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In EPIC Wardrobe Malfunction, Target Creates Thigh Gap by Removing Young Woman’s Lady Bits

Close up of gruesome wardrobe malfunction. EEEK!

In it’s quest to ensure that all its models are sporting an appropriate thigh-gap, Target PhotoShop artists appear to have removed a junior model’s vagina altogether. The image was pointed out by several watchdog groups and blogs not only for it’s garish wardrobe malfunction, but also for the fact that it appears the junior model in question may have also been mutated into an alien creature with a very long torso and very long arms, best seen in the larger version of the photo here:

The photographic evidence of Target’s tampering have since gone viral and Target has issued an “apology” stating:

“In response to your query about the swimsuit image on Target.com, this was an unfortunate error on our part and we apologize. We have removed the image from our Web site,” a company spokesman said. Asked how the mistake occurred, “It was the result of a photo editing error on our part.”

Which leaves me with a few things to say to our friends at Target. First of all, in your “apology” I have to say that I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Sure, your PhotoShop guy or gal messed up. I can certainly understand how that happened. I doubt that it’s some sort of malicious protest on the part of the graphic designer as some have suggested. I really don’t imagine that some designer wanted to point out the brutality inherent in the system of PhotoShopping images by blatantly messing up and releasing a picture. I’ve produced websites and games and DVDs. I understand that stuff slips through the cracks. That poor graphic artist is probably not being paid less per hour than your minimum wage checkers and is probably working 80 hours per week on “salary” in a web sweat shop somewhere. And the junior manager or producer doing Quality Control on those images is probably working just as hard and not getting paid very well either. And if anybody gets fired over this whole mess, it will probably be them.

Apology? Hmmm. Maybe not.

But I’m sorry to say Target, that you apologized for the wrong thing. Don’t apologize to me that a graphic artist messed up and released a photo that makes it blatantly obvious that you drastically altered a young woman’s body to convince 12-year old girls that they need to be seven feet-tall, size 00 and have a thigh gap that could hold a soccer ball. Don’t apologize to me that you got caught. Apologize to me for feeling the need to PhotoShop these images this way in the first place. Apologize to me for altering photos to create impossible beauty ideals to products aimed at 12-year-old girls in an environment where hospitalizations for eating disorders in kids under 12 are up 119% (see Pinhas et. al.) Apologize to me for being so certain that your model needs to sport a thigh gap, a trendy body trait that is nearly impossible to maintain for all but a microscopic percentage of the human race, that you were willing to graphically stretch her on the rack and excise critical bits of her anatomy to accomplish it. (You could consider the techniques shown in the video below. These are kinda cool actually.)

Target, you make me sad. I adore your wide, bright aisles and fun POP displays. I love your colorful and fun, yet generally affordable housewares, camping gear and sporting goods. But this has GOT to stop. It’s time for you to retract your fake apology and give us a real one. Then tell us how you are going to stop digitally dissecting the already beautiful bodies of your models to sell us a dose of unreality we just shouldn’t have to swallow.

Love,

Jeanette DePatie (AKA The Fat Chick)

Don’t miss out on another day of body loving, booty shaking fun! Join me here.

Because I’m Happy…

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I think one of the most difficult barriers I’ve encountered on my journey towards self acceptance is the constant barrage of input telling me that people in larger bodies can’t really be “happy”. In stark contrast to the “fat and jolly” stereotype is the notion that all fat people are unhappy deep down. And this information is everywhere. From our television and magazine advertising to barroom pop psychology to well meaning friends and relatives, it seems like a lot of people are pretty sure I would be a lot happier if I would just lose weight.

“But I am pretty happy,” I tell folks. Their reply, “Not really. If you were really happy you wouldn’t be fat.” Sigh… One of the pieces of prejudice I find most daunting is the notion that all people who are fat are eating to compensate for some life deficiency. Either we were sexually abused as children, or didn’t get enough love at some stage or are facing some buried psychological trauma. “It’s not your fault you’re fat,” they state, while patting you on the head. “We just need to fix what is broken with you emotionally, and the weight will just flow off your body.”

Think I’m making this up? No lie, when I was getting one of my fitness certifications, one of the teachers pulled out a magic marker and headed towards the big paper pad she was using to sketch out the “fitness wisdom” she had to impart. She drew a picture of a fat person (small oval over big round body–it was no Monet). Then she drew another circle inside the fat tummy circle. “Fat people have a hole in their lives,” she stated. “There is something missing inside them that they attempt to stuff full with food.”

I was mortified. And I was pissed. This clearly wasn’t in any of the written materials that she or we had received with the course. This teacher was just making this stuff up and stating it as fact in a training course that is designed to train people to teach exercise to other people.

But most of the extremely thin people in the room simply nodded their heads knowingly and accepted it as fat fact. Along with this notion is the notion that if we lose weight, if we become visibly and socially acceptably skinny, all our problems will melt away and we will finally be happy. This idea is so pervasive that people spend billions of dollars in pursuit of the happiness level of thinness. I believed it. I got thin. For a little while after a ridiculous diet that made me very sick, I was thin. And I waited for the happy. And waited. And waited…

There was some euphoria over increased clothes shopping opportunities. There was some afterglow from the constant validation and encouragement I got about how much better I looked. (Although there was also frankly a lot of pissed off wondering what people thought about how I looked before.) But did I experience magical, mystical happy–smiling while eating a salad, orgasmic swooning over eating yogurt happy? I’d have to say that never arrived.

Oh God, I think I’m… AHHHHHHH!

And now that I’ve lived and loved in a fat body for a while, I can say I’ve found a modicum of relatively reliable happy. Am I happy all the time? Nope. Do I swoon over yogurt? What, are you kidding? But I’m pretty happy most of the time.

That is why I was so very, VERY excited to see this music video by Pharrell Williams and what seems to be half the population of Los Angeles. Take a look. I’ll wait…

Honestly, this music video is what got me on this whole subject with you in the first place. First of all, I have to apologize. This great song is likely to leave you with an earworm that lasts for days. Sorry about that. But on the upside here we have a video with lots and lots of people who are boogying down and singing about being happy. And remarkably none of these people look the same. There are kids, young people, middle aged people and old people. There are men and women. There are single people and families. There are people who are extremely mobile and some who are less mobile. There are people of all different colors. There are thin people, fat people and in-betweenies. They all look happy as hell, and there is not one single carton of yogurt or salad in the entire music video!

The video is actually compiled from a much bigger project called 24 Hours of Happy. Go check out the website. It’s the coolest! I’ll wait. The website contains a 24-hour long music video to this song compiled by Pharrell and his team. I have absolutely no idea how much raw footage they shot, but I imagine it must have been epic. The net result is a web-based clock. At any given moment, you can click in and watch Angelinos of all stripes shaking their thing.

Aside from being a super cool project, the thing I love about this is that it helps demonstrate an idea. Happy doesn’t look the same on everybody. You don’t have to be a particular color or size or shape to be happy. You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to eat dairy products of any kind. But it is still possible for you to be happy.

Now don’t get me wrong. Privilege and wealth and security and a lot of other things can certainly make happy easier. And there is absolutely no doubt that the rampant discrimination that accompany fat stigma can make it much harder to find happy. But I do know that I found it extremely helpful on my journey to learn that happy was at least possible at any size. It made it much easier for me to fight for happy for myself and for all my fat brothers and sisters.

So I will continue to blog, because, I’m happy…

Love,

Jeanette DePatie (AKA The Fat Chick)

P.S. If you like, you can join in the happy RIGHT HERE.

Why we need to “broaden” the Definition of Exercise

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If you haven’t seen it already, I am sorry to be the one to bring this to your attention. The news agencies have begun to pick up on a “study” that shows that fat women exercise, on average, for one hour per year. Now naturally, I found this highly suspicious. Nearly every fat person I know exercises more than that. It seemed extremely unlikely to me, so I held my nose and started reading the articles and checking into the study.

Now the articles that are reporting about this study sport headlines like: “Obese Women Get One Hour Vigorous Activity Per Year”. (Warning, link leads to article with obligatory “headless fatty” picture.) But let’s look at a few things here. First of all–the study asked the participants to wear accelerometers for 10 hours per day for 4 days. Based on the findings from the accelerometers they extrapolated how much “vigorous activity” each participant got over the course of a year. There were not a lot of participants in the study, and the participants were not all fat. In fact, nobody in the study got very much exercise based on how they defined exercise. Even those in the thin categories only got about 10 hours of exercise per year–far, FAR below what is recommended for good health.

So what is going on here? Well the main thing that’s happening, is the the study makes the definition of “vigorous activity” extremely narrow and then reports how few people fit their definition of activity. The study uses accelerometers which are known to only measure a very specific type of physical activity. Typically accelerometers are good at recording lower body movements of a certain type (walking, running, climbing stairs) and not really good at recording many activities of daily livings (ADLs). Further more, it appears that the study uses a short period of time to calculate the activity. (4 days is considered the minimum by some standards and below the necessary threshold of measured time by others.)

The main issue here is that while the study’s definition of vigorous activity is really narrow, may of the headlines don’t reflect this. I’ve yet to see a single headline that says “Fat people spend nine hours less per year running and jumping rope than thin people.” But in essence, that’s what we’re talking about here. It just gives the fat people a lot more ammo to throw at people of size.

It also gives people of size more reason to believe that they are both inactive and unhealthy. And believing you are inactive and unhealthy can help make you inactive and unhealthy. A recent study involved two groups of hotel workers who had moderately active jobs. In the study, one group of workers were told that their daily work “counted” as exercise and the other group were told that their daily work “didn’t count” as exercise. Then they took a host of health metrics down the road.

According to the study:

Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention,the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

In other words, if you believed the activity you are doing “counts” as exercise and will help make you healthy, it is more likely to do just that.

In this light, it is difficult to understand what good will come from narrowing people’s definition of what constitutes healthy activities. In my certification process, I was taught that there are three main categories of exercise–cardiovascular training (aerobic exercise), resistance training (strength training) and flexibility training (stretching). I was taught that all three of these are very important to health. But the “fat ladies get one hour of exercise study” only counts a small percentage of one of these categories as exercise. It doesn’t count resistance training or flexibility at all. It doesn’t count cardiovascular activity based in water or that primarily uses the upper body. It doesn’t count many forms of walking, cycling or jumping as vigorous activity despite failing to take body weight or heart rate into account.

In fact, of the 60 activities listed in the Fit Fatties Virtual Decathlon, less than ten of them would be likely to be accurately measured by an accelerometer. And it would be difficult to determine how many of those would be considered “vigorous” enough to count in this study.

But our bodies are smarter than this study. And our bodies love joyful, physical movements of all different types. We know that shame doesn’t work, and we know that believing you are engaged in healthy behavior makes it more likely that you will receive benefits from that healthy behavior. With that in mind, it seems like we should be actively working to expand the definition of what “counts” as exercise and providing as many examples of people of all ages, shapes, sizes and abilities, who are smiling and doing this stuff as is possible.

With that in mind we are going to be inviting you to tweet some of your absolutely gorgeous pictures of healthy, happy, and fabulous activities in an upcoming project. Stay tuned for the details. In the meantime, keep having fun and keep moving your glorious bodies in lots of different and happy ways. It all counts.

Love,

Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

P.S. Want to make sure you are the first to know about fabulous fit fatty projects and get some free stuff? Don’t forget to join my group!

the HAES® files: DIY Decathlon – Winter Games for Every BODY

Protecting your Heart from new Weight Loss Drugs

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Well it’s that time of year again. The time of year that we talk about cupids and Valentines and love and stuff. And, as a good friend of mine on facebook pointed out, we’ve also reached the golden moment where post-Valentine’s day chocolate is 50% off. It’s the time of year when we think about our hearts.

So in this spirit, I thought I’d write about a new controversy brewing over two new weight loss drugs/combinations that have recently been approved by the FDA. In 2012, the Food and Drug Administration approved two new sets of magic beans, I mean “weight loss drugs” lolorcaserin hydrochloride (brand name Belviq, manufactured by Eisai Inc.) and phentermine-topiramate (brand name Qsymia, manufactured by Vivus, Inc.).

People have been pretty excited about these coming out, especially since a number of other “weight-loss” drugs have been taken off the market due to concerns over cardiac side-effects. Now one might think, in light of the fact that we put thousands of people at risk with the previous round of “weight loss” drugs, that the FDA might be extra careful not to release a new round of weight loss drugs with the same problems.

Not so fast, say a pair of doctors in an editorial recently published in the February 10, edition of JAMA. In this article, Steven Woloshin, MD, and Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, point out that these drugs were approved by the FDA despite an alarming number of side effects. In the abstract for the piece the doctors state:

The drugs have been associated with serious harms: Both drugs’ labels include warnings about memory, attention, or language problems and depression; for lorcaserin, the label also warns of valvular heart disease and euphoria; and for phentermine-topiramate, the label warns of metabolic acidosis, increased heart rate, anxiety, insomnia, and elevated creatinine levels. Neither medication is marketed in Europe because of safety concerns.

And as I read these words, all I can think is, “Here we go again!” The drugs were approved under the condition that the drug manufacturers would conduct studies looking into the drugs’ heart risks. According to the FDA, waiting until such studies were completed to approve the drugs would “delay effective therapy” for obesity. The post marketing trials that were required to begin 16 months ago, do not appear to have begun. And even once those trials begin, those studies are not scheduled to be finished for another four or five years. And in the meantime we’re prescribing drugs known to potentially cause memory, language, attention, mood and serious vascular and inflammatory problems because some trials have shown short-term weight loss improvements of 3 to 7 percent over placebo. There are no studies indicating long-term weight loss improvements in those who take these medications. Nor, as Doctors Woloshin and Schwartz point out, is there any proof that these medications prevent disease or help us live any longer.

In the meantime we play with people’s hearts both literally and figuratively. In a culture and a society where many of us are taught that being overweight is the worst possible situation, doctors are peddling hope in the form of these pills. And rather than rule out potential cardiac and other serious heart attacks before the drugs are prescribed, doctors prescribe these pills to hundreds of people and “expose a lot of people to it while sorting it out,” said Woloshin.

So we can hope that the “post marketing studies” will actually begin and show no serious, long-term side effects like the permanent heart-valve damage we’ve seen from similar drugs in the past. We can hope that we won’t market these drugs as the next great hope for people hoping to escape the pain of weight stigma in our society just to have to pull them off the market a short time later.

But I fear this is yet another page in the weight-loss-fantasy playbook likely to leave a string of broken hearts.

Love, Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

Love (for yourself) is in the Air

Why do we pay good money to feel bad?

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Look, you can buy your very own “Food Police” cookie jar. Click to watch the video…

Okay, I was reading through my email and I came across a wonderful new app that checks your BMI and hurls insults at you if you gain weight. Yup, drink an extra glass of water and this wonderful app might say things like, “Greetings, chubby human,” “Smile, meatbag” and “Prepare yourself to be judged”. Please note that there is NO WAY I’m going to link to this app or even tell you the name of this app on my blog. The dude who created this nonsense is already getting way too much attention and I won’t add to his traffic. But I’ll just drop off this here screen shot to give you an idea about just how awesome this thing is:

Nice. And this bozo (who conveniently places his press kit front and center on this site) is actually charging cash monies for this. Now I recognize a good attention-grabbing publicity stunt when I see it. And this “bad boy” has already garnered plenty of media attention. I’m not sure that he really has any intention of helping people at all. However, this approach to health and wellness is hardly new. Just check out the talking “cop” cookie jar in the video above. When you open the lid, the cookie jar says, “Stop! Step away from the cookie jar!” (Click the photo above to see the video). Wow, your very own, battery-operated, food police–available 24-7 from your very own kitchen. You can also get a pig-shaped cookie jar that oinks at you when you open it. And now you can even buy bed linens that fat shame you. How neat!

Yay, fat shaming while you sleep!

Why do we do this to ourselves? As I have said, literally a gazillion times on this very blog, shame does not make us happier, healthier or thinner. Shame makes us gain weight and engage in more dangerous behaviors. So why do we pay for the privilege of being electronically shamed? It’s not enough to face shame from friends, family, coworkers, medical professionals, the television shows we watch, the magazines we read, and virtually every other corner of the entire universe?

And even if we refrain from buying fat-shaming apps and cookware, are we free from paying good money for shaming ourselves? How many of the magazines we subscribe to have fat shaming messages in them? How many negative body images come to us each day as a result of the cable subscription? And even if we aren’t paying for those things, how often have we purchased expensive healthy foods, extensive long-term gym contracts and overpriced and cumbersome exercise equipment with the notion that if we pay for it, we will feel guilty enough to use it? How did that work out for you last time? Still drying your unmentionables on the treadmill downstairs? You’re not alone. You almost can’t give away a used exercise bike or treadmill on Craigslist any more.

And in case, somehow the previous gazillion mentions were in some way unclear, here it is again:

Shame does not help. Not at all. Not even if it talks to you in a hokey electronic voice. Not even if you pay good money for it.

Love, Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

By the way, if you want to buy a fancy cookie jar, I recommend the Tardis version (because it’s bigger on the inside!) And if you’d like a shame-free approach to fitness, may I recommend:

The Fit Fatties Virtual Events (Early bird pricing ends soon!)\

My book, “The Fat Chick Works Out!”

My DVD (all of which make wonderful Valentine’s Day gifts to yourself!)

And if you book me in February, you can receive 25% off my speaking services. W00t!

Why the First Ten Minutes of Exercise are the Hardest

Exercise from the neck down and the neck up.

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Integrating the head and the body through exercise!

We are doing a lot of fun and useful exploration in my Every BODY Can Exercise group right now. Quite a bit of it focuses on the awesome benefits that come from regular physical activity. One particular benefit that comes from being more active is that we come to inhabit our entire body more fully. Many of us who are sedentary (especially if we have low self esteem about our bodies) come to live a life that exists primarily from the neck up. We live mostly in our heads and become “cut off” from the physical sensations that are found from the neck down. We shy away from full length mirrors. We look at ourselves as others define us–as merely a pretty face. Exercise forces us to reconnect with sensations in the rest of our bodies. We need to use our kinesthetic awareness to know where we are in space, whether or not we are doing the movements or the choreography or the activities correctly. We need to inhabit our bodies in a way that allows us to keep our balance and live in the moment.

Yet, even though physical activity reconnects us with our entire bodies, it is by no means exclusively a “below the neck” experience. We absolutely need to engage our minds as we exercise. We need to constantly assess whether or not the movement is pleasurable and safe. We need to understand our pain levels and whether they represent simple resistance that will dissipate once we overcome the initial impedance caused by inertia or they represent a significant problem in form or substance likely to lead to acute injuries down the road.

One issue that I see quite commonly in beginning or returning exercisers is that a release of tension held in the body, and reconnection with sensation in the body leads to a rush of emotions as well. Even just a few minutes of movement is often enough to leave the beginning exerciser awash in tears. There are many reasons for this. But I think one of the strongest reasons is that our bodies are meant to be experienced in their entirety. Reconnecting the head and the heart and the rest of the body and reestablishing communication among all the parts leads to a dramatic shift in the effectiveness of both mind and body. There is an electric current that runs through bodies and heads that are well connected and getting along nicely. This current can fuel all kinds of thoughts and activities. But this current can also be quite jarring when it is first experienced. And it seems, that often this current can vibrate some of our emotions loose and leave us reeling.

This is why I think it is so important to approach physical activity in a way that integrates body, mind and soul. Resistance to exercise can come from any of these places. Whether its a misunderstanding about what exercise means or a fear deep in our bellies that warns us that exercise may hurt or cause our hearts to beat too quickly or cause others to say cruel things to us–whether it’s a feeling of unworthiness that makes us loathe to take the time to care for ourselves or a lack of organization that keeps us from integrating exercise into our lives, it’s important to remember that many barriers to exercise are not physical. In fact physical activity involves a whole lot more than that.

It involves our whole minds, our whole hearts and our whole bodies. Not only all of these things, but each of these things in their completeness.

Love, Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

The Unwritten Sports Stat: Female Athletes Must Be Gorgeous

1 Reply

A friend forwarded me a link to an interesting article in the Guardian about how female athletes fear that how they look may outrank how well they perform in terms of their careers as sportswomen. The article chronicles the results of a major study commissioned by BT Sport. The study was commissioned after the 2012 Olympics partly in response to Olympic Gold Medalist Rebecca Adlington’s very public admissions about body insecurity after the games. The study included over 100 elite female British athletes.

To those of us who study body image questions, it’s probably not that surprising that 89 percent of the athletes polled felt that they could relate to insecurity about body image. 67 percent felt that the public and the media valued their personal physical appearance over their athletic prowess, and over 70 percent said that it affected their diet and training regimes. Let’s take a moment to ponder here. We are talking about professional athletes who make their living from the capabilities of their bodies who are making training decisions based at least in part on how they will look in their singlet. It makes you wonder if their performance might have been even better if they could allow their training and nutrition to be focused exclusively on what pushes their bodies to their best performance.

I have written before about the fact that I love the Olympics with a big old passion. I have also expressed before, my deep disappointment over how we could spend time skewering the very best Olympic gymnast for the quality of her hairdo, or why we need to make Olympic uniforms look like outfits for cheerleaders. (Another group of highly trained athletes that are hypersexualized to the point of ridiculousness.) And don’t even get me started on Olympics advertising that looks like softcore porn.

And we’re not just talking about Olympians here. Anyone from tennis stars to golfers are expected to look runway perfect these days. Maybe that’s why I’m so excited about our Fit Fatty Virtual Events this year. It allows you to complete all kinds of fabulous physical activities wearing what you want, wherever you want and on your terms. We have had several incredibly inspired entrants who have completed significant tasks wearing pajamas. We have had entrants complete events and perform community service simultaneously. We have met Santa Claus on a 5K and performed epic, family-style, living room dance parties with kids of all ages.

Because Ragen and I are crazy enough to believe that physical activities should be about moving your body and having fun.

Love, Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

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