Are you a size-accepting fat woman?

If so, please consider helping grad student Micheala Null, a doctoral student in sociology at Purdue University, by taking a brief study and potentially doing an interview. Details are below.



*********************

Call for Participants

Hi, my name is Michaela A. Null, and I am a doctoral student in Sociology at Purdue University. I am doing a study about the embodiment of size-accepting fat women, with attention to the ways in which gender, race, sexual orientation, and
body size intersect.

I am currently looking for individuals who are interested in volunteering to participate in my study. If you are interested in volunteering to participate in an interview, I ask that take an electronic informational survey, which will take approximately 5 minutes. Please go here and complete the informational survey. After all survey data has been collected, participants will be selected for interviews, which will be conducted in-person, by phone, or via internet chat, and will last between an hour and an hour and a half.

Participation is voluntary and participants must be at least 18 years old.

This project has been approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board, which protects human subjects of research. I will provide confidentiality to all volunteers and participants will be referred to by a pseudonym in all research documents.

If you have any questions regarding this study, you can contact me at mnull@purdue.edu. For more information on me, you can access my university profile here.
You can also contact Professor Eugene Jackson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, at jacksone@purdue.edu.


Sincerely,

Michaela A. Null
Doctoral Candidate
Instructor for Women's Studies
Purdue University
Department of Sociology
700 W. State Street
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2059

What do YOU do?

So I'm sitting at brunch with some neighbors--new neighbors, people I don't yet know very well but whom I like a lot--and the subjects of eating disorders and weight come up, as they inevitably seem to do. It is just after New Year's, after all, and we are sitting at brunch--a feast of a brunch, actually, with omelets and homemade waffles, a big bowl of whipped cream, berries, lox, roast potatoes, clementines. Everything is delicious and there's plenty of it.

So of course the conversation turns to dieting and New Year's resolutions, obesity and anorexia. And in the space of about 5 minutes I hear pretty much every myth about eating and weight there is:

"Children are much much fatter today than they've ever been and we have to do something about it."
"There's an explosion of diabetes among children today."
"Anorexia--that's all about control, isn't it?"
"Anorexics are doing that because they want to be thin. It's a cultural pressure kind of thing."

As I've said, these are people I like but don't know very well. But I can't just keep my mouth shut. I can't. I try to maintain a reasonable facade but within minutes I'm arguing, spouting statistics and opinions, trying to keep my voice friendly, hearing the urgency in my own words. I explain that one reason for the so-called explosion of obesity in America (among adults as well as children) is that the cutoffs for overweight and obesity changed overnight, so millions of people woke up one morning and were suddenly considered overweight or obese. That while more children are diagnosed with diabetes now than, say, 30 years ago, some of that number is certainly due to increased awareness and earlier diagnosis, which is a good thing. That the numbers don't differentiate between cases of Type 1 diabetes, which is largely genetic, and Type 2, which is linked to diet and activity.

I tell them about Health At Every Size, and try to conjure as many of Deb Burgard's talking points on size acceptance as I can remember. I tell them that Tom Cruise has been considered obese according to the BMI charts.

I tell them that no, anorexia is not about control, that it's not "about" anything except having the shitty luck to be genetically vulnerable. I tell them that for a person with anorexia, eating is like--oh, I don't know, maybe jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Covered in writing snakes. Giving a lecture on the way down. That for some people, restricting (aka dieting) sends them straight down the rabbit hole, that anorexia distorts thoughts and perceptions and feelings, that it's not a question of just picking up a fork and eating.

One of my new neighbors is in medical school. She's particularly interested in these subjects because she will have to adopt a professional attitude about them sometime soon. She'll have to figure out what she thinks and how to talk to people on all parts of the weight and eating spectrum--her patients. She listens. Everybody listens. We actually have a lively and interesting conversation. I think.

But I lay awake last night replaying it in my mind, wondering if I should have taken a different approach to the discussion. It's not so much that I think I was obnoxious (though maybe I was, a little) as it is the fact that I find these conversations exquisitely painful. Every time I hear the words It's all about control, isn't it? it's like some synapse in my brain starts overheating. How do I offer my knowledge and opinions without being obnoxious or driving myself beserk?

What do YOU do when the conversation turns to subjects like this?

Coming soon: Big Brother is watching you--eat

You've no doubt read about the this article in the New York Times by Gina Kolata, in which she covers the "fat is contagious" study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As a fellow journalist, I understand that Kolata had to cover the story. An obesity reporter's gotta cover what an obesity reporter's gotta cover (which is why I left the world of hard news long ago). But the tone of this article is a little too uncritical in my opinion, a little too quick to accept the study's dubious findings as valid research.

The quote that sent me reaching for my keyboard: When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad. “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.

In other words, size acceptance causes obesity.

I'm not even going to try to unpack all the assumptions here. Like, for instance,the fact that thin people can become fat, or that fat is always Bad with a capital B, or that it's better to be thin than to be comfortable with yourself, whatever your size is. And then of course there's the fact that these researchers don't seem to understand that--repeat after me, class--correlation does not equal causation.

Kolata certainly didn't try. She appears to have reported all this with a straight face, more or less, despite her considerable knowledge about obesity and scientific research and, well, bullshit.

Gina, Gina, Gina. I may have to take your book off my shelf.

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?