Archive for the 'I see fat people' Category

Me!Me! Roth must be pleased

Published at October 3, 2009 in Edumacation, Food, Political theater, New York Fugging City and I see fat people. 4 Comments

The NYC Board of Ed — which of course really means Mayor Bloomberg nowadays — has effectively banned bake sales. In the name of — say it with me — fighting obesity.

The problem I have with this is that the bake sales became necessary because of funding cuts; vending machines and bake sales and whatnot didn’t become common until the Reagan-era tax cuts and resulting slashing of school financing. So if you aren’t going to restore funding for sports programs and uniforms and clubs and activities, AND you take away their ability to make money to cover the costs that the city’s not providing, then you’ve just hamstrung your sports programs. Which might not be the most effective way to “fight obesity,” given that physical activity is generally considered an important part of that, if you’re actually serious about “fighting obesity” and not just putting on a show of being tough.

It’s also yet another way to shift the focus from the structural and systemic issues to the individual, putting the sole responsibility on the individual to fix the problem rather than on the system to fix the things that make it more difficult for individuals to fix things for themselves.

Now, Bloomberg actually has some ideas which *do* address systemic problems, such as the grocery gap, and I would even argue that his ban of trans fats and his requirement that chain restaurants post calorie counts of items also address a systemic issue, which is lack of information about what’s in the food or how many calories are actually in a “serving,” without which you can’t really make informed choices about your food. But all this ban is going to do is exacerbate the original problem, which is the underfunding of schools. Until you’re ready to fix that by raising taxes on your rich friends, don’t take away the workaround.

This week in fat hatred

Published at August 14, 2009 in Health, Food, I see fat people, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 4 Comments

Item the first: Anti-donut signs can get you fired from your job as a county health director, but only if you name and piss off local businesses:

A 38-year-old former Army doctor who served in Iraq, Newsom returned home to Panama City a few years ago to run the Bay County Health Department and launched a one-man war on obesity by posting sardonic warnings on an electronic sign outside:

“Sweet Tea (equals) Liquid Sugar.”

“Hamburger (equals) Spare Tire.”

“French Fries (equals) Thunder Thighs.”

He also called out KFC by name to make people think twice about fried chicken.

Then he parodied “America Runs on Dunkin’,” the doughnut chain’s slogan, with: “America Dies on Dunkin’.”

Some power players in the Gulf Coast tourist town decided they had had their fill.

A county commissioner who owns a doughnut shop and two lawyers who own a new Dunkin’ Donuts on Panama City Beach turned against him, along with some of his own employees, Newsom says. After the lawyers threatened to sue, his bosses at the Florida Health Department made him remove the anti-fried dough rants and eventually forced him to resign, he says. . . .

In May, lawyers Bo Rivard and Michael Duncan, co-owners of a new Dunkin’ Donuts, asked Newsom to take down the “America Dies on Dunkin’” message. Newsom already had run other anti-doughnut warnings, including “Doughnuts (equals) Diabetes,” and “Dunkin’ Donuts (equals) Death.”

The businessmen had the backing of County Commissioner Mike Thomas, who owns a diner and a doughnut shop. Thomas called for Newsom’s ouster, saying the doctor shouldn’t have named businesses on the message board.

Note the two statements I’ve bolded. If that’s not conflation of health and thinness/aesthetics, I don’t know what is. But what I find a little disturbing is that his bosses were okay with this kind of hatefulness being funded by the taxpayers until the businesses he called out by name lawyered up.

Continue reading ‘This week in fat hatred’

It’s good to have skillz

Published at June 7, 2009 in Clotheshorsery, Domesticity, Books, Fun Stuff, I see fat people and Vanity. 2 Comments

I went to the reading of Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby’s book on Friday night at Re/Dress, a plus-sized vintage/resale boutique in Brooklyn. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of shopping, in part because at my size, it’s difficult to find *anything,* let alone anything fashionable and at the same time age-appropriate* or suitable for my body type (please let the tyrrany of the Empire waist come to an end). But I also get grumpy in stores, which makes vintage shopping kind of a trial (and when you add in the musty smell that is inevitable among vintage clothing and which also turns me off used bookstores, well), because you kinda have to look at EVERYTHING because everything is one-of-a-kind.

Not my idea of a fun way to while away the afternoon. And it’s not like I can even get into shoe shopping, because of my big feet. I do have jewelry, though! Which is important when you wear the same drab old outfit nearly every day. Continue reading ‘It’s good to have skillz’

Over the top for International No-Diet Day

Published at May 6, 2009 in Books and I see fat people. 1 Comment

Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby’s book is out!  Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body is currently at #2 on Powell’s.  By coincidence, it’s also International No Diet Day, and Kate would like to see the book reach #1 just because it would be too perfect.

So give Kate and Marianne some love and buy the book (preferably through Powell’s, though Amazon has it too).

Surprise!

Published at November 17, 2008 in Health, Misbegotten health care and I see fat people. 14 Comments

So, as you know, I’m going to library school in the spring. And there are certain forms to be filled out and whatnot.

One of those forms is a medical evaluation, including an immunization form, required by state law, to show that I’m immune to measles, mumps and rubella.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been to the doctor, what with the being uninsured and being generally quite healthy thing. I’ve been to various orthopedic folks to fix my ankle, my back and my knees, but the internals have been humming along quite well, other than the odd sinus infection, so I haven’t ponied up for general medical care.

As for the immunizations, I don’t have any records of those (my pediatrician has been dead for years, as has my mother, and none of my prior schools is required to keep the records quite so long). So my only option was to get my blood drawn to check for serum immunity. Since I couldn’t quite get out of the physical, I made an appointment with a NYC health clinic (part of the City Health & Hospitals Corp.), which is supposed to provide low-cost health care for City residents.

More on that “supposed to” later. Continue reading ‘Surprise!’

Why so angry?

Published at December 16, 2007 in work work work, I see fat people, Anxious masculinity and Woman-Hating. 8 Comments

So I’m reading this piece in Broadsheet the other day about a new paper on a study demonstrating that white women are most affected in terms of salary and promotion for being fat,* and against my better judgment, I looked in the comments. As you might expect, the usual suspects brought up the usual moral panic about fat people and healthcare (as do the commenters at a posting on the New Economist’s blog about the study, and their comments are even worse), but one person made an interesting observation:

In addition to the “you can if you really WANT to,” the “prove yourself” and all the other self-help that is more useful and more kindly meant, people have bought up the insensate, profane and semi-literate rage that is often expressed by men and women alike when the subject of obese white women is dragged into editorial columns yet again.

From the especially vitriolic women, I think it’s a way of women establishing superiority over other women while expressing fear of losing status in their subtext. “I’m not like that. I’m not fat. I’m not disgusting. I’m special — but, oh God, what happens if I gain weight? No, I’ve got to hate this so I won’t and can maintain my special perfect thinness.” Barf. And many of them do.

From the especially vitriolic men, it’s “how dare these THINGS not do everything they can to ‘prove themselves’ in our eyes, but instead OFFEND those eyes. They’re not LISTENING TO US.” These characters, especially the semi-literates, seem to think it’s the right of every man, regardless of how he looks, to have arm candy of his very own and to judge women who don’t meet that standard for whatever reasons. Thyroid, anyone? Water retention? How about pregnancy? Want a woman with a big belly to hide out lest your eyes be offended? Repeat after me, and without four-letter words, IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

I really wonder if this is the extent of it. The gibbering and incoherent rage that comes up when this subject is raised is really astonishing, especially that from men, and especially men who seem to think that they’ll be FORCED to find fat women attractive if fat somehow becomes acceptable.

Which I always think is rather revealing, because who’s to say fat women think you’re attractive, punkin?

But I do think this status thing ties into this terror of having to accept fat people, particularly fat women, and especially particularly fat white women. It’s like some kind of advance case of cooties or something, where the very idea of being seen as accepting a fat person as a human being might contaminate that person. And I’m sure a lot of it is simple social anxiety and far too much emphasis on status and the “market value” of one’s mate (which seems to be a big thing in libertarian circles these days). Because you might secretly be attracted to fat women, but you wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it, so you have to loudly proclaim how disgusting they are.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a significant feeling that fat women — you know, the kind of women who are supposed to be unattractive and unsuccessful at love — are getting away with something by having sex and relationships and being seen as attractive while not in possession of a body that shows proper conformity with the prevalent standards of beauty and the time, money and energy required to achieve them.

Thoughts? Why do you think there’s so very, very much anger and seething rage directed towards fat people, and especially fat women?

________

* There was no effect on the wages of white men, and black men actually benefited from gaining weight (probably because they were seen as less sexually threatening or something). Black women had an interesting wage progression: the thinnest black women made less than average-sized black women, but wages declined if they got heavier (though not as significantly as they did for white women). One commenter suggested that part of the disparity could be explained by white women getting a premium for being thin.

Bounce

Published at November 26, 2007 in Sports and I see fat people. 6 Comments

I ran across this column about unwanted bouncing during exercise. And not just of breasts:

For many overweight exercisers, every step of a workout comes with an unintended cascade of motion — breasts bounce, belly fat shakes and thighs rub. The added jiggle and friction of moving body fat is more than just bothersome. It can alter people’s gait and make them more prone to injuries and joint problems. The discomfort prevents many overweight people from exercising altogether.

“Almost all of my clients end up expressing this, how uncomfortable the bouncing around feels,” said Kelly Bliss, a fitness instructor and author in Lansdowne, Pa., who works with overweight people. “They say, ‘I turn right and part of me is still going left.’”

Oh, boy, is that familiar. Body-fat management is one of my personal bugaboos. For instance, while the biggest jiggly bits I have right now are my breasts, properly supporting them during exercise (or, let’s face it, just during the workday) creates other issues — particularly with back fat,* which does not sit comfortably on either side of the bra band. I can have the band above the back fat and sacrifice some support, or I can tug down the band, which keeps the breasts up better but pushes the fat up into my armpits and causes rather irritating rolldown on one side. But there are other issues as well, notably my thighs and hips, which start to remind me that they’re jiggling after a while, particularly when I’m retaining water before my period.

Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot of research done on the way body fat moves — even the way breasts move, which you’d think someone might have noted before now since they’re right there on the fronts of female athletes:

But the jiggle factor, familiar to the overweight and the large-breasted, has been largely ignored by exercise researchers and most sports-gear makers. Only a handful of studies have tried to document the challenges and strain endured by large bodies in motion.

“There’s very little research on the biomechanics and locomotion of obesity,” said Ray Browning, research instructor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who has conducted several exercise studies of the overweight and obese….

Recently, British exercise researchers found that breasts of all sizes move far more during exercise than previously realized. Joanna Scurr, a scientist at the University of Portsmouth, studied breast biomechanics in 70 women for two years, using cameras and light beams to measure breast movement during various activities, including standing up from a chair, climbing stairs and jogging. Her research, presented in September to the British Association of Sports and Exercise Sciences, found that women experienced an average of about four inches of total breast movement, and some experienced more than double that amount.

And while most breast research has focused on vertical movement during exercise, Dr. Scurr’s study showed that breasts moved in three dimensions: up and down, side to side, and even in and out as breasts compressed against the chest and heaved outward during movement.

I say “not surprisingly” because even as fat people are harangued ever more shrilly to get off their asses and exercise, the model of a person who exercises is an already-fit, thin, most likely male athlete, and nobody bothers to accommodate anyone else with research dollars or gear. About the *only* sports gear I can buy from mainstream suppliers are socks and sports bras, which for some reason I can buy in more-or-less my size (almost nobody makes an actual G cup, so I just go up a band size and down a couple of cup sizes, which *really* does not help with the armpit situation) from, say, Title 9, even though they don’t sell a single shirt that will then fit over the bra they just sold me. Athleta is a bit better, but they still don’t have much of anything that will actually fit me (their sizes stop around 20). Which leaves Junonia, and I’ve found their order-fulfillment less than optimal (I’ve ordered from them twice now, and each time at least one item that was listed as in-stock mysteriously winds up being on backorder).

But, hey, if you can’t work out because it physically hurts, you must just be a lazy fuck who doesn’t want to exercise because you’re too morally weak, right?

I will say this: one thing this column misses is that, as bad as the jiggle factor can be when you’re fat, it can be much worse when you’ve lost significant amounts of weight. I lost about 130 pounds during college and was left with sagging, hanging skin that was much, much worse in terms of motion and jiggle than fat-filled skin was. There was a lot more slack, so it could whip around a lot more. I’ve since had a good deal of it trimmed off, but certain areas — such as my hips and thighs — didn’t get done because I just didn’t have the money. I kept that weight off for something like 15 years before I regained a bunch of it in a depression-trauma-injury-and-alcohol-fueled downward spiral in the past few years, and I’ve definitely noticed that my now-fuller thighs are less of an issue while I’m running than they were the last time I did much running, about 70 pounds ago. Even in the water, that felt weird, because it would ripple around as it met the resistance of the water. I always sort of wondered if I was doing damage to myself; it hurt too much to think that I wasn’t, but not enough to stop.

____________

* There’s a tagger in my neighborhood whose nom du Krylon is “Back Fat.” Every time I see one of his tags, I mentally check my bra.

Rejecting the frames

Published at November 18, 2007 in Misbegotten health care, I see fat people and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

Jill recently wrote a terrific post taking feminist fat-haters to task. She was responding to the comments at this post at Feministing, in which the point of Jessica’s post — that the fat-shaming and abusive behavior depicted in a commercial for a Denver gym is unacceptable and the kind of thing nobody would accept if it were directed at (almost) any other group — got lost very quickly as soon as someone calling herself “raginfem” showed up, and she WAS JUST CONCERNED about the HEALTH of all those UNHEALTHY FAT PEOPLE who MUST NOT KNOW THEY’RE FAT and therefore CAN’T KNOW that they’re UNHEALTHY, and they MUST BE ADVISED that they’re FAT and UNHEALTHY because FAT IS UNHEALTHY and raginfem is CONCERNED. Concerned, I say. IT’S JUST that she’s CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR HEALTH. Especially THE HEALTH OF THE CHILDREN. Who have NOBODY WHO WILL TELL THEM THE TRUTH, THAT THEY’RE FAT.

And, of course, it’s not like nobody’s ever heard that one before, and we were off to the races. Continue reading ‘Rejecting the frames’

Gosh, I’m sorry you don’t feel special anymore

Published at November 3, 2007 in Sports, I see fat people, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

From the “Everything can be blamed on a woman” files: Oprah Winfrey is single-handedly responsible for ruining the marathon.

The piece is an extended, and dishonest, whine about how they let just anybody run marathons nowadays, instead of special, dedicated men who did it for the thrill of competition and the frisson of self-denial — oh, and Americans aren’t winning marathons like they used to, which is Oprah’s fault.

The American runners of that era were propelled by a “double wave” of self-abnegating philosophies, theorizes Tom Derderian, who trained with Rodgers and Salazar at the Greater Boston Track Club. They were “heirs both to the warrior mentality of their World War II fathers and the new consciousness of the 60s and 70s,” he told author John Brant for the book “Duel in the Sun,” an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, considered the last great American distance race.

And did I mention the generous helping of fat-shaming?

I had to give up marathoning just as everyone else was getting into it. Not just the rest of the running world. Everyone. The mid-1990s gave us two new long-distance heroes. The first was Oprah Winfrey. If Frank Shorter inspired the first running boom, Oprah inspired the second, by running the Marine Corps Marathon. And it was a much bigger boom. This was not a spindly 24-year-old Yalie gliding through Old World Munich. This was a middle-aged woman hauling her flab around the District of Columbia. If Oprah could run a marathon, shame on anyone who couldn’t. . . .

Once the supreme test for hardened runners, the marathon became a gateway into the sport. Soon, gravel paths were crowded with 5-mile-an-hour joggers out to check “26.2 miles” off their life lists. Team in Training, which raises money for leukemia research, promised to turn loafers into marathoners in 20 weeks. I met a lawyer who started running because, “They say if you can run a marathon, you can do anything!” The marathon was no longer a competition. It was a self-improvement exercise. . . .

Like Oprah, Bingham deserves praise for luring insecure, overweight novices off their couches and into running shoes.

God forbid those flabby, overweight loafers everybody’s always after to exercise might just do so, and do it in public. I mean, don’t they know that *real* runners are trying to get past their fat asses on those gravel paths in public parks?

In the last 15 years, the Chicago Marathon field has increased tenfold, to 45,000. But with this change in the running culture, the average finishing time for men has dropped from 3:32 to 4:15 — not far from the Oprah Line, or my own performance.

Note that he’s conflating a few things in the piece: the lack of American men winning marathons and the average time of American men running marathons. Yeah, if you get a bigger field, with more first-time runners, you’re going to get slower average times, for a couple of reasons: one, more first-time runners means more slower runners, which will bring down the average; and two, in a gigantic field, it’s very hard to run at any sort of pace until the field starts breaking up; it could take you half an hour just to reach the starting line. If you’re in the back of the pack, you’re not going to be setting any world records. However, that’s why they start the elite runners up front — and those elite runners continue to set world records, course records and personal records even as the average finish times of the overall field get slower. That more American men aren’t at the top of the heap of elite runners has a lot less to do with the democratization of the marathon in America and a lot more to do with the quality of international runners, particularly the Africans. Who, after all, weren’t running the Boston Marathon much in the 70s.

By the way, did you happen to notice that there’s a sizable gap between 1982, when the “last great American distance race” happened, and the mid-90s, when Oprah supposedly ruined marathoning by making it accessible to middle-aged flabsters? Yeah, I thought you would. In a case of burying the lede, McClelland acknowledges that maybe Oprah and the Penguin Brigade aren’t actually primarily responsible for the decline in American (men’s) marathon times that began long before they got involved:

You can’t just blame the Penguin Brigade for messing up the curve. The last year an American-born man won a major marathon? 1983. (We have produced one first-class female marathoner — Deena Kastor has won in Chicago and London — although we’re still waiting for another Joan Benoit Samuelson, gold medalist at the first Olympic women’s marathon, in 1984.) The running bum — that post-collegiate dropout who works in a shoe store so he can train 100 miles a week — has almost disappeared. Despite the fact that marathon fields are the size of Sauron’s host, more guys broke two and a half hours in the 1980s.

It could just be that the running bum has moved onto other sports, or has figured out that if just anybody can run a marathon, why not up the ante and get into triathalons, particularly the Ironman, which has not just a marathon, but challenging swimming and biking components? Or it could be that, what with the professionalization of the sport, those running bums have sponsors. Plus, it ain’t as easy to live on a shop clerk’s salary anymore, what with the cost of proper equipment, travel and race fees.

Oh, and McClellan shows his ignorance in another way: his assumption that last month’s Chicago Marathon was stopped because of novice runners:

Last month’s Chicago Marathon had to be shut down mid-race, because undertrained five- and six-hour marathoners couldn’t handle that much time in the 85-degree heat.

Actually, that kind of heat is a danger to *any* runner, no matter how well-trained, as Frank Shorter discussed in this piece (and since McClelland mentioned the 1984 Olympic Women’s marathon, he can’t possibly have forgotten Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, who staggered into Olympic Stadium, dehydrated and suffering from heat exhaustion, and literally fell across the finish line. I’m still a little traumatized by that). The issue with Chicago was not that novice runners couldn’t handle the heat because they were untrained; it was that they were still on the course after the temperature began to climb. The elite runners finished well before it became 85 degrees.

Defining your terms

Published at September 9, 2007 in I see fat people. 102 Comments

I’ve never really been on board the Fat Acceptance, capital letters, train. For one thing, its goals are unclear to me: sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat People (i.e., nondiscrimination in accommodations and jobs; the right to be treated with dignity by health care providers; the recognition that there has never been any good scientific evidence of fat as a cause of various conditions; fighting the whole “obesity crisis,” etc.), and sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat (i.e., body acceptance). I am completely and totally down with the Acceptance of Fat People part of it. The reason I can’t get on board the train is the Acceptance of Fat aspect of it, and how it’s being used by some of the people in the movement as a litmus test, particularly in regard to weight loss being seen as a “betrayal” of the movement. Continue reading ‘Defining your terms’