Ariana Grande gave us a great example of just how ridiculous the “war on obesity” can become:

First, she went with her boyfriend to get some donuts:

For reasons passing understanding, she decided to lick some of the donuts that were on display on the counter, not tell anyone, and then buy other non-licked donuts.

She was caught on tape licking the donuts while making disparaging remarks about people from the US.

So she was forced to make an apology:

I am EXTREMELY proud to be an American and I’ve always made it clear that I love my country. What I said in a private moment with my friend, who was buying the donuts, was taken out of context and I am sorry for not using more discretion with my choice of words.

First of all, what difference does it make who was buying the donuts?  Whatever. This would probably have been ok, but she couldn’t stop herself there:

As an advocate for healthy eating, food is very important to me and I sometimes get upset by how freely we as Americans eat and consume things without giving any thought to the consequences that it has on our health and society as a whole.

The fuck?  Lady, you licked donuts on a donut shop counter, then you bought different donuts, leaving the donuts you licked behind.  I can’t think of anyone whose thoughts about food and health are less relevant to this discussion in this moment.  But she couldn’t stop there either:

The fact that the United States has the highest child obesity rate in the world frustrates me. We need to do more to educate ourselves and our children about the dangers of overeating and the poison we put in our bodies.

The actual fuck? I have to wonder if she arrived at this on her own or if some adviser was like “blame fat people, no…wait, blame fat kids that will totally work!”  Like fat kids don’t face enough bullying, now we’re to believe that their mere existence has lead poor frustrated Ariana to lick donuts on a shop counter, then buy other donuts and eat them, as a way to educate about healthy foods (which, I would think, should include access to foods that haven’t been licked by a stranger.)

But wait, there’s more.  In a second apology video called “sorry babes” she said:

“I kind of missed my opportunity to actually sincerely apologize and express how I was feeling because I was too busy preaching about my feelings with the food industry, which is not, like, relative,”

No, it’s not, like, relative. Hell, it’s not even relevant. How about instead of “Sorry but OMGDEATHFATZARECOMINGFORUS OMGFATKIDS!” just saying “I’m sorry that I licked donuts that were on a counter, and didn’t admit it until I was caught on tape and those donuts had been sold to other people. Wow, I am really a massive fuck up.”

This is the world that the “War on Obesity” has wrought, where “But fat people!” is accepted as a reason/excuse for everything from the suspension of scientific method/all logical thought, to practicing experimental medicine on kids, to calling for the eradication of fat people, to a pop star licking donuts. Fat people are not political punching bags, we are not yours for the metaphoring, we’re not a convenient way to distract from your donut licking behavior. Fat people are, in fact, people.  We deserve to be treated with basic human dignity and we have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So if you want to lick some donuts, you’re on your own – leave fat people out of it.

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It’s “Say Something Sunday,” a day dedicated, at least on this blog, to personal Size Diversity activism. I did the math and if everyone who views the blog each week did one piece of Size Diversity Activism a week, it would add up to over 1.5 million body positive messages put out into the world this year.  Multiply that times the number of people who might see each of those messages and things start to increase exponentially. To be very clear, nobody is obligated to do activism so if this doesn’t appeal to you that’s totally cool, I’ll be back tomorrow with your regularly scheduled blog post!

Today’s theme is “The War on Obesity.”  There is no way that you can have a war against fat without making it a war against fat people. Even if you could, the idea that we should wage war against whatever part of people the government thinks makes their weight in pounds time 703 divided by their height in inches squared greater than 30 (which is how “obesity” is calculated) is seriously questionable.  Not to mention that even if people believe that this is about health and not fat, it’s really not ok to start a war against people because of their health status, or because you think that the world would be cheaper for others if people with that health status didn’t exist.  Not to mention that those interested in public health can create excellent campaigns that are completely weight neutral.

This is a pretty simple one – there is just no need for a war on obesity. When you see people talk about a “war on obesity” speak up and let them know that you are not interested in spending time and money going to war against people for how they look, or their health status,

Have a great Say Something Sunday!

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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

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In case you missed it, in the latest issue of O, The Oprah Magazine a reader asked creative director Adam Glassman “Can I pull off a crop top?”  He told her:  “If (and only if!) you have a flat stomach, feel free to try one.”

So, obviously, Adam Glassman can bite me. (And why O Magazine has men telling women what they can and can’t wear will have to be a subject for another time.)  The good news is all the pictures of fat women rocking crop tops that have followed.

In the grand tradition of shitty apologies following shitty body-shaming behavior (*cough* Jamelia *cough*) a spokesperson for the magazine said, ostensibly with a straight face, “We support, encourage and empower all women to look great, feel confident and live their best lives—in this case, we could have expressed it better. We appreciate the feedback and will be more mindful going forward.”

We could have expressed it better? I mean, really. To be able to express it better, they would have had to express it at all. What they expressed was the opinion that women should feel confident “if (and only if!)” they have a flat stomach. Which is bullshit.

To be very clear there is no clothing requirement to “prove” that we are part of body positivity or Size Acceptance – if you don’t feel like rocking a crop top for any reason that is completely fine.  We have the right to bare arms, and legs, and stomachs, but never the obligation.  That said, I think the idea that there is any clothing that’s ok for thin people and not ok for fat people is total crap.

I am personally a member of the F*ck Flattering club. When someone tells me that seeing rolls isn’t flattering, or showing fat arms isn’t flattering, or bright clothing on fat people isn’t flattering, or clothing that *gasp* isn’t slimming, isn’t flattering, what I hear is “I’m interested in buying into and reinforcing the idea that we should all try to get as close to some arbitrary stereotype of beauty as possible.”  People are allowed to do that for themselves, they aren’t allowed to dictate it to others.  For me, I think it’s feeding the machine that oppresses me and so I personally have no interest in doing anything but fighting it. and you can believe I’ll wear whatever the hell I want while I’m at it.

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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.

Weight loss is touted as a miracle cure.  We’re promised that it will make us healthier, happier, more attractive  – that the life of our dreams is just a diet away. We are told that being fat is the cause for everything bad in our lives – single and want to be in a relationship?  It’s because you’re fat.  Have mobility problems?  It’s because you’re fat.  Have diabetes?  It’s because you’re fat.  Hit by a truck?  It’s because you’re fat.  Abducted by aliens?  It’s because you’re fat.

For today let’s put aside the fact that there are people of all sizes dealing with health challenges, unwanted singleness, diabetes, auto accidents and alien abduction.  Let’s set aside that there isn’t a single study of people who have lost weight long term showing that they were healthier for it.  Let’s not even get into a discussion about alien abduction (it’s beyond the scope of this blog).

Even if becoming thin would solve every single problem in every single fat person’s life (and I don’t think it would), the truth is it doesn’t matter.  Because we don’t know how to get it done. The belief that we know how to help people lose weight long term, and that weight loss leads to greater health, is a major Galileo issue of our time – widely believed, fervently defended, and unsupported by the evidence.

Let’s talk about what would define successful weight loss.  If we are going to buy into the idea of “healthy weight,” “overweight and “obese” categories (and I don’t) then successful weight loss would have to move someone at least one category lower than they are to make them “more healthy”, and the ultimate goals would be to move people into the “healthy weight” category, otherwise their risk – based on this system of categories – doesn’t really change.

We are nowhere even close to knowing how to do that.  In studies of long term weight loss the vast majority of participants regain all of their weight long term, and many regain more than they lost.  Many more never lose enough weight to change categories.

The Nutrition Journal published a review of studies used to prove that dieting works called “Validity of claims made in weight management research: a narrative review of dietetic articles”.  Here are some of the findings:

• [studies included] claims of non-specific ‘health benefits’ which are not substantiated
• It appears that beliefs about weight and health acquire a truth status so that they circulate as intuitively appealing ‘facts’, immune from scrutiny and become used, and accepted by editors, without supporting references
• Dietetic literature on weight management fails to meet the standards of evidence based medicine.
• Research in the field is characterized by speculative claims that fail to accurately represent the available data.

This information is even more fleshed out in the same journal in the piece “Weight Science:  Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift.”

When I first started reading weight loss literature, it was amazing to me how many studies cite an extremely low success rate (between .17% and 5%) but then assert in their conclusions that it’s still a good idea to set a weight loss goal and use the method that they just showed almost never works.

Weight Watchers own numbers show that the average person maintains a 5 pound weight loss after 2 years (a feat I feel could be accomplished by regular exfoliation and without paying a small fortune to Weight Watchers.)  When asked by the Federal Trade Commission to do longer-term studies, representatives from WW refused because “it would be too depressing for our clients”.

Weight loss is promised to “cure what ails ya”, no matter what that is, when in truth there is basically no more research to support weight loss than there is to promote any other snake oil. There isn’t a study that shows that weight loss is possible for the majority of people, and there isn’t a study that shows that if it was successful it would make people healthier.  This entire thing is based on everybody knows.

Almost everyone who attempts weight loss fails.  Yet doctors keep prescribing the same things and blaming the vast majority of people for “not trying hard” enough or “not doing it right”. Can you imagine if Viagra only worked 5% of the time and we blamed 95% of the guys for just not trying hard enough?  It’s completely ridiculous.  But when I point this out people roll their eyes and say “everybody knows” that you can lose weight if you really try.

Let me say it again – even if weight loss would solve every problem (and I don’t think it will), it doesn’t matter because we don’t know how to get it done and my opinion, based on the research that exists, is that it is a massive waste of time, money, and resources to keep suggesting, marketing, prescribing, and pursuing weight loss.  (Especially when there is good evidence that there are other ways to pursue health if that’s a priority (knowing that health is not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, entirely within our control, or guaranteed under any circumstance.)  If people want to keep researching weight loss methods that’s fine, it’s also fine if they want to keep researching ways to help people fly like superman, but I certainly won’t be dieting or jumping off my roof and flapping my arms. Attempting weight loss to get healthier is doing something that nobody has proven is possible for a reason that nobody has proven is valid.

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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 get so many messages about what a fat body is, I thought I’d talk about some of the things that my body isn’t:

My Body is Not Embarrassing

Being fat (or being called fat) is no more embarrassing to me than being (or being called) brunette.  These are just physical descriptors. It’s not that “fat” is bad in and of itself, the problem is that people attach all kinds of stereotypes to the descriptor.  If someone is to be embarrassed, it’s the person who wants to mistreat a group of people based on how they look.

Often when fat people get fat-shamed or fat-bullied we get embarrassed.  Let’s put the embarrassment where it belongs.  It’s not embarrassing to be fat, and it shouldn’t be embarrassing to be fat-shamed.  It’s embarrassing to be a fat-bigot and it’s embarrassing to be a fat-shamer.

My Body is Not a Crisis

Fat people are subjected to experimental medicine without our consent, fat kids are subjected to completely untested “anti-obesity” experiments  Fat people are given stomach amputations that massively increase our mortality rate and have incredibly serious side effects. We are told that all of this is necessary because being fat is just so unhealthy that we need to try to be thin by any means and if it kills us well, at least we’ll leave a thinner corpse.  This is ridiculous.  Fat people have and will continue to exist, our bodies are not crises that call for the suspension of scientific method, evidence based medicine, and all logical thought.

It doesn’t matter how much a doctor (or someone who watches Dr. Oz and thinks they are a doctor) believes that being thinner will improve my life, because that doctor does not know how to make me thin.  There is not a single study where more than a tiny percentage of people successfully maintained weight loss and there is no study that shows that those people are healthier than they would have been without weight loss. Even if someone believes that a fat body is a medical diagnosis (and I don’t think it is) weight loss as an intervention simply does not meet the criteria of evidence-based medicine, since evidence-based medicine requires that we have some reason to believe that a “treatment” will be successful.

People who have bad knees would be helped tremendously if they could fly, since that would take the pressure right off their knees.  No matter how much a doctor believes that to be true, she cannot recommend that they go home, jump off their roof and flap their arms really hard because “it hardly ever works, but think of the benefits if it did!”  Luckily there is good evidence that, for those interested in improving their odds for health (which is never guaranteed, is not entirely within our control and is not an obligation or barometer of worthiness) behaviors  have a much better chance than attempting to achieve a specific height/weight ratio.

My Body is Not Immortal

Having seen the state of the research around “obesity” and mortality, I am painfully aware that If I die because an alien ship drops a futuristic piano on my head, it will be marked down as a death due to “complications of obesity.”  Everyone is going to die, but if you die in a fat body someone – likely someone who should know better, often someone in a position of authority – is going to blame it on your fat.

The threat of death due to fat is used to sell fat people products from diets to stomach amputations. If I were one of those piano-dropping aliens and I listened to the conversations around weight loss and health, I would think that thin people must be immortal.  In fact, thin people get all the same diseases that fat people do, and people of all sizes get sick, and people of all sizes die (and there should be no shame or blame in that.). There’s even something called the “obesity paradox” which is the name given to explain that in certain chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 Diabetes, and chronic renal disease, being fat is associated with better survival than in “normal weight” individuals.  Of course it’s only a “paradox” if you didn’t fuck up your conclusions in the first place, but that’s a topic for another blog.

Still we are told that we should see our fat bodies as large, soft death traps (like the doctor who was quoted by a reporter saying that he’s worried that Kelly Clarkson “won’t live to see her daughter grow up” when, by his own calculations she’s likely to live until almost 80,) and that the key to health is to feed our bodies less than they need to survive in the hopes that they will eat themselves and become smaller.  What they never discuss is the fact that they can’t control for the effects that constant shame and stigma have on fat people (like being the subject of a war waged on us by the government based on how we look.)  The brilliant Deb Burgard wrote an amazing piece that speaks about other aspects of this.  We don’t know how to make fat people thinner, but we do know how to stop shaming and stigmatizing them so let’s give that the old college try and see what happens.

Fat people’s bodies are no less valuable and amazing than any other bodies, and we absolutely should not have to climb over a mountain of stigma, shame, oppression, and bullying just to be forced to fight for the ability to actually like ourselves, but that’s the world we live in now. For me, the solution to this isn’t to change fat people, it’s to change society, until then it helps me to remember that the world is messed up, but we are fine.

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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

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

A company called Zodiak Seats France has applied for a patent for their “Economy Class Cabin Hexagon.” In this air-born nightmare some seats (including the already horrible middle seat) are turned backwards allowing airlines to cram even more people in (and undoubtedly creating an upcharge to sit in a seat facing in a direction that doesn’t not make you violently motion sick.) I don’t see any place for a tray either but that probably doesn’t matter since, according to their drawing, not only will you spend the flight making awkward eye contact, but you’ll also either sitting on some strangers’ hands – or having your hands sat upon by strangers.  FUN!

Obviously this is just a patent and with any luck at all this will never come to be (one person having to go to the bathroom would cause practically half the plane to have to stand up, and I don’t know how they plan to deal with an emergency evacuation so it seems as though there are some un-addressed kinks.) This is one more example of people designing things that exclude fat people from the outset  With this configuration, fat people could not be accommodated, even if we were willing to pay twice as much as a thin person for the same service (the service here being travel from place to place in a seat that accommodates us)

The truth about the people who are in charge of building and configuring planes is that they put them together pretending as if fat people don’t exist, and then the airlines try to make it our problem when we, very predictably, want to be able to access the same travel options as everyone else. (And that doesn’t even touch upon the ableism inherent in this seating configuration. I don’t want to speak for Disabled People/People with Disabilities but for those who use wheelchairs, those with limited mobility, those who need utilize mobility aids, oxygen and more, this seating configuration seems to me to be a complete mess.)

This same thing happens everywhere from transportation, to restaurants, to healthcare facilities.  The larger someone is, the more trouble that they have simply trying to access the world in ways which those for whom the world is built may never even consider – whether they want to travel across town on a city bus, across the country on a plane, have lunch with friends, or get basic healthcare services. That’s not by accident – there are solutions that accommodate people of different sizes – it’s because much of the world is built excluding fat people from the ground up.

The issue isn’t that accommodation is so difficult, it’s that we’re not even trying.  As a culture we’ve chosen to look for justifications to exclude people, rather than being committed to inclusiveness and access. It doesn’t have to – and it shouldn’t – be this way.

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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.

It’s become popular in recent years to act as if “public health” means making fat people’s health the public’s business, or at least that most public health messaging should include some kind of fat=bad element. Many people insist that it’s impossible to talk about public health without talking about body size.  I disagree.  I think that we can have a complete discussion of public health without ever discussing weight, and I think it would be far superior to what we are doing now.

There are times when a discussion about weight might be indicated – like if there are large fluctuations in weight without explanation, or if a prescription is dosed by weight.  I don’t think there is any need to discuss weight in general public health messaging at all, but I get a lot of push-back on this.

Before I get too far into this, the usual disclaimers about health and size acceptance. and about health in general, apply.

The first argument that I typically get is that weight loss makes people healthier and we need to get the word out.  Since public health messaging needs to be evidence-based, there are a couple of problems with this.  The first is that, based on the evidence that exists, there isn’t any reason to believe that more than a tiny fraction of people can achieve long term weight loss.  And the fact that some people survive jumping out of a plane without a working parachute does not make “Don’t use a parachute” a responsible public health message.  In fact, by far the most likely outcome of a weight loss attempt is weight gain so even if someone believes that being thinner will make people healthier, the fact that we don’t know how to get that done means that “lose weight” is not an appropriate public health message.

Then there’s the discussion of fat people and our knees. In this instance prescribing weight loss is like prescribing levitation. Even if levitating would be help people with knee issues (since floating will likely take the pressure right off the knees) suggesting that people jump off their roof and flap their arms really hard isn’t an appropriate public health message because – much like weight loss – we have no evidence to suggest that it will work, and there’s a significant downside if it doesn’t. And let’s remember that there’s only about a 5% greater chance of losing weight than of successfully levitating. Also, there is no study that shows that those who maintain weight loss long term are healthier than they would have been if they had stayed fat and simply practiced healthy habits – the idea that losing weight makes you healthier long term is a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

Another common argument  I get is that companies are specifically manufacturing processed food that manipulates our brains into always wanting more food and never being satisfied without giving us nutrition, and that it’s important  to let people know that those foods exist and may make people fat.

I think that you talk about foods without tagging on the “fat bogey man” message, and that it would be both more ethical and more effective.  Suggesting that part of the population should make choices in an effort not to look like another part of the population is highly problematic and creates an environment where people are encouraged to stereotype and shame others for how they look, which isn’t healthy for anyone. The concept of “healthy” foods is complicated and fluid (it varies based on many individual circumstances) But even if someone believes that there are clear cut “healthy and “unhealthy” foods it does not follow that there are separate healthy and unhealthy foods for fat people and thin people.  It’s not as if some foods are healthier for people who can eat tons of it and not gain weight.  I think that an effective public health message would be to let people know that companies are trying to manipulate their brain chemistry to make them buy more food, and let them decide if that’s ok with them, not tell them not to eat this food because it might put them into a class of people who are being actively stigmatized and oppressed, thereby reinforcing that stigma and oppression.

Finally is the notion that fat people aren’t aware that they are fat and/or aren’t concerned enough about being fat so we have to tell people to worry about their weight.

To this I can only ask “What in the hell are these people talking about?”  All of this FAT IS BAD EVERYBODY PANIC public health messaging has done one thing well – it has successfully stigmatized fat bodies.  Not only isn’t this supported by the evidence, it’s actually contraindicated by it.  Peter Muennig from Columbia has found that “The difference between actual and desired body weight was a stronger predictor than was body mass index (BMI) of mental and physical health.”  The truth is that we will never know how much healthier fat people could be if we weren’t constantly shamed and stigmatized, until society stops shaming and stigmatizing us.  So how about we roll the OMGDEATHFAT messaging back and try making public health about giving people information and access to options and resources, and then respecting their decisions and their bodies.

I often talk about the war on obesity in terms of the way in which it’s goal is to eradicate fat people.  Every once in a while someone will object to my use of the term eradication. They say that even though these people are vocal about their desire for a world without fat people, they’re not actually trying to eradicate us since they would allow us to exist in peace if we became thin people.

I disagree. First of all because suggesting that they don’t want to eradicate theoretical thin me (only actual fat me) is some bullshit. I’m not a thin woman covered in fat, I’m a fat woman, and so a world without fat people is a world in which I do not exist.

But a look at the reality of the situation shows pretty quickly that the people who want a war on obesity want a world without fat people by any means necessary – they are ok if we become thin, but they also seem totally fine if we die trying.  Let’s look at some examples:

Consider the drug Belviq, which was approved by the FDA and is being prescribed by doctors for weight loss not because it won’t kill fat people, but because killing fat people is deemed an acceptable risk. (You can even get a coupon online – first one’s free!)

Another in the “acceptable risk category,” among its many, many dangerous and life-altering side effects, Weight Loss Surgery also carries a serious risk of dying.  “By best estimates, bariatric surgeries likely increase the actual mortality risks for these patients by 7-fold in the first year and by 363% to 250% the first four years.”

Or how about when doctors were trying to convince fat people to eat 500 calories a day and get urine injections?

Then there’s Devon, UK where they decided that in order to save money they would just deny healthcare to fat people.

And that doesn’t even take into account all the fat people’s lives that are put on hold due to the shaming, stigmatizing, bullying, lack of access, and oppression that we face so that even if they don’t manage to eradicate us, they keep us from living the life we dream of.

Often when people object to my use of the term “eradication” they say something like “this isn’t genocide” and I absolutely agree with that. [Edit:  Let me reiterate and clarify because there seems to be some confusion – I am not saying that this is genocide, I am not comparing it with atrocities that have happened to other groups, I am only talking about what is happening to fat people now.]  This is something different – they want to eradicate fat people, but they want us to do their dirty work for them.  You want a world without fat people? Feel free to find another world because I’m not going anywhere. Me and my fat are here to stay.

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

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I’ve been asked a lot about a couple of articles that have been making the rounds. In one, a woman says that she’s decided to have weight loss surgery after her interaction with an online fat hate group.  In another a young girl had surgery to pin her ears back, from a plastic surgeon who created a non-profit dedicated to performing this procedure. He says “This isn’t just free cosmetic surgery – this is a charity that helps combat bullying secondary to having large ears.”  People have been asking me what I think about this.

First and foremost, people are allowed to make these choices (because Underpants Rule!) If someone wants to have a perfectly healthy organ amputated, or have a surgery to change their ears they are allowed to do that, as a way to try to satisfy their bullies or for any other reason.

From a more meta analysis, I’m always troubled by the idea that the solution to bullying is for the person being bullied to change. I’m concerned when the “solution” to bullying is to give the bullies what they want – not just because it’s not fair to the person being bullied, but also because many people being bullied aren’t able to change. 

Often when people  – including laypeople, medical professionals, policy-makers, and especially drug/diet/medical companies trying to profit from this – discuss reasons that they believe fat people should try to be thin, one of the reasons that they include is the stigma, bullying, and oppression that fat people face. Except the problem isn’t that we’re fat, the problem is that we’re stigmatized (often thanks to the drug/diet/medical companies profiting from this) and the solution is to end stigma, bullying and oppression of fat people, not to end the existence of fat people.

Going back to the doctor’s quote, he says “this is a charity that helps combat bullying.” That’s simply not true. It’s not combating bullying at all, it’s accommodating bullies by changing their victims (through a painful process) to look how the bullies want them to look.

When people suggest that those being bullied should change themselves, what they are really saying is “that bully has a point – there is something wrong with your ears/body/haircolor/sexual orientation/whatever”  Go ahead and fix that.  Of course then they’ll start bullying you about something else so please feel free to start a savings account for all the surgeries your’re going to need.

To combat bullying we must create an environment where bullying behavior is unacceptable, not where it’s a good reason to undergo surgery. We need to stop saying that the solution to bullying and stigma lies with changing the victims and not the perpetrators.

In my life when I’ve spoken out about the bullying, harassment and oppression that I’ve experienced because I’m fat, often people have said “Why don’t you do something about it.”  Meaning that I should become thin so that people didn’t treat me poorly for being fat.  I’m calling bullshit on that, I’m “doing something about it” and for me that means standing up and speaking out, not trying to squeeze myself into the mold my bullies made for me.   I’m not the problem, they are.

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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.

Several memes have been making the social media rounds based on a New York Times headline: “Obesity Dropped 43% Among Young Children In Decade, Study Finds”   When you look up the study that’s referenced, the conclusion states “Overall, there have been no significant changes in obesity prevalence in youth or adults between 2003-2004 and 2011-2012”

So just what in the Sam Hill happened here? It’s something that my favorite reporting methods professor in college used to call “fun with statistics” and it most often occurs when someone (a researcher, reporter, company, or *cough* First Lady *cough*) wants a particular outcome and so they just finesse the numbers to get it.

In this case, what the researchers found was that (to quote the NYT article) “About 8 percent of 2- to 5-yearolds were obese in 2012, down from 14 percent in 2004.”   (In actuality the study states right there in the abstract that it was 13.9% to 8.4%  which is a delta of 5.5% rather than 6% but why would accuracy be important here?)  So how did a 6% (actually 5.5% but who’s counting) difference become a 43% change in the New York Times headline?  Through the magic of absolute vs. relative change!

Absolute change is the difference in the item being studied at two different times:

[% of fat 2-5 year olds in 2012] – [% of fat 2-5 year olds in 2004]  = Absolute change

.08 – .14 = -.06

Relative change is the absolute change calculated as a percentage of the indicator in the first time period.

([% of fat 2-5 year olds in 2012]  – [% of fat 2-5 year olds in 2004])  / [% of fat 2-5 year olds in 2004] * 100%

(.08 – .14) / .14 * 100 = -42.85% (they rounded to -43%)

Often when someone is trying to make something seem like a bigger deal than it is, they will use relative change rather than absolute change. And this doesn’t even take into account the margin of error, number and effect of dropouts etc. That’s all the formulas in this post,  I promise (though if you want to see further discussion of the fuzzy math, there’s a good piece in Forbes, though trigger warning for obesity epi-panic language). Something that is worth noting is that for all of this talk about OMGDEATHFAT increasing so much, this study actually found no significant change since 2004, but that’s a subject for another blog.

This is certainly not the first time that this has happened.  Allergan has used “Fun with Statistics” to try to sell lapbands. We’ve even seen this kind of reporting be not only crappy, but actually dangerous. So why am I talking about this now?

First of all, because it’s making the rounds again and every time I see it, it pisses me off. Also since focusing on the weight of children has been a pet project of Michelle Obama, who’s time at the White House is winding down, I expect that we may see a lot more attempts to suggest that focusing on the weight of children – and telling fat kids that we’re all trying to create a world where nobody who looks like them exists – has been a fantastic idea, despite the evidence.

This kind of reporting drives the discussion and policy – including policies that body shame children as a substitute for actually supporting their health – so it’s important that we know that it’s always reader beware, that we can and should ask questions, and that we can and should hold the people doing this reporting accountable.

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.