I’m so excited to share with you a clip of an interview on Fox News in LA yesterday. Finally, a nice piece where we share our thoughts without a nasty comment or a smirk in sight. YAAAAAAY! This was an amazing experience and I MUST give a shout out to the amazing producer at Fox that put this together: Gerri Shaftel Constant. I feel so blessed that she made the effort to take our story in hand and shared it in such an intelligent and respectful way. This is a GOOD day!

Love,
TFC

Oh and here’s the evening recap with a longer video piece:

Check out this little guy.  Clearly he’s been doing his resistance training to have created such magnificent biceps.  There’s lots of reasons to consider resistance (weight) training like: stronger bones, better sleep, better mood and better sex.  And of course, better “guns” (pew, pew)!

Speaking of biceps, I’ll be on a panel as part of a free screening of the movie “Strong” about Olympic Weightlifter Cheryl Haworth next week Tuesday in San Bernardino and the following Tuesday in Long Beach, CA.  More info coming soon!

Love,

The Fat Chick

Okay, so I”m cheating a little.  But the Olympic “combined”  weightlifting score is devised by adding the heaviest “clean and jerk” weight lifted to the heaviest “snatch” weight lifted for a single contestant.  The “clean and jerk” is a weightlifting move where the contestant first squats down and lifts the bar to shoulder level and then lifts the weight overhead.  The “snatch” is a weightlifting move where the contestant squats down and lifts the weight directly overhead without stopping at the shoulders.

Olympic gold medalist Hossein Reza Zadeh (The Iranian Hercules) holds World Records in both the clean and jerk and Olympic combined.  Here’s the stats:

Weight: Hossein Reza Zadeh: 358.5 lbs.

2000 Sydney Olympic “Snatch”  lift: 467.5 lbs (WR)

2000 Sydney Olympic “Clean and Jerk” lift: 572 lbs.

2000 Sydney “combined” lift: 1039.5 lbs.

Conclusion: Hossein Reza Zadeh’s Lifts Weigh More than Me.

If you gotta watch it, you might as well get something out of it.

In my work with ASDAH and on the Health At Every Size(R) approach to wellness I’ve felt it my duty to watch HBO’s newest fat panic-mongering documentary “Weight of the Nation”.  Let me tell you, it can be a tough slog to get through this with sanity points intact.  It’s all there: the screaming about the “obesity crisis”, hand wringing and head shaking as folks ask, “What about the children?”, the headless fatties, the obligatory food porn shots, the mug shots of sad and distressed people of size.  It’s enough to make you crazy.  There’s a definite dearth of happy, healthy exercising fat people like those pictured on our Fit Fatties Forum.  Nevertheless, I felt I should watch this, so I can be prepared when my well-meaning friends, families, co-workers, bosses, and complete strangers feel compelled to share some little tidbit of “wisdom” from the show.  So I created a few special tools to help me get through this, and now I’m sharing with you.  To quote the amazing Ragen Chastain, I’m a giver.

Fat Panic Bingo: Just print out this handy FAT PANIC BINGO document, grab some bags of M&Ms and that fat panic video will just fly by.  Enjoy!

Dire Disaster Drinking Game:  Choose one or more of the items listed on the Dire Disaster Drinking Game game sheet and write it/them on index cards.  Every time one of the items on the card shows up on the screen, everybody has a drink.  (I usually suggest shots for this game, but given what I’ve seen so far, you and your guests will be under the table within 15-20 minutes.  Maybe a beer, with low alcohol content, will allow you to get through an entire episode.)

SECRET Word: Pick one or more of the words listed in Dire Disaster Drinking Game and let everybody in your group know what it is.  As you watch, every time the “secret word” is uttered everybody yells and screams.  This game is probably familiar to all of us who watched live morning television in the 80’s…

Target Practice: Who says that people of size should be the only targets?  Put a small piece of translucent tape at the exact center of your television.  Then give each person a nerf suction cup gun and give each person their own color of arrows (or do teams).  Every time the players get really annoyed, they can let the arrows fly.  At the end of the game the one with the arrow closest to the center, “wins”.  NOTE: Shoot objects at your television at your OWN RISK.  If you’re worried about your TV, just arm everybody with wadded up paper towels or folded pairs of gym socks.  Not as satisfying as suction cups, but probably safer.

Prove It: Pick one person to be the judge or the “referee”.  Every time somebody makes an unsupported assertion, the remaining players should yell “prove it”.  Whoever yells first each time, gets a point.  At the end of the game the points are tallied and the one with the most points is the winner.

I am working on some more sober and studious tools and plan to post them here as well.  But in the meantime, I’m hoping these five special games will help both you and me get through this thing.  Hang in there and hold on to those sanity points my little Chicklettes!

Love,

The Fat Chick

I was on a panel last night at a screening of Strong, Julie Wyman’s new documentary for PBS Independent Lens.  The movie chronicles the life and career of female Olympic medal-winning weight lifter Cheryl Haworth.  In the movie, we learn a lot about the work that Cheryl does to get her body physically ready to compete in the Beijing Olympics.  The movie also shares a great deal about the work Cheryl does mentally and emotionally not only to compete at the international level, but also to accept a body that in some ways, falls outside the societal ideal.

There are so many ways that Cheryl has to be strong.  She has to put a great deal of energy into the process of building a body that is capable of lifting hundreds of pounds over her head and holding it there until the buzzer sounds.  As she mentions early in the film, to compete at her level she depends on her body’s size because, “mass moves mass”.  She points out that when you’re hoisting a few hundred pounds over your head, a big butt gives you a distinct advantage.  Cheryl’s big body has truly taken her places.  She’s competed throughout the world, she’s appeared on national television, and she’s been revered as an American Hero from the Olympics podium.

But the in the same country that applauds Cheryl for her strength and dedication and power, it can be a real challenge finding a cute pair of pants that fit properly.  And Cheryl has to live in a world where those who see her walking down the street and don’t recognize her as an Olympic athlete are likely to assume she sits on the sofa and eats bon-bons all day.  All while coping with the rigorous training, disappointing injuries and wear and tear that comes with being a top competitor on the international stage in a truly demanding sport.  Strong?  Indeed!  And Cheryl handles it all with powerful determination, humor and brutal honesty.  In many ways, I’m not sure she recognizes her own strength.

So my little chicklettes, do you know how strong you are?  Do you have powerful muscles that allow you to bend and stretch and dance and lift?  Do you stride purposefully and powerfully through life?  Do  you hold your head up and get on with it in a body that in some ways fails to meet our society’s arbitrary standards of beauty?  In short, do you know your own strength?  I invite you to take some time today to both recognize and celebrate the myriad ways you are strong.  Record your feelings.  Write about them in a journal, draw them with crayons, or even immortalize them in Play-doh.  But take time to appreciate and know your own strength.  Because my dear chicklettes, you are probably far stronger than you think.

Love,

The Fat Chick

The Iridium satellite at the Challenger Space Museum Cafeteria...

I ran into this bad boy in the cafeteria of the Challenger Space Museum in Peoria, AZ.  This shiny thing is a model of the Iridium Satellite created by Intel to service satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over the entire earth’s surface.  Were it not busy keeping watch over the vending machines and bad sandwiches at the museum, this satellite might be managing up to 1100 concurrent phone calls.  Some of these bad boys have tumbled to earth and in one case, collided with a defunct Russian satellite the Kosmos 2251.  The debris from the spectacular explosion could apparently be seen from several US cities.  In any case, this thing is BIG. Here’s the stats:

OPERATING location: Low earth orbit–approximate height 485 mi and inclination of 86.4

CURRENT location: Nondescript museum eatery

Weight: Over 1500 lbs.

Conclusion: An Iridium communications satellite weighs more than me.