On living a fat life

Fat bodies are public bodies. They are open to comment, judgement, and ridicule. Fat lives are public lives. They are described, proscribed, and prescribed. “Fat people shouldn’t wear skinny jeans!” “Fat people aren’t athletic.” “Fat people can’t find true love.” “Fat people only eat fast food.” “Fat people don’t run marathons.” “Fat people shouldn’t wear […]



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Open Letter to Carol Weston. XXXL is ok.

Due to life, I was unable to respond to directly to this letter by Carol Weston which talks about how horrible the childhood obesity epidemic is. Apparently It wouldn't have mattered because the New York Times printed no rebuttals from...



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Women’s magazines and their terrible messages

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. Trigger warning: Mention of dieting and weight-loss. I’m not a fan of women’s lifestyle magazines. They were something I only to […]



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Tracking: not always a force for evil!

Content note: Diet talk and exercise for weight loss A couple of days ago I blogged about mHealth and wearable technology that allows us to monitor our every metric. One of my readers commented that she had a FitBit and really loved it. As it happens, I have one too, and also love it. I…

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Ballet, Bodies, and Basement Jaxx

This evening I went to a performance of Rasta Thomas’ Bad Boys of Dance: Rock the Ballet (video link). The term ‘rock’ was used somewhat loosely, but six male and one female dancers performed to a range of popular music. All were clearly classically trained, and what they could do with their bodies was truly…

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Lack of insurance and biased doctors hurt us

Amanda writes: Hi guys, My story isn’t necessarily about discrimination, but I do feel like I have to put the whole thing out in the universe, and in writing it down, maybe it will help to relieve some of my anxiety about what is to come. I should start from the beginning. I have always […]



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What’s the point?

Earlier this week, at the 2014 Weight Stigma Conference (yes, I know – I’ll start talking about something else soon), Dr Lee Monaghan talked about how weight stigma was part of a larger problem, and how framing ‘obesity’ as a personal tragedy, shifted the focus to the individual, and deflected attention away from wider structural…

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Sweet potato shepherd’s pie

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. This is a recipe I picked up from Nerd Fitness (not a weight-neutral webpage, just FYI), but it looked absolutely delicious […]



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Canning Books for Beginners

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Yellow Brick Road —

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss products. Something remarkable happened in Washington DC last week while I was on vacation: This […]



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Building Bridges: Interview with Dr. Sheila Parker

by Amy Herskowitz, MSc Welcome to another “Building Bridges” post, in which we feature interviews with health professionals, academics, and policy makers who are not necessarily identified with the Health At Every Size® movement. While some of our readers may experience our choice of interviewees as controversial figures with viewpoints that are at odds with […]



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Are you ready for a fight?

Yesterday was the 2nd Annual International Weight Stigma Conference, this year held at the University of Kent, Canterbury. It was an amazing day and people came from all over the world. I want to thank everybody who was involved in helping put the event together, and to all those of you who sent me good…

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Is There an Obesity Epidemic? Let’s Follow the Money.

I went to my city’s only big, old-fashioned, self-contained shopping mall today. I had returns to make to Lane Bryant and Torrid — online orders that weren’t quite right. I also have two big conferences coming up and my credit card was burning a hole in my handbag. It felt a little like walking into […]



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Detroit, Fat, Allied Media Conference

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It’s Because It’s My Body

It seems that a thread today on a fat hate site suggesting that people -mail me and ask why I don’t support airline tickets being based on passenger weight. Setting aside the fact that some particularly muscular and/or tall people would likely flip out, assuming that this wasn’t meant for them but was only supposed […]



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Decline of The Modern Goddess

Parked in beach chairs, on a deserted stretch of sand, surrounded by aggressive sea gulls and the thunderous crashing of waves, we debated the destruction of our gender. That might seem like a high-brow, large-scale conversational endeavor for a day spent soaking up the sun on the seashore, but it seemed as natural a place […]



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Dr. Oz, Snake Oil Salesman

I watched exactly one episode of Dr. Oz. I found him and his show to be superficial tripe. I watched the episode solely because Dr. Glenn Gaesser (A proponent of fit and fat) happened to be on. Recently Dr. Oz...



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The invisibility of weight stigma

After my blog on weight stigma and the personal responsibility trope the other day, somebody commented on the Never Diet Again facebook page, about whether or not people can actually recognise weight stigma. She referenced an article about aspects of sexist behaviour that are so ingrained in modern society that nobody questions them. I’ve written…

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“Health” and the Medical System

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. Trigger warning: Talk of weight loss and disordered eating histories. The past month has been an utter blur as my university […]



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Loving my body: a work in progress

This afternoon, I had the pleasure of circumnavigating London on an open-top bus with the inimitable Dr Deb Burgard. We’ve been having a bit of a heatwave this week, at least by UK standards, and I found myself hot, sticky, and rather uncomfortable. Oh, and grumpy (sorry, hubby). I’ve written before about dressing for the…

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Blame and responsibility: the chicken or the egg?

At the beginning of this week, I took part in a Twitter chat about weight stigma. I mentioned in my previous blog post about it that I spent a lot of time expounding the view that it matters not a whit whether people are fat through their own ‘fault’ or ‘weakness’ or ‘poor character’ or…

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In Defense of Feminism

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Am I good enough?

Hi. My name is Angela, and I’m a perfectionist.I’ve been a perfectionist for as long as I can remember. I remember being good at school, especially maths. This made my dad very proud and he’d trot me out at parties to do math tricks. You can see where I get my Geek from! I was…

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Weak Four

It’s been over a year since I ran my first, and so far only, 5km race. It was a banner day for me and somewhere in storage is my number which I plan to scrapbook someday. My time was good even though I literally had to run a km to the starting line, re-lace my […]



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Gotta Say It Was A Good Day

Today I did something I hadn’t ever done before. I woke up feeling pretty good, more energy and spunk than usual. I consider myself a pretty lazy femme as far as femme-y ways go. I’m low maintenance, but especially when it comes to my hair. I literally woke up, fed my puggyman, pooped, splashed water […]



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Is banning ‘body talk’ the way to go?

Yesterday, the NY Times ran a story about how some summer camps are banning body talk. Fat talk, skinny talk, no insults, no compliments. No. Body. Talk. I’m not going to talk about the article itself, you can read it. I’d like to talk about some of the comments. Mostly, they fell into two camps.…

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the HAES® files: Healing the World One Book at a Time

by Peggy Elam, PhD There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. ~Junot Diaz Almost […]



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Dr. Oz: Scam Artist

You may have heard that the US Senate called Dr. Oz to Capital Hill for a spanking, because he has made it a habit to sell snake oil under the guise of being a medical professional. “Thanks to brand new scientific research, I can tell you about a revolutionary fat buster, It’s called Garcinia cambogia.” […]



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Get on your bike!

Over here in the UK, a store called Halfords is running their summer ad campaign on TV to get people cycling. Regular readers will be bracing themselves at this point for another rant about how awful and fat shaming it is. Sorry, not this time. I love it. It makes me smile every time I…

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Breastfeeding And Gestational Diabetes, Part One: Vital Benefits to Mother and Baby

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From the vault: What Fat Acceptance means to me

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. Four years ago I posted this on my blog, Life on Fats. With the trolls on reddit devoting what they call […]



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Yoga for Larger Bodies – Documentary Animation

Yoga for Larger Bodies is an animated documentary of one woman’s experience of being a plus-sized yoga instructor. It is the origin story of London’s first yoga class specifically for larger bodied individuals. Uniquely, and in keeping with the themes … >> Read More



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Health help for a Super Fat Friend.

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Why stigma is bad, in 140 characters

Last night I stayed up reeeeeaally late to take part in a Twitter chat about ‘Fat Stigma and Health Ethics’ run by @BioethxChat. The chat was hosted by bioethicist Dr Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD. He was introduced by the host at 5.35 and 17 seconds (PST). At 5.35 and 33 seconds @mloxton, a healthcare analyst…

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Stop Improperly Using my Work

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Fatties who lose weight not necessarily healthier: studies

One of the assumptions of the War on Obesity is that if we fatties lost weight, our health risks would go back to ‘normal’. There’s a lot wrong with this line of thinking. First of all, many ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ people are indeed healthy, and many ‘normal weight’ people are not.* Epidemiological studies consistently show…

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Miss USA musings

We don’t ask much of our readers, but we are asking you to support Casey in improving her mobility while fighting the fat haters. Read more here or click the image above to donate. I used to be really into watching beauty pageants when I was younger, although I have no idea why. Sparkly things […]



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Chaos, catering, and conferences

Note: This post was originally published on Fierce, Freethinking Fatties It all started in December 2012, just after Christmas. I was a about a month and a half into my PhD studies, reading my university emails over the holiday period, and I came across a notice about some funding that was available to PhD students…

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Happy Birthday!

No blog post today because it's my birthday! And I'm still not one foot in the grave.



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Legacy of a female activist

Moving away from fat today to another kind of activism. Bear with me. This week, London has been host to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, bringing together over 900 experts, NGOs, survivors, activists and world leaders from over 100 countries. It is the largest such gathering of its kind ever conceived.…

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Double standards

Apparently, Facebook will no longer be nixing breastfeeding photographs. Sort of. So long as they comply with its community standards. It’s not clear what the exceptions might be. There have been numerous cases of photos being removed for not complying with Facebook community standards – not just photos of women breastfeeding, but also women survivors…

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Fatphobia on the Internet

Trigger warning: Discussion of fatphobic trolls. This is the third and final guest post by Dow Jones, our latest blogging candidate. You can read the first two here and here. Then you can vote on her inclusion here. It is no secret that fat hatred and fatphobia are prevalent in society and online. In my […]



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Yes We Do Need to Talk About This

There is an amazing piece over on Shakesville that tells the truth about what it’s like to be a woman who does advocacy – from the unbelievable amount of abuse and hatred that we deal with, to the people who tell us that we shouldn’t talk about the abuse, or that we’ll never make a […]



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I'm Cute, Fat and Living.

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Chasing a number

Content note: discussion of dieting, exercise for weight loss A few years back, before I discovered Health At Every Size®, I would embark on a New Plan every few weeks. For a couple of weeks I would launch into my latest This-Is-It diet and exercise programme with vigour and zeal. I would go gung ho…

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SWAGGA opening night happened!

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Cane and Able —

Trigger warning: Assholes harassing a fat person for having a physical disability and discussion of weight loss. To quote Michael Corleone… Last May, I wrote a post with a Cher reference in the title that I was quite proud of, all about reddit’s disturbing compulsion to perpetually talk shit about fatties. Since then I’ve written […]



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the HAES® files: HAES Pebbles

by Fall Ferguson, JD, MA Ripple Effect: “a situation in which one event causes a series of other events to happen.” Lately I have been working with the metaphor of a pebble being thrown into a pond, and causing a series of ripples that travel out to the very edges of the pond – the […]



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I don’t want to talk about it

What to write about when you don’t want to write about anything? I don’t want to write about the piece in a UK newspaper asking whether surgeons are selling weight-loss surgery without being honest about the risks (and benefits). Simple answer: yes. But they let the obnoxious, data-inventing, fat-hating Tam Fry have the last, fat…

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Hard Work and Fruitless Labor

Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss. Summer college courses have started and are now in full swing. The abbreviated semester means longer and more intense classes, sometimes taking up as much as half a day per class, four days a week. This semester, I am taking Interpreting 2, the third from last American Sign Language […]



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When a car isn't just a car

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Romantic Love and Double Standards

Out of all the arguments I see against same-sex marriage, the “kids need a mother and a father” argument seems to me to be one of the most specious, because it’s grounded in a massive double standard. We don’t force divorcees, or widows to marry again “for the sake of the children.” We don’t require […]



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But I can’t trust my body

When I talk to people about intuitive eating, a look of horror tends to pass over their face. “But I can’t trust my body!” they exclaim. “If I let my body lead me, I’d just eat everything inside until I explode.” Giving up dieting can be scary. Actually, let me rephrase that. Giving up dieting…

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Choosing Self-Preservation and Kindness Over Friends

Trigger warning: Eating disorder, fat hate, weight loss surgery I’m fairly picky about my friends, it’s true. I hold my friends to a high standard and any bigotry must go. I’ve ended friendships over sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia/biphobia/transphobia, and, yes, fatphobia. The thing is, most people understand perfectly when you end a friendship because your […]



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Music Monday

This is a song I got from a music sampler some artists put together in December. Enjoy.



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All Fat is Acceptable Fat.

Stacey Bias recently put out a rad comic about Fatty Archetypes. Including such fatty types as healthy fatties, rad fatties, fat athlete, work in progress (i.e dieting fatties), etc. These are fat people are “acceptable fat.” The point of the...



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Public support for anti-weight stigma and eating disorder policies: new study

Since I have to read a lot of published papers for my studies, and since some of them are quite interesting, I think I’ll use some of my daily blogs to write about them. I hope you find them interesting too. The one I’m writing about today was just published and is freely available, so…

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Diet Companies Say the Darndest Things – Diet Cards

This installment of my ongoing series – where I publish the conversations I have with people who cask me to write about their diet products – ends with one of the most epically would-be-hilarious-if-it-wasn’t-horrible emails I have ever received. Today’s conversation is with with the creator of “A deck of cards with one goal, to […]



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A personal update

I received a message a few days ago from a new reader who had just subscribed to my blog (thanks CB). She’d noticed that I hadn’t posted since September 2013 and was wondering whether or not I was still blogging. I was actually surprised to find out that I had posted as recently as September…

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Why Isn’t Obesity Research Better Known?

CBC has an article on the part of obesity research that doesn’t always get talked about. Tim Caulfield says his fellow obesity academics tend to tiptoe around the truth. “You go to these meetings and you talk to researchers, you get a sense there is almost a political correctness around it, that we don’t want […]



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Hydra Clown —

Trigger warning: Discussion of eating disorders, dietary choices, and weight loss. Check out Tessa Shackleford’s Etsy page for more amazing, surreal artwork like the awesome illustration she did for this post. Two weeks ago, my friend Leah Segedie, founder of Mamavation, confronted Don Thompson, CEO of McDonald’s, at a recent Shareholder’s Meeting about its aggressive […]



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SWAGGA is unassimilated fatness

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About my freaking body.

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Confession: I Still Have Occasional Body Image Issues That Are Exacerbated By Fatshion Blogs

Sometimes I find fatshion blogs to be fun and inspirational. And sometimes, well, not. I often recommend that clients look at more body positive blogs, especially ones with images of fat people. It’s a way to recalibrate your brain so that fatter bodies seem more like what they are – normal. (I’m not a big [...]



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Can a Fat Girl Get a Dress Please

Fabulous actress Melissa McCarthy is interviewed in the July issue of Redbook. She discussed why she is starting her own fashion line: When I go shopping, most of the time I’m disappointed. Two Oscars ago, I couldn’t find anybody to do a dress for me. I asked five or six designers—very high-level ones who make […]



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Bonehead Ideas: High Cholesterol Equals High Cesarean Rates in Obese Women

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When the going gets tough…

The tough get going, or so they say. This past weekend was a lot of going. Saturday, I woke up with very red and swollen eyelids. No other symptoms, just looked like I got socked in each eye for no reason. I put an ice pack on them and got ready for my fancy tea […]



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This is what an apocalypse looks like

And here I thought an apocalypse would be the sort of thing where, as a thoroughly domesticated human being, I’d be dead within a month. Turns out I’m in the midst of one right now. You see, we are currently experiencing an “obesity apocalypse”, according not to some troll or unpaid blogger, but an actual […]



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Treating type 2 diabetes with compassion

My grandfather is 86 years old, so when he gets sick I have to carefully watch him to make sure his health doesn’t get any worse. Sure enough, last Wednesday when he complained of not feeling well and coughing during my phone call to him from work, I texted my mom and asked her to […]



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Habits, dieting, and Weight Loss

Scientific American recently came out with an article that discusses ditching weight loss and dieting because of poor results. It refers to a man with health problems who instead of dieting began exercising and eating his fruits and vegetables. The...



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New Rule

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Four Not-So-Weird Tips for Managing Stress

Stress sucks. I’m heading into a very, very stressful June. I can’t talk about why (yet), which is mean, I know. I don’t mean to … um … vague blog … but I do want to talk about stress. I don’t handle it well. My body shuts down. That’s what happened to me in December. […]



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