I listened to another episode of Fatcast. They’re up to ten now, with a couple of extra unnumbered episodes thrown in. Yesterday they talked about exercise and it was so awesome that I feel the need to tell you what they talked about. Sometimes just saying “listen to this” isn’t enough after all.

First of all I should say that they ALSO talk about why they love exercise; Lesley says she feels like a gazelle when she swooshes away on the elliptical for hours on end, and Marianne talks about how she loves running because of the impact with every step she takes, and how it makes her go “wow, I’m HEAVY, and it’s awesome”.

But the part that I found the most interesting was when they spoke about why exercise is such a double-edged sword for most people. And not even in the whole disordered eating becoming obsessed with working out kind of way.

A few things they talked about:

* How classist and ableist it is to assume that a) everyone can afford a membership to a gym, b) everyone has the TIME to go to the gym three-four or more times a week, c) everyone has the ability to run, jump, skip, etc, for hours every week. And in many cases, at least in the U.S. you need a car to get to a gym, and the less than stellar neighbourhoods has no gyms nearby. None. It’s the whole grocery store desert all over again.

* It might be sexist too, and Marianne said this bit awesomely:

“So it’s classist and it’s ableist to have all these cultural expectations that everybody is going to exercise in this one particular fashion and I would also say it’s sexist because it’s predominantly women. There was this study recently about how women past a certain age need to up their exercise an hour a day to maintain their youthful figure or whatever. And that pissed me off on so many levels, I mean, there’s so much WRONG with that kind of bullshit, both from an ageism perspective and a sexism perspective and a general fuck-off-it’s-my-body-perspective.”

* Somehow, in many ways it’s become some sort of demented truth that ONLY THE GYM counts. Like, going out dancing for three hours straight or playing football with your kids in the park doesn’t count. It has to be at the gym and it has to be torturous, apparently.

* The TV thing, and with that I mean that kids are said to spend a lot more time in front of the TV these days, and how people are horrified that it means they’re sitting still. Lesley points out that there’s like a hundred other ways this is troubling, and as somebody who watched some American kids TV with a boy I was babysitting… yeah. I agree.

* Fat people are told they have to work out to become thinner, BUT most of them have grown up learning that going outside in ill-fitting clothes (because workout wear for fats is hard to find), especially to a place where most others are fit and capable of much more than you, is a bad idea. And this is hard to re-learn.

* Just the idea of a gym, especially the big franchises are in many ways advertised as a way of losing weight, and more than that, has ads where everyone is skinny and perfect, which is a way makes you feel like, and I quote “it’s trying to erase your body and it’s trying to erase you as a physical being”.

Marianne talked further of this from a feminist perspective:

“As women we are taught that we need to minimise ourselves, that we need to, you know, take up as little space as possible, that we need to have as small of a physical body as possible and I feel very strongly that that is an actual physical manifestation of the minimising of women’s power and embodiment and self-will and all that stuff.”

So, yes. Regardless of size it’s not as easy as it sounds to “make time” for this stuff. And if you’re fat you have all this extra stuff to work through to get there. And even if you do, you are sometimes made to feel like once or twice a week isn’t enough and makes no difference so why should you bother?

I do want to point out that once you do make it to the gym there’s no pointing and laughing, there’s people of all sizes, everyone works out to the best of their abilities and the trainers (of which I’ve talked to two), while skinny and lean (the women) or ridiculously muscled and shiny (the men) do NOT talk about weightloss unless you specifically ask. They’re happy to find you a workout route that works depending on your abilities and while I was scared shitless the first time I’ve come to love that place.

And that was something I never thought I’d say.

Anyway. Listen to this episode. It’s fascinating as it talks about both the cultural expectations, about the actual physical act of making it to the gym, of alternate versions of exercise (dancing around your living room in your underwear was my favourite), of why they exercise and find it fun, and of course there is a rant about workout wear for fat people…

There’s always at least one rant. It’s awesome.

Last but not least, there’s a few programs to help you get started, if the gym is scary. Tansy talked about Life Be In It, which sounds great but has such a couch-potato-fat-hating comic on the webpage that it makes me want to hit things. I’m told there are good things about it, but as I’ve not experienced it myself I’m not sure if I should actually be linking to it. In the podcast they also talk about the Couch to 5k project, which I looked up. It sounds fairly good, but requires you to run with a stopwatch or knowing the exact distance you run, which is a bit on the obsessive side.

Anyway. Podcast. Listen.

I started blogging elsewhere. In Swedish. Somehow I feel like the number of blog posts here have told you this already. Anywayyyy, I posted this, and I so need to crosspost.

Don’t feel like translating the whole text, but this is a kind of heavy (inbetweenie, not fat-fat, and I’m not saying that in a bad way) dancer who tried out for American. So You Think You Can Dance. She’s amazing, and two of the three judges are actually crying at the end of her performance. (The third is the meanie with the British accent, seems all reality TV shows need one of those.)

Watch the clip here, it’s absolutely amazing:

The first version I saved was removed due to copyright violations, so I typed up the post-dance conversation in case this one is too. It’s so amazing and sad and joyful, simultaneously.

NIGEL: Look at these two, they’re both crying here.

MIA: I’m not crying.

ADAM: Oh, shut up, you are too crying, you liar. You just blew every single stereotype so far out of the water. You are so gorgeous…

MEGAN: Thank you.

ADAM: …and you love to dance, it sets you free. It was so ugly, what I was saying, “What am I looking at?” because, you know why? Because I think that I hold stereotypes sometimes too. And I am SO HAPPY that you just schooled me. You just schooled everyone out there. That was fantastic.

MEGAN: Thank you.

MIA: Yeah. Yeah. You make me so happy to be a woman of size. You know, I was told… (crying) …that I would never dance, because of my body, and, um, I’m one of those choreographers that look at the dancer, and the spirit of the dancer, and no matter what size we are, and what shape we are, we are truly an artist, and it doesn’t matter. And you exemplify that to me.

NIGEL: Listen, facing the reality of things, it’s going to be very difficult to find the jobs, for you to become a professional dancer, as Mia found it difficult to the point, Mia, I think it’s fair to say that you got very few jobs, which spurred you on…

MIA: I didn’t get ANY jobs.

NIGEL: …Mia didn’t get any jobs, which spurred her on to become a choreographer and a creator. So, without question, you’re going to find it difficult, and whether it’s stereotypes or it isn’t, it’s going to be difficult for you. How do you feel about that?

MEGAN: I mean, it’s difficult, but at the same time it’s reality, so you just have to face it, but, I mean, I wanna change that, so… so I’m here, because it’s like my dream to be on this show.

NIGEL: You really gave a fabulous performance, and that’s what impressed me.

MEGAN: Thanks.

NIGEL: So, yes, I’m very happy to put you through to choreography.

I could say a lot about the mentality in this line of work, especially as I used to have a friend who used cocaine to stay thin enough to be able to compete as a professional dancer (we’re not friends anymore, I hope she managed to quit), but I’m not going to. I’m tired, so I’m just going to watch Torchwood and cringe at how badly written Gwen is.

And tomorrow I get to go over to my parents house, pet their cat (who is black and about six years old, and his fur is getting all these white hairs in it, it’s adorable), admire the vegetable patch, take pics of the apple trees which are all pretty this time of year, and eat barbecued tofu. Also, going to work out, cross your fingers that my knees will hold up!

PS. I am now running HALF of my twenty minutes on the treadmill. I couldn’t be more proud, seriously. Three months ago I could hardly WALK twenty minutes. Two months ago I managed to run six minutes out of twenty. Now I’m doing ten/ten, and it’s ridiculously exciting.

This one is mainly for Tansy and Alisa who were mentioned in some podcast or other that just thought they were angry and overly sensitive feminists, and you know, all the usual stuff. Why? Because they talked about yet another anthology with mainly men in. I thought about it today when I listened to a whole other podcast that said some awesome things. Granted, the podcast I got it from had absolutely nothing to do with writing or science fiction or anything like that, but they do say some great stuff about language, “safe space” and calling people out on things they do or say that aren’t necessarily meant to be mean/offensive/oppressive/etc, but THAT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS, no matter the intent of the person saying or doing it.

The podcast is Two Whole Cakes FatCast and I highly recommend the whole thing for anyone who wants some more information about size acceptance and all that, but if you don’t I still think this bit is pretty awesome and talks about just the things you guys have been struggling with…

For reference, it starts around 53 minutes of the sixth episode, and here’s a transcript of the best bit:

LESLEY: Dude, if this is the first time in your whole fucking life that somebody has approached you like this, then the level of privilege that you are operating under is so great that it’s hard for me to be sympathetic. Just stop and think! Stop, and just THINK. Like, wow, there are people in this world whose experiences are completely different from mine, and I’ve never thought about that before in my whole life! So, give yourself the opportunity to use this amazing brain, and I don’t care who you are, you have the brain capacity to think of this and to try to be more understanding of other people’s feelings and perspectives. Damn it.

MARIANNE: (laughs like a loon) Sorry, I’m taking you seriously, I promise! I just have like this –

LESLEY: The laughter is really convincing me that you’re taking this seriously.

MARIANNE: I told you I have tone problems! I have, okay, so, sometimes, you know, people get upset on the Twitter or whatever –

LESLEY: (laughs) On the Twitter!

MARIANNE: On the Twitter. I spend a lot of time with my great grandmother, I’ve picked up her sort of ways of thinking about things. So, I’m on the Twitter, and the sense that I get isn’t that it’s the first time people have been challenged, it’s that they have been challenged a number of times and feel at this point in their life or their career or whatever they are entitled to NO LONGER be challenged. And I think that does erase the great variety of experience that you and I value so much, and that so many other people value so much. And puts in its place this borg like… cube of, you know, homogenized experience we all must reference and you have to know that “no I would never mean it like that”, and blah blah blah. I mean… it just, it does, it reeks of this sense of “I have entained a level where I’m entitled to no longer be challenged about these things”, and there is no such level.

LESLEY: No. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care if you are, if you’re like the leader of the… awesome totally socially conscious people of the world movement, there will always be situations in which you, and you know, this is just part of life, life is that you will say stupid shit and you will occasionally offend someone, and frankly, if you’re LUCKY, that person will let you know about it. It’s not, I feel like a lot of time the responses, you know, “why did this person even have to make a deal out of this, why couldn’t they just keep their mouths shut”…

MARIANNE: How dare you hurt my feelings by telling me I hurt your feelings.

LESLEY: Or how dare you embarrass me by pointing this out to me. And, you know, I really strongly believe that if someone takes the time, and risks something, and it is a risk, to tell you that you have said something that offended them or was problematic to them, you’re incredibly fortunate that they think highly enough of you and your capacity to process this information that they bother telling you in the first place, but also, that it’s giving you an opportunity to learn something. And I am a giant ass nerd, but I really cherish opportunities to learn something new like that, particularly if someone I maybe not know that well taking time to tell me something I might just have breezed past, totally oblivious.

The conversation derails a bit after that, but goes on to talk a bit about the risk that comes with calling somebody out on something, especially if you are in a minority, and in a setting that is already kind of niche-y, which I think both goes for the fat acceptance movement and for the whole women in science fiction/horror/etc thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but oh how I thought of that particular discussion when I heard this.

So, yes, there are reasons for doing this sort of discussion publicly, for pointing out why something is hurtful, mean or excluding (different words depending on if it’s a joke, a discussion, a book, and so on) and how it can be done in a better way.

And no, we’re (or in this case Tansy, Alisa and others, because I actually didn’t comment on it when it first happened) not doing it to be whiny old mean feminists with nothing better to do with our time. We’re doing it because it KEEPS HAPPENING, and I swear, if this wasn’t pointed out publicly it would happen ten thousand times more often than it actually does.

That’s all.

So fat acceptance (and thus the OMG-OBESITY-IS-TAKING-OVER-THE-WORLD) has come to Sweden, much thanks to the blog Kroppsbilder, I think. The title means “body images” in both senses of the word, and if you scroll far enough you’ll find my picture among the others. There’s been two newspaper articles about it so far, and my pic has been requested for both. Very exciting, although not the only one, obviously.

And now, since people are realising that there are actually people that are fine with being fat, they’re coming out of the woodwork to tell us exactly what they think about it. So far in the last two, three days?

Oh, let me count the ways.

1. A WebMD type site posted a news article saying that “all fat people” wishes that their doctors would bring up their weight and how they could learn how to maintain it (read: get it down to a good number). The source? A study in a Swedish city. No mention of size of the sample, how representative it was or even a link to the study in this case. As a fat person who LOVES not being berated for my size when I have a problem with my physical health this is far from a great idea, I have to say.

2. A Swedish columnist of the type that looooves stirring things up and has as of late written some crap about both people with mental illnesses and non cisgendered people (and when there was a bit of ranting about that last one she blogged “HAHA, A FEMINIST IS CRANKY WITH ME!”), wrote a piece about there being a thin person in every fat woman, waiting to get out. Yes, that old cliché got to came out to play. She concluded her column with that we’re too nice to the fatties because some doctors (see above) don’t dare to hound their patients about their weight. (Okay, she didn’t use “hound”. But still.)

3. A Swedish journalist and blogger who used to be quite sane but turned thirty, had children, became a conservative (politically speaking) and started lecturing teens everywhere about buckling up and doing what’s good for them blogged the above piece and added that she couldn’t see why encouraging somebody to “become thin” (as if it happens magically) is any different than encouraging them to playing some sport, so they could be really good at it. The last piece of hers I read before this one was about her lamenting that her seven-year-old daughter had quit gymnastics because the other kids were mean to her, and she didn’t want HER daughter to become like she was when she was a teenager, unfit and shy and without social skills. Um. Yes.

4. One of THOSE blogs, with huge font and some philosophical tag line posted about fat and how bad it is and recommending appetite supressant medicines among other things. I replied with a link to Shapely Prose and he mansplained to me about how fat is BAD and to choose my sources carefully and not believe everything such a website, that twists the truth says. I laughed at him and walked away. (And can I say, as somebody who has friends that used to take illegally imported non-FDA approved drugs of this kind, mimicking the effects of amphetamine, only… marginally less bad, this one made me go on a raaaaaage. Though I still didn’t award him a second comment.)

And on top of it I had to endure ANOTHER fucking diet talk at weaving last night, which actually made me so cranky that I had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom. It’s just so awful to sit there and see the forced smile on the face of the biggest of these women as the others go off on this particular subject.

On the upside: new word, coined by me and another Swedish FA blogger, regarding people who tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re not fat, and it’s really like THIS?

“Fatsplaining”.

There’s mansplaining, so why the hell not fatsplaining? Although that might be explaining to the fatties that it’s bad for them to be fat…

Ahem. Will stop ranting now.

Another post first written for my Swedish HAES blog. Apologies to those of you who read both of them.

A few days ago I tweeted a link to a brilliant example of classy Hollywood. Among other things it’s about Keira Knightley, who had so small breasts when she was in Pirates of the Carribean that make-up artists painted in shadows that made them look bigger – and it only lasted 45 minutes before having to be re-done. The alternative was to put her in a bodice that got her waist down to eighteen inches. In this case the trouble was that it only allowed her enough oxygen to breathe for ten minutes, after which she started to pass out. Healthy, no?

The reason I’m talking about this is some opinions on the cover to Vanity Fair’s March issue (click for full size):

Here we have:

Abbie Cornish (Bright Star), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Amanda Seyfried (Dear John), Rebecca Hall (Frost/Nixon), Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland), Emma Stone (Zombieland), Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) och Evan Rachel Wood (The Wrestler).

We also have nine white, thin, classically beautiful women, placed by hair colour to get a balanced picture, and as a tagline: A new Hollywood! Starring the fresh faces of 2010. Sure, Hollywood isn’t the first place you go to for diversity, but seriously? No men? Nobody over the age of thirty? Nobody with the least bit of curves? And the thing most people react on – not one person of colour.

Personally I would’ve loved to see Zoe Saldana on this cover. I love her so, and while she’s had a few movies before this year, it wasn’t until Star Trek that she became really famous. And you know, she might be so skinny that you want to cry just looking at her, but at least she’s not whiter than white.

Inside the magazine another black actress who didn’t make the cover is interviewed, namely Gabourey Sidibe from the movie Precious. When Access Hollywood asked her how it made her feel (not being included on the cover) she said that it didn’t matter to her, because she would’ve felt like the odd one out anyway, which is so sad.

Admittedly Vanity Fair isn’t the go-to-place for diversity either, and writing this I think about this other article they did on social media and Twitter in particular. It had interviews of seven women who uses it, and managed to make them all sound completely moronic.

But to return to Gabby Sidibe, it seems like both the general public, Hollywood and media have a hard time accepting somebody who is both fat and self confident. I read in the Huffington Post about somebody who called her Oscar-gown a tent, and then there were the same old excuses (sample sizes, blah blah blah) cited as a reason she would never be in for example Vogue.

Personally I found her dress for the Oscars absolutely gorgeous, but that’s just me.

Sadly none of this is news, and there’s not much to say about it other than ‘will we ever get anything but mainstream beauty when we go to the movies?’. Apparently only on special occasions, it seems. But instead of talking for way too long about why this sucks I’m going to give you some pics of Gabby along with some quotes of things she’s said, most of them about her body and how she feels about it. Just because.

In her own way, Sidibe is becoming a pinup too. She adores photo shoots.

“I feel like a model. It justifies everyone in my life who told me I wouldn’t be anything until I lost weight. It justifies that little girl who cried because she didn’t think she could be in front of the camera. And it’s for other girls who feel like they can’t do this or that and feel like they’re not pretty and not worthy of having their photo taken.”

Sidibe was not born this evolved, however.

“It came late, too late in my life,” she says. “Something like 21. I just know that I was tired. I was tired of thinking less of myself because others did.”

Daniels, with whom Sidibe has an admirably frank relationship, told the New York Times, “[Gabby] may be in a state of denial or on a higher plane than the rest of us, but either way, she breaks your heart in the movie.”

She sits back. “I was like, ‘What the hell? I’m in denial?’ No, I know what I look like. I’m very much aware.”

She adds, “People always ask me, ‘You have so much confidence. Where did that come from?’ It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and,” she chuckles, “you must decorate it.”

She’s bemused by Kate Moss’s recent recitation of the diet dictum “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” “Well, I wouldn’t know,” she says. “I’ve never been skinny. I’ve heard it before. It’s just one of those things that people say that doesn’t really mean anything in my life. She didn’t make it up.”

Sidibe feels pretty good, actually, and is working on feeling better. Today she is joining a gym, noting with some humor that her primary source of energy as she’s been hurtling around the country of late has been “Red Bull, which I’m sure isn’t the greatest thing.” About a year ago, she used to “swim a hundred laps a day.”

How did she look then? Bigger shoulders, stronger? “Nah,” she laughs, “just like this.”

When Sidibe appeared on Ellen in October, armed with a dance she had been practicing for weeks, Ellen DeGeneres implored her to “stay exactly who you are.”

She lights up at the memory.

“I’m just happy to show up. So, I don’t have any plans of changing because I really, really like myself. It took a lot of work to get here. It’s reaffirming for people to meet me and ask me not to change.” She smiles, slyly deflating her you-go-girl balloon. “And now we cry.”

All quotes are from this article.

I wrote this one in Swedish yesterday. I hope it will work translated, as it was a reply to another brilliant blog post that only exists in Swedish. It was about the “oh but you‘re not fat” comment inbetweenies (to thin for plus size, too fat for straight sizes) tend to get. This is what I had to say about it.

So, let’s talk about the word “fat”. It’s very much a relative term, because most people (especially women) seem to think they weigh too much, regardless of size. This starts much earlier than you think. For example I found this article on girls in the 3-6 age bracket, and how the perfection of for example Disney princess affect their body image. Now, I have to say that I’m a bit dubious on how the questions were posed, because it seems like kids that age are kind of susceptible to leading questions, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

But let’s leave the science speak for a bit, shall we?

A part of the relative-ness (it’s so a word!) of this word seems to have a lot to do with the fact that most people have an extremely hard time judging size and weight of people around them. A perfect example on this is this experiment blogger Marianne Kirby did a few years ago, asking people to guess her height and weight from a photo that she posted to her blog. The result is really interesting, because the guesses range from 170 pounds (77 kilos) to 340 pounds (155 kilos). That is a 75 kilo difference, people!

For the record, she weighted 314 pounds at the time, and is 5′3 tall, so a lot of people guessed that weighed a lot less than she really did, and most of the ones that came close thought that she was 5′8 or taller.

She also talked about how people seemed to think that guessing a too high number would somehow insult her, and that some (especially blokes) came out and said “well, I know somebody your size and SHE says she weighs 200 pounds…”, which is to say that there is a lot of vanity involved here. If everyone shaves twenty or forty pounds off their weight when they mention it to anyone we will all walk around and feel bad about being so much heavier than the rest of the world. So, really, stop lying. I’ll start.

I’m 5′8 (173 cm) tall. I weigh 90 kilos. My BMI is 31. 25 is the upper limit for overweight, 30 is when you fall into obese land, and above 35 you get the lovely label “morbidly obese” affixed to yourself.

So, you know, I am fat. And the fact that people that buy me clothes (mostly my mum and grandmother) consequently gives me things two or three sizes too small is just enervating. It’s as if they think I would be offended if they brought me something bigger than a 44 (that’s a UK 16 or a US 14, btw) or something. I’m not. Seriously. I’m mostly annoyed that I have to go and exchange it for something I can actually wear.

(And for the record, when I was a European 42 they brought me 36 or 38. This is a bad circle, neverending.)

And sure, you probably shouldn’t walk around and expect people to just magically know your dress size, but after a while it gets tireding to hear that you’re not fat. Most people who say this do it about people they like and care about, in some backwards attempt to make them feel good. But know this – as long as you say something like “oh my God, look at her over there, what is she wearing?” about some girl that is wearing a short skirt or tight jeans or show too much cleavage, and she in fact is bigger than your fat friend? It hurts. The “oh, I don’t mean you” thing really doesn’t work in this situation. And yes, I do hope that I am old enough to have grown out of doing this myself, and having friends who do it, but… thought I’d toss it out there anyway.

I do get the reasoning when it comes to assuring people they aren’t fat, and maybe to a certain degree the urge to divide people into skinny and fat, and putting the ones you care about in the former category, just because. It’s just that when you start comparing fat levels there’s always somebody who is going to clock in somewhere in the middle, and she will be told that she’s too skinny to be fat, and too fat to be skinny. Simultaneously.

(I think you all remember my rant from when Fatshionista on LJ changed their policy.)

When I first found fat acceptance I was really surprised, actually, because suddenly I wasn’t enormous. I was… kind of small. That was quite a revelation. And sure, it’s easier to be just a little fat than really fat, in the eyes of people around you. I never have to worry about airplane seats, I can eat in front of others, and so on, but that doesn’t mean I don’t stand in the (usually very small) plus size section, desperately trying to find something that isn’t either too small or too big.

If you’re interested in clothes and fashion and all that it’s possible to find stuff that works in straight sizes by looking at materials and such (read more about that at Young, Fat and Fabulous), but it takes time and effort and seriously? I don’t care all that much. I used to live in jeans and T-shirts and Converse and not care one way or another, but these days all jeans fall off me (because my hips are two sizes larger than my waist) and even my beloved Chucks are too narrow to fit me comfortably. And then what do you do? Well, yes. Then you go to the plus size section, looking to grab something quickly, realising that there’s about three shelves of clothes and that most of them are either too small or too big.

So, yeah. Being an “inbetweenie” is easier than being honest to God fat, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. I may LOOK if not thin, so at least “normal”, and maybe I am. Most of the time.

At least until I stand there in the clothing store and nothing fit.

Until I go to the gym and everyone is smaller than me (and I may say that I don’t care, but I do, I really, really do).

Until people start giving me their old clothes because they’ve “lost twenty kilos, but they probably fit you”.

Until you constantly feel too fat or too thin, depending on the situation. So, yes. I’m fat. And when you say that I’m not it’s not a compliment. It’s just a reminder that I don’t belong on either side of the fence, and honestly, I have far too many fences to sit on already.

PS. This post became rather different than the original. And for Kate Harding excellence on this topic, read Does my butt look fat? at Salon.com. Last but not least, the two first images are from Now Foundation’s Love Your Body project and the last by amazing artist Richard Wilkinson. Check out his work, it’s seriously beautiful.

Oh my God, people. I spent the last two days watching the Nightline Debate “Is it okay to be fat?”, taking notes and transcribing and I think my brain melted clear out of my head from the sheer stupidity. Granted, there were some awesome things said as well, because two of the guests were brilliant, but for the most part? OH MY GOD. That’s all I’m going to say.

Okay, that is not all I’m going to say, because I transcribed for my Swedish HAES blog and I thought I should put something here to, as the notes are all in English and I might as well do that before I translate and all that, but be warned. Very stupid stupidity coming, although I will try to mix it up with awesome.

The guests were (from left to right, with the moderator in orange in the middle):

Marianne Kirby, co-author of Lessons From the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce On Your Body, which I spoke briefly about here. The other author of that one is my hero Kate Harding, btw. Marianne also runs the blog The Rotund, which I love, and seems like an awesome person all around.

Crystal Renn, currently the highest paid plus size model in the world, although she started out as a “normal” model, and developed anorexia because of trying to maintain that size. She’s amazing, and you can read more about her here, or see pics of her rocking the same clothes as a mainstream thin model here.

Kim Bensen, author of Finally Thin!, a memoir about her road from fat-fat-fattie to thin-thin-thinnie. Apparently she once weighed 350 lbs and has dieted her way down to a size whatever, something tiny anyway, and because of that she thinks everyone can do it, and runs a website selling all kinds of weightloss related stuff, from low-calorie sugar, by way of bags with the word BELIEVE to fridge magnets where you can put a picture of your fat self to remind yourself of why you shouldn’t open that door. Yes, seriously.

MeMe (Meredith) Roth, founder of National Action Against Obesity (not a big shiny foundation, but a one person organisation run from her living room) and um, well-known in the blogosphere as random fatphobic crazycakes lady. I could never adequately sum her up, but this post by The-F-Word.org does it quite nicely, and this article at the Guardian as well.

And I suppose I should say that YES, I was rather biased writing up these short bios. There’s no denying that. But still, I do believe their words speak volumes. Their opening statements, for example, as a response to the question “is it okay to be fat?” looks like this:

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Moderator:
“Is it okay to be fat? Let’s start with you, MeMe.”

MeMe:
“It’s not okay to be fat when we realise that in almost every single case being over-fat is a result of habitual improper eating. Obesity ravages the body, there’s an untold cost of human suffering, and there’s a financial burden to all of us, not just the person that is eating themself into obesity.”

Moderator:
“But is there a way to be fat and healthy?”

MeMe:
“Not if you have feet, hips and knees, not if you have an endocrine system, and not if you have an arterial system.”

Moderator:
“Marianne, you would respectfully disagree?”

Marianne:
“Like, I HAVE feet and hips and knees, it’s very exciting. I –”

MeMe:
“I’m sure the orthopedist finds the effect of your weight on those feet and hips and knees very exciting too.”

Marianne:
“Actually, no. I’m actually a very healthy person. It’s kind of amazing, I’m far healthier now than I was when I started dieting, you know, at seven, and continued for a lifetime.”

Moderator:
“What do you make of the question, though? Is it okay to be fat?”

Marianne:
“I think it’s kind of an unfair question, because that’s like asking ‘is it okay to be anything other than white, middle class, heteronormative, mainstream body type?’. I mean, it’s my body. It’s totally okay. It’s noone else’s business.”

MeMe:
“I have a question for you. Would you be willing to forfeit any payout from an insurance company, Medicare or Medicaid for any medical costs associated with your obesity?

Marianne:
“I don’t understand why you think that’s even a good thing. It’s –”

MeMe:
“Well you said that it’s your body and that it’s nobody else’s business, I was just curious if you would be willing to forfeit any payout for any sickness associated with your obesity from Medicare or Medicaid which we all pay for, or insurance. I’m just curious!”‘

Moderator:
“I think MeMe’s getting a little bit ahead in the debate, which is the idea of the cost or burden to society of medical expenses. And we all know that something like 9% of all medical expenses are related to obesity. But we can get to that in a minute. Why don’t we continue with our opening statements? And I turn to Kim. Is it okay to be fat?”

Kim:
“Well, I think that first of all you have to define okay. What does okay mean? Is it a permission? Because once we start policing what goes in our mouths from a legislative point, that’s very scary. And what is fat? Are you talking about a term that the government set up? Is it a pound overweight? How long have you carried it? I mean, I think it’s very difficult to be overweight and healthy. I think there’s exceptions, especially when you’re young there can be exceptions, but it takes a toll on your body and I speak from experience. But my husband told me I was beautiful when I was 350 pounds. It’s not a beauty thing, it’s a health thing.”

Moderator:
“Crystal, for your industry, it’s very much a beauty thing. Is it okay to be fat?”

Crystal:
“I think that it’s okay to eat, well, a balanced diet. I also think that it’s good to exercise and wherever your body falls, whether that’s actually a four, or an eighteen, I think that it’s really about the actual healthy eating habits that you have and wherever your body falls. I believe, actually, because I have met people, in my side of things, you know, my division is the plus size industry, and I meet quite a few women who eat a very healthy, balanced diet, and they just happen to be a size eighteen.”

Moderator:
“But doesn’t the fact that you’re a plus size model speaks volumes about the fashion industry, because looking at you, you don’t look like a plus size person to me.”

Crystal:
“Oh, absolutely. I do know that the society, when they hear plus size model, they have a picture in their mind, but in the industry, a plus size is anything above a thirty-four inch hip, thirty-five inch hip, and that goes all the way up to a twenty. What I’m fighting for is a variety on the runway. I want all different types of women in magazines, because I think that’s an accurate portrayal of what women are. And I think that they could look at those magazines and those ads and feel really positive from that. Because people ARE all different sizes, and no matter if you’re, if you’re starving yourself down to be healthy, I don’t agree with that. And an interesting point that was brought up earlier was about the hips and the knees and it causing problems when you’re ‘obese’. Well, I remember when I’d been exercising for eight hours a day, what that did to my hips. It was quite amazing, I found myself having trouble to walking down the street.”

Moderator:
“So you’re saying that the quest for being thin can be quite unhealthy as well?”

Crystal:
“Oh absolutely. I think it’s all about moderation, which is my stance.”

====

And that’s just the first five minutes.

As you can see MeMe is rather unpleasant, jumping to conclusions, interrupting, talking over the other participants and that’s just the beginning of her craziness. If you want to see the whole trainwreck, you can watch it in five minute segments with an annoying commercial before each one, at the link mentioned above.

And I suppose that I can mention that this estimation of 9%? Is based on the TOTAL cost of all diseases that may or may not be attributed to size, although it’s far from true that every single person who has problem with their heart, joints or blood sugar are overweight. Also, researching this I came across this interesting table, which maps out the total cost of various diseases in the U.S. Heart conditions are in the lead at 8.3%, BUT trauma and cancer are both close behind, at 6.9 and 6% respectively.

That is not accounting for the fact that fat people are more likely to survive cardiac events, that dieting will cause as much health problems as staying fat and that that a portion of all health costs are, in fact, lapband surgeries.

Add to that the fact that so many overweight people don’t get adequate health care is because they’re terrified of going to the doctor when they’re just going to be told to lose weight when they in fact have preemie lungs as a friend of mine, or blood clots in their lungs or, you know, a busted knee.

As the debate went on MeMe Roth kept quoting all kinds of obscure studies, as if rattling off numbers would be especially convincing. One of the studies claimed that the BRAINS of fat people were smaller than those of thin people. Looking for something to confirm or reject this study I found a blog that said it so beautifully:

There’s also the small matter in which Roth stated that overweight/obese people had brains “4% smaller” than “healthy weight” people. I understand the study’s from the University of Pittsburgh, as she noted, but I want to know what exactly the university said, since this sounds – as the audience for the debate attested – like total crap. Does the brain shrink as someone gains weight? What of the five percent of dieters who used to be obese and are now considered “normal” weight, such as Kim Benson? Do their brains enlarge as these people continue to keep the weight off?

The only way this makes sense is if evolution slowly progressed over centuries to the point that genetically larger people had 4% smaller brains, but then that’s admitting that weight and size has very much to do with genetics and very little to do with willpower or one’s moral worth, which Roth won’t concede to. Except when it comes to fat women giving birth to kids with spina bifida, at which point Roth says, “You’re fighting against Darwin here!”

Well, MeMe, you can’t have it both ways – either weight is caused by genetics or it’s caused by one being a self-indulgent slob, and it looks like you’ve undermined your lazy-slob position right there. Check… and… mate.

====

As the debate went on Crystal shared a bit of her obsessive eating habits while anorexic, which became rather telling once MeMe went on to talk about HER not-diet, which is based on the idea that if you want to weight 130, you should eat no more than 1300 calories per day (yes, seriously), and if you want more you can exercise, and then get up to 1800.

Which sounds very healthy, no?

At one point Kim actually said (in horror) to Marianne: “But you don’t know how much you’re eating, because YOU’RE NOT COUNTING YOUR CALORIES”, as if that was the end of the fucking world.

Then a male pediatrician came on and mansplained what the women on the panel had already discussed. Later on he spoke about babies, six months old who are being tragically over-fed, which ties in with MeMe’s closing statement, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The one thing I liked about him was when he asked her if she thinks stigmatising obese people is a good thing. To this she answered that she doesn’t think we should stigmatise PEOPLE because of her family (who are all overweight), but that we need to use stigmatisation to fight obesity.

To this Marianne said:

“But what your message does is stigmatise fat people. You don’t run an organization that attacks school systems for not having recess. What your organization does is making people feel bad about themselves. There are no ‘powers of stigmatization’ that can do anything good for a person. You know, shame doesn’t work that way.”

And really? Her arguments sounds an awful lot like “oh, I don’t like gay people but YOU are okay, because you’re my friend”. And speaking about the size of our brains? Reminds me of when they used to measure people’s body parts to prove that they were inferior, and that is frankly, a thing of the past. At least I really fucking hope so.

====

Another quote of MeMe’s is the following:

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we are behaviorally and neurochemically dependant on food.”

Yes, she really said that. She sat on national television and stated that our brains tell us we have to eat or we’ll die. Um, REALLY? That’s certainly not anything anyone else has ever thought of!

Kim, on the other hand, is nice in comparison. She uses this sugary sweet voice, talking as if she wants YOU, and just you, nobody else, to think about your health and your future and do something about yourself. She speaks like she is your well-meaning mother or aunt or whatever, and really, she wasn’t THAT bad until the very end when the following was said…

Kim:
“I just don’t understand. Are you saying that obese people are obese because of genetics, not because of behaviour?”

Marianne:
“I’m saying that there are a lot of things, and no one reason. And the argument –”

Kim:
“Can I just ask about you? Are you obese simply because you have an obese gene, and not because you overeat? Because you’re talking about eating healthy food, eating in moderation, exercising… (and here she LAUGHS) … I gotta ask about you. I’m just asking, not condemning or making any statements, I just want to know. Are you the size you are because you overeat, or because you’re just genetically pre-disposed?”

Marianne:
“I’m this size because I dieted for twenty years.”

Kim:
“Well, DIETING doesn’t get you to that size.”

Marianne:
“It DOES, actually. It gets you to the point where you lose a little bit of weight, and then you regain like 10% more than what you lost, I can’t remember the exact statistics on that. So when you go through the cycle of gain and loss, of gain and loss, of gain and loss, you do wind up at this size.”

Kim:
“I know! I did! I was bigger than you are!”

Um yes. See what she did there? First she stated that you can’t diet your way into 300+ pounds, just to, mere seconds later, say that she dieted her way to 350 pounds. Anyone see the contradictions here? Yeah. Me too.

====

And finally, here comes their closing statements:

Kim:
“I think that beauty comes from within, not from without. But I don’t want people to fall into the trap that if they want to lose weight, that they feel that they can’t do it. I don’t want them to think that just because they’ve been overweight for a million years, have tried every diet out there, um, have yo-yo-ed up and down a million times… If they truly want to get to a healthy weight it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been overweight or how much you weigh, the only way you’ll never lose weight is if you stop trying.”

Crystal:
“I think women have a problem with self-hatred and lack of confidence. I believe that there’s absolutely a prejudice in this country to anyone over the size of… probably a ten, and I think that’s very sad, and I think that, you know, if this country got over that and maybe started to accept, you know, different types of people, maybe women wouldn’t feel so pushed down and maybe they would even take it to the next step from where they are and they’ve already come so far. I would like to see that happen and I’m so proud of women and I really think that people need to be an individual to find success. Be happy with who you are, and then go out and live your life.”

MeMe:
If we’re going to do anything about reversing the obesity trends in the U.S., we’re going to have to take most of our resources and focus on the pre-pregnancy to age five bracket, before children have developed their body compositions and their eating and exercise habits. It may not be in the constitution, but it is in the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to pursue happiness and without your health you don’t have that. Every child born in this country should have a chance at being healthy and a chance at pursuing happiness. We owe that to them. So let’s focus on the pre-pregnancy to five-year-olds and foster Generation H for ‘healthy’.”

Marianne:
My body and my health doesn’t look like everybody else’s body and their health. Everybody is an individual, everyone has their own challenges when it comes to their health, however that’s defined. And I think that it’s incredibly damaging to judge someone and their health level solely on this one factor. It’s ridiculous. And it has reached a point in our society where it’s not just, you know, fatty-fatty-fat people like me, it’s trickling down to people of all sizes, and children and we’re actively damaging ourselves by being obsessed by this one number instead of doing things that are actually good for us.

And I think that about sums it up. I really haven’t turned the arguments around to make my favourite people sound smarter and the ones I don’t agree with stupid. They did that all by themselves, thank you. Though I have to agree with this one blog I found while researching today (a different one), which said:

I don’t believe fat-fighting generals like Roth and Bensen are truly evil – I don’t believe they wake up every morning and ask themselves, “Hmmm, now how can I torture a fat person today?” Rather, they just have their heads far up their own behinds. They’re more invested in their own PR than they are in creating real beneficial change for other people. It’s their way or the highway, simply because they say so. And their way – at least in their eyes – has taken on an almost holy shimmer. They couldn’t possibly be doing wrong by other human beings when they’re feeling so darn right.

And that, my friends, is going to have to conclude it all, because this post is now 3000 words long. Um, sorry about that.

Some days intuitive eating is SUCH a struggle. I mean, I like the idea of it, I want myself to be body positive enough to give it what it wants when it wants it, but damn. Some days you find yourself in front of the fridge thinking “I can’t eat x or y or z, I’ve already had two full meals today and another can of soda is bad for me, I shouldn’t drink it and that food I could have for lunch if I didn’t eat it right now and anyway, yoghurt is nice and has few calories so I’ll be okay, but if I eat it I’ll be hungry again before bedtime and then I have to eat a second time and… hang on. Intuitive eating, remember?”

That’s what I did today. So now I’m eating nacho chips with shredded cheese and salsa. A year ago I would NEVER have allowed myself to buy nacho chips or eat shredded cheese, but somehow I did buy some the last time I was grocery shopping and damn, I’m glad that I did. Even if I had to check myself before actually allowing myself to eat it.

On the other hand, I have just found the brilliance that is Dr Who about thirty years after everyone else. I have two friends that love it, and I’ve listened to their conversations with a bemused smile on my face for years and years (okay, maybe two, that is how long I’ve known them), but felt kind of intimidated by the sheer amount of seasons there are.

Then of course I found out that Carey Mulligan is in an episode and I love her for insane reasons and so I started watching it. Even though she’s just in a single episode. I watched that one, and another one and I feel like a kid in a sweet shop who knows she can EAT EVERY SINGLE PIECE IN SIGHT. I shall do my best to do this slowly, which is, no more than one episode per day.

Part of the story is of course that I can’t concentrate on anything for more than thirty minutes. I’m getting better at it, this much is true, and from what I’ve seen it’s so crazycakes that you, um, forget that you have tea water on the stove and the kettle boils dry, which you don’t notice for about half an hour because you are using headphones.

Sad little kettle.

I only wish I could get them with subtitles because I have a really hard time following what people say unless I see it written out at the same time, or can ask them to slow the fuck down already. Which, you know, you can’t do with a TV. Or on the phone, really. So it happens, from time to time, that I backtrack four or five times, trying to figure out what they’re really saying. And that is something you can’t do in real life…

Now I shall try to get some writing done. I have people to threat with a knife here! And a forest to burn down. Well, attempt to, at least. Very exciting, much more so than real life, where the most exciting part is that I have about ten pads ready to be listed on Etsy. That and being able to eat cashews again, after a week of just soup, following my unfortunate wisdom tooth removal.

Yeah, doesn’t really measure up, does it?

PS. Made a Twitter account for my business, add @procraftination if you want to know when my shop is all stocked up and shiny!

This post was written a week ago, though apparently I did not hit publish…

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Cups of tea drunk today: 3.
Times I used the kettle rather than the microwave to heat said water: 3.
Likelihood this makes me British: 0.

I enjoy structured blogging, so here we go.

====

Procraftination.
As most of you probably know I run a low-key, DIY, stay-at-home-without-children type business. I sell cloth pads and accessories (okay, mostly cloth pads, but um, more is coming). My webpage can be found here, and my craft blog here. It has various crafty pursuits in it, because I hate when people try to sell things in every single post they make, so I’m trying to mix it up.

I do some knitting patterns too, all free for you to use, should you want to do so. I am not the most accomplished pattern writer, and am in awe of those that are. My dear friend Corrina, on the other hand, is. She is getting a pattern published any day now! So happy for her.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up – would there be any interest of a Twitter account especially for crafty/business type tweeting? I feel like if I did it on my current account it would drown in all the random observations and football mania, but as I already mentioned, people that tweet/blog/etc just to sell things? Booooring.

Maybe I just need a hash-tag of my own…

To-Do-List.
I try to put five things on my to-do-list a week. It’s what I call “trying to live a normal life and make myself not collapse in a heap”. I hope that if I keep this up, it will help me get well sooner. Well, one can hope, right?

So, this week I had 1) clean bathroom and kitchen, 2) cut out fabric, finish pinning it together (this was also on last week’s to-do-list, ie big fail on that, 3) put away laundry, 4) write some, 5) read at least one book.

I managed 1, 4 and 5. Granted “write some” isn’t exactly specific, but I did re-write a very difficult chapter, so I’ll give myself a pass on that one. Books read: Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Tightrope by Gillian Cross.

As for 2 and 3 I have some hope of accomplishing at least one of them before tomorrow night. Go me.

Gluten free stuff.
This one must be FASCINATING to read. But okay. Must buy new pasta strainer, I think that is what’s making me sick.

Ate yummy things this week: Tofu alla Cacciatore (butchered spelling, I know, I know), random stew of awesomeness, more tofu, with glass noodles, which is my new favourite dish. Yesterday mum made vegetarian gluten free lasagna, which was very yummy.

I tried to make vegan gluten free brownies. They BOILED THEMSELVES INTO CONCRETE. It took me two days of soaking before I could shoe horn it out of the cake tin I put it in. I have not yet dared to look at the cookie sheet I protected the oven with.

I can make gluten free cookies and muffins just fine, but brownies? Um, no.

Socialising.
Making myself do this too, just to get out of the house. I managed three times this week; Monday I had tea with Viola, Thursday I went to weaving and chatted with little old ladies, and Friday I went over to my parents house to watch the handball game and have dinner.

I met Viola’s boyfriend for the first time, admired their flat that has an OFFICE (colour me jealous) and talked about… stuff. I also knitted some, but that’s no surprise.

The weaving was more mentally trying than I’d like; they’ve changed it so that it’s a full class on Thursdays too, and there were people everywhere. I am very sensitive to noise, and these people talk OMG SO LOUDLY. I suppose that is par for the course when you hit 75, but come on!

Handball, then. It’s the sport of our little town. Sure, there’s a hockey and several football teams as well, but generally people don’t care so much about them. I tried to explain this sport to a friend, vaguely successfully, as I mostly listed sports it’s not like (football, volley ball, basketball), so here is a link to Wikipedia, in case somebody is interested. Our boys lost, sadly, 30-29 (yes, it’s normal with that many goals), but it’s always exciting to see people you know of in the national team. We had two from the tiny place I’m from (population 1000+) this time, though one is a goalie and barely got any play time. But in the end Sweden was knocked out of the European Championships before the semi finals, and it’s the first time in 36 years we don’t move on to the next stage… Disappointment!

Twitter party.
I love these. I never go out, because of the noise factor, among other things, but today the Aurealis Award happened, and people were live tweeting. Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies series and all that (which I need to read, have a copy!) tweeted, on the insistance of the twitt-o-sphere (so hard to type that word with a straight face, but what am I supposed to call it?), what all the winners were wearing.

Twelfth Planet Press was shortlisted for seven awards, but sadly did not win any. I wish that Tansy’s Siren Beat (yay gratuitous linkage!) would have won, because I love that book so and if I ever get to go to Tasmania I will demand sightseeing of all the places mentioned in the book. (Possibly I’m a tad biased. Just a tad.)

Political stuff.
So many things to mention here!

a) Alisa aka Girlie Jones has an amazing post on Joanna Russ and women in speculative fiction up here. It (as of this very moment) has 71 comments to it, most of them awesome. For example somebody is using the metaphor of somebody standing on your foot and asking them to stop, and possibly being less polite the hundredth time it happens, to describe sexism and why feminists get tired of repeating Feminism 101 over and over and over again.

Very interesting read.

b) Amanda Palmer, Margaret Cho and the fake Katy Perry video. I could say many things here, but I can’t really articulate myself in less than thousands of words, and I don’t have time for that. Watch the clip, form your own opinion.

c) Here in Sweden two female politicians are talked about for two different reasons. Note that I don’t support the political party that either of these women belong to, but that’s besides the point.

1) Mona Sahlin is posing on a pic with seven other politicians, five male, three female, with a Louis Vuitton bag at her feet. She’s criticised for having a 6000 SEK (roughly 800 USD) purse when that is about half of what people earn in a month. And sure, I can see many things more important to purchase than a freaking purse (I so don’t get the purse thing), but I do wonder how much the suits of the male politicians on the same picture cost. And as an aside, it’s said that the purse was a gift and that it was given to her seven freaking years ago. How much are all the purses you’ve used in the last seven years worth? Just a question.

2) Birgitta Ohlsson of another party altogether is pregnant. She’s due in July, and the election is in late September, and people are horrified that she’s not counting it out. Now, I know several people with small children, and I know how stressful the first few months can be, but I assume that a politician have the means to pay for daycare and such, and not to mention that her husband is (according to her blog) going to take the first few months of paternity leave. We can share here, you see, which is amazing, and I think this is the exact reason for it.

I rather enjoyed the blog post she wrote about it, saying things along the line of “I’m married to a modern man, not a dinosaur”, and “if I’m going to lose a post it’s going to be because I’m not the right person or competent enough”, asking what decade media thinks it is anyway.

d) New shiny blog in my blogroll – Trollhare. He writes about fat acceptance (though I’m not sure if he calls it that), queer and/or gender stuff, politics, veganism and mental health. I enjoy his posts a whole lot, and comment possibly a bit too much. But it’s that awesome.

And really, a blog with the subtitle “welcome to the freakshow”? Love at first sight.

====

I totally meant to do some sewing after writing this, before making dinner, but it took longer than I’d expected, so now I have to go glare at my fridge and see what it produces… I think tofu loaf. If I can find my favourite recipe.

PS. Is a post with so many different subjects that it requires ten separate tags fail or win? I can’t decide.

Oh my God, I just ate the best curry ever. Okay, so it was probably not the best ever, but I am REALLY BAD at making curry (it either tastes nothing or is so spicy that I want to die – I’m a total wimp when it comes to spicy food). I don’t know if it that I went with chickpeas instead of tofu or the buillion cube that I added for no reason whatsoever, but it was goooooood.

Managed weaving completely without freak outs. It’s now months since I had to pop anti anxiety meds to be able to go. It’s still difficult from time to time, but today was good. The only thing that gets to me is that these little old ladies try to talk to each other while weaving, that is, yelling across the room, back and forth, which gets tireding.

Other than that I have been doing some difficult writing, or rather, rewriting. Editing, maybe. (What’s the difference between the two anyway?) It’s badness when your whole plot is dependant on severely traumatising your main character, or at least it is for YOU cos you love them so much. But it’s getting better from here on out, I know that much.

I’ve also been working on a different blog altogether. In Swedish. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been since I wrote in Swedish regularly. Three years? Four? I’m sure this new blog has more than a few language mistakes, cos seriously, English is my first language these days, though occasionally when I’m writing I have to look up words that I can only remember in Swedish. It used to be the other way around.

This blog is going to be on fat acceptance, health at every size and intuitive eating. There are so many of these in English, Shapely Prose being the most popular, but I haven’t found a single one in Swedish so far. I’ve been emailing with a Swede that does plus size fashion blogging, and has been doing that for quite a while, and she doesn’t know of any, so I decided to do somewriting on the subject in Swedish.

Part of me thinks I’m insane, cos I know just how mean people can be about people of size – I see it often in other blogs – but on the other hand, I would still be dieting (or trying to) if I hadn’t found these blogs a year or so ago, so maybe it’s time I do something about it myself. Even if I have to brace myself as I do it.

That blog can be found here. It’s not all that full of info yet, but I’m working on it. Mostly I’ve written about the basics and started translating a few posts that have previously been posted on this blog. I know most reasonably young Swedes can read English without a problem, but I so want to be able to point my Mum (and other people that can’t / can’t be bothered to read in English) to a few key posts. She doesn’t really believe in the internet, but I’m hoping that if I give her the address she will check it out anyway. And this is the first time I’ve ever tried to NOT hide my blogging for her, cos she gets so nervous when she realises I don’t feel well.

I took a table cloth off a table cos it was dirty and immediately put another one on. Does that mean I’m a grown-up? I suspect it does.