Category: Anti-fat bigotry
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Typing “Fat People Are” into Google
I understand if anyone doesn’t want to read this. But it says something about our society. When typing “fit people are” into Google,* it helpfully tries to finish the thought for me, providing “more successful”, “happier”, “harder to kill”, and “smarter”. The search results are similar. Typing in “thin people are” shows options like “better”,…
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Things to Read
A clear explanation of why New York’s fat hatred is much more harmful than the soda ban from Melissa McEwan: People do not die of “obesity.” Some fat people die from complications of what are commonly known as “obesity-related diseases,” like heart disease and diabetes, but those diseases have only been shown to be correlated with fat, not caused by fat.…
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Does It Matter?
Tonight I overheard some thin 20somethings discussing fat people as a group (nothing said about the 40ish couple at a nearby table). The terms and statements made were rather derogatory. There was laughter. Then their discussion moved to other topics. This wasn’t pleasant. I tweeted about it. I then focused on dinner with the man…
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Five Things Make A Post
1) I am sooo looking forward to tomorrow morning, when Mark Reads will post the second-to-last chapter of Deadline. Mark Reads reviews books a chapter at a time, progressing through books every other weekday, and it’s been building to this OMG HUGE second-to-last chapter for weeks. (Need I say “spoilers”?) Some of the books he’s…
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Quotes: Pretty
“You have such a pretty face. You should lose weight.” — Relatives “A pretty face and fine clothes do not make character” — Anon “Who cares about pretty? I’m going for noticeable.” — Veronica Roth “It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not, it’s a visa, and it runs out…
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Today in Don’t Read The Comments
Marilyn Wann takes on weight bias in healthcare in “Big deal: You can be fat and fit” on CNN.COM: …People are telling their stories of weight bias in medical care on websites like First, Do No Harm, This Is Thin Privilege and Obesity Surgery Gone Wrong. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance has been speaking out…
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Happy New Year!
Hello and welcome! I’m back at work with my new cartoon-a-day calendar (New Yorker cartoons) and new wall calendar (Pacific Northwest landscapes). I even cut off some of the photos from last year’s wall calendar to decorate my cube. Ready to work! (Yes, I know it’s Wednesday, but today feels like Monday to me. Yay four-day weekends!…
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What is a job for a morbidly obese woman?
This showed up as one of the search terms used to get to my blog: what is a job for a morbidly obese woman? Let’s see…”morbid obesity” is usually defined these days as having a BMI value of 40 or higher. The BMI Project includes photos of multiple folks who are, officially, morbidly obese. So, what…
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Women standing up against a society [that bastardizes] thin and athletic women
[Discussion of fat hate & discrimination] OK, I wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. When Lesley Kinzel wrote about the Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a to stand up for “thin and athletic women” who are oppressed by society’s expectations, I wondered if: The author of the Kickstarter campaign thought that using…
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Things to Read
From Paul Campos discusses the failure of a “sophisticated and expensive attempt” to validate the hypothesis that “significant long-term weight loss improves health outcomes”: It will probably come as a surprise to most readers to learn that this hypothesis remains almost completely unconfirmed by the medical literature – in part because we simply don’t know…
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Things to Read
Free speech means that yes, you get to say anything you want (with some legal limits regarding libel and slander laws, advocating harm of another person or threatening someone with death or bodily harm, blackmail, all that), but free speech also means that other people get to say what they want, too, whether you like…
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Medical Things
Those following along on twitter know that I went to the Urgent Care near work to deal with a UTI. This, of course, brought up the “Seeing the doctor issues”. Fortunately the actual appointment went well, with no weight fight. Then it was off to the pharmacy. The nice part was that the UTI pain…
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Fat Doesn’t Require Apology
You may have seen the video where WKBT anchor Jennifer Livingston responds to a viewer complaint about her weight. In her response, Livingston thanks those who have come to her support. She encourages people to speak against bullying and to think about what they say in front of kids. What she does not say? Jennifer…
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O-Word For The “Win”
Ever notice how a news story will use “obesity” even when that’s not really the point? Example: A study looking for correlations between cognitive decline and metabolic syndrome, explicitly calling out fat. Headline? “Obesity ‘Bad for Brain’ by Hastening Cognitive Decline“. At least one earlier study tied metabolic syndrome with cognitive decline, but didn’t explicitly called…
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Some Things To Read
The Fat Nutritionist has an excellent, and sadly useful, post titled “A little 101 – I get to exist.” It is okay to be fat, because fat people already exist. Fat people have existed for a very, very long time. Even if all of us tried, not all of us would become permanently thin. Fat people exist. We…
Living ~400lbs 