The Fat Chick Diaries

Just for fun, I did a bit more poking around for stuff on the web about carbon sequestration and obesity. I found this by blogger DrRich. While I think he’s a bit rough on the scientists who study global warming, he goes on to dress down the dudes who tried to blame global warming on fat people, and once he’s done doing that, trounces them thusly:

DrRich maintains that his two assertions - which entirely counterbalance those of his opponents - make his argument equally compelling to theirs. So thus far we have a draw. But DrRich’s third assertion, which follows, wins the day.

To wit: The obese are unarguably sequestering carbon.

Storing fat, in fact, is simply a relatively efficient way to store carbon. The obese consume massive amounts of carbon in the form of food, and then they fail to burn it off (unlike thin people, who convert their food to CO2 immediately through their habitually wasteful activities). Instead, the obese store their carbon intake, taking it out of circulation forever, and removing it from the carbon cycle which (we find) is so fatally damaging to the earth. Indeed (at least according to the zero-sum crowd for whom redistribution is invariably the answer to all problems), the more food consumed by the obese, the less food remains available for the thin people who would just go ahead and metabolize it, with all their jogging and whatnot, excreting lots of excess CO2 in the process.

When we finally employ carbon caps, the obese should get a tax break based on their weight.

You really need to go read the entire thing. It’s one of the cleverest bits of writing I’ve ever seen.

I use an online food log to keep track of what I eat. I started doing this while I was seeing a nutritionist in 2008-2009, whom I lovingly refer to as the Food Nazi. I started going at the suggestion of my internist after my annual physical in the fall of 2007, when she recommended I lose weight and I told her what she should already have known: Being a fat chick, I have tried numerous times to lose weight with diet, exercise, blah blah blah, and while I have lost anywhere from 5 to 40 pounds, I have regained it every single time, usually much more than I originally lost, leaving me fatter in the long run, not thinner. In short, been there, done that, got the same results that 95% of people do. This is the story of virtually every fat person I know. Any other suggestions, doc, or is that all you’ve got?

That’s when she suggested the nutritionist. I have to say, the doc was right in the sense that I did actually learn a lot from talking to a nutritionist, and I have made some permanent changes to my eating habits that will benefit my health in the long run. The weight loss, however, was minimal. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

After a year, I felt I wasn’t learning enough new things to make it worth the cost of continuing to see her. You see, my insurance doesn’t cover nutritional counseling unless I’m actually sick, which I’m not. However, the online food log I started keeping while under her care was a revelation to me, and I still do it. It lets me know that I’m getting the right balance of nutrients, when I’m overeating or undereating, etc. It also lets me log my weight, and sure enough, every so often I lose a pound. Not only that, but carefully monitoring my eating has helped me lick the one less-than-perfect test result that’s been dogging me for the past several years– my “good” cholesterol is always a hair too low. Now it’s perfect. So I keep doing the food log.

Most of the people on the site are there to lose weight. I will admit I am thrilled when a pound disappears, and I sometimes let myself get caught up in the weight-loss hoopla. It’s happening slowly enough for me that I let myself believe I may actually keep it off this time. One of the ways in which the site bangs the weight loss drum is to keep a running total of the combined pounds lost by all of the site’s members. So far, it is more than 34,000 pounds. That’s a lot.

There are a few problems with this calculation. First, it doesn’t tell us how many individual people factor into that calculation. Do they have 30,000 members? If so, that’s not a lot per person. In addition, it doesn’t tell us if that calculation reflects the CURRENT weight for members or just each member’s LOWEST weight, whether that’s current or not. Most importantly, it doesn’t account for people who have lost some weight, then started gaining it back and got so frustrated they stopped logging altogether. They may weigh more than they did when they started, but we’ll never know.

Anyway, that 34,000 pound figure is so huge, it got me thinking. Fat molecules are mostly hydrocarbon chains. When you use fat for energy, you are breaking the chemical bonds in those chains to release the energy stored in those bonds. As a result, you breathe out a boatload of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, as we all know, contributes to global warming.

That got me thinking about fat people as a form of carbon sequestration. The reason a lot of the carbon dioxide floating around in the air today wasn’t floating around in the air two hundred years ago is that it was hidden in the earth’s crust in the form of coal and oil. In other words, it was sequestered. Trees do a great job of sequestering carbon dioxide, but unfortunately the human race seems hell bent on stripping the earth’s surface of as many trees as possible to create grazing space for cows (who burp and fart methane all day) and suburbs (which you have to drive to and from, releasing carbon from the fossil fuel in your gas tank, because it’s too far to walk). That’s bad news for carbon sequestration.

That got me thinking about Gaia. You know, the hypothesis that the earth is just one giant superorganism, and that all of the systems and processes that take place in and on the earth are a part of the functioning of that organism. If Gaia can’t sequester carbon dioxide in one way because we’re messing her up, she’ll sequester it in another way– in fat people. It’s like Mother Earth punishing us for not letting her sequester carbon the way she needs to. We got caught burning too many fossil fuels and cutting down too many trees, and now Mother is going to punish us with the OMGbesity Epidemic.

(disclosure: I totally stole the phrase OMGBesity Epidemic from another blogger, and sadly I can’t remember who, so I can’t make a proper attribution. But it’s too cool not to use it. If it was you, let me know.)

Do I really think that’s what’s making us fat? No, of course not. But you gotta give credit where credit is due– fat people are sequestering a whole bunch of carbon that would otherwise have to be somewhere else. If all the fat people so villified by society and the media suddenly lost all that fat, well, that carbon would have to go somewhere, and where it would go would be right into the atmosphere. So what will it be, skinny people? Fat people and polar icecaps, or no fat people and no polar icecaps? Maybe you’d suddenly be much more willing to put up with fat chicks on the subway if the alternative were for the entire New York City subway system to be below sea level.

So here I am thinking I’m all clever for thinking of this, but alas, somebody already beat me to it. Take a look at this blog post from the New Scientist. The guy actually does the math, which I am way too lazy to do (because, you know, I’m fat and all…). Definitely some food for thought.

Amphibians have been taking a major hit for decades. Back in the early 1990s, I was doing graduate research on ranid frogs, so I was paying very close attention to what was being published about amphibians at the time. There was a crisis afoot: frogs were turning up everywhere with bizarre mutations, and populations were dwindling and even mysteriously dying out. There was lots of theories at the time: nematodes and other parasites, UV radiation, chemical pollutants, etc. I will admit that in the past seven or eight years, I have been paying very little attention, as my career trajectory has tended away from teaching biology. But what little I did happen to see did not paint a pretty picture for the froggies.

Frogs are what zoologists call an indicator species. Being amphibians, they have extremely permeable skin. They absorb water and accomplish a fair amount of gas exchange that way, so in that sense the permeability of their skin is adaptive and very handy. However, it also leaves them very vulnerable to pollutants. It’s one of the reasons you have to be very careful what you have on your hands when you handle them. You can’t smoke cigarettes and then handle frogs– the nicotine on your fingers is enough to harm them. If you’re a field biologist out in the wetlands studying frogs, you can’t use bugspray. This can be hugely unpleasant. I speak from experience. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as with the canary in the mine, if you see something going horribly awry with the frogs, you need to consider the possibility that humans are next. Turns out, what’s going horribly awry with the frogs is now going horribly awry with us, and we have only ourselves to blame. Nicholas Kristoff has a great column about it in the New York Times. I haven’t had a chance to go read the source material, so I’m working just from the Kristoff article right now.

Apparently, there is more and more evidence that the culprits are endocrine disruptors. They get into the water supply through human activities, such as women taking birth control pills who excrete high levels of estrogen in their urine. They flush the toilet, and the sewage treatment plant isnt’ really set up to remove pharmaceuticals from water, so…

The results are not good. Male children are being born with genital deformities at increasingly high rates. Horror stories like that. How all of this relates to this blog is this: Apparently, the evidence that endocrine disruptors cause obesity is mounting. Here’s a quote from the article:

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

That last part is so important, I’m going to paste it again:

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Now, you and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the rise in obesity is due solely to fat people being a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs with no self control. We sit on the couch all day swilling Cherry Coke and eating Snickers bars. It’s easy and fun to blame us, so why look for alternate explanations? Sure, the fatties swear up and down they’re trying like mad to eat healthy and lose weight, but they’re still fat, so they must be lying, right? After all, they’re already full of other character flaws– laziness, gluttonny– so it’s not hard to see they must also be liars, too, right? After all, where does the phrase “big fat liar” come from?

The problem with this, other than the obvious joy people take in engaging in vicious negative stereotyping and blaming behavior, is that this type of laziness means there’s no real push to search for other possible explanations. Nothing else could possibly be making us fat- we’re obvioulsy doing it to ourselves. Pollution causes other reactions in the human body– asthma, cancer– but not this one. No, couldn’t be this one. It’s just sooooo much more fun to blame the fatties, because then we can make fun of them and hate them and feel superior. See how that works?

I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would cry out for action if the ONLY problem that endocrine disruptors in the environment were causing was increased rates of obesity. But there are babies involved. Nothing generates an outcry and a demand for action like deformed babies. So there’s hope.

Amphibians have been taking a major hit for decades. Back in the early 1990s, I was doing graduate research on ranid frogs, so I was paying very close attention to what was being published about amphibians at the time. There was a crisis afoot: frogs were turning up everywhere with bizarre mutations, and populations were dwindling and even mysteriously dying out. There was lots of theories at the time: nematodes and other parasites, UV radiation, chemical pollutants, etc. I will admit that in the past seven or eight years, I have been paying very little attention, as my career trajectory has tended away from teaching biology. But what little I did happen to see did not paint a pretty picture for the froggies.

Frogs are what zoologists call an indicator species. Being amphibians, they have extremely permeable skin. They absorb water and accomplish a fair amount of gas exchange that way, so in that sense the permeability of their skin is adaptive and very handy. However, it also leaves them very vulnerable to pollutants. It’s one of the reasons you have to be very careful what you have on your hands when you handle them. You can’t smoke cigarettes and then handle frogs– the nicotine on your fingers is enough to harm them. If you’re a field biologist out in the wetlands studying frogs, you can’t use bugspray. This can be hugely unpleasant. I speak from experience. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as with the canary in the mine, if you see something going horribly awry with the frogs, you need to consider the possibility that humans are next. Turns out, what’s going horribly awry with the frogs is now going horribly awry with us, and we have only ourselves to blame. Nicholas Kristoff has a great column about it in the New York Times. I haven’t had a chance to go read the source material, so I’m working just from the Kristoff article right now.

Apparently, there is more and more evidence that the culprits are endocrine disruptors. They get into the water supply through human activities, such as women taking birth control pills who excrete high levels of estrogen in their urine. They flush the toilet, and the sewage treatment plant isnt’ really set up to remove pharmaceuticals from water, so…

The results are not good. Male children are being born with genital deformities at increasingly high rates. Horror stories like that. How all of this relates to this blog is this: Apparently, the evidence that endocrine disruptors cause obesity is mounting. Here’s a quote from the article:

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

That last part is so important, I’m going to paste it again:

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Now, you and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the rise in obesity is due solely to fat people being a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs with no self control. We sit on the couch all day swilling Cherry Coke and eating Snickers bars. It’s easy and fun to blame us, so why look for alternate explanations? Sure, the fatties swear up and down they’re trying like mad to eat healthy and lose weight, but they’re still fat, so they must be lying, right? After all, they’re already full of other character flaws– laziness, gluttonny– so it’s not hard to see they must also be liars, too, right? After all, where does the phrase “big fat liar” come from?

The problem with this, other than the obvious joy people take in engaging in vicious negative stereotyping and blaming behavior, is that this type of laziness means there’s no real push to search for other possible explanations. Nothing else could possibly be making us fat- we’re obvioulsy doing it to ourselves. Pollution causes other reactions in the human body– asthma, cancer– but not this one. No, couldn’t be this one. It’s just sooooo much more fun to blame the fatties, because then we can make fun of them and hate them and feel superior. See how that works?

I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would cry out for action if the ONLY problem that endocrine disruptors in the environment were causing was increased rates of obesity. But there are babies involved. Nothing generates an outcry and a demand for action like deformed babies. So there’s hope.

I like it when somebody does a study to see whether there are things about fat people that are just plain different from skinny people. You know, things that might help explain why some people are heavier than others that fall outside the category of “fat people are mental cases with no self control who sit on their asses eating buckets of lard all day.” Here is a recent example, covered this week in the New York Times.

Researchers looked at salivation in very fat versus thin people, and found that when presented with a new taste (not altogether new– just new as in that haven’t already been tasting it at the time), thin people stop salivating over it much sooner than the very fat. From the article:

“This is basically saying that there is a difference in how we respond to food physiologically depending on our weight status,” Dr. Bond said. “It suggests that this habituation process is impaired in people who are obese.”

“They’re not as sensitive to those feelings of fullness, and as a result, they continue to eat longer,” he added.

The article goes on to conclude like this:

“It’s going to be longer before they stop eating,” Dr. Bond said of the protracted salivary response.

But he noted it is not clear whether the slower habituation response is a cause of obesity or a feature of it.

“What we don’t know is whether obese people show this different level of responding before they become obese, or if it is something that happens as you gain weight, and whether it changes with weight loss,” he added.

Ever since meeting my biological mother after a lifetime being raised by skinny people, I have been 100% we’re not all fighting the same battle. The playing field is not level. There’s something going on with us that makes it harder for us. I think society (and a few individual, particularly smug thin people) give thin people credit for having more willpower than they actually possess, and not enough credit to fat people for the willpower they possess. It isn’t JUST about willpower. It never has been. But when we jump to that conclusion, we do not bother to look for other factors that may be in play. That type of “blame the victim and look no further” approach doesn’t fly in other fields of inquiry, and it shouldn’t fly with obesity research either. That’s why I’m happy to see this type of research done.

One of the truly beautiful things about my life is that my commute home from work takes me right under Times Square. On any given evening, if I want to I can rise up out of the ground, walk half a block, and partake of a smorgasbord of first-run movies ranging from summer blockbusters to a surprising range of indie films.

Take tonight for example. Earlier today, it suddenly occurred to me why I can’t stop watching the new Star Trek film. It’s this: Eric Bana is the most delicious space villain ever. The moment when he makes contact with the Enterprise and says, “Hello Christopher, I’m Nero,” is worth the entire price of admission right there. So tonight, I stopped by the AMC Empire 25 and caught the 6:30 show.

Afterward, as I walked through the Times Square subway station to hop the 7 back to Queens, I passed by a advertisement on the wall that featured a group of gorgeous, happy, energetic, well-dressed fat people.

Wait. WHAT?

This demanded a closer inspection. Sometimes you see fat people in ads, but they’re NEVER gorgeous, happy, energetic, and well-dressed. And if they are, they’re certainly not in groups. Something must be amiss.

Turns out, there’s a new reality show premiering June 29 on Oxygen. It’s called Dance Your Ass Off. Okay, so it’s a weight loss show. It starts with the premise that fat is a problem to be remedied. It’s not, strictly speaking, about fat acceptance. But damn, those fatties looked GOOD! The women had their hair done, their makeup on, and they were dressed to the nines in cute shoes and dresses that shimmered. The guys were handsome and neat and clean and looked like somebody I’d really like to date. And every single one of them had a look in their eye like, “Sit back and watch, skinny couch potatoes, while my voluptuous self dances circles around you.”

I do not trust American television to do right by fat folks. Especially not if it’s reality TV. I mean, look at what we have so far: The Biggest Loser, which claims to be about transforming lives, but is really about showing us images of sweaty, panting fat folks on treadmills, who will later be dressed in spandex bike shorts and sports bras and placed on a scale, as if showing their fat rolls to all of America is a necessary aspect of transforming their lives. No thanks. And then there’s I Want To Save Your Life, where a shameless self-promoter with questionable credentials stalks fat people and jumps on them for every bad habit he can find, all in the name of wanting to save them from themselves. Oh, and cashing a big fat paycheck while he’s at it. And then there’s the show where they make over fat people so they can go out on dates– the unspoken assumption being that fat people are undatable without massive strategic interventions from dating experts, fashion consultants, and hair-and-makeup people. No thanks.

So when I got home tonight, I watched the trailer. Setting aside for a moment the fact that, as I said, the show is mostly about weight loss, overall I really liked what I saw. It appears that the fat contestants are provided with personal trainers and dance coaches so they can learn to dance beautifully and vigorously. They are provided with dance costumes that are sexy but not exploitative, and judges who appear to be able to focus on the dancing and not on the fat. As much as a show based on weight loss can, this show appears to treat fat people with dignity and respect and a reasonable and like capable people. I plan to watch it.

Oh yeah, and here’s today’s famous person sighting: Ali Velshi was standing outside the Time Warner building tonight when I walked past it. I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen everybody from CNN except my girl Candy Crowley!

In this article from the New York Times, Julie Weed reports on a minor rebellion among primary care physicians, who are radically changing the way they do business so they can see fewer patients each day and spend the time it really takes to offer them quality care. It involves things like reducing office staff and going to web-based appointment management. It also means freeing themselves from the yoke of insurance companies, which have huge paperwork requirements (forcing doctors to hire office staff) and puny payouts.

This got me thinking. This movement is both small and young. The overwhelming majority of doctors still practice rapid-fire, assembly-line medicine, where nurses or medical assistants line patients up in rows of little examining rooms and doctors move along the hallway, popping into each room for as little time as possible, just long enough to order some tests (all of which must be performed off-site, natch), or make a diagnosis and write a script, dictate a few notes, and move on.

If you were one of these doctors, why would you take the time to dig deeper when you could just say, “It’s because you’re fat. Lose weight. NEXT!”

I’m not saying they’re right. I’m saying that type of environment breeds this type of behavior. Fatness is the low-hanging fruit. The easy explanation. And a harried doctor under pressure to move fast probably just can’t help herself after a while.

In fact, the more fat people a doctor has on her schedule in a day, the more money she can make. She can practically run down the hall, pausing momentarily at each door just to peek in and say, “It’s because you’re fat! It’s because YOU’RE fat! It’s because YOU’RE fat TOO!” That leaves a lot more time to ponder the real mystery cases– like when thin people develop medical problems they think only fat people get. Thin and got heart disease? Well, we’ll actually have to look into that, won’t we?

It’s in everyone’s interest to reform the way modern assembly-line medicine is practiced. But I’m thinking maybe it’s especially in the interest of those of us whose larger bodies offer doctors an easy way out.

Have you seen the new ad campaign from Snapple? It goes like this:

“We found better stuff!”

The premise is that Snapple, which has always billed itself as using “The best stuff on earth” in its drinks, has improved its products because it has found a new “good stuff” ingredient to use. Know what it is? It’s sugar. Real sugar.

Snapple is getting on the real-sugar bandwagon (Pepsi and Coke have both put out real-sugar versions) and putting out some of its drinks with sugar instead of HFCS, now that more and more research has come out linking HFCS with health problems.

But to say they’re doing it because they “found better stuff”? Are we really meant to believe that the folks at Snapple really claiming that the reason they’ve been poisoning people with HFCS all this time is not because it’s just incredibly cheaper and more profitable, but because they were previously UNAWARE OF THE EXISTENCE OF SUGAR? Pardon my French, but what a bunch of assholes and hypocrites. Really.

I rarely drink Snapple products, and when I do I go for the diet stuff (joke’s on me– there’s apparently a lot of evidence that articificial sweeteners aren’t so great for us either). But after this ridiculously insulting campaign, I’m swearing off Snapple altogether.

Why? Because I’m made of the best stuff on earth.

I learned two new phrases today: “thin privilege” and “diversely-bodied.”

Things are busy, and I’m a bit behind in reading the fat-related articles from the New York Times. I just finished this one from way back on May 14. (See? I told you I was behind!)

The article is about the experience of fat people in yoga classes, and how separate courses for fat folks are springing up all over the country. It notes specifically the inhospitable climate in many regular yoga courses, due in part to the inability of many yoga instructors to offer appropriate support and pose modifications to accommodate the needs of people who, for example, have breasts and bellies to big to allow them to get into the standard child’s pose. That’s me, by the way– I do mine with my knees spread apart so my belly has a place to go. But then, I do my yoga at home with Megan Garcia’s wonderful DVD put out by the folks at Just My Size. Well worth the money if you’re a beginner.

As usual, the comments that follow the article run the gamut from enlightened and supportive to ignorant and hateful. A few suggest that fatties need to be in classes with thin people so we can have thin role models who did the hard work of losing the weight. This, of course, falsely presumes that all thin people are thin because they work hard at it, that all fat people are fat because they haven’t bothered to work hard at it, and that we’re looking to be (or need to be) inspired by thin role models in the first place.

But then there is this comment by Anna from Atlanta, which I just loved:

It’s amazing that a practice meant to bring about awareness can operationally be so closed! I’ve practiced yoga for many years and have always very much enjoyed the rare opportunities to practice in diverse communities…it brings a whole new level of joy into movement! But before reading this article, I had never considered the fact that diversely-bodied groups are so rare because lots of teachers don’t know how to adjust the full spectrum of bodies.

It’s “thin privilege” to be blind to the ways some are included and others excluded in this society….thanks for opening my eyes! In the future, I would like to train as a teacher, and I will remember this article.

We all struggle, and we can all benefit from enjoying and exploring our bodies…my practice helps me manage depression and be less aggressive toward myself. Until there are more integrated classes with well-trained teachers, I think it’s wonderful that there are separate classes for plus-sized yogis. If yoga is about accepting ourselves as we are and playing mindfully at our edge, then our community of practice can acknowledge its exclusivity (and the underlying issues that inform it) and work intelligently at becoming more inclusive.

— Anna, Atlanta

Among the things I liked about Anna’s enlightened comment is that it taught me two new phrases: “thin privilege” and “diversely-bodied.”

Thin privilege if, of course, an adaptation of “white privilege,” which is a concept that covers all of the ways that white people, even those who work hard to eschew racism, still experience benefits of being white whether they want to or not. It ranges from having no dearth race-mates in positions of power and authority and the vastly different treatment white people receive when they come into contact with law enforcement (nobody gets pulled over for Driving While White) to being able to buy band-aids that match your skin tone. If you Google the phrase you’ll find extensive lists of examples of white privilege.

I’m a bit surprised at myself that it never occurred to me to use the term “thin privilege” to describe the range of privileges that accrue to thin people in society because they are thin, especially to thin women. Next time you go to the mall and see the number of clothing stores for thin women compared to those for fat women, even though the majority of American woman are considered fat, well, that’s thin privilege: a wider range of clothing options, including professional attire. Next time you watch the news and realize that Candy Crowley is virtually alone as fat chick in the world of television journalism, well, that’s thin privilege. Thin people make more money and face less workplace discrimination. Thin students never have trouble fitting into the desks at school. And let’s not even talk about airplane seats. That’s thin privilege. The scapegoating of fat people because certain health issues are associated with weight while thin people with unhealthy habits get a pass from society because they can’t be identified on sight, well, that’s thin privilege too.

This is a phrase I need to use more often. All of us do.

Sometimes I just don’t get fat haters. Not the hating part– I understand the world is full of biggots and people who just need to feel superior by knocking other people down. I get that part. It’s that I just don’t get what it is they think we ought to do about ourselves. Let me explain.

In 2005, I gave up my car. I figured it would save me enough money to get through grad school without loans, it would force me to exercise more, and it would just feel really good to thumb my nose at Bush’s blood-for-oil foreign policy. All three things proved to be true. Because of a particular flaw in the public transportation situation where I was working at the time, I could get directly TO work by bus, but to get home I had to walk two miles from the office to the nearest functioning bus stop. So I was walking two miles a day, five days a week.

This is what the skinny people want, right? Aren’t we all supposed to be out there exercising all the fat off?

Apparently not. On a frequent and regular basis, carloads of young, skinny assholes would roll their windows down and shout abuse at me as I walked from my office to the bus stop. So…. let me understand. You don’t want people to be fat, but when you see a fat person out exercising, you will discourage them from doing so by shouting abuse at them? I just don’t get the logic. Unless… oh wait, I think I get it now– they want us to shut ourselves up in our homes and jog in place where nobody has to see us, until we have burned off enough fat to be acceptable to them. Then, and only then, can we be seen again in public. Got it.

I am still carfree, and I still take public transportation, and I am still fat. (Oddly enough, all of that walking did no lead to the loss of a single pound.) So in the past few years, I have developed an interest in the attitudes of people about fat people taking public transportation. One of these days I will finish my epic post on fat people who ride the subway and the people who love to hate them. But for now, let it suffice to say that a simple web search shows there are a lot of people who just hate, hate, HATE it that there are fat people on subways and buses. They don’t want us to sit next to them. They don’t want us to stand near them. In short, they don’t want us there at all.

So once again, I must ask–what is it that they DO want us to do? Run through the tunnel behind the subway train until we have burned enough calories to be acceptable as fellow passengers? Quit our jobs and stay home, locked in our houses and apartments starving ourselves until we are deemed thin enough to be seen out in public again? What?

So now comes the latest “I just don’t get the logic” occurrence. I am a long-time subscriber to Newsweek, but I’m almost always at least a week or two behind. So this week I’m working on an issue from the beginning of May, and I came across this quote on the Perspectives page, which you can find on their website here.

“We’re on the Titanic and, rather than forcing our children into the lifeboat, we’re telling them to join the band.” –MeMe Roth, president of National Action Against Obesity, on new clothing lines aimed at plus-size teenage girls from retailers Target and Forever 21

Once again, I just don’t get it. Roth objects to CLOTHING? Or is it just that she objects to attractive, fashionable clothing for fat girls? Is that it? She doesn’t want them stuck at home with no clothes to wear– she just doesn’t think they should be allowed to dress fashionably, because that might cause them to… what? Feel good about themselves? Not feel disgusting? Have good self-esteem? Heaven forfend! We can’t have fat chicks feeling good about themselves– that would undermine Roth’s plan to make them hate themselves so much that they will do whatever it takes– healthy or not– to conform and become thin. No, fat girls should wear burlap bags with a big scarlet “F” stenciled on the front.

So it really is just all about hate after all. Nice.

Daily pug count: Three, plus a brace of puggles in front of the laundromat.