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

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

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

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

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

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

No Body Comparisons

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

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

No backhanded compliments

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, that’s better.

No putting yourself down as part of a compliment

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

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

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

Easy squeezy.

So go forth and compliment fearlessly!

I’ve been watching The Glee Project.  (Go ahead and judge me if you want, that show is great).  In one of the episodes they use two of my favorite songs of all times and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to geek out with music lyrics as framework for my HAES (sm) journey.

How can you not love this song?  I think that the lyric that most speaks to me is:

I want to live, not merely survive
And I won’t give up this dream
Of life that keeps me alive
I gotta be me, I gotta be me

It’s how I think about Health at Every Size(r).  I believe that it’s my best chance for health, but beyond that, a life lived through HAES is life lived – being truly alive.  A life of dieting and trying to manipulate my body into a different size and shape is just surviving.  So even if I’m wrong, and to be clear I don’t think I am, I’d rather be truly alive for fewer years than have a longer life just surviving.

And then there’s Defying Gravity

This is probably my favorite song of all time. I love all of the lyrics but some of my tippy top favorites are:

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I’m through with playing by the rules
Of someone else’s game

This is exactly how I felt when I walked away from the diet industry.  The world was the same – still barraging me with messages that I had to be smaller to be healthy, or attractive, or worthy of respect.  But I was different, I had changed and I didn’t believe it anymore. To use another Wizard of Oz reference, it was like I had found out that the wizard wasn’t all knowing, it was just a sad guy behind a curtain.

I’m through accepting limits
’cause someone says they’re so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I’ll never know!

If I had a nickel for each time I did something that somebody said I had to lose weight to do, I could quit my job and blog full-time.  And about as many people told me that it’s impossible to change the thin-obsession of our society, to create a world where every body is respected. But I won’t know until I try.  I don’t do the right thing because it’s sure to succeed, I do it because I’m sure it’s the right thing.

Too long I’ve been afraid of
Losing love I guess I’ve lost
Well, if that’s love
It comes at much too high a cost!

For a long time I tried to make my picture fit other people’s frames. Once upon a time I tried to lose weight because I allowed myself to be sold the idea that nobody would ever love me or think I was beautiful until I was thin.  I’ve since found out that it’s not true, but even if it was, if that’s what it takes to be loved then it’s absolutely not worth it.

I think I’ll try
Defying gravity
And you won’t bring me down

Some days I just feel it all weighing down on me – the diet culture, the thin obsession, constantly being assaulted by people yelling that I can’t be healthy.  But when I was obeying those laws, I was miserable.  So I remind myself that I chose to defy gravity, and that I won’t let it pull me back down.

If you’ve not heard, a new book targeted at 4-12 year olds will be hitting the shelves in October.  It’s called “Maggie Goes on a Diet” and according to the blurb on Amazon.com, it’s about “a 14 year old girl who goes on a diet and is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image.”

Teaching six year olds that dieting is the way to like yourself and become popular? At first I felt sure that it had to be some kind of (really bad) joke. I did not think it possible that anybody would actually write a diet book targeted at first graders. Nobody could possibly be that stupid/cruel/desperate for a quick buck, right?

Wrong.  Paul Michael Kramer is. Sir, may I just say that this is sheer jackassery.

And Maggie might go on a diet, but Ragen is going on a rant:

He made sure that the book is “written in rhyme [so it’s] easy to read and fun to learn at the same time”.  And thank god for that, because I would sure hate for kids to have to struggle to learn to hate their bodies.  That’s definitely the kind of message that we want to be easy to understand and implement.  I think he’s going to have trouble with the sequel though, because not that many things rhyme with “treatment for anorexia”.

Like Michelle Obama before him, I’m reasonably certain that he’ll pat himself on the back for giving kids “real talk” in the face of a so-called “obesity epidemic”; never, ever taking responsibility for the issues of mental health, body image and self-esteem that arise, especially for the 95% of kids who are statistically likely to fail at dieting, and the disordered eating that results.

In no particular order, here are some things that make me wonder how the author can live with himself:

(For the record, it makes no difference if he doesn’t know these things since he’s the one who thought it was a scathingly brilliant idea to write a diet book for kids who have been potty trained for less than 5 years, based on his credentials of having written such scientific tomes as “Booger Bob” and “Louie the Lobster Mobster”.)

First let’s take a look at the positive, empowering messages that we get just from reading the blurb (if you have trouble catching sarcasm, this next bit is not for you):

a 14 year old girl

She’s a teenager, as a 6-12 year old all you want to do is be like the older kids, right?.  So put away those carrot sticks (too many carbs!) and bust out the Slimfast, you’re a big girl now!

who goes on a diet and is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure

Do you look like the picture on the book cover?  Then you’re extremely overweight!  (It’s important to say extremely so that we can hide behind the OMGDEATHFATWON’TSOMEBODYTHINKOFTHECHILDREN panic when there’s a public outcry.) If you’re a fat six year old, ask an adult what “insecure” means.  If you aren’t that already, you should be.

to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star.

It’s important to understand that if your body doesn’t fit a very narrow proportion of height and weight then there is something wrong with you. (Please ignore the fact that almost everything in nature, including human feet for example,  comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Our bodies must all be the same.) Also, we will encourage you to exercise to fit into that narrow range while simultaneously reinforcing the stereotype that you are not athletic.  That may be confusing or upsetting to you, but remember the solution is not for other people to say things that make sense. The solution, as always, is for you to lose weight.

Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image.

Please be crystal clear that no amount of healthy living, exercise or hard work will ever be good enough unless you get thin.  You don’t deserve to like yourself or be proud of anything you achieve until you have reached a height weight proportion that makes you aesthetically pleasing to children’s book author Paul Michael Kramer.

Want some more reasons why this is absolutely ludicrous?

Dieting is the number 2 predictor of disordered eating. According to Lynn Grefe, the president and CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association:  “There are a lot of factors at play with an eating disorder, but they start with diet. There’s a lot more pressure on young girls now. And I think we have to be careful as a society in what we are doing here. We should be focusing on health, not size.” Thanks Lynn. Let me just chime in here, as I would have when I was 6, with a big “No Duh”.

If we were to stop panicking and think logically, (even if we set aside the fact that the most likely outcome of dieting is weight GAIN), we would come to the conclusion that we must start being FOR healthy kids, not against fat ones.  Once we start doing that, we will stop overlooking unhealthy kids with thin bodies, and we will give fat kids a chance at the kind of health (physical and mental) that can only be achieved when they are not constantly stigmatized, helpless combatants in a war being waged against them by some of the most powerful people in the world.  There is nothing that could possibly be accomplished by being against fat kids that can’t be accomplished by being for healthy ones. We need to get that message and we need to get it before we irreparably damage an entire generation of kids.

Mr. Kramer wrote another book called “Bullies Beware” in which a kid stands up to his bully. If you feel like giving that a try, you might consider:

E-mailing him to tell him what you think

Joining the discussion at Barnes and Noble

Joining the discussion at Amazon.com

Letting other people know that this is happening so that they can get involved.

I heard a discussion on a radio show [warning! – not size positive, could be very triggering] about a Delta airlines flight during which a thin woman had her seat encroached upon by a large passenger.  Delta refused to throw the large passenger off and eventually someone else volunteered to take a later flight and give the woman his seat.  The ensuing debate on the radio show was about whether the large passenger should have been asked to de-plane (according to this report he never was), and what is fair in the circumstances.

I understand the airlines’ position that they are selling space and so they feel that if you take up more space than you purchased you should pay more than others.  At the very least, if the airline wants to charge more for people who take up more than one seat, then that policy must be applied across the board – so if people’s shoulders are too broad or their legs are too long, then they’ll need to buy another seat as well. I do not, however, think that this is the only solution that we can come up with.

I’ll also say that I don’t know how much of a problem this really is – it might be one of those things that is used to stigmatize fat people even though it rarely comes up in real life.  (Which is not to say that it doesn’t cause a ton of stress for fat people worrying about it – just that it may be that people rarely complain.) I was flying recently and got into a conversation with the flight attendant about seat belt extenders.  She told me that they only carry 3 on the plane and that she’s never run out on a flight so it doesn’t seem like there are that many people flying who are of a size to encroach on the seat next to them (which is not to say that more fat people wouldn’t fly if it was so stressful.) I’m thinking that passengers with bad body odor, or too much perfume, or cheap cologne, or screaming kids, or who just won’t stop talking to us even though we’re reading a book and listening to our iPods while humming and pretending to sleep, probably cause far more discomfort than fat people on planes. I don’t love touching strangers either, but the public transportation system in New York City seems to be built around this concept so it’s not like it’s unheard of to be in close proximity to your seat mate in a public transportation situation.

Regardless, I think the main issue is that the whole thing is subjective.  You don’t know the situation until you get on the plane. You may be able to fly easily on the first leg of your trip, only to be told by a flight attendant that you are too fat for the second leg. Plane seats are different sizes, seat belts are different lengths.  It’s difficult to decide who actually “fits in a seat”.  A weight limit doesn’t work – I’m ginormous but my fat happens to go forward rather than sideways so I fit in a seat without encroaching on the seat next to me.  Hip and thigh measurements don’t really work for the same reason.  If they had a discreet seat that you could sit in at the airport like the thing that they use to test carry-on luggage that might work (and should also be used on the broad shouldered and long-legged) but you still wouldn’t know until you got to the airport.

So in the event that this is an actual problem and not another overblown piece of the Obesity Epi-panic, allow me to suggest some solutions:

“Sit Next to a Fatty” Option

If you are cool with sitting next to a passenger of size, you check a box when making your reservation.  Maybe they would get a small discount on your seat (although I think that the airline should absorb this cost since it’s their fault that they failed to plan for the fact that their passengers come in different sizes)

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Middle Seat

Especially considering that there are only three seat belt extenders it seems that, just on a couple of rows, we could remove the middle seat.  These could be given to passengers of size.  Or if they want to change they could charge 1.5 times the price of a regular ticket for these seats.  If they don’t sell out to fatties, broad shouldered and long-legged people, the airline could offer them as an upgrade at check in.

Row o’ Fatties

Stick all the fatties in the same rows.  We’ll snuggle.

Two Seats -Seriously

Airlines ask fat people to purchase two seats if they don’t fit into one.  But then they make it difficult if not impossible to do so.  I personally know people who’ve had to spend hours on hold to get the tickets purchased (because you can’t buy two tickets under the same name) only to be told on the plane that they had to give up their extra seat because the airline “needed” it, or to have their seats be non-adjacent.  If this is really such a huge problem then they should make the solution that they propose easy for us. And if the flight is not full, the money that we pay for a second ticket should be refunded.

First Class Fatties

This one will be controversial, but since the airlines fail to be able to accommodate passengers of size in coach, they could  offer a discount to fatties who want to fly first class.

This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure that there are other solutions.  I do know that the solution is not to tell fat people that they need to change their bodies – not just because nobody can prove that it’s possible for the majority of people, but also because weddings, family reunions, and vacations are happening now, not 50 pounds from now and we should not be in the business of telling other people what their bodies need to look like.

The bottom line is that (just like in healthcare) we need to start being fatties and airlines against a problem, not airlines against fat people.

You may have heard of the study by  Kuk et. al. on the Edmonton Obesity Staging System. I’ll give you the background first and then get to the interesting stuff and the swearing:

They characterized fat people’s health on a 4 point scale: “stage 0, no risk factors or comorbidities; stage 1, mild conditions; and stages 2 and 3, moderate to severe conditions”.

They found that:

Compared with normal-weight individuals, obese individuals in stage 2 or 3 had a greater risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular-related mortality. Stage 0/1 was not associated with higher mortality risk (emphasis mine)

The study has limitations in terms of statistical significance (the sample was mostly middle class white people for example), much of the data was self-reported and the authors are clear that further research is necessary.  Interestingly, in the conflict of interest section it states that two of the authors sit on Jenny Craig’s advisory board (although maybe not for long?) and one of those authors has research grants from coca-cola and Body Media (a weight loss product).

Some interesting tidbits:

Stage 0 or 1 participants were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than “normal weight” individuals.

Stage 0 and 1 individuals were more likely to be physically active and eat more fruits and vegetables. Stage 0 or 1 participants were also less likely to report engaging in weight loss practices.

Hey isn’t there a name for engaging in healthy habits and not engaging in weight loss practices?  Wait a minute it will come to me…ah yes, it’s a Health at Every Size (R)* perspective!!!  I knew that sounded familiar!

According to this article, Dr. Pieter Cohen, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a general internist at Cambridge Health Alliance said:  It’s “absolutely” possible for people to be overweight or obese and healthy.

Harvard doctors making sense?  I may have to play the lottery today!

Dr. Sharma, chair for obesity research and management at the University of Alberta (who often makes sense) said: “The key message is I can’t tell you how healthy someone is if you tell me height or weight on a scale.  I have to do additional tests for other health problems.”

Then there are some things that I almost can’t believe about this:

They list the health issues as “co-morbidities”, thereby making the unsupported assumption that obesity is a primary disease or disorder  when it’s really just a height/weight ratio.

The study says

Nevertheless, these factors, together, indicate that obese patients, particularly in EOSS stages 0 and 1, may be better served if physicians promoted weight maintenance, as opposed to weight loss, as it remains to be seen whether individuals in EOSS stages 2 and 3 will benefit from weight loss.

Yet the articles that I read are still recommending weight loss for patients who are at stage 2 or 3. This is problematic because:

1.  They JUST SAID  that weight loss attempts may well worsen health.

2.  They don’t know if losing weight will  help these people.  There is no solid proof.

3.  Even if they did have proof that weight loss would help, they have no idea how to get it done.  Prescribing something with an efficacy rate of 5%, especially knowing that the 95% who fail will likely end up less healthy than when they started, isn’t just dumb – it’s medically unethical.

4. I don’t know whether to make study author Jennifer Kuk the blue ribbon loser or winner for this quote: “the ranking system helps to identify who should actually lose weight and who are we torturing for no reason”

Ok Dr. Kuk. In addition to saying that you don’t know if weight loss will help, in your study you said

For the vast majority of obese individuals, lifestyle-based weight loss is not maintained over the long term (Wing et al. 1995).” This is particularly concerning, given that weight cycling is associated with greater weight gain over time (Van Wye et al. 2007) and potentially worse health outcomes, compared with individuals who may have maintained a stable body weight (Blair et al. 1993; Wannamethee et al.2002).

If you are:

• ruining people’s current quality of life by self-describedly torturing them
• under the auspices of possibly giving them better quality of life later
• all the while knowing that the most likely outcome is actually worse health

may I gently suggest that Ur Doin it Wrong.

Dr. Howard Eisenson (executive director of the Duke Diet & Fitness Center) totally doesn’t get it, but gets quoted in the CNN article on the subject anyway: “If we don’t intervene now [when someone is healthy, 25 and obese], by the time the person is 35 … maybe some damage has been done and the unhealthy habits are more established.”

Okay Dr. Einsenson, I need you to stay with me here, I’ll type slowly: Not all obese people practice unhealthy habits, you’re just making that up in your head. In fact the very  study upon which you are commenting showed that people who practice healthy habits and don’t attempt to lose weight (thereby ignoring the advice of the Duke Diet and Fitness Center) have better health outcomes. Also, see above on your complete inability to effectively create long-term weight loss.

(And not for nothing but why does every article about this study have at least three doctors offering a counter-opinion but Jess Weiner gets to mischaracterize the entire Health at Every Size(R)* movement to sell her new diet program, and nobody bothers to call any of us for a counter opinion? I’m just curious.)

Several articles suggest that the stigma that fat people face may be a worthy reason to lose weight even if their health is fine.

Oh, how can I put this delicately?

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE  FU#%ING KIDDING ME! The cure for social stigma is not weight loss, it’s ending social stigma.

Finally, there are the comments.  If I could give you a piece of advice, it would be not to read the comments.  All kinds of people who think that “personal responsibility” means that I am personally responsible for looking how they want me to look.  So many people who can bite me. But the message I’m taking away is that, as I’ve long suspected, these people don’t care about my health.  If they did there would be a zillion comments saying “wow, I really need to question my assumptions about weight and health”.  Alas, none that I saw, and perhaps that’s because they only actually care about having someone to whom they can feel superior.  But that’s just a guess.

It bears repeating that prioritizing one’s health is not a moral, social or personal obligation (you do not get to choose what is important for me and I don’t get to choose what’s important to you – that’s why we each have our own underpants to be the boss of).  Also, health is multi-dimensional, not all aspects are within our control, and it should never ever be used as a barometer for worthiness.  Knowing those things, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (today backed by research):  while health is never guaranteed, if being healthy is what we want, then healthy habits are our best chance for healthy bodies.

*You’re probably wondering why I’m putting at (R) after every use of Health at Every Size (R).  It’s because the awesome organization ASDAH has successfully put a copyright on the term so that it can’t be misused, and now there are a bunch of rules to follow. And you know that I think this is important because normally I reject rules.  That being said, if anyone knows how to actually make the trademark symbol in WordPress I’m all ears, or fingers, or whatever.

The Role Model Problem centers around whether or not a healthy fat person should speak about their health in terms of numbers. The main concerns that I’ve heard are:  What happens if someone discloses their numbers as a healthy fatty and then gets sick; and that every body deserves to be treated with respect so there is no reason to talk about our numbers.

I completely understand this perspective, I see the merits and I respect everyone who espouses this point of view.  I thought long and hard about putting my numbers out there for this exact reason and I came to a different conclusion for myself.

I don’t write or speak for the people who disagree with me. My work is for the people who are looking for an oasis of body love in a bleak desert of body hate. We are bombarded with the idea that fat is synonymous with poor health. I think that’s untrue and I think that it’s important to stand up to that stereotype.

Of course I always want to be clear that health is multi-dimensional and that I don’t consider health to be a moral, social or personal obligation or a barometer by which worthiness is judged.  My health isn’t just because of my habits, it’s also because of genetics, environment, access, and stress just like everyone else.  Nobody’s health is entirely within their control, and it does it make them more or less worthy, or better or worse than anyone else.

Still, one of my favorite poems is by Marianne Williamson:

…Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you…And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others…

All any of use can do is choose to shine our light.  Other people will chose insecurity, liberation, or something else as their reaction but that’s their choice, not our responsibility.

Our society does it’s best to hide people like me, and I don’t really feel like helping them out. I believe that healthy habits, while not a guarantee of health, are our best chance.  If I get sick I won’t start telling people “never mind, I was wrong, don’t move your body and nourish it”.  Marathoners drop dead of heart attacks and get cancer and they don’t lose their status as athletes who lived a healthy lifestyle.  There is a tremendous double standard if fat athletes who get sick do lose their status, and I simply refuse to buy into it.

We’re all going to die eventually, and whether my health is ended by a fast-moving bus, old age, or alien abduction someone will be standing around saying that it was because I was fat.  So what?  I’m not at all concerned with what these people think.  I’m also much less concerned with being a “good role model” than I am with being authentically me.  I feel good when I look for things to celebrate about my body instead of things to change or hate or hide.  Right now those thing include excellent numbers and I will not let fear of the inevitable stop be from celebrating my body as it is, continuing to pursue things that may me feel good, and bucking a ridiculous unsupported stereotype every single chance I get.

I’ve spent the weekend in San Francisco at the Association for Size Diversity & Health (ASDAH) Conference.  It was awesome on a number of levels.  I’ll talk in a second about some specifically cool things and people, but the predominant thing that I experienced was the joy of being in a size acceptance space.  Being in the space was actually easy and natural, so much so that when I got back to my hotel room and turned on the TV to a weight loss infomercial it was at bit jarring.

This morning I’ve only been awake for three hours and I’ve already heard body hate and fat stigma language repeatedly – in the lobby waiting for the shuttle, on the shuttle to the airport, and in the airport.  It really drove home for me the work that needs to be done in this area.  Some of the science that I’m most interested in at the moment is around the effects of constant stigmatization on both mental and physical health.  It remains unbelievable (which is to say bat crap crazy) to me first that this is so often left out of the discussion on public health, and second that when it is brought up the “solution” is not to end the stigma, but to end fat people.

Miles to go before we sleep but I feel like some great ideas and action plans were put into place and I’m definitely jazzed to continue my work (hint:  there’s gonna be a book and I’m looking at ways to put my dance classes online…) and to collaborate with all of the incredible people fighting the good fight.

In no particular order, some of the amazingness of the conference:

Meeting the people who introduced me to the Health at Every Size(R) concept:  Linda Bacon and Marilyn Wann (with whom I got to spend a lovely evening going to the beach and then around San Francisco – Marilyn and SF are the awesomest and I can’t wait to come back here). I tried to maintain composure and act like a colleage instead of an over-exuberant fat girl but I’m not sure to what level I succeeded an I don’t actually care since they both deserve over-exuberant fan girlness.

I got to meet the amazing ASDAH leadership team (Deb Lemire, Deb Burgard, Dana Schuester, Jeanette DePatie, Fall Ferguson – apologies if I’m forgetting anyone).

I got to work with an ad hoc group who talked about how to combat healthism in the ASDAH message.  The people and the work were amazing and we came up with some action items that I’m really excited about.  The collaboration was also really amazing, we could easily feel competitive with each other, or focus on our differences of opinion but everyone at the conference seemed to be much more interested in collaboration.

I saw the newest screening of Darryl Robert’s Documentary – America the Beautiful II – The Thin Commandments.  That was fun but scary because I’m interviewed in the movie and  I was nervous that the people at the conference wouldn’t like what I had said.  In the end my part was well-received so yay!  (I also found out I get to walk the red carpet at the New York and Los Angeles Premiers. I am beside myself with excitement. Now I need to figure out what the hell to wear…)

I got to meet people who I know from online (I’m definitely going to leave someone out  – it’s very early in the morning – so I’ll just say Hi Y’all!!!)  Meeting people who identify as my fans remains one of the coolest things that ever happens to me.

There are so many blogs to write around things that came up this weekend but right now I have to get on a plane.  Thanks to everyone who made this conference amazing, big fat hugs to you all!!!

I blogged yesterday about Jess Weiner’s “change of heart”  in Glamour Magazine in which she spent years in the Fat Acceptance/Health at Every Size communities (in fact calling herself a leader of the movement) and somehow came away with the idea that our message is that loving your body means not practicing any other habit to support health (obviously, health and healthy habits by any definition are never an obligation, but I don’t know anyone who would have given Jess the message that body love precludes participating in any other healthy habits.)  Now Jess thinks that taking care of her body and health means focusing on weight loss. Since the idea of losing weight “for health reasons” is so prevalent, I want to look a little more deeply into that today because I think that Jess’s story represents everything problematic about the idea of losing weight “for health reasons”.

To be quite honest, I’ve been going through a lot of feelings around this issue. Yesterday I supported Jess in her claim that she was telling her experience from her truth.  Yesterday I tried to push aside my frustration that someone who calls herself a leader of the Fat Acceptance movement would so thoroughly misrepresent it in a major media outlet. Instead, I tried to focus on how sad it was that this woman, who considers herself a leader of this movement, missed the point by so much. I pushed aside my frustration because I felt that some way, somehow, we in the Fat Acceptance and Health at Every Size movement had failed her.

I felt that way, right up until I found out that the Glamour article is part of a marketing push for a weight loss program she’s peddling:

“This interactive session helps you obtain conscious weight wellness… Self-esteem expert Jess Weiner and Dr.James Beckerman create a dynamic duo that explores the psychological and scientific aspects to foster steady weight loss. Together we will learn how moderate exercise, nutrition and self-awareness can give you a fullness you’ve never known.” http://www.paconferenceforwomen.org/conference/agenda/

So now I’m a little more suspicious about a Glamour article that looks like it could be a ham-fisted attempt to grossly misrepresent a movement built on common sense and good evidence  so that she can vilify it for her own monetary gain. At the very least, I feel that instead of asking to be praised for her courage she should apologize for calling herself the leader of a movement that, based on her article, she never understood.

While I respect people’s choice to attempt weight loss “for health reasons”,  I do have some questions.  I’ve always wondered what it really means.  Since weight isn’t proven to cause any health issues, how would losing weight be a way to cure health issues? Ms. Weiner is a great example of this.  Her numbers before her weight loss (when she was loving her body but ostensibly not practicing healthy habits) were in the normal to high normal range.  She uses her blood sugar as an example: it was on the high side of normal, not even in the range for the scientifically questionable “pre-diabetes” diagnosis. Yet her doctor told her that if she didn’t lose weight she would get diabetes.  What with the who now?

After she started practicing healthy habits her numbers moved into the low to mid normal range.  She also lost some weight.  This isn’t surprising, since we know that weight loss is a possible, and 95% of the time short-term, side effect of healthy behavior changes.  Still I have to ask why, when behavior change leads to health improvements and weight loss, do we credit the weight loss for the health improvements and not credit the behavior changes, noting that both the health changes and the weight loss are side effects.

So Jess brought her numbers into the normal range and, for the time being, lost 25 pounds.  Success!  But not for Jess, and here is where “weight loss for health reasons” so often goes awry.

She says about the weight loss “I thought declining desserts and exercising when exhausted would have brought me a more dramatic verdict.”

Verdict?  Is this an episode of The People’s Fat Court?  It seems pretty negative to view your health as a trial of food restriction and “exercising when exhausted” all to get judged at the end by the scale. At any rate, she got healthy by every measure of actual health, but that still wasn’t enough for her.

She says “I’m still focused on losing more weight—30 more pounds is my goal—so I can stay out of the diabetes danger zone.”   If you want health, why would you not focus on health?  And what the hell is the diabetes danger zone? And how would being 195 pounds keep her out of it? If she is 6’3 that weight would put her in the “normal” BMI range, so maybe that’s what she’s looking at? Or maybe she’s just doing the arbitrary “50 pounds” thing?

Either way, despite a huge media push, there’s no such thing as “diabesity“. Diabetes risk in measured using blood glucose and Jess’s is already out of the diabetes danger zone.

If she truly believes that it’s weight-related then Jess might consider gaining 59 pounds because, at 5’4 284, my blood glucose is lower than hers by 16 points. In fact, I’ll make an exception to my normal rule of not comparing numbers to say that all of my health markers are farther into the “healthy” range than hers.  But I would never suggest that the path to health is to weigh what I weigh.  Because that wouldn’t make any damn sense and because health is not entirely within our control.

And that’s exactly why I don’t think that losing weight “for health reasons” makes sense.  Yesterday commenters Emerald and Sunflower put it beautifully with a car analogy:

“It’d be like taking your much loved car for an MOT, being perfectly happy to pay for any necessary work, only for the mechanic to tell you it needs all those crappy body panels replaced at enormous inconvenience and cost before they can pump up the tyres or service the brakes.”

“Whether what you need is a minor as an oil change or as major as rebuilding the engine, you’ll neither meet those needs nor improve their outcomes by getting extensive body work first.”

Health is not completely within our control, it’s not an obligation or a barometer of worthiness, nor should it be. I’m suggesting that if we’re talking about health then we actually measure, report, and work with health.  It seems to me that “losing weight for health reasons” tries to use body size as a substitute for information that we can fairly easily acquire through actual measures of health and tries to use weight loss as a stand in for healthy behaviors.

To paraphrase from a beautiful comment yesterday by Karen Reeves: There is no healthier habit than loving your body.

I would never be so foolish as to say that loving our body should mean that we don’t pursue other healthy habits.  But I also don’t think that people tend to take care of things that they hate, and bodies are no exception. Of course you can make any choice that you want for your body, and none of them comes with any guarantee.  I am simply suggesting that if you want to be healthy, consider instead of manipulating your body size and hoping that health comes along for the ride,  practice healthy habits, focus on actual measures of health, and let your body size sort itself out.

Like my blog?   Here’s more stuff!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Become a member: For just ten bucks a month you can keep this blog ad-free, support the activism work I do, and get deals from cool businesses Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

Fit Fatties Virtual Events:  If you’re looking for a fun movement challenge that was created to work just for you, you can check it out here.  There’s still time to get in on Early Bird Rates.

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

Jess Weiner is getting a lot of publicity for the Glamour Magazine article Jess Weiner’s Weight Struggle: “Loving My Body Almost Killed Me” (Thanks to reader Kim for pointing it out to me)

In the article she tells her personal story which would be fine, except, as with the NPR article that we spoke about a few days ago, there is no balance to the story.  I’ll attempt to provide my own balance here, because loving my body saved my life and I didn’t lose any weight at all.

Jess and I have similarities in our backgrounds: We recovered from under eating disorders in our teens and ended up as obese adults.  We write and speak about self-esteem and body image.

But our stories diverge.  Jess was challenged by someone at a talk about her health. She got tested and her metabolic health indicators (blood pressure, triglycerides, blood glucose etc.) were on the high side of normal. I don’t claim to know all about her habits, but it from the article it sounds like she was not making healthy habits a priority at that time.

Jess seems to have confused loving her body with making healthy choices.  This makes me think that she might have been practicing Fat Acceptance but not Health at Every Size, which is a completely valid choice.  But just in case this article mislead some people, I want to be clear that I don’t know anyone in the Fat Acceptance movement, let alone someone who considers herself a leader, who is saying that loving your body without practicing healthy behaviors is your best chance for health.

I don’t believe that health is a moral, social, or personal obligation (you can choose to prioritize things other than your health just like professional bull riders, X Games participants, stressed-out sleepless executives, those who have elective plastic surgery, sky divers, and people who don’t look both ways before they cross the street). Also, our health isn’t completely within our control.  Health is multi-dimensional and includes genetics, access, stress, environment, and behaviors.

So Health at Every Size says that, although health is never guaranteed, if you want health then your best chance is to focus on healthy behaviors.  And to me Ms. Weiner is a shining example of that working. When she started practicing healthy behaviors, her numbers moved into even farther into the normal range.  She also happened to experience weight loss.  I would note that they never mention the possibility that the improved numbers and the weight loss were both side effects of the behaviors -which is to say that it wasn’t the weight loss that made her healthier, it was the becoming active and/or making better food choices.  Statistically she has a 95% chance of gaining the weight back but that doesn’t mean that she can’t continue the healthy behaviors regardless.

Here’s that balance that I promised.  I was caught in a vicious cycle of thinking that I couldn’t be healthy until I was thin, and having trouble achieving either.  When healthy behaviors failed to make me thin I moved on to unhealthy behaviors (extreme food restriction, compulsive exercise etc.)  I had bought into the diet industry’s marketing that doing unhealthy things to get thin would lead to a body that was healthy, and that I couldn’t be healthy until I was thin.  Looking back is doesn’t make any sense to me but at the time somehow it did. Eventually I did my research and chose Health at Every Size.  My story is that I practice healthy behaviors and my number are all in the healthy range (“healthier” than Ms. Weiners post weight loss numbers), but my body weight stays consistent at 284. I love my body, I have great health, and I am obese. I’ve maintained this health and weight for years and I know lots of healthy fat people who are older than I, so I do not buy the vague future health threat – VFHT.

Loving your body and choosing healthy behaviors are two separate things.  You don’t have to choose to make health a priority but if you do, (and even if you want to change the size and shape of your body) I think it’s easier to make choices that nurture your body if you start by loving and appreciating the body you have now.  It’s pretty difficult to hate yourself healthy. I believe that those healthy habits are the best chance for health, whether or not they lead to long-term weight loss.  If health isn’t a priority for you, there’s no reason that you can’t appreciate and love the body that you have and all the things that it does. In fact, I can’t think of a single circumstance in which hating my body would improve my situation.

What if there is no such thing as flawed bodies.  What if there are only variations.  Different shapes, different sizes, different abilities, but all perfect as they are.  What if, instead of reading another article about clothing that hides those “problem areas”, we realized that our bodies don’t have any problem areas? I was pondering this when I got a comment from reader Amlys with a brilliant idea.  She wrote:

After poking around the SA blogosphere, I started challenging myself to find one beautiful thing about fat women. Even if it was, “I like her earrings”. Eventually, I started seeing beautiful things about their bodies, too. It became an automatic response to fatness–looking for one beautiful thing. I don’t see anything that upsets me–i don’t associate adiposity with being unattractive anymore. Now, I instinctively look for one beautiful thing about every person I see, fat or thin. I truly have found myself to be accepting of all sizes–I don’t see size anymore, just that one beautiful thing that I find about that particular person.

One beautiful thing. No more flaws, no more problem areas, no more body snarking, no more “can you believe she’s wearing that“.  What if every time you looked at someone else, every time you looked in the mirror, you found something beautiful.  Imagine how that could change the world…

Just one beautiful thing.