Kudos to fat activist Margitte Kristjansson, whose new video, "The Fat Body (In)Visible," is a compelling look at the world of fat acceptance and what it's like to be a fat woman in America today. Watch it below, and then leave Margitte a comment at her blog, Riots Not Diets.
Showing posts with label fat acceptance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fat acceptance. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Jezebel investigates MeMe Roth!
Check out this awesome post by Jenna over at Jezebel, who as far as I can tell is the only journalist who's actually bothered to investigate Roth's pseudo (cough fake) credentials for her ridiculous one-woman anti-obesity campaign.
As a professor of journalism and writer for mainstream media outlets, I'd love to know why no one else has even questioned Roth's patently false claims and unsupported stance. How about Nightline, which pitted Roth and a chick named Kim Bensen against Marianne Kirby and Crystal Renn in this "faceoff" questioning "Is it OK to be fat?"
I can't help but think this is a) an example of how sloppy some journalists are getting, and b) a function of the widespread fatphobia washing through the culture.
Either way, kudos to Jezebel for doing some actual reporting. And, of course, presenting that reportage with the requisite levels of snark and sarcasm.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Fat acceptance on Radio Times
I just finished doing a call-in show on Radio Times, a public radio show on WHYY, on fat acceptance and on our relationship to food and eating and weight. It was a good show, and included some excellent comments from Rebecca Puhl of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.
You should be able to listen to an archived version of the show here eventually.
I thought it was interesting, and somewhat sad, that pretty much all the callers espoused the "thin-is-healthy" and "thin-at-any-cost" idea. For those of you who may be finding this blog after hearing the show, I'd love to direct you to a couple of good resources.
I hope you'll check out Ellyn Satter's wonderful website and books. Satter, a nutritionist, therapist, and researcher, advocates for what she calls competent eating--meaning, eating in a way that satisfies your hunger and your appetite. She writes about the need to develop a joyful relationship with food and eating--a radical concept in our current culture, and one worth considering.
One of the callers mentioned anger and snarkiness among the Fat Acceptance blogs. I don't know how you define snarkiness, exactly, but I quite like some of the FA blogs, including Shapely Prose, The F-Word, and The Fat Nutritionist.
Finally, in my recent book, Feed Me: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image, I published a Love-Your-Body pledge, which is also available here. I hope you'll consider signing it. Paste it up where you'll see it everyday, and remind yourself about what you love and appreciate about your body.
You should be able to listen to an archived version of the show here eventually.
I thought it was interesting, and somewhat sad, that pretty much all the callers espoused the "thin-is-healthy" and "thin-at-any-cost" idea. For those of you who may be finding this blog after hearing the show, I'd love to direct you to a couple of good resources.
I hope you'll check out Ellyn Satter's wonderful website and books. Satter, a nutritionist, therapist, and researcher, advocates for what she calls competent eating--meaning, eating in a way that satisfies your hunger and your appetite. She writes about the need to develop a joyful relationship with food and eating--a radical concept in our current culture, and one worth considering.
One of the callers mentioned anger and snarkiness among the Fat Acceptance blogs. I don't know how you define snarkiness, exactly, but I quite like some of the FA blogs, including Shapely Prose, The F-Word, and The Fat Nutritionist.
Finally, in my recent book, Feed Me: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image, I published a Love-Your-Body pledge, which is also available here. I hope you'll consider signing it. Paste it up where you'll see it everyday, and remind yourself about what you love and appreciate about your body.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Fighting weight discrimination, one doctor at a time
If you've ever had the experience of going to a doctor for an earache and being lectured on your weight--or even if you haven't had that experience but dread it--there's hope for America's doctors. Yale University's Rudd Center has created an online course to help sensitize docs to weight discrimination in themselves and in the health-care system. According to a spokesperson, the course is also designed to help docs develop strategies to serve their patients better--always a good thing.
Doctors get 1 credit of continuing ed for doing the course, and their patients get a doctor who's at least been exposed to the notion of fat acceptance and questioning the status quo on weight.
I looked at the first few frames of the course and have to say it looks pretty cool. Check it out. Better yet, get your doctor to check it out.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
For God's sake, repeat after me: There are no bad foods
That's what I feel like saying to the idiots who now want to "salvage" the ridiculous Mississippi bill that would prohibit restaurants from serving food to people considered obese.
Who will be labeled obese, and by whom? Let's not even go there. For now, let's stick with a higher power of absurdity, worthy of Beckett, and talk about the latest twist on this bill: Use it to Save the Children.
Forget about saving the adult fatties, according to this latest spin; let's stick to saving the innocent children. Under the new provisions, children would not be allowed to eat in certain fast food restaurants without a parent present. (Sounds like the concept behind R-rated movies, doesn't it? Do you know the danger you child is able to be exposed to?)
According to John Banzhaf, the idiot behind this new spin,
obese children would still be permitted to order most of the items on a fast food menu. "For example, at McDonald's, even a Double Cheeseburger and Quarterpounder, or a Filet-O-Fish or McChicken, has fewer than 500 calories. Those food items the child should not be served include: the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese (740 calories), Premium Crispy Chicken Club Sandwich (660 calories), several deserts [sic], etc.
What's the cutoff here? 500 calories = OK, 600 calories = instant obesity?
Banzhaf, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, needs a lesson in psychology. Actually he needs lessons in a whole lot of other fields, but let's start with psychology. Does the term forbidden fruit hold any meaning? How about banned books? See, we humans are constructed to always want what we cannot have.
And when it comes to food, that goes double. The biggest reason why 95% of diets do not work is that depriving yourself leads to later cycles of binging. You tell your body it can't have chocolate, and watch your chocolate cravings soar. Whereas if you tell your body, Chocolate's fine, no big deal, work it into your day if you really want it, well, your chocolate consumption will over the long term drop. A lot.
Do we really want a double quarter pounder with cheese to become the Holy Grail of a generation of children? Cause that's what will happen should your ridiculous plan come to fruition.
Here's another pearl of wisdom: The more we try to micromanage our metabolisms, the more badly we fuck them up. Dieting leads to eating disorders and even more weight gain. How about, instead of banning foods like they were chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover, we invest in teaching children the joys of intuitive eating?
Oh, yeah, that would take a complete cultural paradigm shift. And it wouldn't make for such a great sound byte.
P.S. I don't eat at McDonald's; I don't like their food. My kids have never eaten there. I'm not a shill for the fast-food industry. I'm a reasonable human being who believes that people come in all shapes and sizes, that you can be fat and healthy, and that discriminating against and humiliating fat people seems to be the new national sport. Whatever happened to baseball?
Who will be labeled obese, and by whom? Let's not even go there. For now, let's stick with a higher power of absurdity, worthy of Beckett, and talk about the latest twist on this bill: Use it to Save the Children.
Forget about saving the adult fatties, according to this latest spin; let's stick to saving the innocent children. Under the new provisions, children would not be allowed to eat in certain fast food restaurants without a parent present. (Sounds like the concept behind R-rated movies, doesn't it? Do you know the danger you child is able to be exposed to?)
According to John Banzhaf, the idiot behind this new spin,
obese children would still be permitted to order most of the items on a fast food menu. "For example, at McDonald's, even a Double Cheeseburger and Quarterpounder, or a Filet-O-Fish or McChicken, has fewer than 500 calories. Those food items the child should not be served include: the Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese (740 calories), Premium Crispy Chicken Club Sandwich (660 calories), several deserts [sic], etc.
What's the cutoff here? 500 calories = OK, 600 calories = instant obesity?
Banzhaf, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, needs a lesson in psychology. Actually he needs lessons in a whole lot of other fields, but let's start with psychology. Does the term forbidden fruit hold any meaning? How about banned books? See, we humans are constructed to always want what we cannot have.
And when it comes to food, that goes double. The biggest reason why 95% of diets do not work is that depriving yourself leads to later cycles of binging. You tell your body it can't have chocolate, and watch your chocolate cravings soar. Whereas if you tell your body, Chocolate's fine, no big deal, work it into your day if you really want it, well, your chocolate consumption will over the long term drop. A lot.
Do we really want a double quarter pounder with cheese to become the Holy Grail of a generation of children? Cause that's what will happen should your ridiculous plan come to fruition.
Here's another pearl of wisdom: The more we try to micromanage our metabolisms, the more badly we fuck them up. Dieting leads to eating disorders and even more weight gain. How about, instead of banning foods like they were chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover, we invest in teaching children the joys of intuitive eating?
Oh, yeah, that would take a complete cultural paradigm shift. And it wouldn't make for such a great sound byte.
P.S. I don't eat at McDonald's; I don't like their food. My kids have never eaten there. I'm not a shill for the fast-food industry. I'm a reasonable human being who believes that people come in all shapes and sizes, that you can be fat and healthy, and that discriminating against and humiliating fat people seems to be the new national sport. Whatever happened to baseball?
Thursday, January 24, 2008
A little question of semantics
When I showed my daughter the NYT piece on the fatosphere the other day, her only comment was, "But you're not fat."
What she meant, of course, was "You're not that fat."
Put me next to, say, Ellen Pompano, and I certainly look fat. Put me next to someone who weighs 400 pounds and I don't look fat. Or I don't look as fat.
Fat and thin are words that exist mainly in relation to each other. At the extremes of each range we can certainly identify them correctly. But in the vast middle, our judgment becomes much more relative.
Semantics plays a role in the current anti-obesity hysteria. For starters, the definitions and rules changed in 1998, when the cutoff for overweight was lowered from 27.3 to 25 on the BMI chart. Bingo--instant overnight overweight for millions.
As Paul Campos has pointed out in The New Republic, the way we talk about fat and thin, oveweight and obese and underweight, is something of a shell game.
Fat qua fat is not the problem. Because, after all, we all have fat on our bodies. What's more, we need fat. Without it, your body doesn't work well and your brain sure as hell doesn't work right. I've seen the evidence up close and personal, and it's not pretty.
Think about it the next time you find yourself saying, "But I'm so fat!" or the next time you look in the mirror. Come back and tell me how it changed your perception.
What she meant, of course, was "You're not that fat."
Put me next to, say, Ellen Pompano, and I certainly look fat. Put me next to someone who weighs 400 pounds and I don't look fat. Or I don't look as fat.
Fat and thin are words that exist mainly in relation to each other. At the extremes of each range we can certainly identify them correctly. But in the vast middle, our judgment becomes much more relative.
Semantics plays a role in the current anti-obesity hysteria. For starters, the definitions and rules changed in 1998, when the cutoff for overweight was lowered from 27.3 to 25 on the BMI chart. Bingo--instant overnight overweight for millions.
As Paul Campos has pointed out in The New Republic, the way we talk about fat and thin, oveweight and obese and underweight, is something of a shell game.
Fat qua fat is not the problem. Because, after all, we all have fat on our bodies. What's more, we need fat. Without it, your body doesn't work well and your brain sure as hell doesn't work right. I've seen the evidence up close and personal, and it's not pretty.
Think about it the next time you find yourself saying, "But I'm so fat!" or the next time you look in the mirror. Come back and tell me how it changed your perception.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Why talk radio sucks
I just learned Media Lesson 101: Never go on a talk radio show without asking who else is going to be on.
When the Dom Giordano Show emailed today to ask if I would come on the show this evening to talk about today's New York Times piece about the fatosphere, I figured it would be the usual five-minute radio interview, with time for a couple of comments about the piece and the fatosphere.
What they didn't tell me is that there was going to be another guest, a fitness trainer and "expert" whom they have on the show often.
Instead of a civil conversation, we had a lotta fatty mudslinging, complete with descriptions of waddling children, fatties who just want an excuse to be obese, etc. I was blindsided by the vitriolic assumptions that got tossed around. It was a classic exercise in thin entitlement and fat-bashing, all couched in the usual "Don't you know fat is unhealthy?" language.
I'm mad at myself for missing some opportunities, because my heart was banging away and my voice was shaking. Nothing like a shock jock to raise the adrenaline level. Not that it mattered--the research I was able to pull out of the air and cite (the 2005 CDC mortality study, for one) just sailed on by as if it didn't exist. And it didn't, you know, because of the waddling children and diabetic fatties who can't get off the couch. When I suggested that you can be healthy and fit even if you're fat, they practically laughed me off the show.
I feel badly about this--I could have done a better job of advocacy.
I hope the rest of you FA bloggers don't get blindsided like this. And I hope there was one person listening who heard a little something new, and might check it out.
Ugh. I'm heading upstairs to do some yoga. What an end to what a day.
When the Dom Giordano Show emailed today to ask if I would come on the show this evening to talk about today's New York Times piece about the fatosphere, I figured it would be the usual five-minute radio interview, with time for a couple of comments about the piece and the fatosphere.
What they didn't tell me is that there was going to be another guest, a fitness trainer and "expert" whom they have on the show often.
Instead of a civil conversation, we had a lotta fatty mudslinging, complete with descriptions of waddling children, fatties who just want an excuse to be obese, etc. I was blindsided by the vitriolic assumptions that got tossed around. It was a classic exercise in thin entitlement and fat-bashing, all couched in the usual "Don't you know fat is unhealthy?" language.
I'm mad at myself for missing some opportunities, because my heart was banging away and my voice was shaking. Nothing like a shock jock to raise the adrenaline level. Not that it mattered--the research I was able to pull out of the air and cite (the 2005 CDC mortality study, for one) just sailed on by as if it didn't exist. And it didn't, you know, because of the waddling children and diabetic fatties who can't get off the couch. When I suggested that you can be healthy and fit even if you're fat, they practically laughed me off the show.
I feel badly about this--I could have done a better job of advocacy.
I hope the rest of you FA bloggers don't get blindsided like this. And I hope there was one person listening who heard a little something new, and might check it out.
Ugh. I'm heading upstairs to do some yoga. What an end to what a day.
Welcome new readers
Some of you have arrived here via the New York Times piece on the fatosphere. Some have come from other blogs, like Shapely Prose or Manolo for the Big Girl or Creamy Nougat Lair. However you stumbled onto this blog, I'm glad you're here.
I hope you'll take a few minutes to read up on the I Love My Body! pledge. Subversive, isn't it? Especially when you think about the messages the rest of the world gives us every single http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifday. Lose weight. You're too fat. You're worthless if you're fat. Thin = pretty. Thin = sexually attractive. Fat is repulsive, dangerous, unhealthy, ugly.
Here at Feed Me!, we believe in Health at Every Size. When our friends make comments filled with self-loathing, we talk them off the ledge. We believe that each and every one of us deserves a joyful, competent relationship with food.
I've been researching and writing about issues of weight and body image for several years, including this story about my daughter Kitty and her struggle to recover from anorexia. I'm putting together an anthology of essays about these issues, called--what else?--FEED ME!, which will be published by Random House next December.
I'd love to hear from you. What's your relationship with food and eating and your body like? What challenges you and what brings you joy? Share it with the community here. You won't be sorry.
I hope you'll take a few minutes to read up on the I Love My Body! pledge. Subversive, isn't it? Especially when you think about the messages the rest of the world gives us every single http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifday. Lose weight. You're too fat. You're worthless if you're fat. Thin = pretty. Thin = sexually attractive. Fat is repulsive, dangerous, unhealthy, ugly.
Here at Feed Me!, we believe in Health at Every Size. When our friends make comments filled with self-loathing, we talk them off the ledge. We believe that each and every one of us deserves a joyful, competent relationship with food.
I've been researching and writing about issues of weight and body image for several years, including this story about my daughter Kitty and her struggle to recover from anorexia. I'm putting together an anthology of essays about these issues, called--what else?--FEED ME!, which will be published by Random House next December.
I'd love to hear from you. What's your relationship with food and eating and your body like? What challenges you and what brings you joy? Share it with the community here. You won't be sorry.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Love Your Body!
As Camryn Manheim said, This is for all the fat girls. And the thin girls. And the in-between girls who struggle, as so many of us do, with self-loathing.
Well, here's a way to fight back.
Print this out. Use it as a bookmark. Tape it to your fridge. Frame it for your bedside table. Say it out loud.
I promise you, someday you'll actually believe it.
In honor of MLK Day
And in the context of the ongoing discussion about fat acceptance as a civil rights movement, here are some excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail." This particular section addresses the question so often asked in the civil rights movement of the 1960s: Why not just wait, things are getting better, why push it? King's eloquent and beautiful response is moving and righteous.
We still have so long so go for racial equality in this country. And if, as you're reading King's words, you imagine the word fat everywhere he writes Negro, and thin for white, you might get a taste of the work that still needs to be done on other fronts, too.
Letter From Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963
You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. . . . My friends, I must say to you that we have no made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. . . .
Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Civil rights
I just wrote this in a comment on another post, and thought it was worth repeating in a post all its own.
We need a civil rights movement for fat people.
Fat acceptance is great, but we need to go a step further. We need our own Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. We need civil disobedience. We need to picket outside the offices of for-profit bariatric surgery clinics. We need to Act Up, not shut up.
We need to teach our own culture an essential lesson once more: That each and every person is a valuable human being, regardless of the color of his/her skin, intelligence, country of origin, gender, sexual attractiveness, or weight. Hell, we need our own song.
We're talking basic civil rights here. Who's on the bus?
We need a civil rights movement for fat people.
Fat acceptance is great, but we need to go a step further. We need our own Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. We need civil disobedience. We need to picket outside the offices of for-profit bariatric surgery clinics. We need to Act Up, not shut up.
We need to teach our own culture an essential lesson once more: That each and every person is a valuable human being, regardless of the color of his/her skin, intelligence, country of origin, gender, sexual attractiveness, or weight. Hell, we need our own song.
We're talking basic civil rights here. Who's on the bus?
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Entering the dieting/FA fray
I'm going to tell you a story: I once had a friend named Mimi Orner who was a fat activist, woman of size, brilliant teacher, and all-around wonderful person. Here in Madison, Wis., where I live, she started a group that was anti-anorexia, anti-bulimia, and anti-dieting. This was about 15 years ago, mind, somewhat ahead of her time.
Mimi died seven years ago from ovarian cancer. Her appetite for food, like her appetite for life, lasted until pretty close to the very end. Her memorial service was attended by hundreds of people, many of whom got up to speak. All of these tributes were very moving, but the one I remember was a young woman who stood up, tears pouring down her face, and confessed that she and Mimi had once been close but of late had been a little bit estranged. "I found her so inspiring," she said through tears, "and I want to believe what she ways [about fat acceptance]. I'm not as smart or as good as Mimi. I just can't accept myself as a fat person, at least not yet. So we grew apart. And I've missed her so much. And now I'll never have the chance to make it right."
This young woman's words have stayed with me because they capture so vividly the dilemma of the individual and the political. Sometimes, you know, the emotions take a while to catch up with the intellect. Sometimes they never do. That's part of being human. We can't legislate our feelings.
Much as we might like to sometimes.
I miss Mimi too. I wished she was there two years ago when my daughter got sick. I wished she was there when I gained 50 pounds from a medication and struggled with that. I wish she were here now, so we could debate and argue and disagree and learn from each other.
Mimi died seven years ago from ovarian cancer. Her appetite for food, like her appetite for life, lasted until pretty close to the very end. Her memorial service was attended by hundreds of people, many of whom got up to speak. All of these tributes were very moving, but the one I remember was a young woman who stood up, tears pouring down her face, and confessed that she and Mimi had once been close but of late had been a little bit estranged. "I found her so inspiring," she said through tears, "and I want to believe what she ways [about fat acceptance]. I'm not as smart or as good as Mimi. I just can't accept myself as a fat person, at least not yet. So we grew apart. And I've missed her so much. And now I'll never have the chance to make it right."
This young woman's words have stayed with me because they capture so vividly the dilemma of the individual and the political. Sometimes, you know, the emotions take a while to catch up with the intellect. Sometimes they never do. That's part of being human. We can't legislate our feelings.
Much as we might like to sometimes.
I miss Mimi too. I wished she was there two years ago when my daughter got sick. I wished she was there when I gained 50 pounds from a medication and struggled with that. I wish she were here now, so we could debate and argue and disagree and learn from each other.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Time to spread the love!
My fabulous web designer, Gale Petersen, made a PDF of the I Love My Body! pledge. Yay! So now you, too, can download and disseminate the pledge. Post it at work. Email it to teachers and Girls Scout troop leaders and guidance counselors and parents. It's so easy for us to hate ourselves and our bodies--let's spread a little love instead!
And if you do send the pledge around, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it.
And if you do send the pledge around, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
J.K. Rowling and fat acceptance
I love J.K. Rowling. Not just because she's an author of tremendous imagination, heart, and soul, but also for the fat rant that appears on her website. (Thanks to anonymous for the correct link.)
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Take the love-your-body pledge
The previous post, and some of the comments on it, got me thinking hard about how to begin to change the culture around fat and how we perceive it.
I asked myself: What's the one thing I wish I could change around this issue? The answer: I wish I could change the way girls and women talk to themselves and others about their bodies.
I've posted about this before. And I've written about it in this article. Now it's time to do something about it.
So I have this crazy idea: What if we could disseminate a kind of pledge that young girls and women would sign, promising not to trash-talk about their bodies? Something like this:
I, __________________, pledge to speak kindly about my body.
I promise not to talk about how fat my thighs or stomach or butt are, or about how I really have to lose 5 or 15 or 50 pounds. I promise not to call myself a fat pig, gross, or any other self-loathing, trash-talking phrase.
I vow to be kind to myself and my body. I will learn to be grateful for its strength and attractiveness, and be compassionate toward its failings.
I will remind myself that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and that no matter what shape and size my body is, it’s worthy of kindness, compassion, and love.
Then what if we got some of their favorite role models to sign, and stand up and say why it's important? Folks like, I don't know, Sheryl Crow and Jennifer Hudson and Mia Hamm? Would you sign it?
See, I think sometimes if you change the story you tell yourself about something, your feelings follow along. So maybe if we change the words we use to talk about our bodies, our feelings about them will follow along too.
And then maybe kids like the 12-year-old in my previous post won't feel so anxious and conflicted about what they eat and how they look. And maybe some of the kids who are genetically predisposed to eating disorders won't develop them.
Maybe it's naive. Or maybe it's a good idea. What do you think?
I asked myself: What's the one thing I wish I could change around this issue? The answer: I wish I could change the way girls and women talk to themselves and others about their bodies.
I've posted about this before. And I've written about it in this article. Now it's time to do something about it.
So I have this crazy idea: What if we could disseminate a kind of pledge that young girls and women would sign, promising not to trash-talk about their bodies? Something like this:
I, __________________, pledge to speak kindly about my body.
I promise not to talk about how fat my thighs or stomach or butt are, or about how I really have to lose 5 or 15 or 50 pounds. I promise not to call myself a fat pig, gross, or any other self-loathing, trash-talking phrase.
I vow to be kind to myself and my body. I will learn to be grateful for its strength and attractiveness, and be compassionate toward its failings.
I will remind myself that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and that no matter what shape and size my body is, it’s worthy of kindness, compassion, and love.
Then what if we got some of their favorite role models to sign, and stand up and say why it's important? Folks like, I don't know, Sheryl Crow and Jennifer Hudson and Mia Hamm? Would you sign it?
See, I think sometimes if you change the story you tell yourself about something, your feelings follow along. So maybe if we change the words we use to talk about our bodies, our feelings about them will follow along too.
And then maybe kids like the 12-year-old in my previous post won't feel so anxious and conflicted about what they eat and how they look. And maybe some of the kids who are genetically predisposed to eating disorders won't develop them.
Maybe it's naive. Or maybe it's a good idea. What do you think?
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