Wellnessless Initiatives

I love me some Minnesota Public Radio, and Kerri Miller is by far one of my favorite hosts (such an amazing voice!). She hosts Midmorning on MPR and she never fails to feature guests and topics that create great conversation. Driving in to work this morning, I caught a preview of her upcoming segment:

Are wellness incentives fair?
An amendment in the Senate finance committee’s health care reform bill would allow companies to increase discounts on insurance premiums for employees that meet certain health goals. Advocates say that financial incentives play an important role in encouraging healthy lifestyles, but opponents worry that lowering premiums for some will raise them for others.

Guests
Michael O’Donnell: Founder and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
Kenneth Thorpe: Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.
Dick Woodruff: Senior director of federal government relations with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!  I am sick to death of Wellness Initiatives in their current form, and the initiatives being proposed as part of Obama’s health care reform legislation.

Don’t get me wrong. I l.o.v.e the idea of a wellness initiative: implementing health programs that promote healthy behaviors. My previous employer offered programs like brown bag lunches with guests speakers that talked about nutrition, blood pressure and cholesterol check-ups, on-site yoga classes, and 10,000 steps competitions. Participating in these programs came with financial incentives on insurance premiums. I am so down with that because we KNOW that healthy activity, good food, and stable blood pressure/cholesterol do good things for our bodies.

Too bad that the vast majority of the current incarnations of wellness initiatives foster more insidious motives. Yeah, the rhetoric looks good on the surface: promoting preventative care (such as smoking cessation) that pays us back down the road in terms of lower health care costs. But under the surface, there is a system for evaluating the health of employees - often based on inaccurate measuring tools - that penalizes people for what the system dictates is unhealthy behavior.  Yes, you totally know what I’m talking about: Body Mass Index.

Why won’t this thing just DIE? A number on a scale is going to be used to determine what I pay for insurance? Conventional assumptions about my body size - you know, OBVIOUSLY I must be stuffing my face with high fat foods on the couch all day long - are going to gauge my “health”? They want to dictate weight loss for my “health” and reward me for dieting? Penalize me for not?

Unsurprisingly, plenty of callers have phoned in on Keri’s show to tout the fairness of penalizing people with higher premiums, citing that “it’s not fair that we should be burdened for other people’s bad choices.” Apparently, smoking, BMI, cholesterol, and blood pressure, are characteristics wholly dependent upon individual choice. Smoking? Yeah, that definitely is a choice. But blood pressure? It’s a little more complicated than simply a matter of personal choice. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Hmmm, I think I’ll go for a slightly elevated blood pressure today. Goes great with these shoes!” I guess all I want to say to those folks is: Fuck you. I haven’t asked you to bear any kind of burden for me. This just makes me so angry!  I’m still not particularly fond of my body size, but I take care of myself, and I resent the implication that I’m some sort of walking time bomb and I should pay more now for the inevitable catastrophic costs I’m going to burden the system with later.

People NEED healthcare. Some folks will need a little less over their lifetime, and some will need more. I am so tired of the greed that permeates the current health care system; the need to classify risk assessment and wring as much money from people as possible and then refuse to pay that money out when people need it most. I have been without health insurance for a year now, and it’s scary. There’s something really wrong with this country when the value of a dollar is placed so far above the value of a person.

Fat and Academia

Like women’s, gay and lesbian, and african american studies before it, the field of fat studies is starting to make itself known in the world of academia. The GW Hatchet recently put the spotlight on an English professor and doctoral candidate who is branching out to look at the use of fat characters as literary devices. Professor Julia McCrossin explains about her work:

I came to fat studies because of one simple thought: as someone who studies literature, I believe that when authors create fat characters, they don’t do so innocently or free from the cultural baggage fat people have traditionally had.

I think it’s about time that fatness was taken on in the academic world as a serious and complex identity issue. But while McCrossin worries that she “[doesn't] know if fat studies will ever be codified in the academy in the way that, say, women’s and gender studies has been,” she quick to point out the tremendous potential for interdisciplinary work in the field of fat studies, explaining that “this work is popping up literally in every liberal arts discipline you can think of, and some that you can’t.”

BUST Magazine also featured a blog post talking about McCrossin, as well as SDSU Professor Esther Rothblum who recently finished co-editing a fat studies anthology called The Fat Studies Reader. I think the poster ended it in a rather bad way, suggesting that the field of study should “at least be renamed,” but kudos to BUST for giving this topic their time and energy.

What kind of topics do you want to see Fat Studies tackle? Psychology? Film? Art? Anthropology?

Fat Brides!

Yes, I was a fat bride, and I had a lot of fun doing it, too! So when I found this Flickr Pool, I absolutely had to share. Ladies, you are SO lovely.

Fattening Up Social Protest Rhetoric

A very good friend (and former college speech teammate) and I recently got back in touch, and it turns out she’s doing some super amazing things. I mean, the woman already has a PhD in Communication which is pretty damn amazing to begin with, and now she’s teaching Comm. out on the east coast and one of her classes immediately piqued my interest: Social Protest Rhetoric.

For those of you who live outside the geek bubble of communication and rhetoric, let me take this moment to welcome you with open arms. It is a delightful place, and something I find endlessly fascinating. How do we communicate as a people/group? What words do we choose, and how do we structure them? How do those choices affect the final message sent? What are the results?

So what is social protest rhetoric? From where I am, I would describe it as the communication structures and strategies surrounding an issue of social importance that seek to change a perceived imbalance in the status quo. (I’m totally pulling that out of my arse, so if you comm. majors have suggestions to make for this definition, fire away!)

Looking at that definition, if Fat Acceptance isn’t a prime case study for Social Protest Rhetoric, I don’t know what is! Let’s check out some basic tenants of social protest rhetoric that I tracked down and see how HAES stacks up: Bowers, J. W., Ochs, D. J. and R. J. Jensen, (1993), The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, Prospect Heights,IL:Waveland.

1. Petition: Normal discursive means of persuasion.
Hundreds of size positive blogs. Thousands of comments and conversations - on and off the messageboards - discussing these issues. Friendly talks with friends, neighbors, and even the occasional stranger. Sounds like “normal discursive means of persuasion” to me!

2. Promulgation:  Win and attract support of new members through such means as posters, meetings, notices to the media, etc.
Invitations to participate in fat positive conversations. Conferences and round table discussions open to the public. TV appearances encouraging folks to reconsider their assumptions and look at the issue from another angle. Hot dance parties where newbies can shake their booties!

3. Solidification: Unite followers inside the group through essays, plays, songs, art work, symbols, slogans, etc.
We have a vocabulary of our own: Fat Positive, Size Positive, Health At Every Size, Fatosphere. We have writers and poets and dancers and artists who create works to communicate the ups and downs of this struggle; the things to celebrate and the things to overcome.

4. Polarization: Moves individuals into agitation; division of us versus “them.”
We use our eagle eyes to keep a look for fat discrimination and we immediately raise it to the attention of the community: companies and individuals that actively seek to keep fat folks as separate; as “other.” I’m looking at you, MeMe Roth.

5. Nonviolent resistance: Sit-ins, boycotts, picket lines, etc.
This is where we kick some serious ass, not only in terms of blogging, commenting, and letter writing to raise our voices and protest discrimination, we LIVE everyday of our lives in bodies that subvert the social “norm.” Doing nothing more than enjoying our daily lives, we thumb our noses at “them.”

See what I mean? We are are really so very awesome.

Fatter Than a Speeding Bullet

New site design. New slogan. New ways to bring you even more fat.

Actually, no, it’s going to be a lot of the same fat as before, but I hope you’ll find it as charming as ever.

The hiatus stretched out a bit longer than I expected, but I can tell you that the time didn’t go to waste. I have been doing more in the way of recovery, and making myself the top priority was definitely the right move to make.

I joined a group at the Emily Program that is a discussion group based around the book, Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston. Think the title sounds a bit hippy-dippy? Wait till you read the first chapter! It starts off a little on the She-Ra side with a heaping dollop of good ol’ fashioned 1970’s consciousness raising, but if you can look past that rhetoric, there is a lot of great stuff in this book. It really pushes the idea of recovery for women through the use of myth and metaphor - seeing yourself and your struggles in stories that are often hundred, even thousands, of years old. What really makes it work for me is having the discussion to go along with it, and there is a great group of women tackling this with me. I really look forward to this group each week.

PhD Smiley has returned from maternity leave, thank the stars! Had a great session today and am feeling pretty empowered.

The Canadian and I, after many a discussion, have decided to set our sights a bit closer to Vancouver in order to wait out the (achingly, ridiculous, murderously snail-paced) slow processing of his immigration application. We settled on Seattle as it would be a relatively short drive for him to pop up to Vancouver to visit his son. I can tell you that I am absolutely in love with the idea of being back on the west coast. Not to mention that I am getting a serious grad school itch. Master of Library Sciences…..here I come! I will be the bad-assiest librarian. Just you wait. And I’m curious to know if any of you FatGrrl frequenters happen to be Seattlites? I would love to get the low down on moving strategies, neighorhoods, tips and tricks, etc.

Related to that is the issue of money. Alas, we can’t move without it. I had a few heart to hearts with Ellie and we threw around the idea of working with an ad network. We agreed that the top priority for FatGrrl was to remain a fat-friendly and eating disorder recovery-oriented site, so the presence of diet ads is a total No-No. But I wanted to tap your brains and get your ideas and thoughts. If I have the means to produce interesting and compelling content, would you mind the presence of text ads on the site? Would you find that it ultimately detracts from the site, or do you think it could be handled in a way that complements the site without getting in the way? Let me know!

Clearly there was much to say, so I will end here for now. It’s good to be back, and thanks for hanging in there with me. And for those of you who have particularly missed the Hound, here she is hanging out on the couch with me one day:

Negotiating My Set Point

Wendy Shanker wrote in her book, “The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life,” - and I’m paraphrasing here - that if there’s anything you want to know about a diet, you don’t ask a skinny girl, you ask a fat one, because if they are any one of the hundreds of fat girls that have been socially shamed about their size, then they have most likely tried every diet imaginable. This line made me laugh loud and long because it’s so damn true. I could write books about everything I’ve seen and heard about dieting. I could probably recite the South Beath Diet book to you in its entirety and I haven’t even done that diet. That’s how preoccupied I’ve been with size: I want to know all the ways to lose weight, even though I know that I will not lose weight on them.

I bring this up because Body Weight Set Point Theory has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m very intrigued by this idea that your body knows where your weight is supposed to be, and if you just get out of the way, i.e. give it good stuff to eat, exercise, and rest, that it will steer the ship and take care of the rest, leaving you at exactly the weight your body wants you at. I like the idea that my body can take care of itself. I like the idea that if I’m taking care of business with food, water, exercise, and rest, that my body will get me where I need to be and I don’t have to apologize for wherever that “be” happens to end up. And then when someone asks me why I can’t be bothered to lose the weight and be “healthy,” I can just say, “Well, my body has other plans so just fuck the fuck off, mmkay?”

The problem is that my body and I are having a serious disagreement about where that set point should be. I think a little lower on the bell curve would be nice, and my body seems to think that it doesn’t matter where on the curve I end up so long as it’s a big curve. Sigh.

Here’s the deal: I have been the same weight, with normal fluctuations of a few pounds, for a year and a half now. It’s kind of amazing because for the 15 years previous to that my weight did nothing but climb, climb, climb.  So there is some kind of balance being maintained, and I’m cool with that. I don’t have a scale at home, so the only places I’m weighed are at the Emily Program and the doctor’s office. It doesn’t happen all that often (the weighing, I mean), but every time I step up on to that scale, I’m scared to death that I will have gained, and I’m also more than a little hopeful that I will have lost weight. (Eating disorder? Who, me?)

Recently I was at Planned Parenthood doing the birth control tango (and let’s take a brief moment to applaud the awesome work with reproductive health and choice that Planned Parenthood does everyday), and as a new client I had to go through the whole height/weight/allergies thing. I was already on an anxiety roller coaster when the nurse called me and so I ended up doing this awkward and pathetically funny little dance in front of the scale before I finally decided to step on backwards. Ms. Nurse didn’t pick up on my choice to not know my weight, and proceeded to sit in front of me and write it down on my chart. In very large numbers. That I could see clearly. Right near the box on the paper that I checked indicating that I have an eating disorder.

GAH!

I wasn’t bothered so much by the fact that Ms. Nurse could have gotten the same reaction out of me had she just hit me over the head with the damn scale, as I was by the number itself. It was the same number. The same number that has been following me around for a year and a half. 

My brain could have taken a few courses at this moment: 1) “Great! I’m maintaining! That’s fantastic news. It must mean that I’m doing good work!” or I could go for 2) “Ah, fuck! I haven’t lost anything. It must be my fault because I’m not eating perfectly and exercising perfectly” or I could try for, 3) “I’m maintaining. I’m not eating and exercising perfectly, and I’m maintaining. Does that mean if I DID eat and exercise perfectly that I would lose weight?” or last but not least, 4) “Geez. I’m maintaining. Is my body trying to tell me something? Is this where I’m supposed to be?”

First of all, I’d be curious to know what your brain would say in a situation like that, but if you guessed response #4 for this FatGrrl, then you were dead on. Well done! In fact, I was freakily afraid that my set point had made itself known and I’d better get with the acceptin’ ’cause it ain’t going nowhere no time soon.

This is incredibly sad for me. I don’t want to stay this size. I don’t like it. But I also don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to beat my set point in to submission through excessive exercise and carrot sticks. Sigh. For the love of all that is fucking holy in this world, why can’t I just accept myself??!?!

Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, this is rock. Pleased to meet you.

A Damn Crying Shame

Goodness knows there are plenty of dark rainclouds overhead these days, but I’ve got a particular barb in my side that I need to put out there. I am referring to the two recent suicides of young men who were bullied and emotionally brutalized by their peers with anti-gay epithets. Both of these young men were 11 years old. Eleven. Fucking. Years. Old.

Even now all I can seem to manage is to stare blankly ahead and wonder: “What the FUCK happened here?”

On one level, I am amazed at the capacity for cruelty that some children have. I will grant you that hate is not an innate instinct - it’s learned - but I refuse to give a free pass to these kids because they are well aware of the pain they cause. They see it, and they enjoy it. Bullying is such a red hot issue with me. Just thinking about those two dead kids makes me wanna track down their tormentors, grab them by the hair, drag them to the morgue, and say, “Look at this. Look at this, you little bastard. YOU did this.” What can we do to make these kids feel the full weight of accountability for the horrible things they do to their peers? Bullying just sucks every last bit of generosity out of my soul. I don’t give a fuck if poor little Johnny gets his ass beaten at home by a drunk daddy….the minute poor little Johnny turns it around on one of his peers, That. Is. IT. End of the line. End of my sympathy. My heart is fucking breaking for these families who have lost their children to suicide, and I want to know why Jaheem and Carl were the ones that had to pay the price for this. You can totally call me an asshole, but if anyone had to die for this, it should have been the bullies. Period.

I just don’t see school staff or administrators doing shit about it. Not 10 years ago when I was going through it in school, and not now. “Ignore it,” they said. “If they know if bothers you, they’ll just keep doing it,” others would say. “They’re just jealous,” a well-meaning adult would offer. I lived through more than my fair share of it, and I was pushed so far beyond despair that it eventually turned in to anger. I was so unbelievably angry. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I was called “Warthog” or “Fat Bitch;” laughed at, ostracized, excluded from activities….and for what? For nothing. I would keep my head down, pretend I didn’t hear, and then go find somewhere dark and quiet place where I could sob my heart out. But I remember the exact moment when I’d had enough of it.

I was walking down the hall with a guy friend who was a fellow math geek when I heard a shout from a nearby doorway: “Hey, John! You get all the hot chicks, man!” It was the second time this particular asshole had pulled that stunt. I stopped dead in my tracks. I could feel my heart racing and face flushed, but I wasn’t going to fucking cry anymore. I dropped my books on the floor, walked over to the guy, grabbed him around the collar with both hands and threw him as hard as I could into the door frame. His eyes were the size of silver dollars, and I stared at him with every ounce of venom I could pull together. The only thing that stopped me from laying him out on the fucking floor was a shout from the room monitor that there was no fighting allowed in the computer lab. (To this day I regret not giving that motherfucker a black eye.) So I let him go and he said not one word to me as I walked away. I went home from school that day, fed my German Shepherd Fritz a huge tasty meal and I waited around to collect a present from the yard. I gift wrapped the dog crap and the next day I had the office deliver it to the asshole while he was in class. By lunchtime I had complete strangers running up to me to congratulate me and thank me. It was totally surreal, but then I got it: that asshole had bullied these people, too. That’s when the School Administrative Machine decided to make itself known. The Superintendent of the school district was sent to talk with me. The principal warned of the serious conversation he would have to have with my mother. (Little did he know that my mother - also a victim of brutal bullying - had already taken me out to my favorite restaurant to celebrate my standing up to that asshole. Principal Dickhead was then doubly appalled to receive a letter from my mother - a 22-year military veteran - who wrote an incredibly scathing critique about a school that would let an unidentified closed package, that could have contained any number of dangerous things, be delivered to a classroom. He didn’t see that one coming at all.) They didn’t punish the asshole for being an asshole, and they didn’t punish me either. Tell me again, Prinicipal Dickhead, what kind of message were you trying to send?

That was a long story to get me to one point: I do not tolerate bullying. Ever. The hippies of the world can go ahead and say that “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” but whatever world their talking about is definitely not the world where school bullying exists. I didn’t bust out the dog crap suprise again, but I did spend my last year and a half in high school on the offensive in peak form. I waited for the best opportunities, and then I let the bullies and skinny bitches, the jocks and the snobs, get exactly what they deserved. I’d let them copy my homework, having provided mostly wrong answers; I’d use class discussions to flaunt their ignorance and then let them flounder and try to dig themselves out of the hole; I’d stare holes in the back of their heads when I caught them making nasty remarks about someone. I did everything I could to make it clear to them that they were the fuck-ups here, not the rest of us.

People may think I was a duplicitous bitch for these things. They may think that what I was doing was a form of bullying and no better than what was done to me initially. And those would all be totally valid observations. The only difference is that the things I did were for no other reason than to find a way to survive school with my sense of self intact. Jaheem and Carl, and others like them, just ended up dead.

I’m sorry that Jaheem and Carl didn’t have anyone to help them fight this. I wish I could have been there. I would have told those boys to turn right around, walk up to that bully, and rack them in the balls as hard as possible. And then I would have sat right by them in the principal’s office and said, “Principal Dickhead, we would be delighted to stop racking people in the nuts. You just let us know how and when you’ll make the bullying stop, and we’d be happy to oblige.”

Bullies are sharks. They’re little bastards with big teeth, and when they smell blood they don’t ever give up. Don’t run away, don’t yell “Leave me alone!”, just turn around and fight for your life.

FatGrrl Reviews: My Fitness Coach for Wii

Walking past My Fitness Coach for Wii at one of the many video game shops I frequent, I was immediately suspicious and cast a wary glance at the box (with maybe a dash of animosity). It reminded just too much of its Nintendo DS cousin, My Weight Loss Coach. *insert mega-eyeroll here* But I tried to set judgement aside and looked over the box.

The premise behind My Fitness Coach is having a virtual trainer that will create workouts for you based on the kind of work you want to do (cardio, upper body, lower body, core, flexibility, etc.) and the kind of equipment you have available (balance ball, step block, hand weights, or none at all). This game does not utilize the Wii Balance Board. I was intrigued by the customization built in, as this FatGrrl has long been a friend to exercise modification at the gym. So I decided to do a little research, and I sought out some online reviews from people who had actually gone a couple of rounds with the game. Reviews were generally on the good-to-very good side, and I saw one more feature that I was very interested in: during the workout the virtual trainer will ask you how a segment went and depending on your answer (No sweat! I was working hard. I couldn’t keep up), she will tailor the next program to where you are at.

So I decided to give it a whirl: brought it home, got in to my favorite exercise scrubbies, and prepared to work it out. The first 30 minutes is a lot of measuring and testing and determining current fitness levels. At the end of the assessment, the virtual trainer appeared on screen and said to me, “It looks like you’re a bit over the average weight.” And as I was right in the middle of a big, sweeping arc of my eyes from one side to another, I hear her add, “But weight isn’t the be all end all of fitness.”  (!!!!)  “SHUT UP!!!” I yelled at the screen in disbelief.

Newly invogorated by this seemingly supportive virtual trainer, I did a 15 minute cardio workout with her and she Kicked.My.Ass. Kicked it! And I kind of loved it. A good cardio workout, a nice shower, a glass of orange juice, and an episode of What Not to Wear. Yes, please!

My only criticism thus far is that when I selected a program to work 15 minutes on, say, my upper body strength, the program began with a 7 minute cardio warm-up. I thought that was more than what was needed to get ready for a good upper body routine. I think the longer programs will have plenty more strength training and much less warm-up, but it was a bummer that half of the 15 minute upper body workout had nothing to do with working the upper body. 

I think I would recommend this game to others. I think it will be most beneficial to folks who have experience modifying exercises so that they are getting the benefit without any of the injury that can come along with it. (Jumping jacks? With boobs like mine? No. No way. Forbidden.)

Overall, I give My Fitness Coach for Wii 7 out of 10 ThighMasters.

Sew-Sew-A-Go-Go

For any of y’all that have picked up the needle and thread, you’ve likely noticed that there is often a startling difference between the sizing you see in stores and the sizing listed on sewing patterns. I once picked up a pattern that I saw had sizing up through 28W, and thought, “Hell yeah, this’ll fit me.” No, no it didn’t. Not even close. I actually really enjoy this bizarre disconnect between store sizing and pattern sizing because it reminds me that the numbers on the package are just that: numbers. What I’m looking for is the garment that FITS ME. Not the garment that gives me bragging rights to some supposedly acceptable size number. (So the next time you hear some little thing going on and on about being a size 8, just remember that in McCall’s World she’s probably a 14 - which is considered PLUS SIZE, dontcha know!)

Anyway, I was rummaging about the local fabric stores and I stumbled across the Connie Crawford line of Butterick Patterns. Take heed, plus-size sewers! This is a great line of patterns that offers many cute looks in sizing through women’s 6x, which comes out to about a 68″ bust, 58″ waist, and 76″ hip. Some of them also look easy enough to alter if you’re looking for something beyond a 6x. (And if you need any more proof that you can sew your heart out without getting caught up in the numbers: I am a 6x on top and a 2x on bottom. What sense does that make? None. So I just let it go. My body is wacky. It is what it is.)

Here is one of my finds - a button down jacket with raglan-style sleeves and mandarin collar. Cute huh? I’m excited to give this one a go.

Weight Bias at Home and in School

Got a heads up in my e-mail on a recent video put together by the Rudd Center for Obesity and Food Policy at Yale University. The video examines the phenomenon of weight bias for youth at school and in the home. It looks at causes, consequences, and resolution strategies. And it totally broke my heart. I was right there with those poor kids telling their stories of teasing and abuse at the hands of their peers, teachers, and family.

One aspect that I definitely want to draw attention to is the use of research and surveys to support the claims of weight bias. So often I will see trolls and haters claiming that fat folks cry and complain because they are too lazy to fix their own problem (read: a fat body), so those fat folks will make unsubstantiated claims of prejudice. But this video features REAL PhD’s citing MULTIPLE REAL studies done on the causes, effects, and pervasiveness of weight bias among children. The statistics will the scare the hell out of you. No lie.