Notes from the Fatosphere - BFB

[Big Fat Blog] Feeling Excluded

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:56:12 +0000

I have had an interesting convergence of experiences lately which has led me to thinking about exclusion. First off, a few things have happened which have me feeling a bit unwanted in Fat Acceptance. Secondly, I have been editing the section of my book on the conflict between death fat and in-betweenies and how both sides can feel left out. The Billboard Project has been bringing up memories of shaming and bullying from childhood. Then, in listening to Golda Poretsky’s Body Love Revolution Telesummit" – amazing stuff! – I heard Marilyn Wann talk about exclusion.

It finally dawned on me what I was feeling: that old fear of being excluded. Growing up as the fat nerd with no social skills, I felt left out so very often. Whether it was being picked last, not invited to the party or being bullied, I had so very many experiences of not being wanted as a child that I can be thin-skinned as an adult. In the Telesummit, Marilyn noted that many of us feel this way, so we can be sensitive to such experiences in the Fat Acceptance.

When I figuratively walked into the Fatosphere, I felt included. Here are my peeps! They understand me. They know what I have been through. Suddenly, I had a place where I belonged, and, feeling like I belong is such a wonderful sensation. No one was looking at my body and saying, “we don’t want you here.”

The Fatosphere and Fat Acceptance are loving communities. We accept anyone who is willing to honor the boundaries of the community (like no body snarking), even thin people. We build each other up. We support each other. We remind each other that we are worthy. And that is the kicker, because, as Marianne Williamson says, “love brings up everything unlike itself.” In other words, by loving and being loved, by accepting and being accepted, our fears and wounds will come up to be healed. And so, my fear of being unwanted has once again surfaced.

Now, I have a choice. I can run from this fear and let it fester inside me, trying to avoid having it triggered yet again. That running would mean me leaving FA and hoping to find another accepting community where, chances are, that fear will once again be triggered. Or, I can face it and work through it.

What does facing the fear of exclusion look like? I can only speak for myself, but for me it means making a choice. It means choosing to support Fat Acceptance and the Fatosphere even when I’m feeling outside the circle. It means slogging through the controversies, again, and sticking around any way. It means recognizing that I will not like everyone in the community, and they won’t all like me. It also means we can set aside those differences to work towards a common goal. It means doing my best to make sure others don’t feel excluded; yet allowing them to heal from their own wounds, even if I find watching that healing painful. As a child, I was powerless to do anything about feeling excluded. As an adult, I get to make choices.

When I made that choice to be part of this community whether I felt included or not, a sense of freedom overwhelmed me. Now, it will not matter what others do or say – I have made a choice to be included. Now, even if some people have issue with me, I can support the community. I can take part in Ragen Chastain’s Billboard project or Marilyn Wann’s STANDards. I can always choose to be supporting, whether I feel supported or not.

And the result – today I feel like a part of this community; I feel like I belong. Maybe, just maybe, inclusion comes from our own actions rather than others actions towards us. Maybe, just maybe, if we choose to act inclusively we will find inclusion for ourselves. And maybe, just maybe, that old fear doesn’t have to mess with my FA identity any more.

So, how do you deal with feeling excluded?

[body impolitic] Butch Mom, Wearing Words Any Way They See Fit

Debbie — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:14:22 +0000

Debbie says:

If you can’t blog your friends really good posts, what’s the point of having a blog at all? I’m a frequent visitor in Lori Selke’s household, so I can confirm that when they (Selke’s preferred pronoun) say, “I am a butch biological mother in a queer parenting threesome in which the other two members are male-assigned and I would probably have to arm-wrestle at least one of them for the title of ‘most butch,’” it’s no exaggeration.

Selke is responding to a Lambda Literary Review article in which Sinclair Sexsmith interviews Jack Halberstam. (Jack Halberstam, until recently, has been better known as Judith Halberstam: in either identity, a prominent and interesting gender theorist). Here’s the Halberstam quote that got Selke steaming:

Sometimes I get really irritated when I’m around other queer couples where one person is kind of clearly butch and the other is clearly less butch, but the butch partner is still called “mom.” I think, what’s that about? Why do you want to be called mom? Nothing could be further from my desire, in parenting, than to be called mom. So, we’re doing this queer parenting thing, but the roles of mom and dad have remained completely stable? Only women can be mom, only men can be dad? What’s that about? It’s another frontier where we need better and more interesting ways of thinking about how gender interacts with social functions like parenting.

And here’s Selke’s response (well, part of it):

The idea that because my kids call me mom, I believe or support the idea that only women can be mom and only men can be dad is ludicrous. Now we are using the word “mom” to determine who is hip and happening and genderbending and questioning and exploring how gender and parenting interact, and who’s not. Apparently, by not chafing at the label M-O-M, I’m not.

Even though they also call me “Mister Sir” (and sometimes “Mister Sir Mommy Sir”)? Not making that one up.

… I want to open up the word “Mom” to be as inclusive as possible. Butch moms, femme moms, none-of-the-above moms. Stud moms. Trans moms. Mister Sir Mommy moms. Male moms.

I want other words, too. New words and coinages, and the repurposing of old terms, both obscure and forgotten and otherwise. I want to rip vocabulary from the clutches of the hegemony and wear words any way I see fit. I want to mix codes and confuse the masses. And even if I didn’t want that, it happens in my wake regardless. I’ve watched the ripples of consternation follow me all my life, both before and after I became a parent.

And I see using “mom” for a butch parent as very clearly a repurposing. It’s not a word for everybody, and if Halberstam had stuck to “I have absolutely no desire to be referred to as ‘mom,’” I wouldn’t be writing this. But please. If I can be called a Mom, that lights a fuse to a lot of stereotypes about what Moms can and can’t do, look like, be.

I’m right there with them, all that range of Moms. Just the concept makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

But I have a question (more for Halberstam than for Selke, and also for anyone who wants to answer): where are the dads in this article? Is it different to talk about femme dads, and sissy dads than it is to talk about butch moms? It’s one thing to be stuck in the binary of “mom” and “dad” the same way we’re stuck in the binary of “male” and “female,” but it’s something else again to have dads go completely invisible. Halberstam talks some about butch dads (by which he means dads who have also been coded female, presumably by birth and phenotype, since the context rules out dads who have been coded female by femme behavior and dress). Selke talks about the male-assigned parents in their household.

Dads, who aren’t butch, whether they are cis-male dads, trans-female dads, genderless dads, are completely invisible in the conversation. And perhaps because I am so taken with Selke’s desire to mess with vocabulary and codes and confuse the masses (and the words they use to describe that desire), I miss the presence of the range of dads that I’m confident both Halberstam and Selke can imagine.

[F-Words] Duck Face and Shame

noreply@blogger.com (Sara E Anderson) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:47:00 +0000

If you're not familiar with the culture and customs of Facebook, you probably have no idea what "duck face" is. I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Facebook, and I had to look it up, myself. It's apparently a common pose young women assume in photos, and the most popular outlet for misogyny I see in my feed. Here's a fine example.

The usual thrust of duck face humor is that it doesn't look very nice at all, so stop making that face in your pictures.

I think duck face is just a variant (meant to look playful and silly) on the face most people make unconsciously as an expression of shame. Making that connection put some things in perspective for me. Duck face epidemics are probably just epidemics of self-loathing, and the hostile response creeps me out. Facebook is a great way to indulge vanity (which can be annoying, but isn't the worst character trait I can think of), and it's interesting to see how people try to do so by a sideways, not-obvious approach. We demand a certain amount of vanity in women, but punish them for any display of it. If you try to put a funny spin on it, like duck face does, you are the target of everyone's disdain.

I'd love it if I looked fantastically beautiful all the time, and I try to look nice in pictures, but I've come to the conclusion that I photograph poorly (in that I look bad in photos, but I also am terrible at taking them.)

While I'm on the subject of social networking and photos of people, I hate how you can't pull out a camera without people awkwardly hugging and posing for it. I'd like it if I could take a picture of a party, not just the faces of a few friends at it.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Food Crisis and more on Georgia.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:30:03 +0000

By now many of have heard the story of a British teen who ate almost nothing but chicken mc nuggets and suffered health issues because of it. Amanda Hess, editor of the website GOOD points out:

It's also inspired timely commentary from health "experts." Last week, a PR agency pitched me a story pegged to Irvine's collapse. A "weight loss specialist" could be made available to "comment on the dangers of Stacey's addiction" and "speak to the dangers of childhood obesity." The doctor in question has "specialized in the study and treatment of Bariatric Medicine" and has "directed the operation of multiple Weight Loss Centers."

The teen was thin.

If you say something long enough it will become accepted as truth even if it's not.

Her health problems are not related to obesity, and they won't be solved by stapling her stomach. Yet we're so culturally hardwired to believe that unhealthy equals fat and vice versa that even photographic evidence...

An article from a foodie website was shocked that the girl isn't obese.

As I have mentioned before I believe that people should eat as best they can and move as much as they need. This doesn't just mean fat people. This oppressive moral crusade against fat people also damages the health of thin people. When thin equals healthy, thin people will assume they are healthy. I have to wonder if the teen figured she was healthy because she was thin.

Being fat is not the worst thing in life especially when there have been several studies which show that eating poorly and not fat is the cause of certain diseases. I'm not against campaigns for people to cut sugar, cigarettes, trans-fats and processed foods. (Although I question that they might be far more instustive than they should be). What am against is victimization of fat people by stigmatizing us, not for health but for moral reasons.

Meanwhile several projects against the ads in Altanta has grown by leaps and bounds. The first one the "I stand" or stand for kids campaign spearheaded by Marilyn Wann and Atchka Fatty of Fierce Thinking Fatties. There are hundreds of I Stand pictures, Pattie Thomas has done a short video here and Jennifer Jonassen created a much longer (both worth the watch) video.

And as mentioned on Saturday, Ragen Chastian is raising money to billboards and a media campaign against the CHOA ads. She is almost to the 15K goal but needs more donations to unlock to the 5k match. Here is information how to donate either through Paypal (where you can go as low as $1) or the fundraising website (minimum is $5). I've donated three times to help get the match, so please just send $1.

[Red No 3] The All-New Fat Hate Bingo 3

Brian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:15:00 +0000

The All-New Fat Hate Bingo 3 is finally here!

So, back in 2007 in the early days of the "fat-o-sphere", fat bloggers were weathering seemingly endless fat shaming attacks from trolls and concern trolls alike. During a discussion at Shakesville, I made a subtle reference to the history in social justice movements of using "Bingo" cards to diffuse commonly repeated attacks. Kate Harding suggested actually making a Bingo card and 90 minutes later, there it was. Fat Hate Bingo 2 followed the next day and both remain among the most popular posts at Red No. 3. Each card catalogs many of the "brilliant" put-downs fat activists face online and in our lives when we try to advocate for the horribly radical concept that maybe its not the end of the world that we're fat.

Honestly, its something a lot of fat activists try to avoid because its emotionally draining to have to hear the same thing over and over and over again, always repeated by people who are enamored with their brilliance and courage to finally say this to a fat person. I usually avoid it, too, but last fall when I started doing the Maggie sequels, I came upon a whole host of new attacks that I'd see quickly repeated endlessly by all sorts of people who don't realize they are reading from a script. Thus, Fat Hate Bingo 3 was born.

I know fat people aren't supposed to have friends, but if you did have 2 friends, now all three of you can play against each other the next time the concept of fat shaming is introduced to a not so receptive audience. Actually, since we now have 75 Fat Hate Bingo squares, just as many as used in actual bingo, maybe we can all get in the act!

[Image Description: Header Text: “red3.blogspot.com presents Fat Hate BINGO 3. We really have heard it all before.” Below is a 5x5 Bingo Card with squares in alternating red and gray colors with text in each square.

Column 1: My tax dollars are paying for your fat lifestyle. | Shaming of Dieters is the real problem. | If you don’t like being bullied, just lose weight. | If that’s true, why are you so fat? | Fat people threaten our national security!

Column 2: You can’t control fat bigotry, but you can control your weight. | Diabetes! Hypertension! Heart Disease! | You are ugly. Do something about your health. | Fat acceptance shouldn’t mean accepting an unhealthy weight. | Somebody needs to start shaming fat people.

Column 3: Take responsibility for what you put in your mouth. | You can’t all have thyroid problems. | Its not a diet… | Thin privilege doesn’t exist because you can choose to be thin. | People shouldn’t have to look at you.

Column 4: What’s next? Cancer pride? | I can’t condone your self-destructive behavior. | Instead of promoting obesity, use your energy to lose weight. | Fat people are empirically unattractive. | We are becoming an obese nation!

Column 5: BMI may be flawed, but we have to do something. | Its not hate if you really are unhealthy and disgusting. | Your fat activism is killing people! | Since when is laziness like gender or race? | You can’t argue with facts.]

[Big Fat Blog] Academia, Obesity Epi-Panic, and the Emperor’s New Clothes

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:15:36 +0000

A quick hit today with apologies to everyone since I have been completely overcome by work lately and unable to dedicate time to writing. I hope to have everything sorted soon so that I can continue the series on food and food processing. In the meantime, I want to talk about articles in the press, and commenters who bring joy by pointing out the naked emperors in our midst.

It is both wonderful and terrible to have the Newspaper of Record for these United States as one’s hometown paper. On the one hand, there is some VERY fine reporting in the paper. On the other hand, one has to contend with the Fat-Bash Olympics on a daily basis. I have been really fed up lately with the patronizing tone of some of the writers who address topics of health. It really has been worse than usual. And yet, a new crop of commenters seem less and less willing to remain silent, so they are pointing out the birthday-suited emperors running around in academic head-dress justifying their studies by bashing fat and fat people.

Most of the time, unfortunately, I have to say that the worst of the fat bashing contenders play on the Commenters team, not the Journalists team, in the contests. What I have been seeing more of, however is, a commenter such as the one (whose comment I will talk about today) who will distinguish him or herself by calling shenanigans on one or more aspects of an article, and showing very clearly and with few words the bias which underlies it.

One such article appeared last Tuesday in the Times. You can see the article here. It was written by Jane Brody, and it references primarily the work of Dr. Richard J. Jackson, professor and chairman of environmental health sciences at the UCLA. He works in the field of analyzing how the built environment (our cities, suburbs… our living environment in short) affect health. Well, so far so good. In these pages we have often commented upon this. What is unfortunate, however, is that this Dr. Jackson seems compelled to repeat the same shibboleths of the fat-hating academic tribes to justify his pursuits. Here is an example (emphasis supplied):

“unless changes are made soon in the way many of our neighborhoods are constructed, people in the current generation (born since 1980) will be the first in America to live shorter lives than their parents do.
…
“People who walk more weigh less and live longer,” Dr. Jackson said. “People who are fit live longer. People who have friends and remain socially active live longer. We don’t need to prove all of this,” despite the plethora of research reports demonstrating the ill effects of current community structures.”

If one were to remove the highlighted bits (please read the full article for the context), the good work that public health professionals concerned with our built environment would still be emphasized appropriately. The justification of creating environments where movement is possible, encouraged and supported would be maintained.

Why, oh why, does weight have to play a part? Are these academics concerned that their work will be invalidated if obesity is not highlighted as “the problem”? SHOULD they be concerned that their funding will be reduced if it is NOT thus highlighted? I really want to know. Perhaps if one of you academics is reading this you can enlighten us in the comments to this post.

The Comments Section for these articles is where we can feel the zeitgeist most clearly. These were actually (on balance) not bad in the case of this article. That is actually a welcome change. One comment, stood out for aiming a strong beam of light right at the implicit fallacies. The link I provided shows the comment and the responses to it (a fine recent refinement to the commenting process). A gentleman (to judge by the picture provided) writing as Kip Hansen (who I hope keeps commenting on these topics in the future) said:

“…Compare his dreadful predictions with the fact the average lifespan in the US continues to rise, year after year. Americans are healthier and live longer than ever before.

There is always someone who can drag out some 'purpose-chosen' statistics (doesn't that sound nicer than 'cherry-picked' ?) showing how this and that disease is on the rise (usually because we're living longer, and moire [sic] of us suffer the usual diseases and discomforts of older-age)...”

Some people who responded dog-piled on his comments saying that – of course – the increase in diabetes will not show up in death stats for years, and (I am paraphrasing here) that we are all just fat pigs. Yet the gentleman’s comment stands as a very clear counterbalance of common sense to the Obesity Panic-mongering that is de rigeur amongst academics working in public health. Perhaps it is my imagination, but I seem to see a larger number of comments such as Mr. Hansen’s showing up and being recommended by readers several times.

I know a number of regular readers of this blog comment on articles in their papers or on websites. If you do… What have your observations been in terms of the number of pro-HAES comments Have you encountered any great comments that pointed out some fundamental prejudice in an article? Do you have commenters that you consider favorites? What makes you decide to comment or to withhold your thoughts on any given article?

Looking forward to reading your thoughts…

A note to those who have been following the efforts to put up billboards in solidarity with the children of Atlanta who have been subjected to odious and shaming signs depicting fat children: You can follow the progress of the donations on Ragen Chastain’s page. There you will also find links to donate a dollar (or more) in solidarity. The effort exceeded original expectations, and is extremely close to meeting the requirement for a challenge grant from the More of Me to Love folks. Thank you if you have donated, and please donate if you possibly can. Every donation counts!

[body impolitic] Fighting Billboards with Billboards: I STAND Conjures Grassroots Viral Magic

Debbie — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:55:07 +0000

Lynne Murray says:

An amazing online effort raised $12,083 in the 24 hours of February 2nd to set up billboards with positive images and messages aimed at fostering health through self-esteem to fight hateful billboards targeting fat kids.

It all started in spring of 2011 with the billboards in Georgia aimed at humiliating fat kids in the supposed name of “health.”

Advocates of Heath at Every Size, including Body Impolitic, saw the billboards as an invitation to bully fat kids. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) “called for the removal of these damaging billboards in March, 2011.” But a recent NAAFA press release says, “since that time” we have learned that Georgia Children’s Health Alliance has committed to spending $5 million over the next five years on this negative Strong4Life campaign.”

Then, like a miracle of grassroots magic the I STAND campaign began and mustered a virtual digital army of positive images and messages in an effort to counter the bullying billboards.

Pattie Thomas at New Year’s Revolutions Resources invited people to “Join us in showing the world there is better use of Photoshop® than telling bullies it is okay to target fat kids.”

Jennifer Johanssen has created a video slideshow derived from the I STAND photos. It’s long at 18 minutes, but the images and statements were so powerful, I couldn’t stop watching.

I STAND! from Jennifer Jonassen on Vimeo.

Jennifer says:

This is my thank you to Marilyn Wann, Ragen Chastain, Atchka Fatty, and everyone involved with the I STAND movement who are making history! I dedicate this to anyone out there being bullied or in pain. Take strength in these images! They are the tip of the iceberg and represent only a few of the people out there who support you. YOU ARE PERFECT AS YOU ARE.

For those who don’t do online video, Carrie Padian has created (and often updated) a Tumblr page for the images at I Stand Against Weight Bullying.

Carrie says:

What I DO know is that kids everywhere cannot be hated for their own good, that you cannot shame someone to health and happiness. This is true for adults and especially true for kids; once they start on the cycle of shame, diets, unreal expectations and all the rest, it’s very difficult to get away from.

The “I STAND…” responses moved and inspired me with the inclusiveness of the support–i.e, no one was considered too fat/thin/young/old/heathy/disabled to offer supportive images and statements (including a rolling spotted fat kitty, who won my heart).

The idea of putting up counter billboards seemed impossible, but viral media and several hundred positive-minded activists begged to disagree!

–
SF Weekly took note of the controversy and the activist response. I can testify that the activists are located all over and not limited to the SF Bay area.

Ragen Chastain at Dances With Fat puts it well when she says:

Bullies count on our fear and their money. Putting up a billboard sends the message that we aren’t scared, and that we can accomplish something big. It tells these bullies that they can’t take our lunch money any more.

100% of the money raised goes directly to the project. Our billboards need to go up, and theirs need to come down.

I am so proud of and inspired by these efforts.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Fatties fat back

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:41:21 +0000

The magnificent dancer Ragen Chastain is raising money for a billboard in Atlanta Georgia (Preferably near CHOA). The original goal was 10k which was passed, now it is up to 15K and it's getting there.

More of me to love has pledged 5k if Ragen can get 5k (done) and 1000 donors. (More than halfway there) Please donate. You can go as low as $1 or as high as you want. See Ragen's blog post for more info.

[F-Words] Grow up, Leslie

noreply@blogger.com (Sara E Anderson) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:42:00 +0000

I think Amanda Marcotte is right that NBC show Parks and Recreation is being set up as a sexist cliche, but I think her analysis of Leslie as a perfectly competent administrator and sane person are totally wrong. Leslie's wanted to be a public servant to her town for all her life, and it's nice to see her follow her dream. But she's not ten years old anymore.

As someone who followed her somewhat impractical dream all the way through college, I can tell you that a goal that stays static your entire life is kind of a limitation. I was so focused on being a scientist when I grew up that I ignored pretty much all other areas of learning (and never noticed a talent and passion for writing)to focus on what I needed to catch up on to competently work in my field of choice. Luckily, it turned out that an aptitude for these things can be developed if you don't already have it in you.

Having that uncomplicated route to a career derailed has allowed me to see that there's a lot more to me than liking science and tech. I have to play to my strengths now, and that means some modification to my goals.

You can see Leslie slowly realizing this stuff, too. She's a terrible campaigner, partially due to being clingy and unable to read people. She's ignored serious romantic relationships in favor of her career (which is generally a false choice in fiction, but she's so set in her desire to stick with Pawnee, she's had to watch some potential happiness leave her there) and if she's going to be in the business of making life work better for people, she needs to understand what the lives of people who aren't so goal-oriented are like. This stubborn streak is what she has in common with Ben. He wanted something absurd for the town he bankrupted, and getting it was a disaster. He's had to adjust his ambitions to fit his personality, and is trying to give Leslie the benefit of his experience.

[The Rotund] I’m Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack (Still Fat)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:56:29 +0000

So, that was a MUCH longer hiatus than I anticipated! I am so sorry – and I am so thankful to the people who wrote to check on me. It’s been an eventful couple of months on the in-person life front.

Nothing too heinous. But a whole lot of stress, which hit me right in the old depreshuns. And when I’m depressed… writing is hard.

I’ve been easing back into it though, including a gig over at xojane.com – I’m proud to be involved over there, y’all.

And I especially wanted to link here to my newest post there – because I’m talking about the time I posed naked for cancer. Which is, if any one thing can be the genesis of something, the real and true origin of this blog.

I am so glad to see you again. And I hope you’ll come chatter with us on this post:

http://www.xojane.com/healthy/time-i-got-naked-cancer

[body impolitic] Disabled Bodies in Able-Bodied Contexts

Debbie — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:09:06 +0000

Laurie and Debbie say:

Sarah Wanenchak, guest-posting for Sociological Images, did a fascinating post on “Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance”. Wanenchak uses runners Aimee Mullins

and Oscar Pistorius

Mullins and Pistorius present interesting examples. They are both known for being both accomplished athletes and for being physically attractive – Mullins has done modeling work. They present inspiring stories that have generated a fair amount of sports media coverage. And yet things have not been altogether smooth – there has been some controversy regarding the degree to which the carbon fiber prostheses they use for running confer any form of advantage on the runners who use them. Questions over the effect of the prostheses have threatened Pistorius’s bids to compete in the Olympics alongside able-bodied athletes.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of [Fiona Kumari] Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

We also blogged about Pistorius back in 2007, when we said:

We’re guessing that he won’t be allowed to run all the way to the Olympics, because athletes with “perfect bodies” are terrified being shown up by someone whose natural body is imperfect, and whose prosthetics make him cybernetic.

If the trend to keep visible disabilities as normalcy continues, converting them into assets is an inevitable result. … And if someone competing against Oscar Pistorius needs medication to have the courage to leave the house, and then runs like the wind, would anyone say that he was relying on “something that provides advantages”?

Underlying both Wanenchak’s post and our old one is the cultural conviction that the only way to react to disability is with pity. No one wants to be pitied, but many people are comfortable having others to pity. And it’s easy, if you haven’t thought it out, to pity someone in a wheelchair, or someone who walks tapping her way with a white cane. It’s much more complicated to think about that wheelchair, or that cane as something that opens up the person’s life … and would open it up much more if buildings and streets were more accommodating to a variety of needs. It’s not only complicated, but potentially deeply disturbing, to think about high-tech prostheses, maximized for the needs of a particular person with particular skills at a particular time in his or her life, to think that a “disabled” person perhaps has something that works better than what “normal people” are issued with.

As Wanenchak is deeply aware, many athletic enhancements don’t make people nervous. She talks about skater Johnny Ohno, who is

“as able-bodied as one can get. But … he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human.”

You can say the same of any world-class athlete. The distinction seems to be between what we perceive as “compensations”–replacements for body parts that don’t work or aren’t there–and what we perceive as “enhancements,” physical aids or practices that we put on top of what is “supposed to be there.” Ohno skates on the legs he was born with, in his special skates, in his special suit. Mullins and Pistorius run on legs they weren’t born with, and manage to be successful, conventionally attractive, and enviable. Since we don’t have any cultural slots open for disabled, successful, conventionally attractive, and enviable, people get confused, disturbed, and sometimes threatened.

[Red No 3] A Cure for All

Brian — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:19:00 +0000

This afternoon, Susan B. Komen for the Cure, our nation's most prominent charity in the fight against breast cancer, made the shocking and appalling decision to pull all of its grants for breast cancer screening from Planned Parenthood. The rational is a sham investigation by House Republicans who have made a political agenda out of withholding all financial support from Planned Parenthood's women's health programs because the organization separately provides access to abortion services. This excuse is a barely disguised fraud intending to suggest Komen for the Cure is not taking sides, while they are actually doing exactly what one side wants. It is a craven and heartless deception which has not gone unnoticed by the thousands who have protested on Twitter an inexplicable decision that will put lives at risk.

I stand with these protesters in disgust with an organization that has opted to play politics with cancer prevention. There are many who disagree with some of what Planned Parenthood does, as is their right. There are plenty who disagree with some of the activities of some of the religious organizations that Komen for the Cure also supports. For decades, we have found a way to come together and work towards a common goal of providing better access to cancer screen, care, and research. Today, Komen for the Cure has taken a despicable stand against common cause and have instead opted to endorse divisive politics over people's health.

Most of this country rejects this kind of alienating action. Most of this country believes that there are things we can all work together on. Fighting breast cancer is a noble goal, something that can unite us all in fighting for a better world. We must all stand against those who think we should only fight cancer so long as it is politically convenient. That we must only fight cancer in the way one political agenda approves of. That we all must live under the limitations of a few. We all stand together for a cure and we stand against those who would limit the cure based on political agendas.

Komen for the Cure is acting because of the voices of the few have been weighted above the rest of us. Komen caved because some people promised to withdraw their support if their politics didn't limit Komen. It is time for the few to stop dictating terms to the many. It is time that corporations and foundations think twice before consenting to the limitations the few wish to impose on them. It is time that the rest of us be heard and for the charade of "not taking sides" while doing the bidding of one side be challenged.

We must call upon the corporate sponsors and partners of Komen for the Cure to redirect their much appreciated support to groups who do not put politics over fighting cancer. Groups who are fighting for a cure for all. Continuing to support Komen for the Cure now means supporting politics over cancer screening. It means supporting some, not all. If an organization will support such divisive politics on such a grave issue, they will not enjoy my support and I will make my voice heard. My voice will not be alone.

[Big Fat Blog] Stand4Kids Update

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:45:42 +0000

Marilyn Wann's Stand for Kids Campaign is a HAES, body lib reply to Georgia's negative and stigmatizing Strong4Life billboards, which portray fat children as pathetic and inherently unhealthy.

Just a few quick updates.

The Stand4Kids Tumblr has been moved. It is now here: I STAND AGAINST WEIGHT BULLYING. If you have a finished Stand4Kids poster, you can submit it to the Tumblr here.
Ragen of Dances with Fat is spearheading the billboard campaign. She's set up a page for it at www.SupportAllKids.com
Marilyn Wann is still accepting images for the first phase of the project. Submittal instructions are here, in the previous BFB summary post.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Lying to create an epidemic

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:45:50 +0000

As of now, there has never been a diet drug that has worked in the long run. Many have dangerous side effects (including death). That being said, apparently the drug industry feels that they may give up on obesity drugs if the FDA would stop being so rigid on them.

They point to obesity drugs, where Arena Pharmaceuticals, Orexigen Therapeutics and Vivus have hit roadblocks in gaining approval for their diet pills because of potential safety concerns.

I say the FDA isn't rigid enough. Diet pills don't work, and have dangerous side effects. This is something the drug industry needs to give up on. Diabetes is slightly different. A pill that would cure diabetes would be wonderful, but according to Consumer reports, current diabetes medications are no better or safer than the ones they replaced.

On to (or should I say back to) other liars, my favorite topic of the last three posts, namely fat hating Children's Health Care of Atlanta (CHOA). They are under more fire this week for using healthy fat actors to portray poor disease ridden obese children. (There is also a story about NYC diabetes ad that photoshopped off a healthy person's leg.) Perhaps because they couldn't find any fat actors who had these diseases.

Bioethicists and health communicators say untruthful testimonials in public health campaigns are wrong, even if their messages are, in a broad sense, advertisements. Falseness in these ads loses the public's trust, which is critical in public health initiatives, experts say.

Even pro-weight loss groups such as the Rudd Center disapproves of the ads.

Georgia’s “Strong4Life” campaign to address childhood obesity is a well-meaning but likely counterproductive attempt to address one of the most important public health priorities in our country. It is critical to address childhood obesity, but the Strong4Life campaign takes a misguided approach that may inadvertently worsen obesity and harm the very people who are most in need of help.

This highly visible and well-financed campaign ($50 million) intends to motivate parents and children to take action on childhood obesity by using images and testimonials of obese youth (hired actors) who are portrayed with “warning” messages...

I also want to thank them for pointing out the 50 million dollar price tag. In 2009, it was estimated that 11 percent of Georgia's children had no health insurance. I'm pretty sure that 50 mil would help cover that gap. Of give the money to me and I'll start a non-for-profit insurance company called FatCo whose sole purpose would be to give health insurance to people deemed "not healthy enough for insurance".

They have also come under major fire by the Size acceptance community who have taken them on with a campaign called "I stand" Stand4kids, which I mentioned it briefly last week when the Tumblr site was only a handful of photos. SInce then, it has grown by leaps and bounds to over a hundred photos and more are being added each day.

And in other news about liars, fat hating Whole Foods who claims you can be thin, healthy, and beautiful if you only eat from their store has said the mean nasty government (and yes the USDA needs to be more forceful on GMO crops) is forcing them to carry GMO foods.

And I stand for my fat! Because fat is part of my body, it is a part of me. To hate it is to hate myself.

*Disclaimer the b/w image and background were photoshopped. However the fat people in the ads are fat and the thin people are thin. Quotes underneath are 100% truth.

[Feed Me!] Last chance!

Harriet — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:16:00 +0000

Tomorrow is the last day to get the conference room rate for the one-day conference on child and adolescent eating disorders in Pearl River, NY, sponsored by Maudsley Parents. This fabulous one-day conference features some of the top experts in the field talking about how to recognize and treat eating disorders in children and teens:

• Debra Katzman, MD, will talk about where we stand with child and adolescent eating disorders
• Rebecka Peebles, MD, will talk about the medical side of treating child and teen EDs
• Katharine Loeb, MD, will talk about early interventions--what, why, and how
• Daniel le Grange will talk about working with families from both a therapist and parent perspective
• Evelyn Attia will talk about whether there's a role for medication in treating children and teens with EDs

This is going to be a truly remarkable conference, and I hope you can join me and my co-chair at Maudsley Parents, Jane Cawley on Friday, February 17, at the beautiful Hilton Pearl River hotel.

See you there!

[Feed Me!] What do YOU stand for?

Harriet — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Deepest thanks to the fabulous Marilyn Wann, who created the "I Stand for" project in response to Georgia's shameful Strong4Life campaign. I'm proud to be one of the many, many people who stand for something besides weight bigotry, shame, and stigma.

You can see the whole series on Marilyn's tumbler and facebook pages. They're a pretty inspiring bunch. If you'd like to participate, send your photo and "I Stand for" statement to Marilyn at marilyn@fatso.com.

[body impolitic] Enoch Arden, Michi and Jackie

Laurie — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 07:49:15 +0000

Laurie says:

Kyoko Michishita was one of the women I worked with on my Women of Japan project. She is a noted feminist and does strong anti-military work. Michi is also a well known translator.

She recently published a Japanese translation of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, a remarkable accomplishment, particularly given the language differences.

She had asked my permission to use the photo I took of her with her cat Jackie (who unfortunately passed away) as her author photo, and of course I said yes. The publisher used a crop of my photo for the book jacket. (A “crop” is a section of a whole negative or photograph usually chosen for the aesthetics.) And usually, if you are the photographer and have already made your choice, you are often less then thrilled. Magazines frequently do this for overall design purposes, and in that framework it’s perfectly reasonable.

This time, when I got the book and saw the crop, I was pleased. In the context of the book jacket I really liked their choice, so I thought I would share it.

As is obvious from the photo, Michi and Jackie were very close.

[Junkfood Science] Note to My Readers

Sandy — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:44:00 +0000

[body impolitic] Women’s Friendship in the Worst of Times

Debbie — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:20:45 +0000

Debbie says:

I don’t have a lot to say about Emily Rapp’s essay, Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship. Unless, that is, I write a book-length response.

It’s a very sad essay. I’m not so much one for trigger warnings, mostly because I believe people’s triggers are too complex and nuanced to be well-protected by warnings. Let’s just say that if you have a hard time reading about the slow, inexorable death of a child, you won’t find this easy. And who doesn’t? If you have a hard enough time that you don’t want to do that to yourself, don’t click the link. The quotes below dodge the hardest stuff.

Nonetheless, the essay isn’t about death, it is (as advertised) about the friendships of women. I love to tell people that the word “gossip,” so maligned in these times, means the talk of women, and it comes from the term “godsib,” or “god-sibling,” which was a medieval term for “best friend,” the woman who is not biologically my sister, but should be. Rapp isn’t interested in gossip, or etymology: she’s interested in how a particular group of women older than herself–women she worked with in a nonprofit in a country she didn’t know–led her to see the world in a different light:

They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate. And they also understood that you could try as hard as you possibly could, and disaster could still strike – mercilessly. Without warning, without fairness, and with fatal consequences. I wasn’t ready to change my man-chasing, embarrassing ways, but a seed was planted on that afternoon. Nearly fifteen years later I get out of bed each morning and am thankful that I wasn’t so myopically committed to old, tried myths about women’s roles that I couldn’t see what was happening in that room between those three women, or what was happening in my own mind.

While Rapp pursues her young-self goals of marriage and motherhood, her older friends (self-dubbed “The Wrinklies”) follow a different path:

The last time I saw the Wrinklies was in 1999 on a return trip to Geneva. The youngest of the three had had a stroke as a result of a brain tumor. These friends she’d worked and traveled and lived and laughed and loved with for over half her life rented a new ground-floor apartment that would accommodate a wheelchair, took shifts taking care of her, all the while holding down jobs that were about saving other people’s friends, other people’s kids, other people’s lives – not directly, no, but on the sidelines, behind the scenes… I was nervous as I sat waiting in a pub to see them all again, afraid of seeing my paralyzed friend. Would my face show a reaction that I didn’t intend? Fear? Disgust? The three of them came in together, smiling. The unaffected two had learned to understand the other’s few words; they wiped her face, helped her eat and made her laugh. This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love.

Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends, what the Irish call anam cara. It’s what the Wrinklies did for one another, what the French resistance fighters in Auschwitz did for one another, what women do for one another in real relationships with real consequences in real time, every day, what my friends do for me. We help one another other live and sometimes, we watch – and help – one another die. It happens in movies, sure, but it also happens every day, in real life – now, tomorrow, yesterday. It is transformative and transcendent. It is real. It is love.

I have men in my own life with whom I have friendships with this strength and depth and power. I’m lucky. And when I think of those friendships, I think, “Those are like friendships with women.”

Unlike almost every other topic on the Internet, this one brought out the best in the commenters. Read the comments, if you read the essay.

We don’t write about these friendships enough, we don’t talk about them enough. But we live them every day and–speaking just for myself–I couldn’t live without my friends.

Thanks to Jill at Feministe for the pointer.

[Big Fat Blog] NWSA 2012 Fat Studies Interest Group Call for Papers

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:57:30 +0000

National Women's Studies Association 2012 Fat Studies Interest Group Call for Papers
November 8-11, 2012, Oakland, CA.

Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/ feminism/ womanism/ gender/ sexuality and fat studies will be considered.

At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2012:
*Revolutionary Futures
*Traveling Theory
*Social Networks, Power, and Change
*Decolonizing Knowledge
*Creative Awakenings
For more information on the themes, visit: http://nwsa.org/

While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:
* Fat Intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
* Fatopias/Fat Utopias
* Transnational Fat Bodies (immigration, globalization)
* Teaching Fat Studies (professorial bodies, student bodies, resistance)
* Knowledge-sharing/de-colonizing
* Fat Feminist Research Methods (including role of the researcher body)
* Fat Feminists Theorizing the Body
* Fat Performance/Performing Fatness/Fat Icons
* Fat activism & feminism/Fatosphere

If you are interested in being a part of the 2012 Fat Studies panels at NWSA, please send the following info by February 13, 2012 to NWSA Fat Studies Interest Group Co-Chairs Michaela A. Null and Candice Buss: (mnull@purdue.edu and cdbuss@uncg.edu). Please make sure one of us confirms receipt of your submission.

Your submission should include your:
*Name, Institutional Affiliation, Snail Mail, Email, Phone.
*NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above).
*Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session.
*AND a 100 word truncated abstract (NWSA requirement).

Each person will speak for around 15 minutes, and we will leave time for Q&A. In order to present with your name in the program, you must become a member of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.

______________________________________________________________________________
If you submit a fat studies related paper or panel, you can tag it with the keyword 'fat feminisms,' and likewise search the program for 'fat feminisms' to find relevant panels. If you submit a paper or panel on your own, we encourage you to use this keyword if your paper or panel fits the bill. We thank NWSA for adding a keyword that helps conference attendees locate fat studies panels.

[F-Words] Bigotry Sells

noreply@blogger.com (Sara E Anderson) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:08:00 +0000

So, Washington state is set to make marriage equality law.

Industry tends to support marriage equality, because it means that they can hire the talented gay people with families away from anti-gay areas, since they can treat them as employees should be treated.

This makes perfect sense, and you'd think it would get supposed free marketeers excited, but it tends not to (See the conservative states that have banned gay marriage over the objections of industry). A lot of times, when a really obviously bigoted ad gets some attention, people argue that it can't be racist because it would alienate potential customers of color. Markets are segmented and targeted all the time, which alienates potential customers, but will create some loyalty in the targeted segment. No one blinks when an ad takes advantage of classism to position its product as one of the good things in life, so why wouldn't one take advantage of sexism or racism or homophobia?

I used to believe this market-based argument against bigotry in advertising, but I've since noticed how attached people are to their -isms. Anti-feminism is important to some people, and they might buy manly Dr. Pepper.

[Red No 3] I am the 95% of dieters who regain the weight.

Brian — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:55:00 +0000

I am the 95% of dieters who regain the weight.

I didn't try to be part of the 95%. When I gained weight in college, I was struggling with accepting my changing body but also knew that dieting wasn't an answer. But then one summer I got very ill with a drug-resistant Strep infection and was basically on an extreme diet for 4-6 weeks when I could barely keep down food. After putting on about 50 lbs over a year, I lost it all in a month. When I recovered, though, the weight came right back on and then some. My weight stabilized after about a year and remained fairly stable for the next decade with a natural fluctuation of about 15 lbs up and down.

There is an old saying in Fat Acceptance that losing weight is as easy as holding your breath. Keeping it off is as easy as continuing to hold your breath. Dieting has breed a myth of its success off the fact that its not hard to induce weight loss. This period of "success" is what convinces dieters that its their fault when the diet fails. The truth is that the diet failed and was always going to fail. When I did might sound extreme, but its actually tame compared to some commercial diet plans. Even the most pseudo-reasonable "lifestyle change" relies on a fundamentally unsustainable formula. Sooner or later, we need to breathe. The diet industry, though, thrives on sustainability. Every time a diet fails, that's just a new customer. More billions to make off of peddling fat stigmatization.

I am the 95%. I did not fail. A culture of fat shame and fat hate has failed me.

[Big Fat Blog] Stand for Kids!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:07:16 +0000

Anyone who reads The Fatosphere Feed has already heard about Marilyn Wann's Stand for Kids Campaign. It's a HAES, body lib reply to Georgia's god-awful bullying Strong4Life billboards, which portray fat children as pathetic and inherently unhealthy.

Atchka of Fierce, Freethinking Fatties has created a Stand for Kids Blog where he's republishing related posts.

Recent Fatosphere Feed articles include:

I hope I didn't miss anyone!

The full album of images is here, on Facebook, and there's a Facebook group as well. There's also a I STAND AGAINST WEIGHT BULLYING tumblr.

If you'd like to Stand with Kids, Marilyn says:

Do you want your very own Stand4Kids ad? Yes? Good!!! It's easy... Steps:

Send me a photo (either attached to a message here or by email: marilyn-at-fatso.com)

Tell me your "I STAND..." statement.

Wait until I send you the ad for your approval.

Post your ad online and change the world!

There's an effort underway to fund actual billboards with some of these images, through Kickstarter. I'll post when I hear more about it.

I haven't submitted a picture (yet!) but hopefully our fearless leader Carrie won't mind if I post her very excellent contribution.

[body impolitic] What Kind of Film Do You Want to Be In? Combatting Media Brainwashing

Debbie — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:33:10 +0000

Lynne Murray says:

Sometimes I feel like I’m in one of those horror films where the entire population is increasingly infected by an incurable Body Hating Zombie Virus. Only instead of eating other people’s brains this sickness forces one to eat one’s own and pay for the privilege.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film,Miss Representation, and the website/movement that goes with it, aim at a different goal for women: not purchasing power, but real power. The goal is to bring women together in dialogue, action and mentoring to break the advertising trance and redirect women’s energy away from buying the message and the products–and into running the store, and running for public office.

Miss Representation … exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.

In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades,, the site points out, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.

On getting to the website, a visitor is immediately offered the opportunity to sign a pledge “to challenge the media’s limiting portrayal of women and girls.” I did this, got on their mailing list, and begin to receive weekly ideas of “actions you can take immediately to make a difference…” For example:

…Remember your actions influence others. Mothers, aunts and loved ones- don’t downgrade or judge yourself by your looks. Fathers, uncles and loved ones—treat women around you with respect. Remember children in your life are watching and learning from you.

…Use your consumer power. Stop buying tabloid magazines and watching shows that degrade women. Go see movies that are written and directed by women (especially on opening weekend to boost the box office ratings). Avoid products that resort to sexism in their advertising.
…Mentor others! It’s as easy as taking a young woman to lunch. Start by having open and honest conversations with a young person in your life.

When I first planned to write about Miss Representation , someone pointed out that it seemed similar to Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly so I checked that out. It’s available in segments on YouTube

Miss Representation, as a film and as a nudge toward collective action, stands on the shoulders of Kilbourne’s pioneering work on media brainwashing. These films have some equally activist siblings, all of them addressing the insidious invisibility of the advertisers’ message. Kilbourne points it out clearly in the fourth revision of Killing Us Softly:

Advertising is more sophisticated and more influential than ever before but still just about everyone feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising.

I asked the first four people I spoke to after hearing this, and all of them confirmed her observation, saying they were not much influenced by ads because they seldom or never watch television.

Kilborne counters this mindset by listing some of the innumerable, half-invisible entry points through which ads can infect your mind:

The average American is exposed to over 3,000 ads every single day…. The ads, as you know, are everywhere. Our schools, the sides of buildings, sports stadiums, billboards, bus stops, busses themselves, cars, elevators, doctors’ offices, airplanes, even on food items like eggs. Almost every aspect of popular culture is really about marketing. (Killing Us Softly 4, part 1 of 2 on YouTube)

Watching Kilbourne’s YouTube slide show, I suddenly realized I had bought and read her paperback book a few years earlier. Seeing the ads in video format brought home to me how much more intense the film medium can be.

Images from film versions of books stick in our mind even when we reread the books. Harry Potter will always resemble Daniel Radcliffe in our minds. Even a documentary film is simplified and streamlined compared to a book; the visual nature of images and movies bypasses the forebrain and goes directly for the gut.

Advertisers know this better than anyone. The cultural goals that have been carved out for women in particular have sneaked into our brains and become an abnormal “normal” that needs to constantly be questioned.

Author Amy Ahlers expresses frustration at how advertising’s toxic self-assessments creep into our minds and color our self-worth in her essay “Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves: Ditch Your Inner Critic and Wake Up Your Inner Superstar”:

Studies show that only 8 percent of the images we consume are registered by our conscious mind. That means that 92 percent of the airbrushed, stick-thin, perfectly proportioned images infiltrate our subconscious minds, influencing the way we feel about ourselves. It’s an onslaught of insanity: all these unattainable bodies put before us as an ideal to strive for. As the supermodel Cindy Crawford once said when looking at her airbrushed, Photoshopped pictures, “I don’t even look like Cindy Crawford.”

We need to consciously work to win back our thoughts about how we are supposed to look. We need to overcome the Big Fat Lies about our bodies and our self-care. We need to tune in to our Inner Wisdom on a deep level and to practice, practice, practice, so that we can model a healthy relationship with ourselves.

It is refreshing to see independent and dedicated filmmakers fighting back.

One such is Darryl Roberts, whose America the Beautiful, targeting the unwholesome “beauty” standards Debbie reviewed in Body Impolitic in 2009.

Roberts aimed his cameras at the now $65 billion weight loss industry in a follow-up America the Beautiful 2, The Thin Commandments,

The Australian feminist group Collective Shout, which I wrote about here last year, is also aiming to raise awareness of the toxic and dangerous definitions being forced down our throats, and of course there are dozens (if not hundreds) of others.

Each group’s focus is slightly different, but they are all trying to help us shake free of the hypnotic media-induced trance and each invites to examine the advertising industry’s vision of womanhood:

Kilbourne remarks,

The ads decrees that women should be polished, perfect indeed flawless. She has no blemishes, indeed, she has no pores.” Such a woman also need not concern herself with ideas, as she is made to be seen and not heard. Her mission is to devote most of her energy into the quest for an unnatural, truly impossible beauty standard, which will supposedly result in the heavens opening up and showering her with all that she desires.

Sadly, the hook that the advertisers are setting is baited with an almost real, physiologically based experience of power that many people have, briefly, during their prime reproductive years, when nature heightens every hormone in humans to ensure the continuation of the species. The myth advertisers are selling is that this attractiveness can be captured, distilled and sold as a product and used to help the consumer stay young, powerful and vital.

Also highly disturbing is the advertisers’ use of shocking images to grab attention in this morass of advertising, particularly of shocking violence toward women. The advertiser’s “normal” world, where “all the women are flawless and men are Alpha” is also one where battering, gang rape and stalking are presented as appealing courtship modes.

Newsom, Kilbourne, Roberts, Collective Shout, and their allies are engaged in a fight to wake all of us up from the consumer ad dream/nightmare and energize our lives for real. It can benefit every one of us.

Sometimes I wake up from the Body Hating Zombie Virus film and get the much more positive feeling that I’m in one of those sci-fi movies where we’ve managed to contact The Resistance and there is still hope to save the planet. May the Force for Self-Empowerment be with you!

[Fat Chicks Rule] Paula Deen, the fear of food and CHOA's lies.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:15:32 +0000

I happen to like Paula Deen ever since I heard her on Wait Wait Don't Tell me (She nailed all three of her questions about Tofu). Where she had some good advice about her Krispie Creme burger. Only one serving per lifetime. (I have yet to do my one time.) I am saddened to hear that she has diabetes and even more saddened to hear about attacks on her by another chef (Anthony Bourdain) for her high fat diet (Bourdain's only qualification toward being "healthy" is that he is thin; this former drug addict is also an unapologetic drinker and smoker, also Bourdain's recipes are filled with fat as well. Both chefs make their foods from scratch.)

She was vilified in Salon that her own cooking caused her diabetes. Paul Campos has written a good essay why that probably isn't true.

What also saddens me is the increased fear of food. Comfort food, soul food, celebratory food, all food considered bad for us has become of limits, even in moderation. If you eat comfort food, you are psychologically damaged. Kids can't touch any cupcakes at school party because if they are fat they are bad for eating it, if they thin they might become fat. Even cheese has been vilified (warning on the link, it's filled with fat hatred.) We have made food the enemy. Unless you have a food allergy, food is nothing to fear. Food can be amazing, even the stuff that you can only have once per lifetime, even the stuff no one in their right mind should be eating. Learning to enjoy food takes away any sinful associations, allows your body and your mind the freedom to analyze what they need.

Dieting takes that decision away. 10 years after my last diet, I still haven't fully returned to eating normally, I still can't enjoy good food the way I want. I still can't savor it without guilt, and I still have trouble slowing my eating out of fear the food will be gone.

Now to the people that hate fat children about who I wrote previously. First off, every single child in the ad campaign are actors. Surprised? I'm not. (It's an advert, people!)

One of the children, an articulate, sixth-grader named Chloe McSwain, from Sandy Springs, Ga., is portrayed as “Maritza.” At the beginning of a black-and-white 30-second spot, she stares right into the camera.

“My doctor says I have something called hypertension,” she says. “I’m really scared.” In white block letters, “SOME DISEASES AREN’T JUST FOR ADULTS ANYMORE,” flashes across a black screen. In real life, Chloe, 11, actually doesn’t have hypertension, according to her mother.

Meanwhile Doug Hertz a trustee (Not a doctor or medical profession but the local beer guy) of Children's health care of Atlanta. (CHOA) has defending their ads claiming that everyone is ignoring the issue. Except I've been reporting stories since this blog's inception how weight loss is constantly pushed on children. Hertz claimed It is not about a child’s weight; it is about increased risk of illnesses once seen only in adults. These include hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and liver problems, to name a few.

If it isn't about weight, why are the ads filled with fat kids, disturbed that they are fat?

Oh and CHOA, take note, Georgia has to two biggest polluters in the Country, the worst one is 60 miles from Atlanta. Maybe CHOA would like to focus on other health issues, say Asthma? But I suppose it's easier to pick on fat kids that take on a dirty plant.

I leave you with a far more beautiful and positive image

[Big Fat Blog] More "Shit you Say to Fat People"

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:24:26 +0000

This video was written, directed, starring and conceived by Lillian Behrendt and Matt Cornell. It's the second in a series. BFB linked to the first video here.

Trigger warning: fat shaming, body snark, diet talk

(from the video)
"You look great. Have you lost weight?"

(my recommended answer)
"No, I haven't lost weight. I just look great, thanks."

[Feed Me!] This makes the Georgia campaign even more manipulative

Harriet — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:16:00 +0000

According to a story today in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the heavy children shown in the state of Georgia's shaming, shameful Strong4Life campaign are child actors hired to pretend they have hypertension, no friends, and other negative qualities the ads associate with childhood obesity.

Because . . . they couldn't find any fat children with those conditions who were willing to model for their ads?

Maybe. Maybe not. Here I was worrying about how starring in an ad like this would affect a child like "Jaden" or "Maritza." It turns out there is no "Maritza," or rather, "Maritza" is actually a healthy 11-year-old girl named Chloe who does not have hypertension, or any major health issues.

So it turns out that not only is this so-called public health campaign manipulative and shaming, it's also a big lie. A big FAT lie.

Stop lying, Georgia. Really.

[fat fu] Who Gets To Eat What They Love? (Hint: Not Women)

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 07:00:34 +0000

posted by meowser

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Dairy-related digestive iss-yews notwithstanding, I absolutely loathe cream cheese. I despise pimentos. Mayonnaise rivals ipecac syrup for me in the anti-emetic department. So suffice it to say that Paula Deen’s recipes, for the most part, do not appeal to me at all. I do make a GF/CF version of her cornbread dressing, though, and it rules. I just swap out Earth Balance for the butter and use gluten-free breadstuffs, and also use mushrooms, onion greens, and chestnuts in lieu of the celery and white onion. Yummers.

But you see, I am fat. Fatter than Paula Deen, even. A lot fatter than her, in fact. I’m never supposed to eat that stuff. Ever. At all. Not even for a holiday treat. I shouldn’t even think about it, lest I incur some sort of phantom pancreatic stressor solely from imagining the taste. Paula and I, and maybe you if you are female and have any visible flesh whatsoever, are supposed to pick at salads full of rubber bands with the merest hint of olive oil and lemon while sipping Diet Coke like good girls, day after day after day, even on our birthdays, because if we don’t, we will be punished. We will not have earned the ultimate Upper-Class Good Girl Prize of getting to live to be 100 years old with no health problems whatsoever, which would have been ours if only we had no hipster-disapproved vices of any kind. (Alcohol, coffee, and marijuana don’t count as vices in Hipster Land, not even in mass quantities.) Uh huh. You betcha. Because thin people in their 60s never, ever get type 2 diabetes. Nope, not ever.

For all anyone knows who doesn’t watch her eat every single meal, Ms. Deen does eat more rubber band salads than chicken-fried steaks. But it doesn’t matter. She might as well eat a pound of batter-fried butter cubes every day and wash it down with a gallon of Pepsi laced with a quart of cherry syrup, because that’s what everyone wants to believe she eats. Only bad, bad people get this bad, bad disease, and if you are a woman and you indulge in high-fat goodies and you’re any heftier than, say, Alison Brie, oh boy are you bad. It’s a notion with about as much basis in science as “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” (or for that matter, “don’t drink or wear miniskirts and you’ll never get raped”), and yet, people fall for it. They want to believe. It never ceases to astonish me how quickly certain hipster atheists (regardless of gender) morph instantly into finger-waggling church ladies the minute food gets mentioned. Drink like a man, fuck like a man, oh fuck yes…but never, ever, ever eat like a man. Unless you’re very, very thin — and even then, you’d better watch that intake, missy. Youthful metabolism doesn’t last forever, you know.

There’s a young chef in Portland by the name of Gabriel Rucker. He founded a couple of fancy-schmancy restaurants here in town that I’ve never been to, that specialize in things like maple ice cream with bacon and foie gras brulee and cauliflower crepes with Mornay sauce. People drool at the very mention of his food. The New York frigging Times can’t get enough of him, and they’re 3000 miles away! You don’t go to one his restaurants expecting diet food; they’d laugh in your face. And nobody ever accuses Gabriel Rucker of leading people down the primrose path to pancreatic destruction. Hasn’t happened once. You see, Gabriel Rucker is a man, and he’s thin. Nobody gives a shit if he eats that kind of stuff for every meal; in fact, nobody would ever think to ask him if he does. (I’m guessing no celebrity chef eats stuff all that fancy for every single meal; the cleanup alone would be a massive headache.) And if he announced he had T2d tomorrow, do you think there’d be the over-the-top outrage we see about Deen? Hah. Oh, and also, Gabriel Rucker cooks mostly for rich people. That probably has more than a little to do with it.

I’m getting to think the most radical statement a woman can possibly make these days is, “I eat what I love, as much as I want, and if anyone doesn’t like how I look because of it, they can sit and spin.” Saying “I enjoy inviting entire football teams in with their pet ocelots for a nightly gang-bang with fire rings and crotchless asbestos suits” will be a total yawn by comparison. Look, I do think there are legitimate moral issues surrounding Deen’s endorsement of a diabetes drug. If you want to argue the ethics of celebrity pharmaceutical endorsements, I can’t really object; all of them make me a little queasy. If you want to argue that non-insulin treatments for diabetes have limited efficacy — hey, we can talk about that too. Interesting and compelling arguments can be made either way. But those are separate issues from whether or not she was obligated to open her medical file and her pantry to the whole world, and put a Webcam on herself every time she sat down to eat, the very second she was diagnosed. She was not. Period.

And you know what? Even if she was, and still is, on the fried-butter-and-cherry-Pepsi diet, and even if her health would have been perfect if she’d been a good girl and eaten like she was told, maybe she’d rather not live to be 100 years old if it means office product salads and aspartame for every goddamn meal. Me, I don’t like the taste of rubber bands any more than I like pimentos. Pass the gluten-free skillet-fried pie, please.

[F-Words] Ron Paul is the least racist member of Congress

noreply@blogger.com (Sara E Anderson) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:41:00 +0000

The title of this post is actually a comment I've read from a Paul supporter. Typical Lost Cause bullshit here: Yes, Lincoln's motivation for war was to keep the unity of the country together. The South was in it to keep slavery, or maybe squeeze a few extra dollars out of slavery's demise in a scam like Paul is describing here.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Healthy Weight Week

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:28:55 +0000

Press Release

By the third week in January, New Year diets are dumped, the rebound binge is over and people are looking for balance to get their lives back on track. They can find it in the 19^th annual Healthy Weight Week that begins Sunday, promoting lifestyle habits of wellness for people of all sizes and shapes.

“It’s a time to say ‘I’m okay and so are you.’ Let’s stop dieting and get on with living in normal healthy ways,” says Francie M. Berg, MS, licensed nutritionist and adjunct professor at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, who chairs the event.

Healthy Weight Week features two sets of awards. Adele, the young British singer, topped the Women’s Healthy Body Image Awards. The Slim Chance Awards for worst diets of 2011 went to a 23-year-old self-made millionaire, HCG hormone treatment, Sensa weight-loss crystals, and a plastic bracelet set with hologram discs.

During Healthy Weight Week, people are encouraged to improve habits in lasting ways by eating well, living actively and feeling good about themselves and others. For more information see www.healthyweight.net/hww.htm
##

CONTACT:
Ronda Irwin or Francie M. Berg
701-567-2646
Healthy Weight Network
402 South 14th Street
Hettinger, ND 58639
www.healthyweight.net

[Big Fat Blog] NPR: "obesity epidemic" has peaked

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:57:28 +0000

This, from NPR: Obesity Epidemic May Have Peaked In U.S.

"These data basically show than we haven't seen any change probably since back to 2003-4 in obesity in any group," said Cynthia Ogden of the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the latest data and published two papers online in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. One paper focused on adults while the second focused on children.

This has been common knowledge in the fat acceptance movement for a while now. Those who are still claiming that Americans are getting heavier generally have a financial or personal stake in believing that, and are using old or suspect (if any) data.

Some researchers are saying...

"We've seen some very effective changes that are occurring in schools and at the societal level in terms of food labeling, economic incentives, behavioral strategies," says Penny Gordon-Larsen, an obesity researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Hum. I cant remember reading anything suggesting that those strategies are effective at making people thinner, though I suppose that here they're just trying to take credit for average BMIs remaining stable. It could just as easily be because people have begun to reject dieting, and dieting often leads to long term weight gain. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if fat acceptance is playing a role in Americans' average size stabilizing.

Others are saying...

It's also possible that we're reached a kind of new normal, with the proportion of population who is predisposed to obesity having already become obese, says Harvard's David Ludwig, a specialist in treating overweight kids.

...and there may be some truth in that.

It ends with a quote from Dr. Glenn Gaesser, author of "Fat Lies."

"Most people who lose weight will ultimately regain it. If you do this do over and over and over again you develop a nation of weight-cyclers, a yo-yo-dieting society and there are risks associated with yo-yo dieting that are every bit as hazardous as the risks associated with just being fat."

Wow! It's not the usual "But fat people should diet anyway" ending. If it weren't for the headless fatties illustrating the article, it would seem almost unbiased.

Of course, if the government and medical establishment really want to play a role in lowering obesity rates, they could just do the opposite of what they did in 1999. Instead of redefining "obesity" to a lower BMI, they could redefine it to a higher BMI - one that actually reflects serious health risks and increased mortality. Better yet, they could stop trying to use body size as a proxy for health and instead treat it as one physical characteristic among many.

[Fat Chicks Rule]

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:02:13 +0000

Take action today against SOPA & PIPA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

[Big Fat Blog] "Shit you say to fat people"

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:42:15 +0000

This video was written, directed, starring and conceived by Lillian Behrendt and Matt Cornell.

...and I think it's fucking brilliant. Cheers, Lillian and Matt.

Trigger warning: fat shaming, body snark, diet talk

What would you add?
I'm thinking

You have such a pretty face.
Congratulations. Getting active will help you lose weight (when you've been active - and the same size - for years, and are not trying to lose weight).
You're not fat.

[Big Fat Blog] Protest in London Today at 2:30

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:03:54 +0000

Ditching Dieting* is planning a protest today, Monday January 16th, at 2:30pm until 6:30pm. The protesters are meeting under the Lion on the Southside of Westminster Bridge, by the yellow wheelie bin.

They have a Facebook page.

(thanks, Tehomet!)

From the Guardian: Women plan protest against diet industry outside parliament, subtitled 'Protesters say weightloss companies wreak havoc with appetites and rely on dieters' repeated failures to make money.'

Women who say they have been failed by weightloss programmes sold to them by diet companies are planning a demonstration outside parliament on Monday to hit back at the multimillion-pound industry for "wreaking havoc with appetites and lives while it builds huge profits".

The protest, part of a campaign called Ditching Dieting, has been organised to coincide with representatives of the diet industry giving evidence to an all-party parliamentary group inquiry into the causes and consequences of body image anxiety.

Ditching Dieting's homepage is here. It's sponsored by an organization called "Species Endangered" that's planning summits in London, New York, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Melbourne, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

I've only taken a quick look at the website, since I wanted to get this posted quickly. Here's the interesting thing about Species Endangered / Ditching Dieting. It's not a size acceptance organization. They're focused on body image and preventing eating disorders, which is all well and good. Except, it looks like regular people can't join the organization, and who's in charge? Well, Suzy Orbach is first in the list.

Suzy Orbach is well known for "Fat is a Feminist Issue," a late 1970s book that got some things right but endorsed the idea that weigh loss will naturally result for all of us once everything is hunky-dory. Yes, when we learn to see past society's bad influence and heal ourselves emotionally and psychologically, we will be rewarded with skinniness- it's a sign of mental health and enlightenment!

I wish I could say that she's learned more over the years and now has a different outlook, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Googling support for the protest, I found groups such as Beyond Chocolate, Stop Yo-yo Dieting and Lose Weight for Good that seem to form the core. Yes, these are the "it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle change" folks. (Sorry, guys. If weight loss is a goal, then it's a diet.)

So... I would urge fat acceptance supporters in London to show up for this with the knowledge that there may be opportunities to educate your fellow protesters as well as the intended audience. It's great that Species Endangered has organized this. If they have an outlook that excludes fat women who think we're fine as we are and do not expect to become thin? Well, you've gotta start somewhere, and we do share a lot of common ground.

* For the folks who are didactic about the word "diet," in this post it's short for "weight loss diet."

[body impolitic] Filament interview with Laurie

Laurie — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:06:03 +0000

Laurie says:

As I posted earlier, Filament magazine did an interview with me in their last issue. They are an English feminist erotic magazine that called itself the thinking woman’s crumpet. The questions were excellent and they chose a really good selection of the photos from “Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.” The editor Suraya Sidhu Singh was a pleasure to work with.
..

This is part of the interview:

In a world where beauty is portrayed almost exclusively as young, thin, white women, photographer Laurie Toby Edison works to reveal the beauty of people of all sizes, ages and ethnicities. Interview questions by Jacqueline Dunkley-Insight and Marta Owczarek.

• Tell us a little about how you got started in photography.

I had spent several years doing social change work on issues of body image – what was then called “fat liberation.” I was the token ‘thin’ woman on panels and at workshops where fat women discussed their social and political experience of being fat and we strategized about what could be changed and how. In working with these women, I realized that they were beautiful – and it was a kind of beauty that was almost never portrayed in the world we lived in. I literally became a photographer to portray this beauty. (I’d been an artist for years, but I had worked only in metal before.) I wanted my pictures of fat women to be fine art black and white photographs. I knew that high aesthetic quality would be essential to changing how people see. These portraits eventually became the “Women En Large” project, done in collaboration with my writing partner, Debbie Notkin.

• What inspired you to undertake the ‘Familiar Men’ project?

After completing “Women En Large,” I contemplated working with a wider variety of female nudes and realized that “Women En Large” was my artistic statement on the female nude. When I started to consider the male nude, I realized that, like fat female nudity, male nudity was unexplored and unrepresented except for a very few images of conventionally sexy men. I was immediately captured – I’m always pulled to work that is both artistically and intellectually challenging.

I wanted to do respectful nude portraits of real men, the ones in our lives, the men we see every day. They are largely invisible in a world where the dominant culture’s vision enforces a narrow stereotyped version of masculinity. An underlying theme of all my work is making the invisible visible. My goal was to photograph a wide and diverse group of men, of differing age, race, ethnicity, ability, class and size. Familiar Men continued my exploration and representation of the body and its images. And as with the Women En Large photographs, I knew that the aesthetic quality of the work would be crucial.

• How did you choose your ‘familiar men’?

When I see a person, I know whether or not I want to photograph them. I also see people differently at the beginning of a project than toward the end, because I have an aesthetic structure for the suite of photographs in my head. As the project develops, that structure evolves, and I know more about what’s needed.

I only photographed people to whom I could be introduced. I want the people I approach to have a context for me and the project. I needed both the greatest possible diversity and I knew I would have to work hard to get it. I also needed community feedback on Familiar Men. So, during the five years of the project, my collaborators (Debbie Notkin and Richard Dutcher) and I did a series of slide shows of the work in progress. We would talk about the work and ask people what they wanted to see and what was missing. Many of the models came from the slide show audiences or people they knew.

• Do you think women need or want their own porn or erotica, designed especially with women in mind?

I know that some women do. I think that the female erotic gaze differs from the male in many ways – although women, like men, vary greatly in in what arouses them. One example of a difference that I perceive is the intense focus on the penis in male erotica.

• Do you find your images sexual or erotic? Were there moments of erotic tension while shooting?

My images are portraits, and people are complex. I’m striving for as complete a sense of each person as I can portray. By definition, erotic and sexual images foreground at most one aspect of a person. Nudes do have a sensual quality, and I think that’s present in my work. What I want to show is an essential sense of who people are. I shoot in people’s chosen environments, frequently in their homes. I work with the models so that they can be as comfortable and relaxed in the moment as possible.This requires such a level of focus from me that, even if an erotic response were appropriate, I would have no emotional room for it.

• What sort of reactions did the men have upon seeing the resulting images? Did any of their reactions surprise you?

Being photographed by me is a process. I start with having coffee, showing the prospective model images of other people I’ve photographed and discussing the project. I explain early on that, as this is a fine-art project, the final image choices are mine. If someone is interested, I like to give them a month to think it over. This was a film-and-darkroom project, which affects both the timing and the kind of image(s) seen. Some time after the shoot, I show them the contact sheets (all the photos shot in small images) and then (frequently much later) my final photograph(s).

Many men were immediately delighted with the final image; some needed time to think and process. Most reacted very positively, and for some the image was revelatory. There were a few who, however much they may have appreciated the work, were not comfortable with their photographs.

I was not surprised by men’s final reactions, but I was surprised during the very early photography sessions because I had thought I understood how unused men were to being the object of “the gaze,” and how this would affect the sessions. I was wrong – I completely underestimated the issue. It takes far more work to make men comfortable with being photographed than women. One of the most effective tools I know for making people comfortable is to be silly in ways that make them laugh at me.

• Would you have chosen to do anything differently if you were creating ‘Familiar Men’ again?

I looked through the book before answering this question. I wouldn’t change anything important, but my eye and my work have moved on since I finished Familiar Men. I’ve changed aesthetic – I can always see differences and potential changes in previous work.

If you’re interested in getting the magazine, it’s available in these places including several in the US.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Off to the woods

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:31:21 +0000

On vacation today, so no blog post. I will be snowshoeing in Vermont in highs expected to be 10. Glad to have the extra padding.

[body impolitic] Birth Control: Back in the News

Debbie — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:16:34 +0000

Laurie and Debbie say:

We were very impressed by this article by Valerie Tarico at truthout.org . Tarico couches excellent contemporary birth-control information in the context of Rick Santorum’s recent attack on birth control (“It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”).

Good news: Even if you feel hazy or muddled right now, you likely have access to technologies your parents could only have dreamed of. Bad news: The confusion is no accident.

Although the headline implies that she is simply writing about birth control misinformation coming from the right wing, the article is much more nuanced than that. She covers five things the right wing doesn’t want you to know about birth control, five that big pharma doesn’t want you to know, and five that the medical gatekeepers don’t want you to know. One thing all of these groups have in common is that they don’t want women to be able to control our bodies. Here’s one from each group:

Right wing: IUDs work by preventing eggs and sperm from hooking up. Opponents of abortion and contraception would have us believe that virtually all modern contraceptives are abortifacients. They especially have targeted the most effective contraceptives available, IUDs, with this accusation. In reality copper IUDs like the Paragard work primarily by inhibiting sperm motility, thus preventing fertilization. Hormonal IUDs like the Mirena work primarily by thickening a plug at the opening to the cervix —another means of preventing fertilization–and secondarily by decreasing ovulation. …

Pharma: The best contraception is also the cheapest. The most effective contraceptives on the market have the potential to kill some of Pharma’s big profit streams. The Paragard copper IUD, which is top tier from an efficacy standpoint (over 99%) offers the cheapest month over month contraception. The problem for Pharma: you put it in once and then don’t spend any money on contraception for the next 10 years. The Mirena hormonal IUD (99.8% effective once established), is more expensive, but has the side benefit of reducing menstrual bleeding and cramps over time by an average of 90%. Family planning practitioners who promote LARCs joke about putting themselves out of business. In contrast, Tarico says that one in twelve women on the pill gets pregnant each year, a higher number than we would have guessed.

Medical gatekeepers: The FDA lags behind. European women have an array of contraceptive options that either never make it to market in the U.S. or are delayed by anywhere from 5-20 years. American regulators are influenced by a litigious environment and by religious fundamentalists, which skew the equation toward inaction. For example, Nexplanon, the latest iteration of the implant, only just became available in the U.S. Similarly, the Mirena IUD has a long track record with women of all ages in Europe but is not yet approved for childless women here. By the time it was officially sanctioned in the US to regulate heavy menstrual bleeding (2009), it was already in use for contraception or bleeding by 15 million women worldwide. A frameless IUD optimized for small women is approved in the E.U., but hasn’t yet reached the U.S. market. If you want to know where contraception is headed, take a look at what Europeans are doing.

Many of the other fifteen points are just as rarely discussed.

So it got us to wondering why birth control has gotten so little attention and discussion over the past couple of decades.

One answer is obvious: the three groups that Tarico singles out are happiest if there isn’t a lot of conversation.

Another is that abortion is getting so much attention and is under such intense attack. This means that the heroes fighting to keep abortion safe and legal are too busy to look at birth control, and that the anti-abortion warriors are really busy with their main campaign. The war on abortion has pushed some of the truly fine birth control resources under the radar: Planned Parenthood (link below) not only has to spend energy fighting it enemies, it has to do what it can to stay out of the public eye, because every time it shows up in the news, the attacks get more fervent. Tarico’s other recommended resource, Bedsider (a new site launched by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy), is one neither of us had even heard of, and it looks excellent.

But why aren’t feminists talking much about contraception? Our guess is that it’s generally thought of as a “solved problem.” In most places in the United States, women who want contraception can get something. And feminists, with so many hot-button issues to concentrate on, may have been too busy to notice that that something is served with large doses of preconception, misinformation, and monetary gain. So wrong-headed Rick Santorum is, for the worst possible reasons, calling attention to something we need to look at more closely.

So, to close with more of Tarico’s words,

You really can manage your contraception. A decision about contraception can shape the rest of your life—your happiness, your ability to contribute to the world around you, the wellbeing of your children. Only you can weigh the risks and benefits of any given contraception against each other in the context of your lifestyle and life goals. To make the best decision possible, you need accurate information, and that means knowing what questions to ask, who to ask, and what factors may be biasing answers. An hour on the internet can fill your mind with rubbish about almost any medical technology. Alternately, an hour spent on sites that are rigorously fact based could mean you have more up-to-date information than your peers or even your doctor. (Bedsider.org and Planned Parenthood are among the best.) Tarico doesn’t mention Scarleteen’s excellent birth control bingo interactive site, so we will.

Thanks to F.S.J. Ledgister, who linked to this on Google+

[Big Fat Blog] Panera Bread: Discriminatory?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:13:19 +0000

Covered by the Hinterland Gazette, "a source for thought- provoking social and political commentary on issues affecting the African American community and beyond": Guy Vines Sues Panera Bread for Racial Discrimination, Saying Co. Doesn’t Want “Black, Fat or Ugly People at Register”

Also covered by NBC10 Philadelphia: Panera Doesn't Want 'Black, Fat or Ugly' People at the Register: Lawsuit, subtitled "A Pennsylvania man has filed a lawsuit against Panera, saying it has a policy that keeps black employees away from the public eye. He's the second person to file such a suit against the restaurant."

The lawsuit hasn't been resolved yet, but this sounds pretty overt and pretty heinous. However, it might be a problem with the owner of the franchise, Sam Covelli, rather than with the company as a whole. The NBC article notes that "according to its website, Covelli is the fifth-largest restaurant franchisee in the country and develops and manages the franchise rights of nearly 200 Panera cafes in northeast Ohio, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and West Palm Beach, Fla." So, if it's the franchise owner, it's still a widespread problem. If there is a systemic problem with Covelli Enterprises, then hopefully the parent company will do something about it.

Has anyone had experiences with Covelli Enterprises' restaurants or with Panera Bread in general that would shed light on this?

[F-Words] Intersecting Privileges and Oppressions on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Sara E Anderson) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:40:00 +0000

It's true: the first thing I do when I get going on the computer is open up Facebook. This morning was pretty interesting in terms of intersections of privilege.

The first thing I saw was a photo NPR had posted of amputee and runner Aimee Mullins, captioned "Inspiration, in On Photograph." Mullins, a white, thin woman, is pictured in a bikini running on a beach, with the aid of prosthetic lower legs. The comments turned into a little bit of a fight about how hard it would be for someone who wasn't so sexy to be called inspirational. Mullins is a really attractive woman - it's true. The thing that started to bother me in the comments were a lot of negativity about wheelchairs; Mullins had the good fortune to access the prosthetic technology she did. Not everyone is so lucky. Mullins works with organizations that seek to let everyone access this tech, and educate people in general about disability, so she's no slouch when it comes to, well, anything.

Next up was an item from the Courage Campaign about Pat Buchannan's complaints that he's being forced out of MSNBC by "militant gay groups" and "people of color." What stood out to me about this is the implication that people of color and gay groups (there's likely to be some crossover in the membership here) shouldn't have sway over what goes on at MSNBC. Buchannan has been an embarrassment in American culture for too long, and he knows this was long overdue.

Oh, and what the hell. I wrote a bit yesterday that would not have made a whole post on its own, so I'll just add it here:

Unfortunately, I am not in the regular habit of giving money to causes that need it. In the past year or so, I've run into a few really absurd societal failures (like Topeka, KS stopping prosecution of domestic violence) that have prompted me to find a local program and send a few bucks in. Today, it's transitional housing in Pennsylvania, since if you have enough money on-hand to pay first and last-month's rent (ish, $2,000 in savings is the cutoff), you will no longer be able to get food stamps.

[Feed Me!] Dear "Starving Secrets"

Harriet — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:21:00 +0000

Editor's note: Today's guest post comes from 15-year-old Bridgette T. I'm impressed with this young woman's articulateness and determination and I think you will be too. And if you're not sure you agree with her, I suggest you google the show and click on "images."

*************

Dear Starving Secrets,
I am a fifteen year old girl recovering from anorexia. This is currently my tenth week in an outpatient program. I began treatment in the program after my initial evaluation there resulted in me being sent to the hospital. I was in the hospital for sixteen days, though I never restricted during any meals except for my first one. I had to drink at least one Ensure every night, as my heart rate dipped into the 20s when I was asleep.

I’m not asking to be on your show. I’m asking you to reconsider it.

The title was the first thing that shocked me: Starving Secrets? Really? They’re making a pro-ana show?! Huh…that’s going to be pretty hard to stay away from…

Then I saw a commercial for it: What in the world? People with anorexia are being documented? If I were just a normal person and I found out that there was a show about people who were anorexic, and all I knew about anorexia was that it made you skinny-of course I would watch the show, to learn how they do it! How do they drop that much weight? I understand that the show also shows the negatives of eating disorders, but I don’t think kids are really going to take that into account. A big thing with eating disorders is the whole “It couldn’t happen to me” thing. At treatment, people are told that by not eating they are risking going to the hospital. Half of us already have gone to the hospital. Though vitals are tanking and we know that people have died from this disease, it doesn’t make people eat. Because you simply don’t believe it could happen to you, that you could be that girl whose funeral is on the local news because she starved herself to death.

Though this show may help inform some people, it’s also going to trigger many. Is it really worth the risk?

Sincerely,
Bridgette

[Big Fat Blog] Diabetes Expert Disses Weight-Loss Programs

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:56:28 +0000

This article in MedPage Today is so frustrating. Richard Kahn, PhD, who was the chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association for nearly 25 years, said that community programs are ineffective at achieving weight loss. No shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue? He told this to public health advocates and diabetes researchers at the Health Affairs briefing Tuesday, which was a stark contrast to the "prevention works" message of the event's other speakers.

Kahn -- who now teaches medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- said that just sustaining significant weight loss, even with intensive dieting, exercise, and coaching, "requires near-heroic measures" in the face of a "very hostile food environment."
He outlined his views in a paper published in the January edition of Health Affairs, in which he wrote that there are two ways to dramatically reduce the toll of diabetes: One is to detect diabetes early and then treat it so effectively that complications from the disease are practically zero. The other is to prevent diabetes before it even happens.
Thousands of public health campaigns are aimed at prevention, and for diabetes, that generally means losing weight. But people have the "fundamental problem" of not being able to maintain weight loss, so preventing diabetes in a person at high risk for the disease is extremely difficult, Kahn said.

So, they're saying that community programs are ineffective at achieving weight loss, but for preventing diabetes, pretty much all they recommend is losing weight. Sounds to me like they're dooming people to have diabetes if that's all they can come up with (and I happen to know there are other solutions to delaying/preventing the onset of type 2 diabetes that don't entail weight loss, depending on your genetic risk factors for it).

His paper looked at diabetes prevention studies, including the large Diabetes Prevention Program, in which patients lost an average of between 4% and 6% of their body weight (but gained about 40% back by the end of the nearly three-year trial). It also looked at the government-funded Look AHEAD trial, which found that intensive lifestyle changes resulted in a major reduction in cardiovascular risk factors, but the effects greatly diminished after four years when many participants gained weight and lost their improved fitness.
Kahn said those studies, along with the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study -- in which the greatest diabetes prevention benefit occurred in people who lost at least 5% of their body weight -- suggest that "without substantial, sustained weight loss, progression to diabetes will probably resume." Progression to diabetes may be delayed for a few years, but the long-term effects are uncertain, he said.

So, losing weight helps, but it can't be maintained in the majority of cases (tell us something we didn't know about maintenance) and the benefits of weight loss disappear when the weight returns. Doesn't sound like such a good recommendation to me.

"The main argument is that implementing a nationwide community intervention program is not going to do anything, I believe, except waste resources," Kahn told MedPage Today.
Kahn said that there are too many unanswered questions about how weight loss works that must be answered before a national program would ever succeed in preventing diabetes in the long term.
"We really need to know what is going on with this complex system we have," he said. "What is going on in our physiology that precludes us from losing weight and keeping it off?"
Another issue that prevents people from keeping weight off is the ubiquity of the "cheap, widely available, delicious food that we eat again and again."
He suggested "painful policies" as the solution -- such as raising the price of all food except for fruits and vegetables, and offering financial incentives to people who can keep weight off, while penalizing overweight people with higher insurance premiums.
He acknowledged those aggressive policies likely would be unpopular among members of Congress and doctors.

Those "painful policies" are going to be unpopular among members of Congress and doctors? What planet is he living on? Congress won't give a shit about raising the price of all food except fruits and vegetables, or penalizing fat people with higher insurance premiums. If it isn't going to affect the pocketbooks of the members of Congress personally, they don't care. As for offering financial incentives to people who can keep weight off, that will be one of the cheapest programs to finance, what with the success rate of diets, as Kahn well knows.
The disconnect between Kahn saying " community programs are ineffective at achieving weight loss" and "raising the price of all food except for fruits and vegetables, and offering financial incentives to people who can keep weight off, while penalizing overweight people with higher insurance premiums" is staggering. Does he realize how two-faced he sounds? Does he realize what an asshat that kind of thinking makes him? "Weight loss is nearly impossible, but if you don't lose weight and keep it off, you're going to pay more for your insurance, even though it's not your fault and there's nothing you can do about it, we're going to fuck you over anyway because you're fat and we think you should be thin because only thin people are healthy."

He added that the best doctors can offer right now is to suggest to overweight patients that losing 4% body weight and keeping it off can reduce the risk for serious complications of diabetes by 15% to 20%.

The best he can offer? Even though he knows it's damn near impossible to keep the weight off, he still recommends losing weight as the best way to reduce the risk for serious complications of diabetes. Kahn, I have some suggestions for you - carb counting, controlling blood glucose, regular exercise, and regular check-ups with an endocrinologist who is well-educated about type 2 diabetes will go farther to reduce the risk of the complications of type 2 diabetes than losing weight ever will. Pull your head out of your ass and wake the fuck up before you do more harm than you already have.

[body impolitic] A Guys Guide to Feminism

Laurie — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:11:47 +0000

Laurie says:

We’ve always been impressed with Michael Kimmel’s thoughts on masculinity, which is why he wrote the introduction to Familiar Men:A Book of Nudes. Recently he and Michael Kaufman have written a book called A Guys Guide to Feminism.

Quotes are from Seal Press:

Authors Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, two of the world’s leading male advocates of gender equality, believe it has everything to do with them—and that it’s crucial to educate men about feminism in order for them to fully understand just how important and positive these changes have been for them.

Kaufman and Kimmel address these issues in The Guy’s Guide to Feminism. Hip and accessible, it contains nearly a hundred entries—from “Autonomy” to “Zero Tolerance”—written in varying tones (humorous, satirical, irreverent, thoughtful, and serious) and in many forms (“top ten” lists, comics, interviews, mini-stories, and more). Each topic celebrates the ongoing gains that are improving the lives of women and girls—and what that really means for men.

This seemed like an appropriate place for a Familiar Men photo.

…

Here’s Michael Kaufman talking about The Astounding Simple Truth About Masculinity and Goodness (It’s well worth reading the whole post.)

…To answer the question, “what is good about masculinity?”, we need to remind ourselves that:
Masculinity doesn’t exist. At least not in the way we think it exists. There is no timeless definition of manhood. It varies from culture to culture, era to era. It’s simply how we define manhood and how we define the relations of power among men and between men and women.
That means that masculinity (like femininity) is a collective hallucination. It’s as if we’ve all taken the same drug and walk around imagining that masculinity is real. We might assume it is biological, we might think it comes from being male or female, but in truth, each culture makes it up.

…and here’s the great paradox I’ve written about for the past three decades: the very ideals that confer and represent power and privilege, are a death trap for men. They are a source of enormous pain, isolation, and fear. The reasons are many: To demand that any human not feel or express pain is impossible. To push boys (and men) to ceaselessly prove we’re real men leads to a constant dialogue of self-doubt about making the masculine grade.

And them he goes on to discuss what is bad and good about masculinity and concludes:

So, rather than talk about what’s good about masculinity, I’d rather encourage both boys and girls, men and women to do two things: To celebrate and nurture the human qualities that are good for us all. And, secondly, to allow for true individuality: yes, some of us will be more one thing or another. Let’s let our boys and girls be those things without wedging them into the miserable world of pink and blue.

And it’s so good to hear people saying what Debbie and Richard Dutcher said in their essay in Familiar Men.

[Fat Chicks Rule] Georgia becomes a school yard bully & another study for HAES.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:52:22 +0000

Early last year, I criticized a "Health" organization in Atlanta, Georgia for ads that both victimized and villainized fat children. I've have bought up before that fat people are either victimized for not knowing any better or villianized for delibrately becoming fat. Most health care agencies tend to use the victimization mentality. If only those poor stupid fat people would understand healthy eating and exercise they would be healthy and slender!

However this organization seems to have decided to keep the negative ads and it seems they have now taken a step further into full scale bullying of fat kids. Ads such as this one (I have used a cut version from the Huffington post as I don't want to show the full ad):

For some reason, this caption disturbed me the most.

I have been fat since I was 10 years old. I am now forty, still fat, happily married, in a good job and independant.

I am still my parents little girl.

What I do know is the worst diet in the world wasn't Weight Watchers or Atkins or Slim Fast or Nutrisystem or (I got a bunch more) but the stigma diet. Playing devil's advocate here for a moment. I wouldn't start another diet unless I was motivated. So I never started one when I felt ashamed. Feeling shame made me not want to bother dieting, or lose weight or do anything because I was a monster and not worthy.

I'm not the only one who thinks of this as outright bullying. Paul Campos pointed out in his Daily Beast article:

Oh heavens no: we certainly don’t want to shame anyone! After all, we value, and indeed treasure, human “diversity” in all its forms—except, apparently, body diversity...

...Even if we put aside the difficult question of how you can avoid shaming and stigmatizing people if at the same time you’re claiming that their bodies are diseased as a consequence of behavior that’s within their (or at least their parents’) control, there are other problems with the theory that it’s useful to inform fat children that in this culture it’s not considered desirable to be fat.

Harriet Brown points out

Efforts like this one emphasize the idea that weight loss is a matter of personal responsibility, and they demonize fat children and teens in the name of helping them. How do kids feel when they see kids who look like them being targeted as not OK? They already know it’s bad to be fat; in one recent study, children as young as three showed a strong preference for thinness over fat, and made comments like “I hate her because she has a fat stomach” and “She’s fat and ugly.”

I firmly believe to the creators of these ad campaigns don't care about children, they hate fat people. There is a change.org petition against these ads, if you haven't signed it, please do. And it's a waste of 50 million dollars when I would much rather it be used to, say, take care of Georgia's children.

And studies have shown these "inventions" do not cause weight loss.

Waters' group aimed to update a 2005 review that found many pediatric obesity interventions were not able to reduce weight gain but were successful in promoting a healthy diet and an increased level of physical activity.

So an "intervention" causes healthy habits but no weight loss, is it a failure.

Meanwhile if they really really wanted to help the children, they might look at some research. For example check this study out, look at that conclusion:

Conclusions: Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.

Is anyone here tired of my comparing HAES to weight based health? Because I have one more.

Strong4life = shame, eating disorders, stigmitization, humilation, marginalization and stress.

HAES = Eating right, movement, healthy ingrained habits, body love, oh and significant decreased mortality.

[body impolitic] Rescue: A Useful Step on the Brainstorming Road

Debbie — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:09:34 +0000

Lynne Murray says:

Some advertiser (I can’t be bothered to find out which) is wooing ‘60s nostalgia money and set a 1965 song to ringing in my head these days and thinking about how songs echo life strategy problem-solving tactics. The song is Fontella Bass’ Rescue Me

Even though this was Bass’ only major hit, she co-wrote it and I’m glad to report that she is still alive. I’m less glad to report that she has to fight to be reimbursed for all the many ways her song is still being used.

Sadly, women’s fantasies of being rescued by a knight in shining armor, are still a popular idea in life as in literature, even nearly fifty years later.

Popular music is hardly the only social force suggesting a passive role for women, and many men cherish the thought of riding to the rescue. When I think about this as a way to solve problems Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft keeps coming to mind, probably because I used it myself some years back as a guide to starting my own business to subsidize my writing.

I can still visualize the page in Chapter 6 where Sher suggests brainstorming–listing as many solutions as you can think of to any given problem, just listing them without censoring:

That’s how brainstorming often works. You think of all the staid, sensible, obvious ideas first, like scholarships and loans. Then come the “rescue fantasies”: someone is going to come riding along in a white Cadillac, carry you away, or appear mysteriously on your doorstep with a check for a million dollars. Being free to give those fantasies a legitimate place on your list brings liberating laughter—and only then do the really audacious, original ideas begin to flow.

You notice she’s not suggesting following the rescue fantasies as life plans. Janis Joplin’s plea for supernatural intervention to secure a Mercedes Benz wasn’t really a life plan either:

Looking up the rescue concept online renewed my old acquaintance with Heartless Bitches Website, which is always fun.

My favorite was Jane:
-I don’t expect Prince Charming to rescue me. I’m an 8-year practitioner of martial arts with a 2nd degree black belt. I would probably have to protect Prince Charming in any sort of potential bodily altercation. I really am a GI Joe type myself and prefer to date dangerous men–Navy SEALS, Marine Recon, Firemen, Navy pilots, Cops.. you know, men who can throw me in a bed, and in turn, don’t mind if I do the same to them. Nice men are just that–nice, and best left to nice women who prefer to live mundane, Leave-It-To-Beaver existences.

-I believe having kids is an option, not mandatory. After all, it is my body, dammit. Should I choose to have one, I will ensure that she can fully take care of herself in any regard.

-I don’t believe women should be married until they’re at least 30 and have figured themselves out and have developed some sort of clue when it comes to life, love and the universe as a whole. This will also enable them to have to learn to take care of themselves financially.

Also included are some real-life role models and books.

In emergencies, rescue is totally appropriate, but rescue fantasies shouldn’t stand in the way of anyone’s learning how to stand on her own, plan for the future and use resources at hand to rescue herself and build herQ1` own dreams.

[Feed Me!] What's wrong with Georgia's childhood obesity campaign

Harriet — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:27:00 +0000

My Aunt Selma was a fat teenager. Like most fat kids, she was deeply ashamed of her body. She tried many times to lose weight, and eventually hit on two strategies: cigarettes and bulimia. She died in excruciating pain, in large part from the abuse she’d heaped on her body for many years. But she died—and lived—thin.

I think about Selma every time I hear about yet another new initiative to fight childhood obesity. The latest is Georgia’s “Strong 4 Life” campaign, which features black-and-white images and video clips of children talking about being fat. Several of the kids say they don’t like to go to school because they get picked on. One asks his mother dramatically, “Mom, why am I fat?”

The answer is implicit in the advice found on the campaign’s website: Eat less junk food and more fresh fruits and vegetables. Be physically active. Limit screen time. All great ideas, except that doing these things won’t necessarily make kids thinner. Over the last decade, dozens of school programs have used nutrition education, junk food bans, and farm-to-school projects to try to slim schoolkids. None have worked. They’re positive programs that support kids’ health. But they’re considered failures because they don’t reduce weight.

Like virtually every other effort to combat childhood obesity, the Georgia campaign suggests that obese kids and adults can get thin by making moderate lifestyle changes, a fact not borne out by research or experience. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, has demonstrated over and over how biology makes maintaining weight loss difficult to impossible for most people.

And like most such efforts, the Georgia campaign fails to take into account the connection between obesity and stress—specifically, the stress of being stigmatized over weight. When Jaden tells the camera he likes to play video games alone because other kids pick on him, the screen reads, “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.” The implication is clear: The problem is with Jaden. It is his fat, and the fact that he is fat, that make the other kids taunt him. The ad follows up with a taunt of its own: “Stop sugarcoating it, Georgia.”

Peter Muennig, M.D., of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, researches the connections between weight and health. He believes stigma and weight bias are responsible for at least some, and possibly most, of the adverse health effects associated with obesity. In other words, it may not be weight itself that makes people sick, but rather the stress of being fat in a fatphobic society. Kortni Jones, a physician’s assistant in Michigan, looked at the relationship between weight stigma and health care in her master’s thesis, and found that messages of overt stigmatization from health-care providers translate to worse health care for people who are obese. Rebecca Puhl of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity has come to similar conclusions after doing a series of studies on how stigma affects obesity.

Clearly, shaming people about weight is not an effective public health strategy. So why are we still doing it? Why, for instance, is there nothing on the Georgia campaign website about educating kids not to tease each other over weight? Why do people who would never dream of telling a joke about blacks or Jews tell fat jokes without flinching?

Efforts like this one emphasize the idea that weight loss is a matter of personal responsibility, and they demonize fat children and teens in the name of helping them. How do kids feel when they see kids who look like them being targeted as not OK? They already know it’s bad to be fat; in one recent study, children as young as three showed a strong preference for thinness over fat, and made comments like “I hate her because she has a fat stomach” and “She’s fat and ugly.”

I have a better idea for a public health campaign, one that’s supported by research and experience. Let’s take the best ideas from campaigns like this one and frame them around health instead of weight. Instead of trying to make fat kids thin, the goal would be making all kids healthier.

We don’t fully understand why some people become obese and others don’t. But we do know that all of us, no matter how old, no matter how fat, benefit from eating well and getting exercise. We know that friends are good for our health and that bullying hurts the bully as well as the victim. We know that shame drives people like my Aunt Selma to self-destructive behaviors. In my campaign, the word obesity would never be mentioned. But the words health, respect, and compassion would be on every page.

[fat fu] Fat Fat Haters

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:40:07 +0000

posted by meowser

Last week, as I’m sure most of you know, Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times did a piece called “The Fat Trap,” which was both about the virtual impossibility of significant weight loss (at least without literally making it a full-time job) — and in the end, also about Ms. Parker-Pope revealing, for the first time, that she herself is a fat person and deeply ashamed of it, and promising to do better. Like Ragen says here, even though it doesn’t make any sense.

I actually felt bad for TPP reading this story. I mean, here’s a woman with a job ten million other writers would kill for, and her size (estimated by her to be 60-plus pounds “overweight,” though it’s not clear how she defines that) has never interfered with her health in any way — and yet instead of making her date wear his dinner when he makes some snide remark about her body, she’s ashamed of herself instead. That is some fupped-up cultural programming here, folks. Here’s research, right here in your face, saying that almost nobody can do this, and the few who do don’t seem particularly happy about what they have to sacrifice to maintain it…yet you hate yourself for not being able to do it anyway, and will fall out the window with that Superman cape on again and again, hoping for a strong enough breeze? Yeesh.

But this week, TPP published a follow-up to that story, in which she tackles readers’ questions about the original article. And now, actually, I’m kind of pissed. One question reads, in part:

A Slate article on your piece argues that the mentality of these people “resembles the symptoms of an eating disorder.” They suggested that our fat problem is not obesity but that we encourage people to adopt an eating-disorder mentality to fight obesity. How would you respond to this?

To which TPP replies:

I think if a person had epilepsy and needed to adopt a very regimented diet to control that disease, nobody would accuse them of having an eating disorder.

AARGH AARGH AAAAAARGH NO NO NO NO BARF NOOOOOOOOOO.

Okay, now that we’re done with the onomatopoeia portion of our presentation…while I’m just some dumbass fatty who works in healthcare, and hence shouldn’t have to give freebies to a frigging New York Times health writer who probably makes more in a year than I will for the entire rest of my life, let’s talk about ketogenic diets for seizures for a moment, K? To begin with, this is a treatment of last resort for refractory epilepsy, almost always used on children with this condition, rarely adults. Refractory means it has not responded to any other treatment — medications, biofeedback, yoga, therapeutic nose-picking, whatever. (I’ll give those of you unfamiliar with my sense of humor a moment to Google “therapeutic nose-picking” and see if it actually exists.) The reason it’s a treatment of last resort is that you have to be monitored like a hawk by doctors and dietitians in order to go on it, and since it’s basically Atkins cranked up to 13 (with way more fat), eating any food away from home other than brown-bag is pretty much an impossibility.

In other words, this is an experimental treatment for epilepsy. Nobody treats you like a self-destructive lazybutt if you get (or your kid gets) a diagnosis of epilepsy and you don’t immediately start preparing pitchers of bacon fat to drink. Nobody thinks you’re a failure and not trying hard enough if you still have seizures while you’re on it. Nobody calls you a liar and in denial if you’d rather keep trying new meds to see if there’s one that won’t make you forget your own name or require 20 hours of sleep every day. Nobody worth listening to for half a second, anyway. You are allowed not to want to do this, not to want to even consider this, because it is a giant, huge, unremitting pain in the gazongas. (Probably literally; in the deathless words of Buffpuff in the old Shapely Prose comments, “you don’t shit for a week” when you eat like this.)

And not only that, no one is expected to remain on this diet indefinitely. Every couple of years, people who are on it are tapered off — again, under close medical supervision — for a few months’ rest. You know what happens if you’re on a low-carb diet for weight loss and you go off of it for a few months? That’s right, every single pound comes back and brings friends with it. It’s like you never did anything at all, and you’ll be treated as if you haven’t.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting fed up to the teeth with fat people who still think it’s our civic duty to sacrifice every moment of our lives to become as thin as possible, especially if they are media stars with megaphones loud enough to hear on every planet. It’s not about what TPP eats or doesn’t eat, or weighs or doesn’t weigh; I don’t give a rat’s toenail clippings about that. If Gary Taubes or whoever really likes eating super-low-carb, if they feel great doing it, if it’s worth it to them — fine. Taubes has claimed to eat no carbs at all, not even vegetables or fruit, because they make him gain weight. Hey, more cherries for me, then. Let him and the other meat-heads have all the five-pound T-bones they want, even for breakfast.

But how you talk about your diet equates very nicely with how you feel about other fat people. Do you actually expect, or at least hope, that all fat people will follow your example? I’ve rarely met a public dieter who didn’t (killer exception: Debra Sapp-Yarwood), though I’m sure there are a few private dieters who don’t make it a topic of conversation. Do you actually think it’s realistic that none of us will touch another carb of any kind for the rest of our lives? Do you actually think it’s sustainable to keep doing hours of aerobics every single day, forever, no matter how sick or how much in pain we are or what else is going on in our lives? (“Sorry, I know you’re on your deathbed, but I really can’t miss my gym time.”) Do you actually — even secretly, in the very pit of your heart — think people are fools not to give up their friends, their hobbies, anything that could possibly interfere with the job of serious weight loss and lifelong maintenance? Then you are an asshole, and I don’t care what you weigh, you are not on my side.

To be fair, I can’t imagine that Tara Parker-Pope would have her plum media job if she didn’t parrot the party line about weight. Gina Kolata can question it if she wants; she’s thin, nobody thinks she’s just looking for an excuse to shove donut holes up her nose. (Not that I can imagine why anyone who’s not on Atkins thinks that sounds like fun, but whatevs.) That boor of a date of hers, in a way, was making a very salient point: people expect someone with her job to be thin, as if she could just flip a switch and make it happen, just will all those fat cells to disappear if she’s smart enough. I’m actually kind of surprised to find out she’s not thin myself, given some of the things she’s said about weight before.

But that just makes this all the more of a letdown. What’s it going to take for us all to be on our own sides? To say, “I deserve a life too, and I’m not going to devote the time that’s pissing away rapidly on the hourglass to counting every single thing I put in my mouth, and sweating it all off for hours, and bargaining with myself about whether I can have a single bite of something when I’m shaking from hypoglycemia, and drinking enough water before bed so I can fall asleep with my stomach full, and hoping I don’t have to wake up to pee because then I’ll be hungry again”? Maybe that’s “a life” for some people. But it will never, ever be one for me.

[Big Fat Blog] Study: Fat people benefit the most from healthy habits

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:11:08 +0000

Another quick link.

There's a new study out in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine: Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Obese Individuals. It's from a research group at the Medical University of South Carolina. The link above leads to the full study.

Here, "Healthy Lifestyle Habits" are defined as

eating 5 or more fruits and vegetables daily,
exercising regularly,
consuming alcohol in moderation, and
not smoking.

From the abstract:

When stratified into normal weight, overweight, and obese groups, all groups benefited from the adoption of healthy habits, with the greatest benefit seen within the obese group.

This table is from page 13 of the study. At the bottom are the number of healthy habits (out of the four above) that the subjects followed. The hazard ratios along the side are the comparative risks of dying early, with a BMI 18-25 person with four healthy habits set as "1". Anything above one is a higher risk.

Two things really jump out at me. First, the more healthy habits we have, the more our life expectancy matches the life expectancy of thin people with the same habits. When we've got all four, the gap is pretty much closed. Second, it's only the fat people with no healthy habits who have a dramatically reduced life expectancy in comparison to thinner people.

This is a strong confirmation of what HAES advocates have been saying for years.

[Big Fat Blog] CBC: a HAES story on Ontario Morning

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:12:22 +0000

Just a quick link. Yesterday, CBC Radio's Ontario morning had a piece on HAES featuring Jacqui Gingras, a professor at the Ryerson School of Nutrition. It's upbeat and encouraging.

You can listen here.

Favourite quote: In answer to "How do you determine what is healthy for you?"

Healthy... is being able to eat according to hunger and fullness, the signals inside our bodies... our ability to move in an embodied way; to move freely, without pain... to feeling good about ourselves, trusting ourselves, trusting our bodies to know what we need.

[Big Fat Blog] Seeking the Straight and Narrow

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:54:51 +0000

Lynne Gerber's new book, "Seeking the Straight and Narrow," subtitled "Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America," is now available from US booksellers, from international booksellers, and from Amazon.com.

Here's an excerpt from the University of Chicago Press's description of the book:

Losing weight and changing your sexual orientation are both notoriously difficult to do successfully. Yet many faithful evangelical Christians believe that thinness and heterosexuality are godly ideals—and that God will provide reliable paths toward them for those who fall short. Seeking the Straight and Narrow is a fascinating account of the world of evangelical efforts to alter our strongest bodily desires.

Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, Lynne Gerber explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program’s results—or, frequently, their lack.

Lynne has also contributed a piece, weigh in, to "freq.uenci.es, a collaborative genealogy of spirituality." The article focuses on First Place, a Christian weight loss program, and the relationship between the spiritual and physical demands of the program.

I haven't read the book yet, but the freq.uenci.es article is engaging and insightful. As someone who hasn't been involved in a church, I found Lynne's analysis of how spiritual and physical goals interact in the program really interesting:

First Place’s range of commitments reflects a central ambiguity in the program’s purpose: whether First Place is a weight loss program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of spiritual practices or whether it is a spiritual program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of weight loss practices... Ostensibly, the program positions itself as the first: as a weight loss program that is enhanced by spirituality. First Place is effective at weight loss, they claim, because it focuses on the whole person, integrating spiritual concerns into the heart of its practice. The absence of God is depicted as the problem in secular weight loss programs and First Place presents itself as filling that crucial void.

Yet there is reason to see First Place as primarily a program of Christian discipleship that instills spiritual practices by linking them to the popular goal of weight loss. Spiritual changes are often the changes celebrated in First Place literature and its spiritual disciplines inculcate Christian practices that are deeply valued yet quotidian in the evangelical subculture...

Most of the time this ambiguity is not an issue. Within this self-help landscape, weight loss aims and spiritual aims are seen as so vitally interconnected, so conflated, that there is no need to distinguish between the two. Thinness is God’s desire, and godly devotion will effect weight loss. But when the judgment of the scale threatens to reveal possible tensions between First Place’s spiritual and weight loss projects, distinguishing between the two can be helpful...

Lynne also has a website,pondering the body in American religious life, where you can find links to other articles she's written.

I should probably note that anyone who's very sensitive to the discussion of weight loss dieting may find both the book and article triggering.

[Fat Chicks Rule] From Radical to Realism! ReVolution Time!

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:23:33 +0000

It’s a new year. And many are pledging the same boring resolutions of 2011, to lose weight! To become thin! (or thinner!), to use that treadmill covered with cobwebs! To fork over money to my old gym! To refill the seats at Weight Watchers! Cut those carbs, count those calories! Lower those fats! 2012 will be the year of a whole new me! There is a reason now you are bombarded with diet ads. They know one of the biggest resolution is to lose weight. Weight Watcher's current slogan is "Believe because it works." The New York Times begs to differ.

A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost.

Instead of those same tired resolutions we make each years (and yes, you should call your mother more often), let’s try something radical and different, reVolution. Let’s make changes at any time for the good of yourself and others. Dieting and intentional weight loss doesn't work for most of us in the long run. So why keep repeating these failures?

Revolution comes from real change. The only real change you might get from a diet is eating disordered. Although critic often say the fat acceptance movement are just fat people "giving up" but we aren't. What we are giving up that the thin cookie cutter ideal is a lie. We are giving up that food and movement is the enemy.

Health at Every size shouldn't be as radical as it is and it shouldn't be dismissed. The idea of eating healthy and normal foods and doing movement you enjoy and letting your weight fall 8777745wherever it is supposed to be isn't radical, it should be normal. Diets are the ones that are abnormal. They teach us healthy is only when you diet. Associations of health with dieting means if I'm off the diet, I shouldn't do anything healthy.

HAES shouldn't have to be a revolution, because it is something we can do, everyday.