Thursday Theater: Joy in the Dance with Helen Keller

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For this Thursday Theater, I wanted to share this amazing video featuring Helen Keller and Martha Graham. Apparently when these two women met, they recognized that they were kindred spirits. Martha Graham was immediately taken by Helen’s ‘gracious embrace of life’. And indeed, Helen’s joy at experiencing the dance in her own unique way is palpable.

You can read a lot more about the meeting here, including a very wonderful story about Helen learning the meaning of the word “jump”. Apparently while experiencing the dance, Helen asked what the word “jump” meant. Martha Graham called one of the dancers over and placed Helen’s hands gently on his waist. He then jumped in the air several times. Helen was so excited as she now understood the full meaning of this word. She experienced the freedom that comes when a body leaves the earth. “How like thought, how like the mind it is!” she exclaimed.

I played Helen Keller in a theatrical version of The Miracle Worker when I was in high school. Ever since then, she has been an important influence in my life. I find this video especially moving for two reasons. First, I think it shows that dance is a very powerful form of communication that breaks through many barriers. And second, I think it shows how wonderful it is that each of us can experience joy in a way that is personal and unique. I love watching Helen’s face in the video and watching the abandon with which she experiences life. It’s something that I would like to aspire to one day. I find it deeply inspiring and hope you do too.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Fat Activism’s Day in the Sun?

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Well looking back, I’d have to say that this September and October have been pretty amazing months for fat activists. Both Jennifer Livingston and Stella Boonshoft rose from obscurity and went all the way to the Today Show. Jennifer Livingston even appeared on Ellen talking about her anti-bullying rant. Veteran fat activist Ragen Chastain appeared prominently on both Time and Newsweek web feeds yesterday after acquiring over 100,000 signatures on her petition asking Disney not to create special, 5’11”, size 0 versions of their characters just to fit in a Lanvin dress for Barney’s. Even yours truly appeared on Hallmark’s new Home & Family Show with Paige Davis last week. I attended the first plus-sized fashion show held during LA Fashion Week a few weeks ago. And I’m sure there’s lots of other amazing things that happened this month in the media and the public eye featuring us fluffier folk. What’s happening out there? Is size acceptance finally having a day in the sun? Maybe. And if so, it’s about darn time.

It’s hard to know what is fueling this blip. I know in Ragen’s case, it’s a combination of brilliant strategy and very hard work. And to be honest, I’ve worked my butt off as well. But the Home & Family gig happened as a result of one of my business partners running into a talent producer at the local coffee shop. And although both Jennifer and Stella’s journey began with a single, somewhat public step, I’d venture to say neither of them expected to end up on the Today Show. Is there something in the air? Is it because October is Anti Bullying Month? Is it because we’re on the heels of Weight Stigma Awareness Week and Love Your Body Day? Is the world finally catching on to what we’ve been trying to say for the past 50 years?

I hesitate to say that this is IT, and the world has changed for fat people FOREVAH. I’ve seen these moments come and go. This may just be a blip on the radar. But I think we should take heart that this blip has happened. I think we should Carpe freakin’ Diem and seize this darn day. Because in the size acceptance and size diversity movement things are often very hard. Sometimes it seems like everybody is against you or nobody is even listening. So all you rad fatties out there, let’s take a moment to store this time in our memories and savor it. Let’s keep it safe so we can pull it out on a rainy day. Because none of us activists in the public eye have done this all by ourselves. It is a movement. And every brave thing you do, every radical act of self respect and joy that you perpetrate in the world adds fuel to the fire. You are changing the world my friends. Keep up the good work!

Love,

The Fat Chick

P.S. One really cool activism project is the Fit Fatties Forum created by Ragen Chastain and myself. Why not hop on over there and take a look? Better yet, how about joining and posting a photo of you working out and enjoying your day in the sun?

Size Acceptance Young and Old

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I recently ran across this photo on Facebook and was floored by the brave beautiful young woman staring at me. And when I read the post from Stella Boonshoft that went with it, I got even more excited. And the longer story, was also touching and interesting.

I’m so amazed at the brave and amazing things that young size acceptance heroes and heroines are up to these days. They are putting themselves out there in new and exciting ways. They are making a significant impact on the movement and on peoples lives at younger and younger ages. They are getting it done!

To a certain extent, I think young people in the size acceptance movement are very fortunate. They’ve grown up in the age of computers and the internet where the concept of size acceptance may be available at a much younger age. Even if they are the only fat kid in the class, they can connect with other fatties all over the world via facebook and tumblr and twitter. After all, I hadn’t even heard of the notion of size acceptance until I was nearly 30 years old.

We older folks have a lot to learn from the younger set when it comes to body acceptance. We can see what a life is like when size acceptance begins in high school, junior high or even elementary school. We can see the energy savings that come from not beating yourself up for 40 years before you start to feel better. We can marvel at the bravery of a college girl posting a revealing picture of her body with rolls and stretch marks and all. We can be encouraged by her direct stare and her challenging words:

MOST OF ALL, this picture is for me. For the girl who hated her body so much she took extreme measures to try to change it. Who cried for hours over the fact she would never be thin. Who was teased and tormented and hurt just for being who she was.

I’m so over that.

THIS IS MY BODY, DEAL WITH IT.

and FUCK YOU ALL who tried to degrade my being and sense of self with your hurtful comments and actions.

GUESS WHAT IT DIDN’T WORK HAHAHAHAH

But if we read between the lines, we see that growing up today as a fat person is no picnic. The same technology that allows young people of size to connect with one another, subjects them to the potential for 24/7 bullying–often from anonymous sources. Stella’s story has generated relatively positive results–receiving hundreds of likes per minute when first posted and launching her blog on a national stage. But she has also had to shovel through some of the nastiest vitriol the Internet can serve up. And it’s not hard to imagine that Stella’s story might have had a very different ending. In our visual world, the pressure to be stick thin and look like a television show/rock star/supermodel/celebrity is greater than ever. And maybe we, who grew up in a different time, have already endured decades of lumps, can offer some perspective to the younger generations as well.

They say hindsight is 20/20. And I find myself having more and more hind to my sight these days. So I can offer Stella some thoughts and advice. I can say things like:

Enjoy your day in the sun. They are rare but beautiful. But know that rain will come as well.

You don’t have to read every comment. There’s only so much nasty a body can endure in one day. Let your friends help you filter through and find what you really need to know.

You are not a persona, you are a person. That means you will not be perfect. But that’s okay, because what makes us human makes us real and allows others to relate to us. This allows us to do good in the world.

There’s a place for folks of all ages in the size acceptance movement. The generations are different and face very different challenges. But those differences ultimately make us stronger. We are better when we learn from one another. Here’s to using our differences to unite, to share and to build a better place for all of us.

Love,

The Fat Chick

P.S. Want to get my newsletter and a bunch of awesome free stuff? Why not join The Fat Chick Clique? It’s super fun, totally free and literally takes ten seconds to join (well 15 if you type slowly.) oxoxoxo

Hooray for Hydration: Pour Yourself a Tall One

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Here in the U.S. many of us have a drinking problem. I’m not talking about alcohol here. I’m talking about simply not drinking enough water. Sure, there’s a lot of fancy stuff we can do for our health. We can drink sports drinks and down vitamin shots and so forth. But often, the thing that will make us feel better is as close as the nearest tap and virtually free.

There’s not really any excuse. But I’ll admit that I often get busy and tied up with the everyday drama of my life and I forget to drink water. Then comes around 3 PM and I’m sporting a major headache or feeling lethargic. I’m tempted to pop a few aspirins. But maybe all I really need is the glass of water.

Nearly every function in our bodies involves water:

in saliva and stomach secretions it helps to digest food
in blood, it helps transport nutrients and oxygen to all the cells of the body
in body fluids, it helps lubricate joints and cushions organs and tissues · in urine, it carries waste products out of the body
in sweat, it removes body heat generated during exercise

(from Physician and Sports Medicine, Nancy Clark MS, RD – May 1995).

In terms of athletic performance, few things are more important than being properly hydrated. The amount of water needed varies from person to person. People have different “sweat rates” and therefore have different requirements for replacing water after a workout. But the effects of dehydration on your workout can be pretty traumatic. I know when I did the marathon, I almost derailed the whole thing because I was hoarding my water and not drinking enough. I was afraid they would take down the drink stations and wouldn’t have enough for later. Mary Ann, my awesome training partner, ultimately helped me find a bar, where I stopped in to fill my Camelbak again. (And the two of us popping into a bar along the railroad tracks, mid-marathon, on a cloudy Saturday in November in Springfield, Missouri were a sight to see.) Sure it took a few minutes to do that, but at least it allowed me to finish without the massive headache that had been hampering my progress.

Wondering if you’re drinking enough water? Well my dear, the easiest way to tell is to check your pee. Pale yellow or mostly clear means you’re doing great. Dark yellow means it’s time to get some good old H2O into your system. Most people need 6-8 glasses of water per day. You may need significantly more if you drink caffeine or alcohol, live in a hot climate, or sweat a lot during exercise.

Look, of all the super fancy fitness performance advice I can give you, this is some of the most important. Make sure you’re drinking plenty of water before, during and after your workout sessions. You’ll feel great and you’ll have plenty of fluid left for blood, sweat and tears.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Stuff That Weighs More Than Me: The Giant Spud from the Famous Idaho Potato Tour

Thursday Theater: The Second Candy Crowley Debate about her Weight

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I have to say that Candy Crowley did a pretty good job of being tough in the most recent presidential debate. And it’s no surprise that some folks are pretty up in arms about the fact that she did her job and told the leader of the free world and the man who is competing for that position to sit down and be quiet at times. And there is some concern that she added information to the debate when perhaps she should not have.

But most people seem to agree that she did a much better job of managing the dialog between two of the world’s most powerful men than had been seen in the first debate. So are people on Facebook singing her praises? Is the Twitterverse glowing with her awesomeness? Well yes, and then again no. Because what some people feel the need to talk about right now is Candy Crowley’s weight.

Here’s one post I ran across on Facebook:

Since it’s the 21st Century, why do we even need Moderators? Siri can ask the questions, refrain from interrupting, and 5 seconds after the red timer light goes on, cut off the speaker’s mike. Also, we can save the Rain Forest from devastation by not having to raise all the beef cattle necessary to feed Sliders in the hospitality tent to Candy Crowley.

I found this truly offensive, so I said “This is offensive”. Here’s the response I got:

LOL! I think the above two responses are even funnier than the original post (wink). Talk about what’s wrong with America! We need a tickle prison for people who live by strict PC rules; maybe enough laughter will lighten them up. And I’m not talking about their weight.

And this one:

She’s a big fatty, and she’s demonstrably biased towards Democrats, that’s enough for me.

Okay here’s the thing. Declaring that a debate moderator is biased towards one political party may or may not be true in this case. But at least the question is relevant to the discussion at hand. What does the fact that she’s a big fatty have to do with the price of fish in Finland? Nothing. It’s just a form of hate speech against an extremely intelligent, successful and powerful woman that someone is pretty sure they will get away with. It’s a cheap shot, and it’s lazy thinking. But it’s so pervasive in our society that people are appalled when called out on it.

I don’t want to dwell a great deal more on this particular Facebook exchange. What I really want to talk about is the idea that a woman can ever be powerful enough, successful enough, or strong enough in this world to avoid being called a “fatty, fatty 2×4”? Is there ever a moment that she’s free from this sort of playground harassment? Based on what I see coming through on my Facebook feed, I’d have to say no.

And I’m not saying this to depress you. I’m saying this to make a different point.

For many years I lived under the delusion that if I were smart enough and funny enough and successful enough and dressed well enough, and so on, I would finally be free from childish taunting about my weight. But at a certain point I realized that I won’t ever be “good enough” to avoid this kind of nonsense. I had to learn to deal with it when it came at me. And I have to work to change the world. Because I’m unlikely to permanently change my size to a level that’s acceptable, and I can’t change the rest of me enough to make this kind of mindless, petty, playground nonsense not happen to me.

And you know what? This afforded me a freedom of a sort. I started focusing my energy on getting what I really wanted in life rather than avoiding pain. I realized that I had no moral obligation to be jolly and I only needed to be funny when I really wanted to.

You don’t have to be nice all the time. You don’t have to be funny or jolly. You don’t have to be tame or quiet or good. Pain will happen anyways. People will say stupid things anyways. So you might as well be the person you always wanted to be. And join me and my colleagues in our quest to make the world a better place for people of all sizes.

Love,

The Fat Chick

P.S. Why not start by joining The Fat Chick Clique? It’s free and it’s liberating!

Never Good Enough: How a Big Body Means “You’re Doing it Wrong”

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One of the things I find deeply frustrating as a fat woman is the assumption by many complete strangers, that I am not doing enough for my health. And the more I appear in public and on television, the more I hear this criticism leveled at me. No matter what I’m doing for my health, clearly I’m not doing it enough, because, well look at me. And if I should claim to be doing something far beyond what another person is doing, then I must be lying.

For example, I am a fitness teacher. I exercise pretty regularly and moderately. But many people believe that clearly, I’m neither exercising hard enough, nor the right way, because look at me. I’m still fat. I should lift more weights. I should exercise at a higher intensity. I should do Fred the Celebrity’s Super Insane Fitness Plan. Forget that I might get injured. Forget that I would hate it and quit after a few workouts. The folks that know everything about everything are glad to let me know that since they are thin and I am fat, I’m not working out as well as them. And when I tell them, that when I was training for the marathon and walking/running up to 35 miles per week I still maintained this weight, they tell me I was eating 4,000 calories per day, or lying. People who are conventionally thin, don’t get this treatment. If a conventionally thin person says that they exercise 45 minutes per week, they are usually told, to keep doing what they are doing because they look great.

The same is true with eating. Many people assume that since I am big, I eat nothing but junk food, I eat large amounts of food and I eat all the time. In pre-interviews for certain public appearances, I am grilled over and over about what I eat, when I eat, how much I eat, and so on. No thin woman is asked these questions. It is assumed that if they are thin, they are eating well. But the producers ask these questions of me because A) they think their audience will wonder (and they are probably right about this) and B) they just can’t imagine that I’m not eating the whole house because, well, look at me. We have been conditioned so deeply to believe that fat people do unhealthy things and fat people do healthy things that we assume that we know, by looking at someone what their habits are. In the name of full disclosure, I would say that my eating habits are pretty average. I eat more than some and less than some. I eat more junk food than some and less than some. Some of those who eat less than me weigh more than me. And many people who eat more than me weigh less than me. As comforting as the idea is that we can control every aspect of our appearance and our health outcomes with our behaviors, it just isn’t true.

So all we can do is what seems to be best for us at the time. There is no perfect exercise regimen. There is no perfect diet. There are no perfect people. There’s just people. So the next time you look in the mirror and decide that your size means you aren’t doing the right healthy things or doing enough healthy things, maybe that’s the time to just stop. You don’t have to put yourself into the same box that society does. Make your own plans and build your own life. Build a life that is joyous and right for YOU.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Big Girls on the Red Carpet

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Jeanette working the Red Carpet with the two directors of the Haute Curves Fashion Show for LA Fashion Week: Angela Rene’ AKA “The Purple Diva”, CEO of PurpleDivaDesigns.com and Jasmine Epperson, CEO at Kris Eliza Boutique

On the list of things we big girls are told we will never experience, you can add wearing beautiful clothes. As a kid, I never thought I’d get to wear gorgeous things and the idea that there would be plus-sized models seemed extremely remote.

So in my week of saying “neener, neener, neener” to the list of stuff we fluffy folk “shouldn’t expect to enjoy,” I’m telling you that the models ROCKED THE HOUSE at this past weekend’s Haute Curves fashion show for LA Fashion Week. For over two hours we watched unbelievably gorgeous men and women of all sizes, small to super-sized, strut down the runway in some extremely gorgeous clothes. And folks, these were not your mama’s muumuus. There was an awful lot of extremely beautiful clothes from delightfully weird to sporty to super sexy on that runway. Angela and Rene put on an absolutely spectacular event!

The Fat Chick near the runway at the Haute Curves fashion show.

So besides the need to feed my considerable ego by showing you pictures of the cool thing I got to do on Saturday night, why am I sharing this with you? I think it’s important to bust myths about what people of size can expect for their lives. I know for me, the panic over the things I thought I would miss as a plus-sized woman, like true love and a kickin’ black leather skirt I could wear, once filled me with feelings of panic. And I think in some cases our loved ones (especially our parents) are unduly fearful of the things we will miss out on or can’t have if our bodies are larger than societal ideals.

It took several decades, but I now realize that there is virtually nothing completely unavailable to me as a person of size. (Well maybe a comfortable coach-class airplane seat, but I’m not sure ANYBODY feels comfortable in one of those.) And it has taken several decades, but those who love me most have come to realize that I can do all that I want and have all that I dreamed of without losing 100 pounds first. And let me share with you, it has been an absolute blessing and a joy for all of us to just calm the heck down about the whole thing.

Yes Virginia, there is a Sexy Santa Claus costume just for you. There’s even a fabulous black leather skirt in your size, just waiting for you to claim it.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Love and Marriage, Size XXL

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Celebrated my 17th wedding anniversary with the most amazing man in the world yesterday! What a lucky, lucky duck I am. All together I have spent over 25 years and more than half my life with this super awesome guy. Color me completely and totally grateful.

Now why am I telling you about this? Well one reason I’m telling you about it is that I AM grateful, and I want the whole world to know that. But the other reason I’m telling you is to remind you that a lifetime of love with a fabulous partner is possible at any size. I’d call it “Love At Every Size”, except for the somewhat unfortunate acronym generated by that title. Let’s just say that sex, love, marriage, kids and the whole 9 yards are possible even if you aren’t a size 2.

Finding this out was a very important part of my journey to loving the skin I’m in. As a young person, a lot of my frantic dieting was driven by panic. I was terrified that, as a person of size, I wouldn’t or couldn’t find someone to love me. And even after meeting and falling in love with and marrying the “best man in the whole wide world” I was terrified that he would wake up one day, realize that I’m fat and leave me.

So I’m sharing this with you as a reminder. You can find the best partner in the world and even keep that person in your life even if you’re fat. And whether you are ten pounds over what society calls your “ideal weight” or several hundred, there’s someone out there for you. Yeah, I know you may have dated a few duds. Honey, it happens to all of us. But according to the US Census Bureau, the world has a population of over 7 billion people. That’s billion with a “b”. So you met a few potential partners that are less than ideal. Maybe you’ve dated a baker’s dozen. So what? That’s 13 down, and 6,999,999,987 to go.

We need to teach this to our kids and share it with the world “at large”. Your ability to find, give and receive love is not dependent on your BMI. And there’s someone out there for every BODY.

Love,

The Fat Chick