway. My fat body is not up for public discussion, debate or judgment. My fat body is not a signal that I need help or input to make decisions about my health or life. My fat body is the constant companion that helps me do every single thing that I do every second of every day and it deserves respect and admiration.
I will wield my beautiful fat body like a weapon. I will love it, I will care for it, I will show it in public, and I will viciously defend my body against anyone (including the UK government,) who seeks to classify it as anything but amazing.
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Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group.
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!
Before we get to the post, please take a moment to sign and share (or re-share) the petition for Esquire UK to pull the piece in which an author calls his 4-year-old child a “chubby fucker” and a “fat little bastard” and then says that he would kill all fat people. We’re starting to get some good traction and the media is starting to bite at the story! Another huge help would be Tweeting the celebrities who Giles Coren used in his article to fat-shame his 4-year-old son and asking them to speak out.
They are:
@JKCorden, @onebiggins, @Adele, @PaulHollywood, @THERussellGrant, and @HackneyAbbott
Sample Tweet (you can either send one big Tweet or send one for each person:)
I hope @JKCorden, @onebiggins, @Adele, @PaulHollywood, @THERussellGrant & @HackneyAbbott tell @EsquireUK to stop letting Giles Coren use them to body-shame a 4-year-old boy. Sign the petition tinyurl.com/StopGilesCoren #GilesCoren
Now for today’s post:
We live in a world that is chock full ‘o fatphobia. Some of it is at the hands of random people – the person who screams a slur at you from the car, the busybody at the grocery store who comments on the contents of your cart, or the group of teenagers who moo at you in the mall. Sadly the opportunities that people take to mistreat fat people seem to be frequent and varied. Other fatphobia is systemic and institutionalized – it’s healthcare facilities that don’t have chairs, beds, or even blood pressure cuffs for fat patients, staffed by doctors who can see past their own size bias It’s clothing stores that advertise that they make clothes for “all shapes and sizes” but definitely don’t. It’s airplanes that don’t have seats that accommodate fat people and try to make that fat people’s problem. Sadly, they are often successful, and that’s a bigger problem.
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “fat is the last acceptable prejudice.” Well, that’s crap. There is a ton of prejudice — racism (including at the hands of the police), xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, ageism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and plenty of other oppressions are far too common to suggest that they aren’t acceptable. What may be more common with sizeism (though it can happen with all types of oppression) is internalization.
This happens when fat people become convinced by fatphobia that fatphobia is correct and our bodies are the problem — that we deserve derision, that we don’t deserve a seat on an airplane or competent, evidence-based medical care. Too often, even if they haven’t actually internalized oppression, fat people who are in the public eye will toe the fatphobia line rather than risk the pushback that they can receive by fighting back against fatphobia.
That’s why Aidy Bryant’s recent interview with The Cut is so refreshing! Aidy is crystal clear that the problem isn’t fat bodies, but rather fatphobia. Starting with her decision to move away from the pursuit of thinness:
She recalls the moment that she stopped focusing on trying to be skinny as “a switch flipping.” “I finally was like, what if I put all of that energy into just trying to like myself and focus on the things I actually want to do as opposed to this thing that’s like a made-up concept? And I’m not kidding, my entire life changed after I did that.
Within two years, I was hired by Second City; two years later I was hired by SNL,” says Bryant. “I stopped letting it be an all-day, everyday thing that defined everything that I did,” she says, snapping her fingers. “And it worked.”
And she got clear fast on the total unfairness that it the world of plus size fashion:
Sign and share the petition to tell Esquire UK to pull the article and the column written by Giles Coren – who used his column on fatherhood to fat-shame his four year old son, and then say he would kill and burn all fat people.
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
Before I get into the post today, I’m excited to tell you that got over 7,000 signatures in just two days on our petition to get Esquire UK to pull Giles Coren’s article on “fatherhood” in which he fat-shames his 4-year-old son and then says he kill all fat people. This is really great momentum! The more people who are involved, the more pressure we put on Esquire UK so please take a moment to sign and share (or share again) https://www.change.org/p/esquire-uk-fire-writer-who-said-all-fat-people-should-be-killed-and-burned
On to today’s post!
If you haven’t heard of the #FATANDFREE campaign, you are missing out. The project was Ccreated by plus size model, fat activist, and body positive influencer Saucyce West and according to the press release:
“Saucye presents a campaign that is showcasing fat, proud and beautiful women. What is different? She is telling women that once you embrace and love your body that will give you true freedom. She expresses that fat women are often kept in a box. Often told what they shouldn’t wear, what they shouldn’t eat. Even express fears of going outside and showing their arms!
“It’s time for us to be limitless in the way we view ourselves. If we see no boundaries we will be free to flourish and love ourselves without apologizing for it”- Saucye West
The campaign started on New Year’s Day, photos with women toasting and celebrating. Instead of giving resolutions for the New Year, they made a pledge to live fat and free for 2017!
Since then women have started using the hashtag on social media, showing the world they are living in and loving their bodies.
There will be #FATANDFREE events throughout the year along with photoshoots. So that this can become a mantra for women. And begin to heal and create self-love that will last far beyond
Sign and share the petition to tell Esquire UK to pull the article and the column written by Giles Coren – who used his column on fatherhood to fat-shame his four year old son, and then say he would kill and burn all fat people.
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
Before we get to today’s post, please consider signing and sharing the petition to ask Esquire to pull the article and column written by Giles Coren – who used his column on fatherhood to fat-shame his four year old son, and then say he would kill and burn all fat people.
Onward to today’s fat-shaming ridiculousness. There is a new game on Kickstarter called Hey There Fatty! It comes packaged in a stereotypical Chinese food delivery container complete with a fat-shaming fortune cookie. The game just won DreamHack 2017’s Best Multiplayer Experience Award, which is a shame because it’s a terrible, fat-shaming disaster.
According to the game’s description, Hey There Fatty! is “a game unlike any you have played before. By counting calories, going to the gym, and yes, even hosting a potluck, you can strategize to beat your friends and family. Or if sabotage is more your style, go for it! Just don’t end up a fatty!”
Look, the idea that fatphobia is the “last acceptable prejudice” is complete crap. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and more run rampant. But fatphobia is one of the prejudices that people still seem to find completely acceptable.
The creators of Hey There Fatty! claim to have worked on this game for over three years. They dedicated time and energy for three years toward creating a game that has the express purpose of fat shaming and is based entirely on stereotypes about fat people.
In case you needed a reminder that internalized oppression is a thing, the creators have claimed that they are “overweight,” that they’ve played it with “overweight” friends, and that everyone thinks it’s hilarious.
Let’s be honest here — the game is not even clever. It’s hardly “unlike any you have played before” if you are someone who has been stuck on the diet roller coaster, been fat-shamed(supposedly) “for your health,” or had every bit of their food intake scrutinized and commented on by family and friends.
Speaking of food scrutiny, with cards for binging, over-exercising, and a goal of food restriction, this game could just as easily be called Hey There Eating Disorder!
The fat shaming is bad enough, but the connection between this kind of fat shaming and eating disorders is real and dangerous.
If you find this game inappropriate you can report it by logging into kickstarter, going to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1741293451/hey-there-fatty Scroll all the way to the bottom and click the “report” button.
Sign and share the petition to tell Esquire UK to pull the article and the column written by Giles Coren – who used his column on fatherhood to fat-shame his four year old son, and then say he would kill and burn all fat people.
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
Giles Coren writes a column for Esquire about fatherhood. His most recent piece is titled: “I Don’t Care What My Son Becomes… As Long As He Isn’t Overweight.” I thought I couldn’t be shocked by fatphobia anymore but I was wrong.
Before we get into his advocacy of child abuse and killing fat people, let’s take a look at his kid, who he calls “morbidly obese”
I’d also like to be clear that this isn’t Giles first day as a human-shaped piece of garbage, having previously published a piece (also for his Esquire column) where he said it was ok if his daughter didn’t do well in school because she could just marry a banker.
Finally, the quotes from his piece will be indented. All are offensive, many cross the line into blatant, violent, hate speech, including discussion of burning. They may be extremely triggering. If you want to skip this post entirely, I don’t blame you. If you want to skip the quotes you will still get the gist of the post without reading all of his bigoted drivel.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at that picture of my son and you’re thinking, “Fat little bastard”. Sure, he’s cute. He’s got a nice little face. He looks a bit of an idiot because his mum took him for a haircut on the morning of the photo shoot (completely failing to grasp the first rule of shoots which is, “never have a haircut closer than two weeks before, or you’re going to look like a chump”) but on the whole he is a good-looking boy.
Wrong right off the bat there Giles. What I’m thinking is “Please, please, please don’t let this article be about a dad who is taking out his size bigotry on his four year old son.”
Except he’s fat. Arse on him like Vanessa Feltz and a full frontal presentation at bath time that puts one in mind of a Gavin and Stacey-era James Corden or a well-waxed Christopher Biggins, all giggly on too much rosé.
At this point (while I know full well that regardless of his kid’s size it’s wildly inappropriate for Giles to think of him this way, or to involve so many other people in his blatant size bias) I am compelled to look again at the picture. While it would be perfectly fine if his kid fit this description, he absolutely does not. I’m forced to assume that Giles wanted to splash around in a pool of fat hate and decided to facilitate that by pretending that his kid is fat. Regardless, there is no size his kid could be that would possibly justify fat-shaming him.
It’s all very well to say that it’s puppy fat. It’s all very well to pinch his cheeks and go, “Who’s a cheeky chubby-chops? Awww, wittle fatty boom-boom…” and nuzzle your face in his tummy and blow raspberries and feel how they ripple through him like a fart in the bath, but what if… IT DOESN’T GO AWAY?
If it doesn’t go away, then you will have a fat kid. If he doesn’t have a growth spurt, then you’ll have a short kid. The thing about kids growing up is that they grow up into adults of all kinds of shapes and sizes and none of that requires ALL CAPS HISTRIONICS because all bodies are good bodies.
You know what I’m saying? Adele’s parents probably thought it was puppy fat too. And Paul Hollywood’s. And Russell Grant’s. No doubt Diane Abbott’s family assumed that she would change shape when she was out of nappies. But the change never came.
Giles seems really, really angry that fat people are allowed to exist and he continues to try to involve as many of them as possible in his bigoted farce of an article.
It’s reasonable to assume that the parents took their eyes off the ball, let their porky pups feast on a shitty diet and do fuck-all exercise into adolescence and now look at them: ostensibly successful, yes, but laughable to behold with their untucked shirts and stretched, shiny faces.
It’s not reasonable – it’s fatphobia and stereotyping. People, including young people, come in lots of different sizes for lots of different reason. People of all sizes eat whatever Giles’ definition of a “shitty diet” is, and people of all sizes choose not to exercise. People’s choices and sizes are none of Giles’ business. People of all sizes wear untucked shirts and have shiny faces. Giles, needs to get ahold of himself, he has completely failed at keeping his blatant bigotry subtle while pretending that he cares about his son.
The sort of people you want to follow down the street playing “Flight of the Valkyries” on a tuba.
No dude, YOU want to follow them down the street playing the tuba because you are an absolute garbage human. I continue to be absolutely stunned that Esquire would allow a piece that is nothing but hate speech to be published, especially under the guise of how to be a father.
And I’m worried as fuck that my little Sam could go the same way. Not only because of how it will ruin his life but because of how it will reflect on me.
I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Giles. I’m worried that Sam “could go the same way” because his father is a raving fatphobe who will undoubtedly do unimaginable damage to him every day until he can escape. (Pssst, Sam, find the Fat Acceptance Movement, a lot of us grew up with parents who were worse than useless as well, we’ve got your back!)
For while obesity as a demographic phenomenon can be classed as disease, epidemic, socio-economic tragedy, whatever, on an individual, case-by-case basis, each actual fat person is blatantly just a badly brought-up, greedy little son of a bitch committing the unforgivable sin of gluttony in a world where there is not enough food to go round.
Being fat doesn’t ruin your life. The thing that ruins your life is this kind of (fact-free) fatphobia. “Obesity” isn’t a disease, it’s not an epidemic, or a tragedy – it’s just a ratio of weight and height. Granted, a ratio onto which some people (many for profit, others for attention, others because they are simply bigots) have heaped tons of negativity.
Also be clear that there is plenty of food to go around. Hunger is a complex issue that has to do with things like capitalism, nationalism, racism and more. And even if it wasn’t indisputable fact that there are thin people who eat far more than fat people, it would still have literally NOTHING to do with fat people existing. This is just another way that people who want to be bigots try to justify their bigotry, and using people who are starving to do it is particularly despicable.
I’d kill them all and render them down for candles.
Let’s be absolutely clear what he is saying here. He is saying that, given a chance, he would kill all fat people, then burn us. It’s not funny, it’s not cute, it’s a call for genocide. (People will immediately suggest that I’m going to far in saying this, those people are a part of the problem. “I’d kill them all” is not an unclear statement.) Anytime you say that everyone who shares a single characteristic should be killed, you are going down a very bad road. I would love to know the name of the editor at Esquire UK who read that sentence and said “Sure, kill all the fat and burn them, that’s totally reasonable. Leave that in.”) Here, again, is the link for their complaints section.
It may sound harsh but how else are we to recoup the tens of billions of pounds they cost the NHS and the wider economy each year with treatment needed, working days lost, hospital beds broken, chairs smashed to splinters and good workers accidentally killed when fat people sit on them?
Here Giles seems to be trying to make another wild stab at justifying his bigotry (won’t somebody please think of the tax dollars?!) But he’s so overcome with his desire to say horrible things about fat people that he can’t even keep it together for a single paragraph.
It is no business of mine what Sam does with his life. I’m not ultimately bothered whether he’s rich or poor, artist or scientist, crackhead or alcoholic, married or unmarried, gay or straight… I don’t care if he runs every letter of the LGBTQI spectrum to the end and back, and comes home with a cock in every hole and says he’s changed his name to Rita. As long as he isn’t fat.
The first sentence may be the only correct and appropriate thing he says in the entire piece. The rest is obviously total bullshit. Now might be a good time to remember that someday, who knows how soon, Sam (who might end up being fat) will read this. The idea that he would be more upset if his son had a larger body that if he was addicted to crack is obviously incredibly troubling, but also troubling is – again – Giles’ tendency to feel free to use some marginalized groups in his quest to oppress fat people. Here he uses people who struggle with addiction as well as queer and trans people showing that while he’s is definitely a fatphobe, he’s certainly not a single issue bigot.
My daughter I am less worried about. Possibly because she is as skinny as a cricket. But if at some point in adult life she pulls the ripcord, well, there are uses for a fat woman. She can be kind of cosy. Whereas a fat man has nothing to offer but his ability to consume. To bring forth upon the world a fat son is indeed a shame before God.
Not satisfied at simply inappropriately (some might say abusively) using his son for this ridiculous exercise, Giles brings his daughter into it and makes the transition to blatant and disgusting misogyny. Unfortunately he doesn’t even have enough new ideas to support the entire diatribe, so we’re back to the old “fat people eat a lot” crap. Even if this was true it would be a tired argument at this point but, again, it’s simply not. And once again I’d remind you that his son will someday learn just how conditional his father’s love for him really is. So while I’m angry at Giles for being such a blatant and vocal bigot, I’m terrified for Sam growing up with an abusive, misogynist, fatphobe for a father, and I would support child services if they removed the kids from the home.
But it’s hard to know what to do about it. I’d put him on a strict diet and buy him a hamster wheel but my wife is not the moral absolutist that I am and she is the one who does the Ocado orders. And cooks most of the food. But is a bit of a lazy tart. Sorry — a busy working mother with many other important things to think about, who knows her way down the path of least resistance.
So Giles also doesn’t respect his wife. This is my not-surprised face. In good news, it looks like Sam may have one decent parent.
So the boy eats a lot of white carbs, sugary cereals, pizza, fried chicken… much like a poor child in America’s morbidly obese central heartlands. Which is why Sam looks like one of them. He doesn’t like fruit or veg and none of us can be arsed to force them down him. But he does like a tub of ice cream and a long run at the television of an afternoon. And on even the shortest car journey he expects his iPad and a sack of Kettle chips.
So he gets them. And I say, “Can’t you give him a carrot instead?”
And my wife says, “If you want him to eat carrots, you try feeding him a fucking carrot!”
So I let it go. And I feel ashamed. But then I see these middle-class kids with their weekday screen bans and their steamed fish and vegetables and no chocolate or sweeties and 10 hours’ oboe practice a day and it makes me want to puke. And I find that I’m kind of proud of our somewhat slutty stance on it all, or lack of one. Otherwise, I suppose, I wouldn’t be admitting to it here.
This is quite the juxtaposition of bigotry – marginalizing an entire swatch of America, middle-class kids, and those who play the oboe is not beginner level oppression. Giles is a piece of shit, but at least he’s good at it? Let’s be clear – giving kids (of all sizes) lots of food choices and helping them to develop a healthy relationship with food is a positive thing, giving kids food and then shaming them for eating it is just fucked up and is basically trying to give your kid an eating disorder.
I try to look on the positive side. Such as the possibility that having a fat adult son — who I will unquestionably continue to love with all my heart no matter what — might help me to lay aside my prejudices regarding fat people and bring me to a more respectful place vis-à-vis the fat and ever fatter future we unquestionably face as a race. And that being grotesquely flabby, sweaty, knock-kneed and impotent would mean that Sam was unlikely ever to have a girlfriend or any mates or be invited to parties, so he’d have more time to work at becoming a nuclear physicist or getting filthy rich and supporting me in my old age.
And then other times I think, “I’d best get the chubby fucker’s jaw wired before he’s old enough to stop me.”
Classic abuser technique. First he spends the entire article being clear that if his son is fat he would be perfectly happy to kill him and burn him, that he would rather he struggle with a drug addiction than be large, that he would consider him to be a “shame before god,” and that his son would (continue to) be the recipient of every piece of fatphobia with which Giles’ little essay is dripping. Then Giles does the whole “I still love you, maybe I can be better” rap. But, as we’ve learned, Giles can’t hold it together for long, so he throws in a few more stereotypes and then leaves a little reminder that he is capable of physical abuse.
My heart goes out to Sam, I hope that he can somehow escape this situation clinging to a healthy relationships with food and his body, and I also hope that he can avoid becoming the super bigot that his father is modeling to him and anyone else who will read his work.
As far as Giles goes, I think we all know where he should go:
Red box around a picture of a trash can with the text “Moved to Trash”
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Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
I was so disappointed to hear that Rosie O’Donnell joined in on fat-shaming donald on Twitter. It’s really not ok no matter what he weighs or how much weight he has or hasn’t gained. The real problem is that the thread she Tweeted out to her 1.09 million followers is a cesspool of size bigotry – including the constant no-less-wrong-just-because-it’s-so-predicable conflation of weight and health.
In looking at the thread that she links to (which is not linked to here because I’ll not give it clicks) I’m extra disappointed to find that so many of the people who are gleefully engaging in fat-shaming have Twitter pages that are absolutely full of social justice posts. The idea that fat is the last acceptable prejudice is total bullshit – there is way too much prejudice and it’s all far too acceptable, what this does remind me of, is that people who are vocally anti-racist, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-misogyny, anti-ableism and more are often still absolutely comfortable engaging in and supporting fat-shaming (Melissa Toler wrote an incredible piece about this here.)
There are those who will claim that it’s ok because donald regularly fat-shames people, or because he is an absolutely despicable racist, xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, ableist, misogynist sexual predator who installed white supremacists into the highest levels of our government while constantly trying to give less to people who already get crumbs while he and his cronies steal every cookie from the jar.
Those people are wrong. There is more than enough material to criticize donald from now until the end of days without taking cheap shots at his size. In fact, his body might be the only thing about him that isn’t a problem – there is absolutely nothing wrong with donald’s body. Besides which, answering his bigotry with size bigotry is super screwed up.
Speaking of donald’s bigotry, when he fat-shamed Rosie in the past, she was justifiably furious (and, happily, a lot of people backed her up,) so why go after donald’s weight and, in the process, add to the notion that there’s something wrong with fat bodies?
The thing is, it really isn’t about donald at all. It’s about us. With our speech, our actions (and our Tweets) we are always either helping to dismantle fatphobia or we are adding to it. Let’s choose to solve the problem rather than become it.
ACTIVISM OPPORTUNITY:
In a piece for his column on fatherhood, Giles Coren called his four year old son a “chubby fucker” and said that, when it comes to fat people, “I’d kill them all and render them down for candles.” This piece is violent hate speech. It needs to come down and Esquire UK needs to fire Giles Coren. Please sign the petition! http://chn.ge/2i6zPYh
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
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NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
Fat people should be accommodated by the all the same places that thin people should be accommodated. That statement shouldn’t be controversial, and it shouldn’t even need to be said.
Sadly, that’s not the way the world works right now. Fat people can’t even be guaranteed accommodation when our lives depend on it – with healthcare facilities not bothering to have blood pressure cuffs, chairs, or beds to fit us, ambulances to accommodate us, with medicine doses not tested on fat people, and medical students prevented from working on fat cadavers, and with surgeons allowed to refuse to give us routine surgery while requiring us to risk death with dangerous surgery we don’t need.
So if we can’t even count on those who are charged with saving our lives to accommodate us, how can we count on vacation spots? The truth is that we can’t. It’s possible for a fat person to pay a lot to go on vacation only to find that the chairs, beds, resort restaurants, even the poolside chairs don’t accommodate us.
So, while we do the slow and difficult work of creating a world that isn’t full of sizeism and fatphobia, it also makes complete sense to create and enjoy spaces just for us, and James King’s “The Resort” in the Bahamas is exactly that. James is not a fat person, but he was working at another resort when he saw a chair break because it wasn’t built properly to accommodate the woman who was trying to sit in it. Then the hotel tried to charge the woman for the chair.
James says[Content Warning – the linked article uses words that pathologize body size, and obviously the comments are a dumpster fire of fatphobia.) ““I tried to convince the owners that we needed furniture other than this plastic flimsy stuff, and they didn’t care. I decided that I had to do something.” And so he did – including having to design all the furniture and have it built because, as he says “We needed beds that are able to hold up to 1,500 lbs., we needed lounge furniture and beach furniture that doesn’t break. And it just doesn’t exist. So everything that we have there I had to create and prototype.”
And it worked! “The response has been phenomenal,” King says. “I’ve been booked all year and about 10 percent of that is repeat customers, which is amazing when you’ve only been open for two years.”
Fat people deserve to be accommodated and included in all aspects of daily life and The Resort is a step in the right direction.
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
The sitcom “Mom” has decided to hide Jaime Pressly’s pregnancy by having her wear a fat suit and pretend to be “addicted” to food. In the past the show has dealt with alcohol and gambling addiction and they plan to deal with food the same way.
That’s a hot mess. The idea of “food addiction” being the same as an addiction to alcohol or gambling is highly controversial for a number of reasons, including the fact that nobody needs to drink alcohol or gamble so “abstinence” is possible, but everyone needs to eat.
If what they are actually talking about is a health condition such as Binge Eating Disorder, they should know that binge eating issues happen to people of all sizes, so conflating them with her new body size fat suit, is playing to stereotypes and creating a confusing and inaccurate message about eating disorders and body size.
Regardless, wearing fat suits is seriously questionable even when people claim that they are trying to learn from it (yes, even if it’s Dr. Oz) since we have plenty of fat people telling their actual lived stories and we could just listen to and believe them. It’s 100% wrong when does for a Halloween costume, or for cheap laughs.
It seems very much like this is an example of the latter, and not just because it’s being done in a show that’s part of a genre that has “comedy” in its name. In addition to enjoying blithely donning a fat suit and engaging in stereotypes about fat women in a world where fat actresses face almost impossible odds of getting hired at all, in an attempt to claim that they won’t be making fat jokes (though the interviewer says that “…seeing the petite Pressly in puffy prosthetics will certainly be a gut-buster…”) Pressly made a fat joke:
“They don’t make fun,” says Pressly. “The writers are very careful. For everything we talk about on the show, there’s a fine line between what’s right and what’s wrong, and what we what can and cannot say. There is sensitive material in recovery. The other women kind of tiptoe around it. They don’t want to make Jill feel bad. There’s a big elephant in the room and that elephant is Jill.”
She’s an elephant – because she’s fat. Get it? It’s so funny I forgot to laugh. According to Jaime, having her hide behind tables and such would have been too “cheesy” – so that had her dress up as a fat person instead? Dressing in someone else’s skin is a terrible and offensive idea. Especially when we know that once the babies are born she’ll shed her pretend fat skin and return to her life of thin privilege while people clamor to ask her what it’s like to be fat.
This is crap. Apparently it’s not enough for Hollywood to burden the few fat actresses who get work with scripts chock full of stereotypes and shitty jokes about their food intake, now they’re putting thin actresses in fat suits to do the same.
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
This is one of those annual tradition posts – it’s the Underpants Rule and it is pretty simple: when it comes to personal choices, everyone is the boss of their own underpants. So, when it comes to personal choices, you get to choose for you and other people get to choose from them and it’s not your job to tell other people what to do and it’s not their job to tell you what to do. (Note that I’m talking about choices like what to eat and whether/how to exercise, not whether or not to encroach on some people’s civil rights, as that’s not a personal choice. Over the years, there have been some misunderstandings about the Underpants Rule – mostly confusion about what is and is not covered, rest assured, the Underpants Rule has limitations.)
To illustrate, if someone is considering saying something about personal choices that starts with
People should
Everyone ought to
What people need to do
We should all
Nobody should
You shouldn’t
blah blah things that have to do with underpants that aren’t yours blah blah
then there is a 99.9% chance that they are about to break The Underpants Rule. Of course telling you that you should follow the Underpants Rule is, in fact, breaking the Underpants Rule which is pesky, so let me instead make a case for the Underpants Rule and then you can make your own choice.
I chose a Health at Every Size practice (knowing that health is not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, or entirely within our control) because I am a fan of research, logic, and math. I think that the research clearly shows that a HAES practice gives me a much better shot at supporting my health with way less downside risk than a weight loss- based health practice.
There are people who think the exact opposite of that. I know that because they come here and tell me so – they say that I should make a different choice. This blog is my little corner of the internet. It exists only because I created it and I am thrilled to pieces that people enjoy reading it, that people get inspired by it, that it gives people information to help them make choices etc. I try very hard to make sure that I always follow the Underpants Rule and never tell anyone else how they have to live when it comes to their personal choices, and yet people come here and try to tell me how to live when it comes to my personal choices. That’s annoying.
For this reason, I would never go onto someone’s weight loss blog and tell them all about Health at Every Size and quote research as to why I think it’s a better choice. Those are not my underpants.
I do not enjoy (or believe them) when people tell me that I need to become smaller to be attractive. Therefore I would never say that thin women need to become larger to be attractive. Besides the fact that I don’t believe it, those are not my underpants. (Not to mention that the path to high self-esteem is probably not paved with hypocrisy so doing to someone else exactly what I don’t want done to me seems ill-advised.)
The “War on Obesity” is an underpants rule breakdown on a massive scale. A group of government, public and private interests (with various profit and political motivations) has chosen a group of people who are identifiable by sight and is now trying to tell us everything from how we have to prioritize health, to the path we have to take to become healthy, to how our bodies have to look. Who died and made them Underpants Overlord? Nobody. (And another year has gone by and I’ve still not received myofficial fat person pony, so there’s another angry letter I have to write.)
My metaphorical underpants and my actual underpants have something in common: if I want somebody else in them, that person will be among the very first to know. I have definitely not invited the executives at HBO, Kaiser Permanente, the government, or the diet industry into my underpants.
Now, I’m not telling what to do (cause, you know, Underpants Rule) but I’m suggesting that if you don’t like it when people attempt to be the boss of your underpants, then maybe take a pass on trying to be the boss of someone else’s. I’m fairly certain that “Do unto others exactly what you don’t want them to do to you” is the brick rule or the pile of crap rule or something – at any rate a LOT of steps down from platinum and gold. (If you are suddenly overcome with the urge to talk about how much fat people supposedly cost in “your tax dollars” then head over to this post immediately.)
Remember, you are forever the boss of your underpants – occupy your underpants (with a nod to reader Duckie for that phrase)! I’m going off to see if there is a Guinness World Record for number of times the word underpants is used in a blog post.
Underpants. Underpants. Underpants. Underpants.
Underpants.
Under…
…pants.
Like this blog? Here’s more cool stuff:
Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you. Click here for details
NEW!!! 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!
Over the course of eighteen self-paced, content-packed, quick videos you’ll get the tools you need to create healthy relationships with food, movement, and your body, and you’ll map out a path to health that makes sense for you, in an easily digestible format. Built-in tools allow you to track your progress and keep notes individually or as a group. 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!
Before we get to the post, please 
Before I get into the post today, I’m excited to tell you that got over 7,000 signatures in just two days on our petition to get Esquire UK to pull Giles Coren’s article on “fatherhood” in which he fat-shames his 4-year-old son and then says he kill all fat people. This is really great momentum! The more people who are involved, the more pressure we put on Esquire UK so please take a moment to sign and share (or share again) 
Before we get to today’s post, please consider 
Giles Coren writes a column for Esquire about fatherhood. His most recent piece is titled: “I Don’t Care What My Son Becomes… As Long As He Isn’t Overweight.” I thought I couldn’t be shocked by fatphobia anymore but I was wrong.
I was so disappointed to hear that Rosie O’Donnell joined in on fat-shaming donald on Twitter. It’s really not ok no matter what he weighs or how much weight he has or hasn’t gained. The real problem is that the thread she Tweeted out to her 1.09 million followers is a cesspool of size bigotry – including the constant no-less-wrong-just-because-it’s-so-predicable conflation of weight and health.
Fat people should be accommodated by the all the same places that thin people should be accommodated. That statement shouldn’t be controversial, and it shouldn’t even need to be said.
The sitcom “Mom” has decided to hide Jaime Pressly’s pregnancy by having her wear a fat suit and pretend to be “addicted” to food. In the past the show has dealt with alcohol and gambling addiction and they plan to deal with food the same way.
This is one of those annual tradition posts – it’s the Underpants Rule and it is pretty simple: when it comes to personal choices, everyone is the boss of their own underpants. So, when it comes to personal choices, you get to choose for you and other people get to choose from them and it’s not your job to tell other people what to do and it’s not their job to tell you what to do. (Note that I’m talking about choices like what to eat and whether/how to exercise, not whether or not to encroach on some people’s civil rights, as that’s not a personal choice. Over the years, there have been some misunderstandings about the Underpants Rule – mostly confusion about what is and is not covered, rest assured, 
Dances With Fat 