Category: Anti-fat bigotry
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Rebecca Puhl on Chris Christie & Weight Bias
3 comments on Rebecca Puhl on Chris Christie & Weight BiasRebecca Puhl is the director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale. The Rudd Center is pro-weight loss, which can be disconcerting to run across on their website. Nonetheless, they do useful research on weight discrimination and health, not to mention writing articles for CNN on how weight discrimination affects the news coverage of NJ Gov Chris Christie. How common is [weight discrimination]? It may…
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Fat Women Shouldn’t Exist
From a Jezebel piece (originally on First, Do No Harm) on troubles getting an abortion because the anesthesiologist doesn’t do patients with a BMI over 40: So not only are fat women not meant to be attractive to men and not meant to have sex, and not be able to get pregnant, when we do get pregnant we are apparently putting our baby at risk because we are…
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Proper Treatment
Knowing intellectually that people can die of asthma is a bit scary. Reading that a friend of a friend died of an asthma attack is another. Death from asthma is a relatively uncommon event, and most asthma deaths are preventable. It is very rare for a person who is receiving proper treatment to die of asthma. However, even when it is not life threatening, asthma can be debilitating and…
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Very Fat Characters and Writing Difference
As Roxane Gay notes in her discussion of The Help, Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, “How do I get it…
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It’s not the diet. It’s YOU.
From a discussion of celebrity endorsements of diet plans comes this gem from Nutrisystem exec Stacie Mullen: “The dieting public understands that the dieter has a responsibility to comply with the program,” said Ms. Mullen, adding that if the dieter fails, “I don’t think the public blames the program the dieter was on.” And from Zalmi Duchman of the Fresh Diet: “If they don’t do good on it,…
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Twitter Party
There’s a bunch of fat folks tweeting about “things fat people are told” – in twitterspeak, #thingsfatpeoplearetold. (The # before makes it searchable.) Some examples: You have muscle? But have you really, really TRIED to lose weight? You’re too fat to do yoga properly, so don’t think you’re REALLY doing yoga. Your allergies (that you’ve had all your life) would go away if you lost weight.…
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Ah, The Fat-Phobic Media
The headline: “Are the Religious Prone to Obesity?” The facts: A study finding that those who attend religious services most frequently tend to gain more weight in middle age. Those who attend religious services most frequently also tend to be healthier. What I consider fat-phobic: The “healthier” is seen as despite the weighing more in middle age, even though other research found that weight in itself isn’t…
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QOTD: Why Stigmatize Fat Kids?
From Pattie Thomas’ post at Psychology Today in response to a “Cease to be obese crusade” billboard on how kids should exercise: Why do you have to promote weight loss in order to promote exercise? If you really believe in the calorie in/calorie burned model, promoting exercise and healthy eating for every one would automatically solve the “obesity” problem, would it not? Is it necessary to promote…
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Sex or Thinness?
Obviously it takes a certain kind of mind to ask 2,400 women if they would sacrifice a full year of sex to be skinny. In this case, the mind works at Fitness magazine. 51% of the 2,400 women said “Yes”. Now, I’m sure that some of those women interpreted “sex” to mean “sex with a partner”, are single, and figure they aren’t getting any anyway, so why not? However,…
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Yelling Out The Car Window
Today a young(ish?) male passenger in a car yelled something at me out of the car window. I was walking down the sidewalk at the time.* This isn’t common around here, perhaps because Seattleites are reserved (or unsocial, take your pick) — and/or because it’s the suburbs, so not a huge number of walkers anyway. I could tell by his tone that he was yelling rather loudly and…
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Ban Fat Marriage?
Yes, I know that Dan Savage’s screed on banning fat marriage is trying to illustrate the point that gay marriage bans are ludicrous. Fellow Stranger writer Lindy West has already responded with a solid “why fat hate doesn’t work” aimed at those who don’t want to get it, and I don’t disagree with it. However. I do think Dan seriously missed the boat bringing up the silly “fat is…
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Things to Read
This is kind of a mishmash ;) If you’ve seen comments about “dickwolves” and PAX and wondered what it was about, JetWolf has a nice summary. Author Seanan McGuire addressed why fixing the US healthcare system is so terribly, terribly important this week. Seanan has discussed why she needs health insurance here and here. Seanan’s new CD, Wicked Girls, is available for ordering at CDBaby. Alternet has a well-done…
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Fat Discrimination Research
Rebecca Puhl, director of research and weight stigma initiatives at the Rudd Center, is quoted on studying weight bias in The Toronto Star: [It’s] one of the easiest [bias] fields to research as the prejudices are so widespread and socially acceptable that people easily admit to them. This is a form of bias that is so prevalent, society accepts it unchallenged […] It’s a social justice issue and…
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Weight vs Wait: A Vocabulary Anecdote
A teacher of my acquaintance does “use this word in a sentence” exercises with homonyms. Asking the kids to use the word “wait” in a sentence, the boys wrote about “waiting for someone” scenarios; the girls wrote about “losing weight”. Second grade. (ETA: She’s asking them to use the word “wait” verbally, so the kids are interpreting which homonym, wait or weight, to write about.)
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Things to Read
A review of the book Deadly Spin, which is an inside look at how for-profit insurance companies use PR to make their policies palatable. From a piece on why the L.A. public schools are not participating in a reality TV show: “Reality TV has a formula. You either have to have drama or create conflict to be successful. We’re not interested in either.” And this was nicely put: Conflating…
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A few links
Marilyn Wann launched a new HAES site at http://2011revolutions.blogspot.com/, focusing at replacing diet resolutions with a revolution. Jezebel: If You’re Fat-Phobic, You’re Also An Ignorant, Bigoted Idiot and Biggest Weight Stories of 2010. “I don’t eat a hamburger and large chips every day!” A qualitative study of the impact of public health messages about obesity on obese adults. From the abstract: Personal and contextual factors influenced the…
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Today on Twitter: Body Acceptance
I don’t plan to write a lot of posts about things I say on Twitter, because I figure if you want to read it you’ll read it on Twitter. But I have a couple today I’d like to share to a wider audience. Today, Polimicks (of http://www.polimicks.com/ and http://polimicks.livejournal.com) decided to tweet about body acceptance, using a “#bodyacceptance” tag (which in twitter searches for things with that tag). Some…
Living ~400lbs 