New documentary coming soon

"If fat is the new normal why is fat discrimination on the rise? Follow the lives of three women struggling with fat and fat hatred. Learn the hidden facts about fat, food and health. Experience straight and gay fat folks happy and healthy in their own skin."

For more info: WWW.FAT-FILM.COM"

Great article on Fat Studies

November 26, 2006
Big People on Campus

By ABBY ELLIN

ASK Sheana Director for a detailed description of herself, and chances are the word fat will come up. It is not uttered with shame or ire or any sense of embarrassment; it’s simply one of the things she is, fat.

“Why should I be ashamed?” said Ms. Director, 22, a graduate student in women’s studies at San Diego State University, who wields the word with both defiance and pride, the way the gay community uses queer. “I’m fat. So what?”

During her sophomore year at Smith College, Ms. Director attended a discussion on fat discrimination: the way the super-sized are marginalized, the way excessive girth is seen as a moral failing rather than the result of complicated factors. But the academic community, she felt, didn’t really give the topic proper consideration. She decided to do something about it.

In December 2004, she helped found the organization Size Matters, whose goal was to promote size acceptance and positive body image. In April, the group sponsored a conference called Fat and the Academy, a three-day event at Smith of panel discussions and performances by academics, researchers, activists and artists. Nearly 150 people attended.

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The site will probably require a login. If you don't have one already, try using BugMeNot to get one.

Fat! Fit? Fabulous!

Fat! Fit? Fabulous!

Meet the East Bay activists and researchers at the center of the new civil-rights movement known as Health at Every Size.
By Lauren Gard

The last thing Lake Merritt pedestrians expected to see on a recent Thursday afternoon was a fat, vibrant woman inviting them to step onto a scale. "Would you like a free compliment?" Marilyn Wann called out to a group of teenage girls on the concrete path. She motioned to the scale, which she'd covered with pink paint and sparkly silver paper. Silver pipe cleaners across the bottom spelled "YAY!"

A lanky girl with long braids pulled into a ponytail eyed the glittery object with suspicion. "I do not need to know my weight," she said defiantly.

"Oh, this won't give you a number, only a compliment," Wann said, her vintage aluminum-framed glasses glinting in the sunlight.

"What is it?" the girl asked.

"It's a Yay Scale."

The girl squinted at it for a moment, still clearly confused, then shrugged and stepped on. The dial spun and came to rest.

"You're gorgeous," Wann announced.

"Ooh, that's nice," the girl replied with a grin. Soon her friends had all clambered on to take their own Yay readings.

"What are you doing this for?" asked one who'd just been declared "fine!"

"I'm part of a group of people who try to encourage good nutrition and fitness, whatever your size," Wann said, handing each teen a slip of pink paper listing five body-positive Web sites.

Within an hour, several dozen people had collected such spontaneous flattery. A father and his teenage son riding their bikes: "What a way to make a guy's day," the father said after being deemed sexy. "And look at that — my son is fine!" A toned jogger in her twenties whose face initially fell when she realized the scale wouldn't divulge her weight: "Yummy," she read with a smile, after stepping on anyway. "That's better than 140, right?"

A few people recognized Wann, who proselytized body acceptance in a black T-shirt and her signature hot-pink attire of pedalpusher jeans, suede loafers, and a purse: "Are you Marilyn?" a young woman asked. "The one who wrote Fat!So?"

"Yes, that's me," Wann admitted, blushing so her cheeks matched her bubblegum-hued MAC lipstick.

"I love that book," the girl gushed before asking Wann to autograph the handout. "It really helped me!"

At 39, Wann is the uncontested queen of the modern American fat-pride movement. The San Francisco resident carries around a hundred or so pounds more than the US government thinks she should. When she was denied health insurance in 1993 based solely on that fact, she launched a protest zine called Fat!So?, which evolved into a book that has sold fifteen thousand copies, which in turn inspired a popular Web site, all of which have given way to a thriving speaking career. Wann began making Yay Scales five years ago, and now offers them up via word of mouth and, soon, through VoluptuArt.com, an online shop stocked solely with body-positive art that will be run by Richmond therapist Nomi Dekel.

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An activism opportunity

Stacy Bias, founder of FatGirl Speaks is putting together a book and is looking to interview fat women about their experiences.

The book "will consist of a series of monologues suitable for stage performance, all around the topic of fat. Bias intends to interview 150+ women of size, all across the United States, and in Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Samoa, Asia, India and South America."

So all you fat chicks out there, check out her site for more info on the project and how to contact her if you are interested in being interviewed for the project.

Campos: Fat doesn't equal unhealthy

Campos: Fat doesn't equal unhealthy

August 1, 2006

Occam's razor is a logical rule of thumb suggesting that, roughly speaking, a simple explanation which accounts for all the data is better than a complex one that does the same. For example, the fact that biologists have never seen a unicorn can be explained by the theory that unicorns are superintelligent beings that have devised technologies to make them undetectable to humans.

A simpler theory is that unicorns don't exist.

A story in The New York Times, authored by its excellent health writer Gina Kolata, illustrates how useful Occam's razor can be. The story chronicles the astonishing improvement in health Americans have enjoyed over the course of the past century - what Kolata describes as our transformation "from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable."

Over the course of the past few generations the average American has gone from being thin and sickly to being fat and healthy. The average American man is 3 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than he was at the time of the Civil War (Kolata's story focuses on the health records of Civil War veterans).

This means the typical Civil War veteran had a body mass index of 23, which put him in the middle of what our public health officials incorrectly label the "normal" range of weight (it was normal to be thin in the 19th century, mainly because so many people were malnourished).

Meanwhile, today's average middle-age male has a BMI of 28, putting him toward the high end of the government's "overweight" category.

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THE STATE OF THE F-WORD – THREE LETTERS THAT STILL SHOCK

THE STATE OF THE F-WORD – THREE LETTERS THAT STILL SHOCK

By Lynne Murray

The word "Fat" is close enough to an insult that it catches the attention in a title. But what it conveys beyond that is a little more complicated. When the word Fat pops up, should we laugh, be afraid, angry or guilty? Through the magic of media firestorm, fatness is now looked on as a killer disease, a moral failing and a safe target for ridicule by all and sundry. Is it infectious? Can you catch it by reading this essay?

Fat is like a killer clown that may honk a horn at you. It may paint tears on its face as if asking for pity and then bonk you with a rubber chicken when you come near. Worse yet, Fat may suddenly leap out of your closet and strangle you in your bed at night.

No wonder we keep a nervous eye on the F-word, because there's no telling what it will do next.

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French Women Do Too Get Fat

French Women Do Too Get Fat
What the best seller neglects to mention.
By Kate Taylor
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005, at 3:23 PM PT

Mireille Guiliano, the French-born CEO of Clicquot Inc., Veuve
Clicquot's American subsidiary, has many things to toast these days.
Besides being 58 and still weighing what she did in her 20s, she is
now a best-selling author, too. Her recently published memoir-cum-diet
book, French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure is
currently at No. 3 on the New York Times list for hardcover advice
books. Since the book's publication, she says, she has been inundated
with offers to write a sequel, host a cooking show, and wear various
designers' dresses to the Oscars. There has even been discussion of a
movie. While it's still too soon to tell, it is possible that Guiliano
has helped launch one of the periodic turnovers in American dietary
mythology. Out with carbophobia; in with Francomania.

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Fat phobia makes us sick

Fat phobia makes us sick

2005-02-23 / Knight Ridder / By Kathleen LeBesco

During National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 27 to March 5), we hear a lot about the devastation that anorexia, bulimia and compulsive overeating can wreak on the lives of our citizens. However, in the midst of our everyday media messages, what we often miss is a sense of how our hostile attitudes toward fatness and fat people fuel disordered eating.

Today's media, for instance, point to the values of our culture, and make examples out of those who conform and those who transgress. A host of programs centered around bodily transformations - from "The Biggest Loser" to "The Swan" to "Extreme Makeover" - remind us that fat folks, those icons of the obesity epidemic, should not exist as anything but the ghosts of "before" pictures.

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Fit for life: why fat is not the problem

Fit for life: why fat is not the problem
February 24, 2005

YOU can be fat and healthy. It sounds like heresy, but it's the message of a leading Sydney nutritionist and author, who says our medicos and politicians have created a moral panic about obesity that could be doing more harm than good.

Sydney University's Jenny O'Dea is outraged at claims this week by University of Queensland researcher Alan Lopez that obesity is the new tobacco.

And she has a message for those self-satisfied stick insects out there.

Fat, fit men have a much lower risk of heart attack than slim, couch potato men.

Yes, wait for it, fat is not the root of all evil. You can also be thin and unhealthy.

O'Dea, who has written a book, Positive Food for Kids, says the approach of blaming the victims for the nation's weight gain is backfiring badly.

Her research has found overweight patients are deterred from going to the doctor because they don't want to be lectured by a profession they believe is prejudiced against them.

The media hype over obesity has spawned an explosion of fad dieting, which research shows will only add to long-term weight gain.

And by focusing on weight loss as the goal, the obesity-is-bad juggernaut has diverted attention from what should be the real message – the promotion of a healthy, active lifestyle as the means to preventing medical problems.

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Meet the Women of "Big Dance"

Meet the Women of "Big Dance"

February 21, 2005

Are you ready to meet the women of "Big Dance"? Artistic director LYNDA RAINO teaches a modern dance class just for plus-sized people -- and she's revolutionizing the art form of movement in the process! ET has the story.

"The mandate of 'Big Dance' is 'You don't have to have a dancer's body; you only have to have a body that dances and dance with the body you have," Lynda tells ET.

Lynda says she began "Big Dance" in 1993 when a plus-sized woman came to the Victoria, B.C. resident and said she would love to take a dance class but would never, ever, walk into a studio with all those "skinny dancer bodies." Why not start a class for fat women? Lynda said to herself, "Why not?" and confides, "I was naive. I did not know I was going to enter a whirlwind ride of absolute revolution in dance. I thought we were just doing a class for fat women."

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Learn to love your body, says belly dancer Ruth

Learn to love your body, says belly dancer Ruth
nlnews@inuk.co.uk
16 February 2005

BELLY dancer Ruth Cowan wants to help women of all shapes and sizes to love their bodies.

The 47-year-old, of Alexandra Park Road, Muswell Hill, teaches the dance while delivering advice on body psychology.

She said: "I want to help people feel comfortable with their bodies and to celebrate themselves as they are. It's therapeutic. People who feel fat can enjoy belly dancing."

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Fat and Proud

Fat and proud
Activist Heather MacAllister brings message of fat liberation to Ann Arbor
By Jason Michael
Originally printed 2/10/2005

ANN ARBOR - OK, let's start here: What is "fat liberation?" Admit it, you read the subhead and wondered, right? Well, worry not. Heather MacAllister has an answer for you.

"It is the radical concept that people can be healthy, happy and sexually attractive at every size, large or small," she said. "That's not to say that everyone is healthy. There are people who have health issues. But that's thin or fat. It's not inherently unhealthy and - more importantly - no one deserves to be discriminated against and fat liberation is about ending discrimination."

Now before you size threes out there throw this story down and move on, consider this:

"Ultimately, fat liberation helps everyone with any kind of body because it flies in the face of the billion dollar industry that supports people being dissatisfied with their bodies - the weight loss industries, cosmetic surgeries and fashion," said MacAllister. "I love fashion, but the industry holds up an ideal that very few people can obtain so we spend our time focused on how we look rather than how we feel."

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Love Your Body Day fights weight bias

Love Your Body Day fights weight bias
Student suggests amending UT's discrimination policy
By Kristin Butler

Laura Gladney-Lemon said she has put up with "fat bias" long enough. After suffering ridicule from people throughout her life, she has decided to take a stand to raise awareness of weight-based discrimination on campus.

"At least once a month, someone on UT campus will be overtly mean to me based on what I look like," the Student Government graduate representative said. "I've had food thrown at me, and people will yell 'pig' or make pig noises at me."

Instead of falling victim to harassment, Gladney-Lemon is proposing that height and weight be added to the non-discrimination policy at the University. In a few weeks, she plans to introduce her height and weight resolution to SG, and then hopefully to the UT administration.

Her efforts reflect her active role in the annual Love Your Body Day, which was recognized Wednesday nationwide. As part of the celebration on campus, "fat rebel" Marilyn Wann, who led a 1999 protest in San Francisco that successfully urged the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass a height and weight anti-discrimination ordinance in May 2000, spoke to a crowd of more than 100 people, comprised of both women and men.

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The War on Fat's Casualties

The War on Fat's Casualties

By Sandy Szwarc
Published 07/24/2003

With all of the pressure to be thin, the onslaught of diet messages finds a ready audience. At any given time, up to 80 million American adults are on a diet.

Women and children are the primary victims of this relentless harping. Almost half of all first graders and 90 percent of high school girls are already dieting, even though only 10 to 15 percent of them are over recommended weights. By college, almost all students have dieted, disproportionate to the number with real weight problems, according to multiple studies. One study, led by Lori Clayton Pereyra, M.F.C.S., R.D., C.D.N., and published in a 1997 Journal of the American Dietetic Association, found half of students were currently on a diet even though only 18 percent were outside recommended weights.

It has been well documented that dieting and insufficient calories and nutrients in growing children contribute to poor learning, stunted growth, delayed puberty, and behavioral problems, according to Kenneth Davis, M.D., of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Total Nutrition (St. Martin's Griffin, 1995). "Many teenage girls, already the most poorly nourished of any group in America, have stopped drinking milk or eating meat in their extreme fear of fat," Frances Berg, M.S., editor-in-chief of Healthy Weight Journal, said.

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The Skinny on Fat

The Skinny on Fat

By Sandy Szwarc
Published 07/16/2003

A host of sinful foods have been demonized as the root of obesity and poor health of American adults and children. Fast food restaurants have been sued, accused of contributing to customers' obesity because their food tastes too good and they tempt us by advertising. Taxes are being proposed on foods deemed fattening or bad for us, namely, anything with meat or fat, that is fried or processed or that is sweet.

Although these foods make intuitively appealing (and profitable) targets, the body of scientific evidence doesn't support the assertions. There is no scientific evidence that any specific food causes obesity. Like the American Dietetic Association (ADA), the American Council on Science and Health's (ACSH) position is: "There are no good foods or bad foods. The problem is not any one food, but one of dietary immoderation, imbalance and lack of variety." That's true for children as well as adults. The American Heart Association (AHA) Medical Scientific Statement, "Understanding Obesity in Youth," concluded, "Studies of diet composition in children do not identify the cause of obesity."

Let's consider the evidence about the supposedly most sinful culprits:

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The Truth About Obesity

The Truth About Obesity

By Sandy Szwarc
Published 07/14/2003
TCS

In the fight against obesity, we're told: 'Being fat is simply a matter of energy balance. It's easy to lose weight, just eat 3,500 calories less than you burn and you'll lose a pound. We've become a fat nation because we're eating more than ever before, and too much fat and junk food, and not moving.'

Of course, the real message is one of blame: 'You fat slobs! You are irresponsible, lazy, gluttons. You wouldn't be fat if you just didn't eat so much (or so much fat, sugar, and junk food) and got off the couch!'

If it were only that simple.

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