Baggy

Wear what feels good to YOU!

Well it was hot in So Cal this past weekend so I did what every single other red-blooded California resident did and I went to the mall. I wasn’t really intent on shopping but rather on killing loads of time. So I went to lots of stores and tried lots of stuff on. My husband was with me, so naturally he rendered his opinions.

Often as I tried things on, he sent me back to the dressing room with a smaller size. It’s not that I’m losing weight (I’m not). It’s just that my renewed body confidence and my supportive husband are encouraging me to come out of the fat closet and wear clothes that actually fit. Many of the clothes in my closet at home are gorgeous, but at least one size too big. Often when I try something on that I love, if it shows even a leetle roll or jiggle or chub, I buy one size larger. A lot of the clothes in my wardrobe hang on me. Because, somehow, in my little brain, I imagined that if folks couldn’t SEE the rolls or chub or jiggle, they would imagine that it wasn’t there.

Trouble was, they can’t really see my body at all. And I’m coming to realize that my body is FABULOUS and it’s simply a crime to hide it under a big drape-y thing that is far too large for my frame. So I’m actively working now to buy clothes that show my body rather than draping it under the wardrobe equivalent of a sheet and hoping that folks imagine my body is fantastic.

Now my little chickadees, I want you to understand that you can wear anything you like. If you want to wear a muumuu, then by all means do so and feel free to ROCK that thing. I’m just reminding you that you have a choice. Maybe you could dare to bare just a little bit. Show some arms. Buy a skirt that curves lovingly around your butt. Wear a shirt that shows off some fantastic cleavage. Whatever floats your proverbial boat. Because it’s your fabulous body and you should show it off (or not show it off) any way you darn well please!

Love,

The Fat Chick

Some Athletes are Notably Missing from NBC’s Creepy Bodies in Motion Video

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An Olympian woman licks her lips accompanied by a boom chicka wow wow 70’s soft porn soundtrack in NBC’s Bodies in Motion clip on the NBC website.

I’ve admitted it before and I’ll admit it again. I am complete Olympics junkie. I LOVE watching the Olympics and cheering for people who have devoted a serious percentage of their lives to be incredibly good at something. But I have to admit how sad and disappointed I’ve been with the NBC coverage which seems intent on objectifying women and shows a ridiculous fetish-y need to show off the rear ends of incredibly talented women athletes.

First, there was the concern over the London weather being too cold for the beach volleyball players to wear their bikinis. Then there was the uproar over Gabby Douglas’ hair. And if that wasn’t enough, NBC felt the need to post a totally inappropriate video called “Bodies in Motion” that along with it’s 70’s soft porn style soundtrack featured a whole lot of women’s bodies, often without faces, in loving slow motion that featured, a lot of women’s butts. Not that Olympic booty isn’t wonderful. But seriously, these women train hard every day of their lives to be excellent at their sport. So why oh why do we need frame-filling close-ups of beach volley-butts?

Probably most distressing to me about this video is who ISN’T in the video. Weight lifters? Nope. Boxers? Uh-uh. Fencers, Judo Competitors, rowers, horseback riders, in short anything where women sport bodies considered slightly less movie-star-ready or wearing slightly more clothing? No, no, no, no and no.

And what really frosts my fridge is the effect that this desire for conventionally attractive bodies has on sponsorship dollars for women athletes. Sure if you’re gorgeous, blond, bouncy, ponytailed and razor thin, money can often be found. Meanwhile serious athletes like Sarah Robles often have to get by on a few hundred dollars per month and help from neighborhood food banks.

Let’s face it, not all athletes look like porn stars. Not all of them were considered worthy to star NBC’s soft porn video (which has since been pulled due to public outcry). Nope, lots of athletes look just like you and me. And nearly 1,000 of them participate in the fit fatties forum that I host with the ever-awesome Ragen Chastain.

So my little chicklettes, even if your rear-end is not bikini-clad or featured in barely safe for work fetish videos, don’t despair. Remember that fitness comes in all shapes and sizes.

Love,

The Fat Chick

How to Never Clean Your House

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With the extremely hot (well at least for LA) weather we’ve been having I can tell you that our house is dirty. Not a little bit, needs some tidying kind of straightening. Not a little Mary Poppins “spoonful of sugar” kind of cleaning. Oh no. This place is a dump. In the heat we haven’t had the energy to keep up with stuff like we normally do.

So since installing a new room air conditioner which allows us to stay sane in 2 rooms of our house we’ve started to think about cleaning up. But we quickly ran into a problem. Everywhere you look is a mess. And every time we start cleaning one thing, we run into 10 other things that need to be cleaned. And after a very short time, we throw our hands up, grab the dog, jump in the car, crank up the AC and head to Sonic again. (Who by the way, has the best ice for crunching in the EN-tire world).

I know that we’ll eventually get this mess cleaned up. We’ve done it before. And when we do get it done, it will be in one specific way–one step at a time. Outside of wrinkling my nose like Samantha on Bewitched (I am SOOOOOO old) and cuing a tinkling bell sound effect, one step at a time is the only way I know to get the job done. And the same is true for any sort of health or fitness goals I have for myself as well. As much as sometimes I want to add more exercise and overhaul my eating and change my sleeping patterns and add stress management tools all at once, I know how that will end. I’ll end up grabbing my dog and my husband, hopping in the car, cranking up the AC and going to sonic again.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash the sheets. It ain’t much. But it’s a start.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Dive Right In

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This happy bear shows off his great diving form…

In honor of the Olympics diving competitions, I thought I’d present this awesome looking bear and make a little suggestion. So often, when we’ve been berated for our weight and looked down upon, when we’ve heard the nasty comments, when we’ve internalized a need to hate our own bodies, we become cautious. We don’t want to try new things. We don’t want to wear a swimsuit in public. We stay wrapped in our robes of familiarity and just occasionally dip our big toe into the water.

Well my little chicklettes, my advice for you today is to pick something–ANYTHING–in your life and dive right in. Try something new. Plug your nose and plunge into the deep end of the pool. In this time with its dog days of summertime heat, it’s easy just to find a shady spot and lay low. But summertime is also the time when taking the plunge is most refreshing! So pick one thing that you’re holding back on or waiting for and just go for it!

Love,

The Fat Chick

Stuff that Weighs More than Me: Big Ben

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“Big Ben” actually refers to this bell within the Clock Tower in London.

Thought it was time for some Olympics-sized stuff that weighs more than me. And since the Olympics are in London right now, the first thing I thought of was Big Ben.

Naturally when most people point to Big Ben in London, they are actually pointing to the clock tower. Big Ben is the nickname given to the huge bell located in the belfry of the clock tower. The bell was cast in 1858 and first chimed the hour on July 11, 1859.

The huge bell is not rung by a clapper, but rather by a hammer located outside of the bell. In concert with the Great Westminster Clock, the bell is accurate to within one second. The clock is actually powered by gravity. There are weights on huge cables that are wound by the clock engineers three times per week. The engineers check the clock against the world clock from time to time and add or remove pennies to the pendulum to bring it back to perfect time.

Here’s some stats:

Height of the Clock Tower: 97 Meters

Dimensions of Big Ben: 7 ft., 6 in. tall and 9 ft. wide

Weight of the “hammer” that rings the bell: Over 400 lbs.

Weight of Big Ben (the bell): 13.5 tons

Conclusion: Big Ben weighs more than me. (It just might be louder than me too, but the jury’s still out on that one…)

Love,

The Fat Chick

Olympic Athletes Say “Enough” With the Fat Bashing Already

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It seems even winning a gold medal in the Olympics Heptathlon isn’t enough to shut people up about your weight. Women who can run and jump and hurdle and pole vault and lift hundreds of pounds at an undeniably elite athlete level are still receiving criticism in the media and in the social media stream about the size and shape of their bodies. And these women have had enough!

Olympic weightlifters Sarah Robles and Holley Mangold received criticism for their size and shape although they are elite athletes at the top of their game. Eight-time gold medal winner Liesel Jones from Australia was blasted for the way she filled out her swimsuit. And apparently qualifying for your 4th straight Olympics games is not enough to quiet critics unless your washboard ads are visibly rippling.

Even Jessica Ennis, arguably one of the fittest women in the world was criticized for the size and shape of her body. She went on to win the Heptathlon for Great Britain last week. Look, it’s one thing when folks have difficulty believing the fit/fat story in my case. I’m a size 20 and a mere aerobics teacher. But one has to find it at least a little ridiculous that the fittest women in the world are being criticized for not looking like supermodels. I guess we can take heart in the fact that there is a backlash, and these women are speaking back.

But apparently no matter how accomplished you are as a woman, you’re not okay unless you look great in a swimsuit, oh and have perfect hair.

My little chicklettes, all I can say is that the world most definitely sucks sometimes. All you can do is all you can do. And sometimes, you just have to tell those small minded critics out there to kiss your tailfeathers.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Ripples on the Pond

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At the Blogging Panel at the NAAFA Convention with some amaaazing ladies!

One of the things I loved past about this past weekend at the NAAFA convention was the blogging panel. I shared the table with the authors of Dances With Fat and NotBlueAtAll and the fabulous moderator Julianne Wotasik.

And one of the common themes that came up again and again at the panel was the way that none of us, on the panel or in the audience, ever seemed to know ahead of time how we were able to impact other people. It always seemed the small things, the innocuous things, the tossed off things that would find someone and change the way they felt about things. And this held true when it came to blogging or even just an off handed compliment we paid a stranger or a moment of kindness that came at a critical moment. You just never know how much you can help somebody just by doing your thing.

I was astonished to hear a story told by Ragen Chastain of Dances with Fat shared with the panel about the effect her blog had on a person of size who had contemplated suicide. This woman had decided to use pills but wasn’t sure about the appropriate dosage for a woman of size. This woman went on the internet and searched “fat suicide”. It turns out that Ragen’s blog had had so much hate mail suggesting that fat people should commit suicide that Dances With Fat came up in the search engine. The woman spent the entire night reading past blogs on Ragen’s site and in the morning decided to send Ragen an email explaining why her blog had helped her decide not to end her life. Because Ragen had been so bullied in the comments section of her own blog, that woman is alive today.

So my little chicklettes, you don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to write a best-selling novel or be a movie star. Someone asked the panel how to help people find happiness and body acceptance earlier in their lives. And the answer was this: just be yourself as hard and as completely as you can. That’s it. And you can make the world a better place for you and so many people around you.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Reducing A World Title to a Hairdo

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I’d like to talk today about another way that obsession with thinness reduces us. I wasn’t always a person who spoke out on behalf of HAES(R) and Size Acceptance. For many years, I hated my body. I was miserable because of my body. And I put my life on hold waiting to be pretty enough and thin enough to be ready to begin my life.

This went on for years.

There were years and years where I wasn’t living to my full potential, because I didn’t think it was possible for a woman of size. Day after day, I didn’t dare to try challenging things or exciting things because I thought they were impossible to achieve unless I was thin. Month after month, I let opportunities pass me by–waiting to be acceptable.

And all during this time I was spending thousands upon thousands of dollars and thousands upon thousands of hours focused on losing weight and recovering from the inevitable (at least for me) weight gain.

I love my life now, but I honestly wonder where I might of been had I not lost nearly two decades obsessed with losing weight. And I am one of the incredibly lucky ones. I have a genuinely wonderful supportive family. I have an amazing spouse. I have a survival instinct that has always fought against this desire to make me smaller–to make me less than.

But I wonder about the millions of us that are right now not achieving, not winning not being in a world where Gabby Douglas can win the most prestigious gymnastics award in the entire world, and face a huge argument about her hairstyle. I mean really? Gabby beat out countless thousands of gymnasts around the country, achieving an unbelievable level of perfection in a merciless sport where skill is measured in thousandths of a point, and you want to talk about her hair? What is going on here?

Is Gabby threatening the idea of what a gymnast should look like? Is she redefining a visual standard of success? You’d better believe it! And you’d better believe that a whole lot of people are threatened by it. And you shouldn’t be surprised when that threat manifests itself in terms of people finding any excuse to put her down.

You have to wonder, is obsession with thinness a tool used by those who must compete with us? Those who see our talent and our power and are afraid? Those who will do anything to put us down and make themselves seem better, sexier and more powerful? Those who will cut down the herd of competitors by any means necessary?

My dear chicklettes. You can choose, right now, to throw off your shackles. You can choose to love yourself and accept yourself. You can refuse to gain ascendancy on the backs of other women. You can choose to empower and strengthen your fellow women and succeed together. You can live your absolute best life, right now. Right this very second. I’ll be in the stands, waving a flag, jumping up and down and cheering.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Thursday Theater: Nike Ad Featuring Fit Fatty Runs During 2012 Olympics

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I have to admit that I was pretty excited to see this Nike ad pop up during the Olympics. When the jogger trotted into view I held my breath waiting for them to say something nasty. After watching all those perfect bodies in spandex, this kid was a breath of fresh air. And I have to say, that for the most part I think Nike got it right.

To me, this kid embodies the awesome spirit of the joy of fitness that I try to share on The Fat Chick website. He embodies the nearly 1,000 Fathletes featured in the Fit Fatties Forum which I host with the amazing Ragen Chastain. He’s out there doing it. He’s not limping along. His pace is steady. His breathing is even. There’s nothing tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic about it. He’s just going out for an every-day training run. And kicking butt.

The voiceover reads: “Greatness, it’s just something we made up. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift, reserved for a chosen few, for prodigies, for superstars. And the rest of us can only stand by watching. You can forget that. Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. It’s not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it. All of us.” Cue the logo text that reads: “Find Your Greatness”.

Now, I imagine, given the assumptions of our culture and the placement of the ad within the Olympics with its flood of conventionally beautiful and chiseled bodies that some viewers will add their own subscript stating “this kid needs to lose weight to be great.” But luckily nothing in the V.O. or text that says anything about finding greatness “within”. It’s talking about finding your greatness and is part of a group of ads featuring other unconventional athletes like this one, and this one and this one. Frankly, I wish the voiceover from this ad could be on the ad with the fat kid, but still. For the most part, I found myself giddy with excitement when I saw this one.

And yes, Nike could make a lot more fitness clothes in much bigger sizes. I wish they did. Although they do have a few pieces of plus-sized wear that are 1-3x (generously sized) that I have purchased and I absolutely adore. But there’s not a whole lot to choose from.

So, perfect? No, far from it. But I think, with this ad campaign, Nike displayed a potential for greatness.

So my little chicklettes, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what YOU think.

Love,

The Fat Chick

All New From Concentrate: Fat Chick Quips

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Keep an eye out for “Fat Chick Quips”!

Reduction does mean to make smaller. But sometimes, like when you’re cooking an AMAZING sauce, reduction means to distill or to concentrate. You take 2 cups of wine, and “cook it down” until it’s one cup of concentrated wine-flavored yummyness.

So in honor of our discussion on reduction this week, I”m pleased to launch my “Fat Chick Quips”. These are pithy little sayings that “boil down” ideas about loving and honoring our bodies into short, little quotes. These are great to share (via your favorite social media spot) with your friends who might need a little pick-me-up. And since I KNOW y’all are brilliant, if you have any sayings that you’d like me to put out in this format, I’d be honored to include them. I’ll be happy to credit you. Just send me an email at: jeanette at thefatchick dot com with your short quotes.

So my little chicklettes, keep an eye out on facebook and Pinterest and Tumblr for more Fat Chick Quips. And don’t be shy! Send me some of your pithy, super awesome sayings right away!

Love,

The Fat Chick