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.

Don't Fat-Shame. Really, Just Don't Do It.

Seriously. Just don't fat-shame.

There's no point to it. It doesn't make people magically thinner. Being magically thinner wouldn't make people magically healthier. It doesn't make you superior. It doesn't do anything positive.

All it does it promote bigotry. It makes people hate themselves. It reveals that you are an ugly and small-minded individual full of prejudice.

It's worse for fat people than actually being fat. It's degrading to mental health. It promotes stereotypes. Stereotypes have real implications.

It leads to fat people being hired less. It leads to fat people hearing rude comments shouted at them from cars. It makes people feel awful.

It hides behind some veil of "helping." People who fat-shame get away with it because they think they're encouraging fat people to de-fat themselves. And apparently de-fatting is the be all and end all of...something.

But it just causes pain. It leads to depression and isolation and prejudice. It causes nothing good and everything bad.

So just don't do it.

I Am Not A Disease

I woke up this morning to learn I have a disease. Or, rather, that I AM a disease.

No, I did not receive a phone call from a doctor with some upsetting test results. I am exactly the same as I was yesterday, except the American Medical Association has decided to classify the body I have been living in for 29 years as diseased. Why? Simply because I am fat.

"Obesity" (which I put in quotes because, since it's calculated using the outdated BMI system, I consider it to be an abstract, arbitrary, and fake classification), they say, should be called a disease so we can have better "treatment options." In case you weren't aware, "treatment options" means "weight loss." Or "ew, fatty, stop being so fat."

Except, you know, the diet industry literally makes billions of dollars every year. The medical establishment already treats fat people horribly, many doctors are downright abusive and act like we are non-compliant, insolent children if we stick up for ourselves. They ignore the fact that practically no one keeps weight off (there's a 95 percent long-term failure rate), even after resorting to extremes like surgery.

Let's take this headline, from Forbes, into account:

That says it all to me. This is a way for drug companies to claim legitimacy as they waste time and resources to develop more diet pills that ultimately will have no more long term "success" (if you consider thinness a success) than anything already out there. They will divert scientists and efforts from researching things that actually plague us, like cancer, AIDS, and other diseases, or actual nutritional woes like world hunger.

On Twitter, there is a hashtag gaining some speed: #IAmNotADisease. It really shouldn't be necessary to start a social media campaign to point out that fat people are human beings, not walking illnesses, and that we deserve to be treated as such. But there are a few great tweets being sent:

The medical establishment needs to stop pathologizing body types and start promoting health at every size and basic human dignity. Let's focus on actual diseases instead of creating new ones where none exist.