Tag Archives: Jeanette DePatie

Loving Your Body by Listening to Your Body

I’ve been married for nearly 20 years, and that’s quite a while. If I’ve learned anything over this past 20 years about relationships, it’s this–if you love somebody you have to take time to listen to them. Sure, it’s important to buy each other presents, and show affection. And yeah, sex is pretty important too. But few things are as important as taking time to really hear what your partner has to say.

Today is Love Your Body Day, and I think that’s wonderful. It’s a day which encourages us to celebrate the bodies we have as they are. It’s a day which encourages us to put diets aside and to spend at least 24 hours not comparing ourselves to unrealistic media ideals of bodies and not beating ourselves up for failing to “measure up”.

But I think we can take this relationship with our bodies a little further than failing to beat ourselves up. And I think one of the most important things we can do to show our bodies love is to learn to listen to them.

Our bodies are mysterious and magical and wondrous. So much of it works without our having to think consciously about it at all. Our hearts beat, and breathing happens. Our stomachs digest food and our bodies break it into nutrients that fuel movements both conscious and unconscious. But for things that we need to do consciously like find food and move our limbs, and lay down to sleep our bodies have a very sophisticated built-in wiring system intricately connected with our brains. And if we become attuned to that wiring system, we can learn so much about what our bodies need.

So many of us have learned to be frustrated by the fact that our bodies get hungry. But I for one, am deeply grateful for it. I am a busy person who is easily distracted. Were it not for hunger, I think I might find myself stranded on the side of the road somewhere completely out of fuel and without roadside assistance. Luckily, I get hungry often and in no uncertain terms. So even if I find it really annoying, I find that I have to take the time to find food on the regular. What’s more, I find that if I take the time to listen, my body is pretty specific about what food it wants. The more carefully I listen to my body, the more attuned I am to what nutrients I am lacking and what foods might best top off my nutritional tank. Sometimes my body craves carrots and sometimes (well most of the time) it craves chocolate. And it seems the more carefully that I follow my body’s menu choices (rather than my brain’s dictates about what I should eat) the better I feel. And when I really listen to what my body wants to eat, and give in by eating precisely as much of those things as my body wants, I am rewarded. My body feels warm, wonderful and satisfied.

Another area where I’m learning to finally listen to my loud-talking body is in movement. Our bodies are capable of amazing abilities to move through space. Not only can we walk across a room or catch a ball without thinking about it, but we can also hike and swim in the ocean and dance. And this is another place where the highly sophisticated wiring in our bodies has a lot to tell us. If I sit too long, my body protests. My back and knees stiffen. I feel pain in my head and neck. On the other hand, if I move too much or too long or in a way that is too intense for my current fitness level, my body sends me messages of pain and fatigue. Now just like hunger, pain and fatigue can be deeply annoying. My schedule may convince my conscious mind that it does not want to get up and move or it may not want to stop moving or it may find it extremely inconvenient to sleep. Thankfully, my body sends signals that are difficult to ignore and I try to find ways to meet my body’s demands by moving or resting or sleeping. And when I get this right, my body rewards me. I feel a lightness in my limbs and a glowing sense of energy when I am well-exercised and well rested.

Our bodies strive for something that is so difficult for us to achieve in modern life–balance. Our bodies tell us when we are eating more food than we need or not enough. Our bodies tell us when we need more broccoli, and when we need buns. Our bodies tell us when to leap and when to laugh and when to rest and when to run. And when I listen, truly listen, to my body, it sings. The energy flows through me and I feel a hum that runs from my toes to the top of my head. That’s what it feels like to be in a loving relationship with my body. It feels wonderful. It’s enough to make me strive to make every day love my body day.

Love,

Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

Stupid F@#!ing Injuries

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Medic!

If you’ve done any sort of exercise for any length of time you’ve probably experienced some sort of pain or injury. I know. I feel ya. I’ve experienced injuries of many shapes and sizes and they all, unequivocally suck. But of all injuries I’ve faced, I have to admit that I’ve had the hardest time coping with the stupid f*$%ing injuries.

If you’re wondering what I mean, let me explain. There are injuries that sound justified or even tough. Like, “I got a stress fracture training for that Ironman race”. Then there are stupid f##$ing injureis like, “I tripped over my own shoelace and now I’m going to be in traction for a month.” It doesn’t sound sexy. Nobody’s thinking, “wow what dedication and stuff, the guy walked in SHOES, with LACES. And they came untied and he just KEPT GOING!” Nobody is making YouTube videos with inspiring music behind them documenting your “tripping over your shoelaces” comeback. Like I said, it just sucks. Because as much as your knee or your back or your shoulder is hurting, you also have to deal with the agonizing blow to your pride.

I had a reminder of this just this past week. I hurt my back, working on the remodel of our house. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad, right. Oh, did I mention I was SWEEPING at the time? Yup, all I was doing was sweeping and my external obliques let out a rebel yell:

OMG it was so embarassing. My husband asked me what was wrong. And I replied that I had just experienced the dumbest injury in history. He told me to take some Advil and go lay down. At first I told him, no–that I didn’t have time to lay down. And in his infinite awesomeness he replied,

“Jeanette, tweaking your back is not the dumbest injury in history. That kind of stuff happens to everybody. But if you don’t take the time now to lay down and you make this worse and you allow a little injury to become a massive, got to lay in back for a week injury, now THAT would be pretty dumb.”

God, I love my husband–that is when I’m not trying to kill him for being annoyingly correct all the time. But you know what? He had a point. I wish I could say that the injuries I suffered were some sort of sexy battle scars from the hard core exercise wars, but the truth is, the worst injuries I’ve ever had have been stupid !@#$ing injuries. Including:

1. Meniscus tear from jumping up on some exercise mats to get some exercise equipment for one of my classes. Result: 4 weeks on crutches, massive physical therapy.

2. Torn ligament in the sole of my foot from catching my sandal on a single cement step at my parents house. Result: 6 weeks on crutches, massive physical therapy.

3. Tweaking my back from sweeping. AAAAARGH!

Look there’s a point to all this and here it is. We alllllllllll experience stupid f!$%ing injuries from time to time. It happens to everybody. Get over it. The only thing that you can control is how you cope with it after it happens. You can rest, get diagnosis, and get treatment OR you can ignore it and allow a small f#$%ing injury to become a MASSIVE f!#$%ing injury. And as my husband says, that’s the dumbest kind of injury of all.

Hang in there!

Love,

Jeanette DePatie (AKA The Fat Chick)

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A Sensible Approach to Healthy Kids

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Folks of ALL ages dancing their hearts out!

I have to admit that the blog post I did on Monday broke my heart. The idea that it is even possible that a six-year-old girl may have died because of weight stigma is just so sad. I need to reiterate, that none of us can know precisely what that doctor was thinking. But the testimony she gave at her own trial makes me more than a little suspicious.

And you know what? It doesn’t have to be this way.

There are far simpler ways to help kids be healthy. Not the least of which is simply helping them find safe places to play and joyful places to move their bodies. Because one of the best things we can do to help kids be healthy is offer them fun ways to get exercise. Yet another study came out this week that indicates that cognitive abilities among kids have a lot more to do with fitness levels than BMI. But this fact, doesn’t seem to deter those who feel the best way to help kids be healthy is to send home a BMI report card. Despite the fact that BMI is very loosely correlated with health in young children, and that focusing on BMI makes kids more likely to develop eating disorders, and that focusing on BMI tends to lead to shame in kids which not only makes them develop other bad health behaviors, but also tends to make them gain weight, we are STILL PERPETRATING THIS NONSENSE IN SCHOOLS. Let’s focus on helping kids be healthy without increasing the risk from eating disorders. Remember this chart?

Helping kids be healthy can be positive and fun. This past weekend I led some fitness demonstrations at a local event. The City of Hope hosted its Foothill Fitness Challenge event here in Duarte and over 1,200 people showed up. It was so much fun! I led two fun dance demonstrations and was so excited to see moms and dads and kids all dancing together and having a good time. Check it out:

It made my heart so happy. Little kids and big kids and grandmas were all dancing together. If we want to help kids be happy, LET’S DO THAT! Let’s find some kids, put on some music and dance with them. Sure maybe it’s simplistic, but it’s also fun and is likely to do no harm.

So what do you say? I challenge you to connect with a kid and go out and play this week. Dance, bike, throw a ball around–whatever makes you (and them) happy.

Love,

Jeanette (AKA The Fat Chick)

Six Year Old Girl Dies–Diagnosed as Fat?

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Sorry to start your week out with such a sad story, but I think it needs to be told. Late last week I became aware of the story of Claudialee, a six-year-old girl who passed away after being misdiagnosed with type 2 diabetes, when she actually had type 1 diabetes. There is a very detailed account of the story here.

I’m not going to go into every detail of this story, but I did want to point out a few things that stand out for me. One is that Claudialee has a family history of diabetes. Another is that the doctor diagnosed Claudialee as obese. It is clear that the doctor was deeply concerned about the young child’s weight–prescribing diet and exercise in an effort to get her to lose weight. It is also clear that the mother closely followed the doctor’s recommendations–carefully monitoring what Claudialee ate and making sure she got plenty of exercise.

What is not clear is why the doctor felt so strongly that this child had Type 2 Diabetes as opposed to Type 1. According to a source cited in the article (The National Institute of Health) at that age group, Type 1 Diabetes has an incidence of about 20 in every 100,000 kids, whereas Type 2 Diabetes has an incidence of .4 in every 100,000 kids or 1 in every 250,000 kids. What’s more, at that age, Type 1 Diabetes is a far more urgent problem than Type 2 Diabetes. So what led to the doctor’s misdiagnosis?

We may never know for sure. But it does invite one to speculate whether the child’s weight was a factor. Clearly, getting Claudialee’s weight down was a prime part of the prescription to the parent. And as the child’s weight went down, the doctor neglected to do some of the critical follow-up blood tests that would have indicated that something was drastically wrong.

The article states:

Because Mercado [the doctor] had locked in on type 2, she did not monitor her patient’s blood. She did not tell Irma [the child’s mother] to purchase a $20 blood sugar meter from the drugstore. She did not ask Irma about the frequency with which her daughter drank and urinated. And neither she nor Cabatic [another doctor] described to Irma the danger signs to look out for.

When asked in court, why the doctor seemed so certain that the child had type 2 diabetes when type 1 diabetes was so much more prevalent among children that age, she stood by her original diagnosis:

“How many type 2 infant diabetics have you treated?” a lawyer asked her.

“A lot,” she replied. “Maybe it’s geographical, because I work at Brooklyn as an assistant professor and also in wellness program where there are a lot of obese children, so we diagnose a lot of children with type 2 diabetes.”

Clearly there may have been other issues at play here. Claudialee was on Medicaid and doctors are paid significantly less for treating patients on Medicaid than they are for those with private insurance. The doctor was not board-certified, and the article points out that finding board certified physicians willing to work in clinics that take Medicaid can be difficult. And this is a single case where a single doctor has been convicted of malpractice. We will never know exactly what was in the doctor’s mind.

I but I personally found myself wondering if this doctor had ever previously considered that she may have a bias against fat patients–and maybe even fat children with low SES in particular. I wonder, had this doctor considered the potential for her own bias in this arena, would that child still be alive? Would Claudialee still be running around and playing today?

We certainly have plenty of evidence for a seeming “hysteria” around the issue of childhood Type 2 diabetes. A simple google search of “childhood diabetes epidemic” yields hundreds and hundreds of articles. This hysteria has spawned a number of shaming techniques aimed at children despite the fact that shame has been proven over and over again to be ineffective at treating obesity at any age, that shame is more likely to make kids engage in unhealthy behaviors, and that eating disorders are much, MUCH more prevalent among children than diabetes of any kind.

All I know for sure, is that stories like that of Claudialee get me even more fired up to fight against weight stigma in medicine. And that passion leads me to come to you with a plea. The Association for Size Diversity And Health and the Size Diversity Task force have embarked on a documentary film project to help doctors see and understand weight stigma and weight bias in medicine. This project is called the Resolved project. But this project needs a little bit of help from you. We are raising funds to finish the documentary on Go Fund Me here. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Even if you can only give a few dollars, that will help. And if you don’t have a few dollars to spend, would you consider sharing this with your friends and asking them to help? Let’s see if we can end weight stigma and weight bias in the healthcare industry for good. And maybe, just maybe we won’t have stories like Claudialee’s any more.

Love,

Jeanette (The Fat Chick)

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I’m Back! (With a New Video)

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Maybe we all need to do a little more dancing…

Okay kids, I’m a little bit tardy (2 days) but I am back with a renewed desire to offer you juicy blogging goodness. And I’m back with a brand new video showing just a little bit of what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks.

On September 18, we held our second annual Hot Flash Mob in Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. The weather was GLORIOUS! Our initial turnout was small, but after some rapid recruiting among those enjoying the fabulous San Francisco sunshine we got a crowd together and did our dance…

This crowd was a great mix! There were men and women. There were older people, younger people and in-betweenies. There were thin people and fat people and people with amazing hair and even a cameo from one of San Francisco’s street population. We all had a wonderful time.

And all of this makes me more determined THAN EVER to get groups of people together and get them dancing. Because dancing is sort of like a magic catalyst. It crosses line of age, shape, gender, class, language, economic status and more. And even if you can’t do the moves just like I do, we can all find and share the beat together and boogie down.

It this time of serious strife and division, where I almost can’t bear to look at the news and hear the latest details about the complete breakdown of civility and communications, I think it is more important than ever to just dance.

Maybe that’s what we need to do. Just get all the politicians in the world together to dance:

Then again, maybe not…

Love,

Jeanette

P.S. Want to get access to FREE STUFF? Just opt in RIGHT HERE!

What fitness looks like*

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Today I was tagged in a post by the super awesome Kimber Simpkins pointing me to a gorgeous new slideshow on Mind Body Green entitled I Am A Yogi. It was posted by photographer Robert Sturman as the first entry in what he hopes to be a big group of photos on Instagram portraying yogis of all shapes, sizes, ages, races, creeds and situations. Sturman says:

Whether you’re a CEO, serving a life sentence in prison, living with cerebral palsy, living with breast cancer, a full-figured human being, a burn victim, living with HIV, living at the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, 95 years old, or are just plain human, I invite you to post a picture on Instagram — just one per person, please! — and say a little something about yourself. Use the hashtag #iamayogicelebration and tag @robertsturman any time through the end of September.

I am pretty excited about these slides as I think it gets at a very important part of the work I and other allies like Ragen Chastain do in the fitness industry. This work includes helping the world widen their visual definition of how fitness looks.

This so important and so necessary in a world where fitness, especially fitness for women has turned into a code word meaning, “any and all activities necessary to make your body fit my culturally predetermined definition of somebody I would like to have sex with.*” Blogger Kevin Moore had a lot to say on his scathing teardown of the “strong is the new sexy meme” here.

Strong isn’t really replacing skinny; being skinny is no longer enough. Now, ladies, you need to be skinny and ripped. It’s an additional layer of self-loathing (perfectly suited for hypergymnasiacs), just in case people had started to get desensitized to the omnipresent and psychologically crippling display of corpse-thin women in the media.

I’m not saying that the women in these ads are not fit. I’m also not saying that they are not sexy. I AM saying that they don’t get to be the only visual definitions for the words “fit” or “strong” or “sexy”–at least not in my vocabulary.

Sure, sexy can look like those women, or it can look like these folks who performed with me at the More Cabaret Gimme More! Show this past Sunday. (All taken by the amazing photographer Robert Ray.)

That is an important part of the work that Ragen Chastain and I do with the Fit Fatties Forum where we have over 300 images of men and women of all sizes getting out there and having a glorious good time being fit and enjoying the skin they’re in.

I really think if we’re going to define the “new sexy” or the “new fit” that definition needs to be (ahem) a little broader.

Love,

The Fat Chick

*I know I’m ending a sentence with a proposition. So for the grammarians out there just add “…” and a word that you would like me to use to describe you. For example–“This is what fitness looks like…smarty-pants.”

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Skin

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Well a few weeks back, I issued a nudity challenge to y’all and I thought I’d check back with you to see the results. As promised, I spent 15 minutes per day in the buff, and I’d have to say, after getting over the initial discomfort, I enjoyed it! It proved a challenge at times. I had to really do some careful scheduling when we headed out for the Church Choir summit for 2 days. I also had to learn to keep a robe near by as my nakee time was when the front doorbell inevitably rang. Mailmen, neighbors, telephone book delivery people–you name it, they knocked. I was starting to suspect a conspiracy y’all.

Initially this was a challenge for me as I am still learning to love my body and also come from a Catholic, Midwestern upbringing which tends to discourage nudity for any reason. But after a while, I learned to enjoy the experience of feeling the air conditioning on my skin as my body dried from the bath. And for the last two weeks with temperatures soaring well over 100 degrees, it was a time of welcome relief. I got to think of my body not as a sex object or a reason to be shamed, but simply a part of what made me, well, me. How about you? Did you try it? What did you learn about yourself?

You know, if you are in any way interested in skin, I would like to invite you to the More Cabaret Gimme More! Show this Sunday. Ragen Chastain and the More Cabaret girls will be showing some skin and performing a whole lot of hip shaking, toe tapping fun! They will be accompanied by a whole host of other performers. I’ll be singing a few songs. And guess what?! You can see it all online with our live streamed version. We’ll be live right HERE starting at about 6 PM PST tomorrow night.

Can’t wait to see you!

Love,

The Fat Chick

Like my posts? You’ll love my stuff!

Buy my book: The Fat Chick Works Out! (Fitness that is Fun and Feasible for Folks of All Ages, Shapes Sizes and Abilities)–available in softcover and e-book versions

Buy my DVD: The Fat Chick Works Out! (A Safe, Easy and Fun Workout for Klutzes, Wimps and Absolute Beginners!)

Buy a book or a DVD for a friend and save $5! Just enter FRIENDBLFT in the discount code box!

Check out my Training Programs–both in person and via Skype (Starting at just $25!)

Book me to speak at your special event!

Try, try again and again and again and again and again…

Come dance with us in the Bay Area!

Why BMI stands for “Blatantly Meaningless Information”

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Yup, higher shoe size means higher BMI. Maybe we should re-institute foot binding for better health?

The LA Times has published another awesome article, this time taking aim at BMI. The article headline states “For nearly 1 in 5 Americans, BMI may tell the wrong story”. Although one of the main studies actually places the misdiagnosis statistic closer to 2 in 5 Americans, I have to give the LA Times credit for posting this story which goes on to detail something that many of us in the HAES (R) universe already know: BMI is not a good predictor of individual health. In short:

Having a high BMI does not mean you have poor metabolic health. Having a low BMI does not mean you have good metabolic health.

So why is this important? Well for a lot of reasons. First off, if your doctor is using BMI to determine whether or not you should get further screenings or tests, he or she is using an extremely unreliable metric to make this determination. This means as a fat person you may be exposed to a lot of tests you really don’t need. This means as a thin person, your doctor may miss some stuff that is really important or even life-threatening. I often wonder if a significant proportion of the medical costs associated with fat people are because we have so many more tests done. Or even if higher percentages of certain diagnoses among fat people are in part because we look so much harder for these diagnoses among fat people.

Another reason that BMI bias is such a big problem is that the workplace wellness gurus are using it to coerce or even force us into interventions that may be entirely inappropriate for us. For example, I’ve been talking a lot about this Michigan “walking program” for fatties. BMI was used as the sole determinant as to who had to participate. Those with higher BMIs were told they either had to wear a pedometer that reported their steps to the “home office” or they had to go to Weight Watchers. There was no initial fitness assessment done. There was no assessment of eating behaviors. The program simply assumes that people with higher BMIs don’t engage in fitness and eat very poorly. It’s entirely possible that people in the program had to reduce other, more strenuous and more enjoyable exercise programs in order to comply with the stupid walking rules. It’s entirely possible that people in the program with well-balanced healthy eating habits were encouraged towards more disordered eating habits after their new stint with Weight Watchers. It’s almost certain that people with low BMIs who are also sedentary and eat nothing but junk food were patted on the head and told to “keep up the good work”.

But we’ll never know because they never tested this stuff.

You know what? When company money and government money and my money gets spent on stupid health programs that are just as likely to make people less healthy than before, and nobody bothers to test the hypotheses because “fatties” I get pretty annoyed. In fact I’m crossing right over the line towards enraged.

It’s not like this research is all new. It’s not like the problems inherent in the BMI as a measurement of individual health haven’t been known for decades. But as long as entire industries are set on putting their fingers in their ears and chanting, “La, la, la, I can’t HEAR you!” I’m just gonna have to keep on saying the same things over and over and over. As long as people walk around with misdiagnosed brain injuries because doctors simply think they need to lose weight, as long as thin people miss out on important medical screenings because they are assumed well, and as long as some insurance programs think it’s okay to strap a piece of hardware to my a@@ to track whether I’m moving enough just because of my dress size, I’m gonna keep on talking.

You hear that universe? I’ll keep shaking my chubby fist and you and shouting that your BS. Measuring. Instrument. is not a valid way to understand anything about who I am.

Love,

The Fat Chick

Like my posts? You’ll love my stuff!

Buy my book: The Fat Chick Works Out! (Fitness that is Fun and Feasible for Folks of All Ages, Shapes Sizes and Abilities)–available in softcover and e-book versions

Buy my DVD: The Fat Chick Works Out! (A Safe, Easy and Fun Workout for Klutzes, Wimps and Absolute Beginners!)

Buy a book or a DVD for a friend and save $5! Just enter FRIENDBLFT in the discount code box!

Check out my Training Programs–both in person and via Skype (Starting at just $25!)

Book me to speak at your special event!