I was asked, indirectly, to respond to the question “Why do you think you’re healthy?” Definitions of health are important to me, as I’ve spent a lot of time in school and at my job considering what it means to be “healthy,” and watching how those definitions play out in real life. This is what [...]

It is sad that this even needs to be said, but given the fact that we essentially live in a health meritocracy, let me be the first to announce:
You are under no obligation to be healthy.
And, as an addendum: even if you were, eating “well” and exercising wouldn’t guarantee your success. There. I’ve said [...]

On Monday, I presented the PSA and the rest of my social marketing campaign to my classmates and professor. I barely slept the night before, I was so nervous. I seriously entertained fantasies of being pelted with things and booed out of the room for ‘promoting obesity,’ or something. At the very least, I expected [...]

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With a special appearance by Maria Callas. See if you can spot her.

ATTENTION FAT PEOPLE. Or not-fat people. Rather, attention people of all shapes, sizes, nationalities, colours, sexes, and assorted wonderfulnesses.
I am creating a (fake) Public Service Announcement for one of my courses. I am a nutrition student, and the course is about communicating nutrition messages to the public. My project is to create a social marketing [...]

Did someone say “third piece of pie“?
I’d like to say something about how much fat people eat. I, personally, would be neither surprised nor offended if it were somehow proven that fat people, on average, eat more than thinner people. Of course, this hasn’t been proven, and if it were, there would be exceptions and [...]

Re: this.
Dan Savage does occasionally give lip-service to the idea of not discriminating against people based on their size and weight. But at the same time, he comes back again and again to statements that are not backed up by evidence, such as:
And if Ms. English—a 400 hundred pound woman—stops eating drive-through garbage, starts [...]

The policy may be more inclusive than I first interpreted. According to the Canadian Transport Agency website,
“For persons disabled by obesity, the Agency cites the practical experience of Southwest Airlines, which screens for entitlement to an additional seat by determining whether a person can lower the seat’s armrests.”
This makes it sound like the status of [...]

The Canadian Transport Agency has declared a “One Person, One Fare” policy to apply to Canadian airlines. Unfortunately, it only applies to the disabled, including those who are “functionally disabled by obesity.”
While I am glad they have taken this step (obviously. There’s no way disabled people should be charged more for airfare if their [...]

Paul mentioned something about diet concerns co-opting the language of fat acceptance, and it put me in mind of a couple of things I’ve noticed recently and meant to write about.
And, before I go on to the meat of this, I’d like to offer a brief and completely nebulous apology for the lack of writing. [...]

I was thinking about this today. And it occurred to me: if all the fat people in the world suddenly stopped participating in everything, do you know what would happen?
I do. The entire goddamn world would collapse.
We fund the healthcare systems that we’re supposedly draining. We run the governments and the immigration services that [...]

I recently received a Becel newsletter (don’t ask) very excited to announce that “Being moderately overweight increases heart disease risk.” You won’t be terribly surprised to find that this description stretches the truth just at leeeetle.
The original study (Association of Overweight With Increased Risk of Coronary Heart Disease Partly Independent of Blood Pressure and Cholesterol [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about fat acceptance again, mostly due to reading Kate Harding’s excellent blog. I’ve been noticing, in myself, a move toward a different stage of personal understanding about the issue. It seems like there are stages of fat acceptance.
Stage one is based mostly on disproving stereotypes. There is a cursory [...]

As you know, I’ve been painfully working my way through Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. This morning, I encountered the article about sweathogging, which I’d read before. I barfed up my rambling reflection into my paper journal. Apologies beforehand for the repetitive/arrogant focus on my appearance.

I’m fat. It’s no secret to me or [...]

Once, I had a therapist for depression who assumed that I had binge-eating disorder because I am fat.
It took me over a year to realize this. Right from the beginning, I made it clear that I was not there to talk about my weight, and it was off-limits as a topic. So, for over [...]