Fatty Fitness

I've been participating in a fitness challenge through the website Fit Fatties. I signed up for a double decathlon, which means I have to do 20 events. It's a lot! But I've been looking for a reason to be more active and it's a fun motivator.

There's a list of events, and every time I finish one I take a picture with a sign saying what I did and share it to the Facebook group for the community. Getting a bunch of likes and comments from people for each one feels really good. Having a supportive community at your back is always an excellent thing.

What I really like is that talk of weight loss is expressly forbidden. I find those sorts of discussions triggering, so to have a space where I can talk about fitness without hearing that stuff.

Of course, you always run the risk of hearing it out in the world, especially if you're spending time in exercise environments, so I'm working on tuning it out and just enjoying the experience. I've signed up for a service called ClassPass, which is a flat rate for unlimited fitness classes around the city, and so far I haven't run into it.

Today I hit a class at Crunch called "Aerobics With An Attitude" -- it was like an updated version of the aerobics classes my mom taught when I was a kid. So I enjoyed the nostalgia aspect of it. I'm pretty wiped, but in a good way. I've got a stretch class, a pole dance class, and a Krav Maga class set up for this week, and I'm really looking forward to all three.

From the Archive: So, are you trying to lose weight?

"From the Archive" is a series of posts that I wrote on past, no-longer-updated blogs that I feel are good enough to need a new home.

This post was originally written in January 2014.

I have been following vegan blogs and Twitter accounts pretty frequently since my month-long foray last year, and in doing so, I've encountered a depressing amount of fat-shaming.

There seem to be a lot of places touting veganism as a hot new way to lose weight, and frankly I'm pretty sick of it.

I am NOT doing this to lose weight. As I say in my FAQ section, I practice Health at Every Size and am a believer in fat acceptance. I am a fat woman and will likely stay that way.


I have a checkered and troubled history with dieting, as do many women nowadays, especially those of us who grew up as the chubby kid. I was on and off diets from the age of 8 or 9 until I swore them off entirely in my mid-20s. Name a weight-loss company or fad diet, and I've probably tried it. At one point (the last straw, really) I even did one of those liquid things that keeps you at caloric levels below what might be considered torture if it were done on prisoners of war. Oh, and that was supervised by a "doctor" who also prescribed me Phentermine, which was one half of Fen-Phen. Which, you know, killed people.

If anyone is going to come at me with how terrrrrrrible it is to be fat, I'm going to point you here, here, here, and here.

I've seen too much anti-fat bias in the vegan community. It needs to end. There have been fat-shaming PETA ads (they are one of MANY reasons I dislike PETA) as well as everyday, casual uses of anti-chub language all over vegan blogs and social media feeds.

This is NOT a weight loss plan. This is a way of eating that makes me feel good about my choices for animals and the environment, and makes my body feel better. It has nothing to do with the amount of adipose tissue residing under my skin.


This is a body positive vegan blog.