big fat feminist

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No, being fat does not automatically make you unhealthy. [giant list of articles and studies, another giant list of articles and studies, a single article]

No, unhealthy people (who are also, mind you, thin people — that’s a Venn diagram, not two separate graphs) are not less deserving of love, dignity, and acceptance than healthy people. A person with fibromyalgia is not more or less worthy of being loved and supported than a person with diabetes or Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. A person with depression is not more or less worthy of being loved and supported than a person without. I’m not going to cite sources here — I just feel like that’s a really obvious thing to point out. Further, the health of an individual is between that person and their doctor.

Yes, I think promoting full-body health is a good thing. This is why I’m a proponent of HAES. However, focusing that promotion solely on fat people is ridiculous, starting that conversation with “thin = healthy and fat = unhealthy” is both counterproductive and not actually based in fact, and using shame as a motivational technique clearly doesn’t work (if it did, everyone in America, at least, would be thin).

I’m glad you’re taking steps to becoming a happier person. I genuinely am. Happiness is so important, and such a tough journey.

“

It is none of my goddamned business if a random 400-pound (or 150-pound, or 90-pound) woman is healthy or not. Just as it’s none of my business how much money she makes or how her sex life is going. Health is private. Period.

What I do believe – and what I feel perfectly qualified to proclaim from the rooftops - is that every woman at every weight, shape, and size deserves to be treated with respect, deserves to feel loved, deserves to make her own decisions about her own body. Every woman at every weight, shape, and size deserves to have a fabulous time exploring her personal style and honing her unique look. Every woman at every weight, shape, and size can define health for herself. And, above all, every woman at every weight, shape, and size deserves to be happy. Every woman at every weight, shape, and size CAN be happy. And anyone who claims that happiness is contingent on weight is foolish and misguided, prejudiced and small-minded.

I’m not interested in quantifying the health of other women. I’m not qualified to make decrees about the health of other women. But I’m making it my life’s work to make sure that other women are happy. Happy with their lives, their bodies, their very existences.

Because happiness trumps everything, and we all deserve a piece of it. ALL of us. Including you.

”

The question of health is a private one. And often irrelevant | already pretty (via curvesahead)

I believe this could have  included gender neautral pronouns but overall it hits the spot right.

(via bigassfemme)

(via rocko-socko)

Seventeen Magazine is asking their teenage readers to use #AskJillian to talk to Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser for “health and fitness” advice. This is the same show, mind you, that purportedly abused and bullied at least one contestant to the point where she was triggered into an eating disorder, and the same magazine that signed the “Body Peace Treaty” and claimed it wants teen girls to have good body image. The hypocrisy is a teensy bit overwhelming.  Might I suggest we flood this hashtag with questions about body shaming and health?

Seventeen Magazine is asking their teenage readers to use #AskJillian to talk to Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser for “health and fitness” advice. This is the same show, mind you, that purportedly abused and bullied at least one contestant to the point where she was triggered into an eating disorder, and the same magazine that signed the “Body Peace Treaty” and claimed it wants teen girls to have good body image.

The hypocrisy is a teensy bit overwhelming. 

Might I suggest we flood this hashtag with questions about body shaming and health?

Big Fat List of Myth-Defying Health Resources

redefiningbodyimage:

This is Redefining Body Image’s go-to list of resources, articles, research, videos, etc. providing facts and information regarding health and body image, especially dedicated to debunking the everyone’s favorite myth that fat = unhealthy.

If I referred you to this page and this way of thinking about fat and fat health is new to you, I encourage you to have an open mind.

If you have something to add, please submit! The more this list grows, the more ammo we have to back us up in our fight against the body positive nay-sayers.

Let the facts come marching in.

Fat Acceptance/Size Discrimination Related Resources (WIP)

Body Positivity Resources (WIP)

Thank you.

On Being Fat and Romantically Interested in Other People: A Rambling Confessional, of Sorts

bigfatfeminist:

[TRIGGER WARNING: Rape]

Look, it’s really fucking hard to be a fat person who happens to be romantically interested in other people, particularly when those other people are cis het dudes.

It’s hard because when you grow up fat, you grow up believing that you’re not ever going to be attractive to anyone. You don’t even do this on purpose - the world does it for you. For me, they did it through fat jokes on Friends, fat jokes on Will & Grace, fat jokes on every single sitcom, ever, headlines on my mother’s Cosmo and Self telling me (I wasn’t supposed to be looking at them, but whatever) both that my sexuality only mattered as long as it was relevant to men and that being fat automatically made my sexuality irrelevant to men, “No Fat Chicks” bumper stickers, bullying in school, and rampant self-hatred and body-shaming in my family. I don’t think I ever had any agency in deciding whether or not I thought I was attractive until college. I just sort of knew, because the world knew, that I wasn’t. I was fat. How could I be?

This was a daily fact of my existence. It was never, ever something I questioned. It means that when I did get a boyfriend, at 15, I was actually surprised that he wanted to touch me. It means there was always a part of me that wondered if it was a pity thing. It means that when he cheated on me with a much thinner girl, and ultimately broke up with me for her, I assumed it was because I was no longer sexually attractive to him and never really had been. It means that when I found the fat acceptance movement and realized all this I’d been told my entire life was total bullshit, I had to start unpacking some really toxic shit that I’d internalized.

It means that now, when I ask people out, the answer I’m terrified of is not “No” but “Wait, what?”

Here’s why: a “no” answer means that you were actually considered to be part of this person’s potential dating pool, even as a negative. You were there. You counted for something. The idea of your sexuality was not erased simply because you don’t fit conventional norms of attractiveness. 

“Wait, what?” means you were never there in the first place. “Wait, what?” means that everything the world told you when you were little was 100% correct.

Look, when you grow up fat you’re basically told that no one will ever want to fuck you. Not date. Not kiss. Not hold hands with you while walking through a park and eating ice cream. These things aren’t even considered, because if no one wants to fuck you, who would ever fall in love with you? Don’t you know the only thing that matters is how attractive you are to heterosexual men? No, I don’t care if you’re queer. The opinions of heterosexual men are the only ones that matter. Duh.

And you’re told — often overtly, particularly if you’re a fat feminist on the internet — that the only way you’d ever have sex is if you got raped, but ha ha ha who would want to rape a fat girl, and fat girls can’t get raped anyway because they’re so desperate for sex because no one would ever want to fuck a fat girl!! Am I right?!

Of course, usually people grow up to the point where they can realize that none of this is true. It’s actually, you know, kind of nuts. But there’s still a part of you that believes, because there’s a part of you that has always believed. And so the scary thing, when you put yourself out there, isn’t “Oh sorry, I don’t see you that way.” It’s “Oh… I don’t even see you.” 

I’ve gotten a lot of “Wait, what?” in my time. I’ve also gotten a lot — a LOT — of people who have told me that I’m amazing, and funny, and so intelligent, and so fun to be around, but that they can’t date me. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons given for this; sometimes there aren’t. Either way, the surface reason is never “I can’t date you because you’re fat.” And I have no way of proving that the underlying reason is “I can’t date you because you’re fat,” probably because nobody in their decent mind would think of it in those terms. But I wasn’t the only one who internalized all that “No Fat Chicks” bullshit when I was younger, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of other people haven’t taken the time to take that out, give it a once over, and decide it’s trash.

And you know what? Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because what another person ACTUALLY believes is completely secondary to the little voice in the back of my mind from my childhood. That voice will always, always be there. That voice is less audible now than it was when I was 15, but it’s a seed of doubt. And I have days where it’s all I can hear. I do not think I’m alone in this.

An amazing friend of mine said to me recently, “If a person says they ‘can’t’ date you for whatever reason, they’re right. You don’t want to be with that asshole anyway.” She’s right, of course. It doesn’t matter why they can’t, and it doesn’t matter whether that little voice is right or not, because the funny thing about that voice is that it is always fucking wrong.

This is something I need to remind myself of, every so often: THAT VOICE IS ALWAYS FUCKING WRONG.

It’s wrong because no one falls in love with weight. It’s wrong because attractiveness is subjective; there is absolutely no one who is categorically, objectively “hot” to everyone, ever. And most importantly, it’s wrong because the things and people who started it talking certainly did not have my best interests at heart, so why in God’s name should I take it seriously? 

No, really. Imagine if that voice was actually attached to a person who was telling you these things. You’d tell that person they were a fucking asshole, you’d fume, you’d maybe slap it or punch it directly in the kidneys, or maybe you’d run home and cry on the phone to your best friend or your mom, but the point is that you sure as HELL wouldn’t think it was the voice of reason. Why does that change just because it’s the little voice in the back of your head? 

It doesn’t. So next time that little voice starts yammering away, tell it to shut the hell up. It has no idea what it’s talking about.

This is going around again and it’s particularly pertinent to my life lately, so I’m bringin’ it back myself.

Three things to remember about weight and health:

  1. Weight and health are not the same thing. You cannot tell a person’s health by looking at them.
  2. Someone else’s health is none of your business, anyway. No really, it’s not. Unless that person is very close to you, you have no right commenting on their body or habits. 
  3. Even if you believe someone to be unhealthy, why would you treat that person with anything other than empathy? Concern trolls need not apply. See #2.

“This is precisely why I think we should take weight loss out of the health discussion. There is so much confusion about weight and health. That causes people to confuse weight loss behaviors with healthy behaviors and that, in turn, causes people to do unhealthy things under the false belief that they will be healthier when they get thinner no matter what they have to do to make it happen. The next thing you know someone’s doctor has convinced them that the healthiest thing that they can do is have their stomach amputated.”

The “…then you lose weight” Debacle. Read the whole blog. It’s short, sweet, and awesome.

Activists respond to connection between eating disorders and anti-obesity education»

While the science community is heralding poll results from the recent C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health as groundbreaking, many fat liberation activists are far from surprised with data that demonstrates a potential connection between eating disorders and anti-obesity education in schools.

“The thing about shame culture—or, a culture that makes people who don’t look or act a certain way feel self-loathing—is that it doesn’t work,” said body-positive activist Kaye Toal, a blogger for Big Fat Feminist.

“If it did, no one would be fat. If all it took to make people stop being fat was to make them feel horrible about themselves for being fat, our entire society in America would have thinned down decades ago. It’s more complicated than that.”

Click-through to read the rest of this article, it’s fantastic! And I am not just saying that because I was interviewed for it.