The internet is chock full of fat jokes so they can be difficult to avoid, but it’s always extra upsetting when someone we think of as a friend posts one of them.  I’ve talked about those terrible “People of Walmart” pictures before, today I’m talking about something more subtle  – jokes that suggest, for example, that just existing as a fat person is somehow hilarious, or cheap jokes based on lazy stereotypes.

Like all oppressive BS, we get to choose how to deal with this.  The choices we make might change from day to day, or even hour to hour based on the situation, our relationships with the people involved, and how we feel on any given day (maybe we feel like doing some activism, or maybe we need a break from standing up to bullshit behavior,) and all choices are valid.  Here are some options:

Do nothing

Yup, just ignoring this is an option.

Hide/unfriend

Depending on the platform where this is happening, it may be an option to hide this particular post, all future posts, or to unfriend the person.

Private message

You can send them a message and say something like “You may not be aware, but the post you made earlier was really hurtful in the way that it [insert issue here]

• stereotypes people like me
• uses people like me as the butt of a joke
• tries to make appearance-based bigotry funny

We are [friends/family/etc.] and I know that you didn’t mean to post something hurtful, but you did and I’d really appreciate it if you take it down.

Or

Can we talk about that joke that you posted earlier, it really hurt my feelings that you would post a joke that is based on stereotyping people like me.

Be Prepared!  They may refuse to take it down and/or attack you. When people are confronted with their inappropriate behavior they often try to make the person who confronts them the problem – be prepared to be called “oversensitive,” to be accused of having no sense of humor, of not being able to take a joke etc.  At that point you’ll need to decide what to do moving forward and the options range from doing nothing, to trying to continue the conversation, to ending the friendship.

Reply publicly

Leave a reply explaining exactly why this “joke” isn’t funny, or cool to post.  Again, be prepared for people to try to make you the problem. Remember that you get to decide how to reply, how long to involve yourself in the conversation and you can opt out at any time.

It can be incredibly hurtful when a good friend posts a fat joke, to me the most important thing to remember is that your feelings are totally valid, and while you may be able to control your reactions, you can’t control their actions. If things get bad you can use a three-step boundary setting process:

1. Explain what you would like.
2. Explain the (realistic) consequence, if you don’t get it.
3. Follow through.

Make sure to choose a consequence that you can truly follow through with.  So maybe you say:

1. I need my facebook wall to be free from fat jokes
2. If you insist on posting fat jokes I’ll need to unfriend you.
3. If they post another fat joke, unfriend and let them know why.

or maybe something like this:

1. I’m not willing to be friends with someone who engages in weight bigotry
2. If you continue to engage in weight bigotry then we can’t be friends.
3. If they continue to engage in weight bigotry then, in the words of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, if they were laughing you don’t need ’em cause they’re not good friends.

Remember that this is not an argument about whether or not their behavior constitutes weight bigotry, you get to determine what you feel is offensive and you get to set boundaries based on that.

For more support around this check out

When you have to confront weight stigma

and

Five Phrases for Size Acceptance Self-Defense

It’s not you, it’s them.  Bullying, stigma, and oppression are the problem, fat people are not, and we get to choose how we deal with it and whatever choices we make are valid.

Join Me In a Q&A with Michelle Hess!

Today (8/5/15) at 4pm Pacific I’ll be a guest on Brave Girl Coaching’s Body Positive Q&A series.  Check it out here! You can listen in and ask questions of your own!

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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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

This is something that came up several ways in several places today so I wanted to address it.  It’s the concept that someone can “act fat.” The three situations that I saw were:

Someone ate a lot and said that they “ate like a fat kid”

Someone had a slow run and said that they “ran like a fatty”

Someone described skipping their workout as being “fatty for a day”

Dude, no.  Here’s what actually happened:

A thin person ate a lot.

A thin person ran slowly.

A thin person skipped their workout today.

Being fat is a body size/composition, it is not a behavior or group of behaviors – fat people have as wide and varied experiences and choices as any group of people who share a single physical characteristic. There are people of all sizes who eat “a lot”, run “slowly” (or not at all) and skipped their workout today (or don’t workout ever).  There are people of all sizes who eat “a little”, run “fast”, and didn’t skip their workout today. These are all totally valid choices, they are also all personal choices that are nobody else’s business.

When people say that they are “acting fat” what they are actually doing is acting like the kind of asshole who stereotypes people based on how they look.  This is actually two layers of crap. The first layer is the mistaken idea that our personal choices around food and exercise should be judged at all, the second layer is that we should associates specific ways of behaving with broad appearance-based categories (ie: fat and thin.)

Our body sizes and our behaviors are two different things, neither of which should be up for public comment, or be anybody else’s business unless we ask them to make it their business (anyone wishing to make a “but muh tax dollarz!” argument should check out this post.)  When a thin person chooses not to exercise they are not “acting fat” any more than when I train for an IRONMAN I’m “acting thin.”  We’re just different sized people doing (or not doing) our own personal stuff.

Own your choices – if you are a thin person who eats a lot, runs slowly, is skipping a workout, is licking donuts (that you already own!), etc. that’s all fine, but it has absolutely nothing to do with fat people, so kindly leave us out of it.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

In a conversation I was having today, several of us were talking about our frustration with stores that sell plus-sized clothing but don’t use plus-sized models (and by “plus-sized models” I mean models who wear actual plus sized clothes – preferably models in all the sizes that the clothing comes in, but definitely someone who could actually wear the clothes in real life, the idea being that seeing the clothes on the model should give us some idea how the clothes might look on us, rather than showing us how they would look on thin women while being gathered at the back with industrial sized clips.)

As often happens in these conversations, someone brought up the fact that there is research that shows that plus-sized women bought more clothes when they were advertised on a “straight sized” model than on an actual plus-sized model.  The person who brought it up acted as though that was the end of the conversation.  I think it’s just the beginning.

According to a controversial study from Arizona State University:

“We found that overweight consumers demonstrated lower self-esteem – and therefore probably less enthusiasm about buying products – after exposure to any size models in ads (versus ads with no models). Also, normal-weight consumers experienced lower self-esteem after exposure to moderately heavy models, such as those in Dove soap’s ‘Real Women’ campaign, than after exposure to moderately thin models.”

Here’s my question:  Do you think it just might, maybe, possibly be because we have been so aggressively sold the idea that there is only one body type that is “beautiful”/worthy to be seen, that we’ve started to believe it, and so as a culture when we see someone outside of the single image of beauty that we are sold  99.999999999% of the time we experience a conditioned response and immediately think “That’s a bad body.  That body is wrong.  My body is like that. My body is wrong.”?

Instead of looking at this study, asking the question that I asked, and pondering their culpability in the situation, what I see the media and advertisers and clothing companies doing is hiding behind the study and continuing to perpetuate their singular idea of beauty on the grounds that we like it better, which continues to reinforce that any body outside of that ideal is somehow unworthy of being seen, which means that we like the “ideal” more, and like our own bodies less.  Especially in a world where we almost never see an image that has not been so “retouched” that it is a completely impossible standard of beauty. Does this seem like a good idea to you?  I think it’s pretty much crap.  If we want things to change, then we’re going to have to get it done ourselves, which I think includes insisting that the stores that want us to give them our fat money put their clothes on fat models.

In the meantime, here are some things that we can do for ourselves:

Seek out pictures of bodies of all sizes, look at them every day.  Find things about them that you like. Start to really look around you at the diversity of bodies that exist, and appreciating that diversity.  I think that the ability to appreciate all kinds of bodies is a skill that, in most of us, is left under-developed because society tries to convince us that beauty is singular and objective.

Decide, right now, that you are above putting down other bodies to make you feel better about yours (even if you only think it), or for any other reason.  Start to notice any time you think anything negative about anyone’s body and stop yourself and replace it with a positive thought.  Refuse to participate in body snarking with other people.  Be the change.

Find ways to love your own body.  If you want some help check out Love Your Body More in Three Simple Steps

Want some places to start looking at beautiful bodies of all sizes?  Check these out for a start:

I have a gallery of my own pictures on this site.

The Adipositivity Project (NSFW)

VoluptuArt has amazing pieces to look at and buy.  I have done both and I love the stuff.  (Nope, they don’t give me anything to say that, they most likely have no idea who I am)

This post (check the comments for lots of amazing pictures of fat people doing awesome stuff from belly dancing to hammer throwing).

These videos:

As always, if you know of others please add them in the comments.

Our thin-obsessed culture makes it easy to believe the lie that some bodies are better than other bodies, but it’s still a lie, and we don’t have to be duped into believing it.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

Fat people get a lot of negative messages about our bodies every day. One way to fight this is to change the number of positive messages. Unfortunately I’ve found that some people don’t know the difference between an authentic compliment, and saying something really offensive. It’s cool though, I’m here to help.

Allow me to elucidate using personal experience from a meeting to which I wore a sleeveless shirt and a skirt (and where I typically wear pants):

“Look at you, rocking a dress!” (said positively, no hint of sarcasm).

Compliment.  Well done. (Yes, it’s technically a skirt and not a dress, but that’s not important right now.)

“Oh (makes pensive face), I didn’t think you wore dresses.  I actually think pants suit you better.”

Nope, not a compliment.  Not a thing to say at all really.  Maybe should have used your inner monologue on this one.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen you wear a skirt before.  You look so cute.”

Compliment.  That’s how you do it!

“I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re very brave to wear a sleeveless shirt, I always feel like my arms are too fat” (said by someone less than half my size).

Swing and a miss, I’m afraid.  Not a compliment.  I appreciate that you’ve made it clear that this is your issue and not mine, but really if your “compliment” starts with “you’re so brave” and doesn’t end with the equivalent of “for saving those kids from those wild animals”, you might consider skipping it.

An open letter to that fat person I saw and made all those assumptions about.

World of no. Galaxy of no. Universe of no. No.  These people should stick to posting facebook updates with adorable animals and keep the stereotype-ridden open letters in their diaries.

So a quick summary of indications that what you are about to say is not a compliment:

• You would be offended if someone said it about you (“I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re very brave to wear your hair like that”)
• You can imagine that immediately after saying it you’re going to have to follow it up with “but I meant it as a compliment!”
• …or “Don’t be so sensitive, I was trying to be nice.”
• You are complimenting someone for not conforming to your stereotypes about them (“You’re not like those other fat people.”)

So, it’s pretty simple:

Think.

Compliment.

Repeat.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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 reader Sarah, who asked the two most common questions that I hear about starting a personal Health at Every Size practice.  I’m going to answer them but before I do, just a reminder that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not size, health, or “healthy habit”, dependent, nobody is obligated to pursue health or health habits by any definition.  Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size are two separate things, more about this here.

So the answers to these questions are for those who are interested in considering/practicing HAES, but we each get to choose how highly we prioritize our health and the path that we take to get their and that’s not anyone else’s business unless we decide to make it their business.  Now that we’re clear on that, here is Sarah’s e-mail:

I have been reading your book and like it so far. I like the message that fat and health are not synonymous. I’ve heard about the HAES movement and feel it is the best option for me. I do have have a question or two for you:

1) I think a big part of my own health needs to be loving myself and I find that difficult. Any tips?

2) How does one eat healthy and exercise without weight loss in mind?  Every time I try try a health approach,  I I was end up worried about weight loss so I become scale dependent and depressed if it isn’t going well.  I also tend to restrict too much and that never lasts long.

I don’t think that there is a single answer to question 1, I think it’s a process and it’s different for everyone.  My journey started without getting to a place of being really grateful for what my body did.  Then came the realization that the ability to perceive beauty is a skill (so if I can’t see the beauty in someone, it’s not because they aren’t beautiful, it’s because my skill set is lacking.) The last steps were the hardest and they started when I got to the point where every body but mine was beautiful.   Feel free to get support around this, using  books, blogs, classes and coaching. To me the  most important thing was making the decision – I wasn’t going to stop until I figured out how to love myself, no matter what it took.  From there it was about learning things, trying things and celebrating progress.

The second question is hands down the most common one I get.  Many of us have been so inundated with the idea that the only acceptable “outcome” of eating and moving is weight loss, that we can’t imagine what other goals there could be.  My advice here is to set goals that you can, for at least the most part, control and then measure those.

For example, one of my goals is five servings of vegetables a day.  Another is at least 150 minutes of movement a week (of course training for the IRONMAN I get way more than this.)   These are things that I can, for the most part, control.  I can then measure things like how I feel, my energy level, strength, stamina, and flexibility to see how I’m doing.  Sometimes I set specific goals, like as a random hypothetical completing an IRONMAN triathlon.   In that case I get a training program, set intermediate smaller goals, and work through that.

I want to suggest a bit of caution with using metabolic health (blood glucose, cholesterol, blood pressure etc.) as a measure of success. These things can be affected by behaviors, but they can also be affected by genetics, other medications, and other factors.  I think it’s interesting to get these measurements taken sometimes, but it’s important to remember that while you may be in control of the behaviors, you cannot control the outcome.

I would also recommend making your health practice blame free, shame free, and future oriented.  As far as I can see, there’s no point in having any blame or shame for where we are now.  The only thing that we can hope to control at this moment is our behavior moving forward (and that can often rely on how much privilege we have around access, money, and physical and mental health and other factors) .

To me, that’s at the heart of choosing the Health at Every Size.paradigm rather than the weight loss paradigm (and of course there are more than just two choices)  HAES holds that people at every size can make choices based on their prioritization of health and the path we choose and our current situation (rather than the weight loss paradigm which suggests feeding our bodies less food than they need to survive in the hope that they will eat themselves and become smaller, and also healthier.)

I think the research suggests that, while of course there are never any guarantees and health is never entirely within our control, healthy behaviors are the best way for me to support my body.  Based on the research I have rejected the idea that my best way to support my body is to use food and movement in an attempt to manipulate my size and hope that health comes along for that ride.

Finally, I think it helps to look at the whole thing as a journey, and remember that, like all journeys, there will be ups and downs and good days and bad days. What I know is that since i left the diet lifestyle to pursue Health at Every Size I’m healthier – but I also know that my health could change at any time, but  know that I’m happier, my ups are higher and my downs are less low, and I have healthy relationships with food, movement, and my body, and a sense of peace and partnership with my body that never seemed possible during my diet days.  Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

Reader Michelle forwarded me a ridiculous graph called “This is Why You’re Fat America” listing the calorie counts for some very rich restaurant foods. I seriously doubt that The Cheesecake Factory is the patient zero from which all American fatness stems.  But this highlights a larger issue.

I have noticed that guessing why fat people are fat has become one of our cultures very favorite pastimes.  I don’t know a single fat person who hasn’t had to deal with people guessing why they are fat. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been told to “eat less and exercise more” by people who can’t possible know how much I eat or how much I exercise.  Or we get told that no matter what we’re doing our bodies make it completely obvious that we must not be doing it right.  We  are not doing enough cardio, we are doing too much cardio, we need to cut down on this food or eat more of that food or natures newest miracle berry blah blah blah.

This goes really badly because we’ve devolved so far from anything resembling scientific method and true healthcare when it comes to fat people that any theory that anybody comes up with becomes instantly actionable.  The mayor of New York thinks that banning extra large sodas will make people less fat, no need for any kind of evidence – just do it.  Michelle Obama wants to make her time as First Lady about focusing on the weight of children even though there are no interventions proven to lead to long-term weight loss in kids? No problem, take your best guess and turn kids into lab rats for 8 years.

I’m not going to go into explanations about why people are a lot of different sizes for a lot for different reasons, nor am I going to go into the fact that after over 50 years of intense study there is not a single intervention that has been shown to lead to long term weight loss, or that there is no study that shows that such weight loss would lead to greater health.  What I’m going to say is that this treatment of fat people is ridiculous.   It’s bad enough when people use their very limited time on Earth to make random guesses about why fat people are fat, but it’s worse when it comes to people who think that these guesses constitute some kind of basis for evidence-based health interventions.  The way that you can identify an evidence-based health intervention is that it is based on evidence, and has something to do with health.  It is not based on somebody’s random guess about why people’s bodies are a certain size and how that size might be manipulated.

If I want someone’s rectal-pull-generated guess about why I’m fat, they will be among the very first to know.   Otherwise,  people are allowed to spend as much of their free time wondering why I look like this, but I don’t give a flying frick. And I will continue to insist that my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the right to exist, in a fat body, without being made the subject of a war on people who look like me, which includes a massive society wide game of “why is she fat” and “how can we change her.”

New Fit Fatties Videos

Want to see some awesome representations of athletes of all sizes?  Check out this month’s Fit Fatties Montage!

And if you missed last months, check that out too!

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

Several people have sent me a video of an individual who takes it upon himself to scream and rant and rave at, and about, fat people.  He is not the first person to believe that fat people are just a little bit of emotional abuse and bullying away from being thin (or pretend to believe it as a way to justify his abhorrent, abusive, bullying behavior.)

People do this for a number of different reasons.  Many, like the dude in the video I saw, seem to be partaking in some combination of attention-seeking, and enjoying being a bigot and bully out loud. Some are still stuck on the junior high school that-trick-never-works attempt to put others down to feel better about themselves. Others do it for profit. Jillian Michaels is certainly not the only person to do this, but she does seem to be one of the most successful in terms of getting attention and money. Of course we can’t know other people’s intentions and it doesn’t really matter since this behavior is inappropriate regardless.

Let’s get something very clear. This is not about helping fat people – the idea that we should abuse and bully fat people (or any people) “for their own good” is not a conclusion that can be arrived at through logical, rational thought.

It is possible that a few of these people have become so deluded and confused by a culture where fat hating is rampant and encouraged (including by the government) that they think this is a good idea, or their sense of self-importance is so over-exaggerated that they think that they are being brave and helping those who are beneath them, but at the end of the day they are still bullying and abusing people and their behavior is still deeply wrong.

There are things to be learned from these people and their ranting.  Nothing about fat people of course, as this actually has very little if anything to do with us.  It can, however, be helpful in illustrating just how screwed up our society has become when it comes to size and health.  It can also show how people are comfortable treating fat people, and how comfortable people are or aren’t with the bullying and abuse of fat people. (Just as a reminder: while the bullying, stigmatizing and harassment of fat people is certainly often socially accepted, it is definitely not the “last acceptable prejudice”  racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, ageism and more are all alive and well and if they weren’t “acceptable” they wouldn’t be happening.)

If you are a fat person and you have the misfortune to deal with this behavior either in person or by coming across one of these videos, I recommend that you do whatever it takes to keep yourself ok.  You can do activism around it, or ignore it, leave a comment, report it, or block it.  If one of your friends posts this crap you can leave a comment, send them a private message, unfriend them, or do nothing and move on with your day.

Whatever you do, just be clear – it’s not you, it’s them  Fat people are not the problem, fat people should not be treated like this, ever.  These people and their behavior are completely and totally unacceptable and wrong. Period.  And no, it doesn’t matter if they can find someone who says that their life got better because of this bullying and abuse.  If people want to be treated this way then they can request it, otherwise there is simply no excuse, justification, or reason for this behavior.

If you are not fat and you see this behavior, please consider speaking up – reminding people that even if someone believes that they can judge others by appearance (even though that’s obviously bullshit) there is no way to bully and abuse people for their own good and that this behavior is completely unacceptable.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

Ah, Kevin Trudeau.  He came to the diet book world like so many others – as a con man (*cough* Steve Siebold *cough*).  He originally found himself on the Federal Trade Commission’s radar for schilling a cure for severe pain, and then a cure for cancer.  As part of a settlement he promised to, you know, stop lying about stuff for money.

So he wrote a diet book!  I imagine he looked around, saw the world of weight loss and said “hey, this is an industry where not only does absolutely everyone lie about how well their stuff works, but everyone, including the customers, blames the customers for failing! Hot damn why didn’t I start with this?”

His book was called “The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About.” Ooooh, tell me more! Apparently what “they” don’t want you to know, is that if you sell a book claiming “easy” weight loss with “no exercise”, but your book actually says that people must exercise an hour a day, eat only 500 calories a day, and get injections made from the urine of pregnant women, the shit will hit the fan. Kevin got 10 years in prison and now it looks like he has to give refunds to the people he conned.

While this is good news, I think it’s important to note that, based on the research, there isn’t any company, program, or book selling weight loss that is any more honest about their success rate (or any more successful) than Kevin. People try to act like there’s a difference between “fad diets” like Kevin’s and “lifestyle change” programs like Weight Watchers, but the fact is that the only difference is that Weight Watchers has been getting away with this longer. (though the FTC did get involved, which is why companies like Weight Watchers have to put up a disclaimer that says that their product doesn’t really work every time they advertise it. Though I would prefer that they be forced to have realistic slogans.)

The truth is that whether they are selling us pills that come with a warning to carry extra pants, suggesting that drinking 5 reconstituted soy protein shakes a day is the path to health, or trying to get us to take pills that might kill us, nobody selling weight loss has any research to suggest that more than a tiny fraction of people will succeed long-term.  So here’s hoping that what’s happened to Kevin is the start of a trend.

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On the blog KevinMD, (self-described as “Social Media’s Leading Physician Voice”) a video was posted [every trigger warning that you could possibly imagine, I definitely don’t recommend watching it] under the title “This is the video that will make you feel sorry for doctors treating obesity.” (Update:  The blog has been removed from KevinMD – way to go everyone, thanks for your activism!)

It’s a slickly produced video by Waqas Khan (who I don’t even want to acknowledge is a physician because it’s just too horrifying), the premise of which is that fat people are all stupid walking stereotypes, and that everyone should feel sorry for doctors because they are expected to treat fat people like human beings.

I mean, who do these fatties think they are, expecting healthcare practitioners to provide evidence-based (god, even compassionate?) care rather than just making assumptions about us, diagnosing us as fat, and prescribing weight loss (using “interventions” that have not only been shown to be almost completely ineffective long-term, but to actually have the opposite of the intended effect most of the time.) Poor doctors, oh the humanity!

Or, in Waqas’ case, the complete lack thereof. (Activism options are listed at the end of this blog post.)

The videos are created by Waqas’ company called “Healthcare Not Fair” (I guess “Doctor Bigot Films” was already taken.)  He claims the piece is satire. So we can add “satire” to “compassion,” “basic human respect,” and “evidence-based medicine” on the list of things that Waqas Khan does not understand. What this video actually shows is what happens when a bigot abuses a position of authority and trust to wallow in, and perpetuate, his bigotry.

Make no mistake though, his behavior is a direct and serious threat to the health of fat people. Waqas is trying to spread a message of weight bigotry, body shame, and self-loathing. If he succeeds, many fat people (and those who feel fat) will believe that our bodies are not worthy of good care and that we are not worthy of being treated with respect by healthcare practitioners, or anyone else which will make it nearly impossible to make decisions in our best interest.

Many of us will see doctors like Waqas who ignore our actual complaints, trust their bigotry and stereotypes over what we tell them, and miss actual health problems because they are so busy trying to manipulate our body size.  Some of us will see doctors who refuse to give us routine care until we meet some ratio of weight and height.

Others will be so scared that our doctor will be a bigot like Waqas that we’ll avoid seeking care, causing us to miss out on preventative care, early diagnosis, and to have worse outcomes than those who can go to the doctor without being terrified that the doctor might create and promote videos making fun of patients like them. This is a real public health threat. If we’re going to wage war against someone in the name of public health, let’s wage war against bigots, and bullies, and people like Waqas Khan.

By the way, this video (called “Miss Fatty”) isn’t the only one, this is a series that includes “Ms. Stupid Taxpayer,” and “Ms. Have it All” among others. Nobody, of any size, should be subjected to a physician like this.

The video contains a “watch at your own risk” warning at the beginning that says “Just like cancer, there’s no cure for getting offended.” His trivialization of cancer to defend his bigotry aside, I beg to differ. I think the cure for getting offended is taking action. Here are some actions that you can take: (Regardless of whether you engage in activism or not, let me just remind you that this guy is the problem, not you. This is severely fucked up, you are fine.)

Activism Opportunities:

Leave a comment on KevinMD.com  and e-mail him at contact@kevinmd.com asking him if “Social Media’s Leading Physician Voice”  really wants to be a voice for bigotry, and suggesting that he take the video down.   DONE!  Thanks to our activism, KevinMD.com has removed the video! There’s still work to be done:

E-mail Waqa’s company (by the way, his next project is a “memoir” film called ““Superdoc: Healthcare’s Own Superhero”” about himself) and let him know what you think of him healthcarenotfair@gmail.com

He works with Healthtap so you can e-mail them and let them know how you feel about their choice of physician partners.

If you wanted to file a complaint with the California Medical Board online (perhaps for unprofessional conduct?) Waqas Ahmad Khan’s License Number is 108929

Leave comments on his social media:

Twitter @driamsorry1 https://twitter.com/driamsorry1

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/healthcarenotfair

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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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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

In response to reactions to my post yesterday about Ariana Grande’s #DonutGate, I wanted to revisit a post I wrote a few years ago about the double standards we have around eating in our culture when it comes to fat and thin people.

I’m watching the show Friday Night Lights, it’s the episode where one of the tall thin beautiful female characters decides that she is hungry, she asks her boyfriend for a long list of junk food from the convenience store, and reminds him that she was going to eat all of it (so he better get other food if he wanted something.) He smiles at her.  You can see this repeated all over the place in pop culture.  This is iconic – she is a hot chick who is “one of the guys”, she can eat her body weight in wings, she orders beer and not wine, she orders her hot dog with chili and extra cheese and in the event of a break-up she eats a gallon of mint chocolate chip punctuated with sprays of whipped topping directly from the can into her mouth.  She looks like a model but eats like a linebacker. She’s cute, adorable, hot, sexy, quirky.

But what about this girl:  She’s fat, she can eat her body weight in wings, she orders beer and not wine, she orders her hot dog with chili and extra cheese and in the event of a break-up she eats a gallon of mint chocolate chip punctuated with sprays of whipped topping directly from the can into her mouth. She is a fat woman who eats like a linebacker.  She is the subject of shame, stigma, humiliation and ridicule by everyone from random strangers on the internet to her doctor. She is disgusting, she is everything that’s wrong with the world.

Why if someone is thin are these behaviors considered some combination of hot, sexy, adorable, and quirky, but if she’s fat the exact same behaviors are irresponsible, disgusting, creating diseases that she “deserves”, costing tax dollars etc.?

I was going to give a hint, but let me just take a stab at the answer – it’s because it isn’t about health, it’s about our cultural bias against fat people and all the ways that people find to perpetuate it. It’s about the way that fat people are used as a target – including and especially by the government – for people looking to blame their misfortune on someone.

I’m kind of surprised it isn’t already a Twitter hashtag. Healthcare costs too high?  Blame fat people (even if the evidence doesn’t support it.) Taxes too high? #blamefatpeople (even if it makes no sense) Licked some donuts and getting (rightly) eviscerated in the media? #blamefatpeople

There is an answer.  It’s not to stop “condoning” these behaviors in thin women or to start “condoning” them in fat women.  The answer is for each of us to realize that, just like our personal choices aren’t other people’s business, their personal choices aren’t our business. Other people’s food choices are not really ours to condone.  The answer is to learn the ancient art of minding our own damn business.

We are allowed to have all kinds of opinions, but nobody else has an obligation to care about what we think. If we start to insist that they do, i think we’ll soon find that this slope is very slippery –  whose behavior do we get to choose and who gets to choose our behavior for us?  It’s a lot less fun when someone gets to tell us how to live.

While we’re at it, let’s stop making assumptions.  Let’s not assume that the way someone is eating tonight out at dinner is the way that they eat all the time. Let’s not assume that we can look at someone and know what they eat.  Let’s not assume that it’s any of our business what people eat.  Let’s stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around food, and we can also stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around bodies, mind our own business, make our own choices, and live happier ever after.

Like the blog?  More Cool Stuff!

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!

Like my work?  Want to help me keep doing it? Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information on topics, previous engagements and reviews 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

A movie about my time as a dancer is in active development, you can follow the progress on Facebook!

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