Today has been a strange day.
For instance, this happened. That link is to a story about a fat news anchor who called out the writer of a very concern-trolling email about what a bad example she was setting for THE CHILDREN by publicly being a fat person with a job.
Watch the video if you haven’t already seen it. It’s pretty great. She points her finger several times, which I loved.
You might also notice the little link there at the bottom. Kaye, the kind soul who posted the video to Upworthy.com, included a link to my site as a place to read more about fat and health and fat stereotypes. Very cool! The influx of traffic is also kind of bananas. I hope my website doesn’t break – if it’s taking longer than usual to load, that would be why. As a result, I’m kind of sitting here babysitting things for tonight.
If you are new here, from Upworthy or not, hi and welcome. This is a blog written by a fat lady (me, I’m Michelle) who has a degree in nutrition.
I don’t do clinical nutrition (the kind where you get a special diet for diabetes or high cholesterol or kidney disease or cancer and whatnot) and I am not a registered dietitian, but I have similar training and I teach people who’ve had a lifetime of guilty, weird, or otherwise restrained eating to feel good about food again and eat relatively normally.
I didn’t make up the idea by myself – I was trained by a dietitian named Ellyn Satter, who created the approach (known as eating competence.) I’m one of the few people in the world who does this work. I work online over Skype with people all over the world, so if you’re in the market for that kind of thing, check me out.
This blog, and my work, takes a Health at Every Size approach, meaning that instead of focusing on making weight changes as an avenue to good health, I focus first on behaviour changes (like eating normally) that improve quality of life and health, regardless of weight.
As part of this work, a belief in the ideas of size diversity and fat acceptance, or fat liberation, is critical. This is the philosophical and political stance that fat people are not lesser members of society because of their bodies, that appearance-based prejudice is never okay, and that stereotypes based on those prejudices are always flawed. This stance is linked in sisterhood to larger anti-oppression activism.
I also like science a whole lot, and I take an evidence-based approach to my work, although the moral principles (that people of all sizes and in all states of health are equally worthy of respect and have the right to exist) stand independent of weight and health science.
I like comments, if you want to chime in, but I want you to know that I have a whip-smart set of readers already who will be critical of any comments championing weight loss or indulging in stereotypes about fat people. Most people don’t make that mistake, but I thought I should give you a heads up.
At the bottom of this post, however, you are totally welcome to comment and introduce yourself and ask any (polite) 101-type questions you might have about this whole strange idea. We will try our best to help you out. Or you can just post links to funny YouTube videos and cat pictures. I’m happy either way. Comments are on moderation right now – see note below.
Last thing: I live in Canada and often spell things funny. I grew up in the US, though, so I do know what milk in jugs and Milky Way bars look like.
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