Health at any Size

Time for some honesty here. I have been ignorant and judgmental about fat people. I have been friends with many overweight people and I never thought they were lazy or particularly unhealthy. I even thought of their fat as beautiful. However, I did stereotype "other" fat people in general and actually thought, "Oh, my friend isn't like most fat people." Sounds a lot like racist talk from the past doesn't it? It is time for us sizists to get real and start challenging our beliefs with a healthy dose of reality.

In fact, I am the lazy one. I am not overweight but I do NO deliberate excercise, literally, NONE, ZERO. I needed to be honest about my stereotypical attitude and make this into a learning experience. I think that stereotyping fat people might be one of the most difficult things to overcome in our thinness obsessed culture.

I found the Leonard Nimoy photographs beautiful and I thought the BMI photographs were enlightening about how skewed the scale is. Mostly though, Linda Bacon, Ph.D.'s "HAES Manifesto" and Jon Robison, PhD's "Health At Every Size: Antidote for The Obesity Epidemic” provided the facts backed up by research to help eliminate the false knowledge that we have about fat. These two articles are useful tools. Spreading this knowledge will be an uphill battle with so much media coverage about how deadly fat is.

Linda Bacon's website referred me to the article "Fat! Fit? Fabulous!" which referred me to "Voluptuart" which sells gifts that celebrate normal bodies. These are the sorts of images that we should be surrounded by in order to shape our beliefs about reality to reflect actual reality instead of super thin model ads.

At The F Word.org, which is an eating disorders awareness and education blog, I found many more helpful links about "Fat Activism" and eating disorders.
My favorite sculpture at the Art Institue of Chicago is this one because while I was there in front of it, I took a moment to reflect on the lessons I had been presented by Dr. Kissling in this class. It is "Woman (Elevation)" by Gaston Lachaise. This American sculptor was born in France. The sculpture was modeled from 1912-15 and was cast in 1927.



I encourage everyone with the same prejudices that I had to examine them and choose to expose themselves to reality by looking around in the world and by taking advantage of the lessons in this class.

Here is another tool to challenge the myths. Thanks to Dr. Kissling for showing this in class.