#fat.acceptance

Whoa. Very cool gay moment. I didn't know i was allowed to be fat. (This is not a joke) i didn't know omitting this word from my vocabulary was holding me back so much. This week has been firsts for everything i guess lol. I don't know what kind of goofy ass denile math i was doing this whole time but like damn lmao. Im allowed to be fat and i like it. Both @dionysianchub and my partner called me fat today.... It was really cool and gay. My partner is fat and i adore them so like by that logic the same applies to me if i am also fat like them which is really cool.. i think i might pass out ngl lol

far more discussion, but to be honest–other than my disgust at what appears to be Kate’s entire arc in a trailer for an upcoming and supposedly inspirational TV drama, This Is Us–I actually have little personal experience encountering it, as the kinds of stories I’m regularly drawn to–superheroes saving the world, starships exploring the great unknown, detectives solving the mystery, and final girls surviving to live another day–don’t generally engage in that particular narrative, mostly because they rarely include overweight characters at all. It was difficult in some cases (especially with adult literature) to think of good examples for this column, not because fat representation is overwhelmingly positive, but because it is so often entirely absent. Because, as we’ve seen, when fat characters are included, they’re likely gluttonous, unattractive, dumb, slothful, or cruel; many times, however, they’re simply invisible, absent from the fantastical worlds that can imagine mythic pasts full of dragons and magic, or far futures with technological marvels and alien wonders… but can’t imagine fat people inhabiting those worlds, questing there, commanding there, saving the day.

Why did the show’s writer’s choose to include this? This scene makes no narrative contribution. The only possible narrative contribution of this line is to show Jessica’s mean snarky snarkiness, however, this is something virtually every other scene already does. There’s no reason for existing other than to do one thing: Let fat women know that they are lazy, that they are not Jessica Jones, that they are not welcome in the circle of safety the show creates for abuse survivors.

These two problems reinforce each other. Tradition holds that Hamlet is lean and pensive; this jibes with our ideas of what a hero is and feels right; the tradition is then bolstered further. Reviews of both Beale’s and Giamatti’s performances, for example, tended to mention their unconventional bodies, with the Boston Globe’s Don Aucoin noting that Giamatti’s age, height and “paunch” made him “far from the heroically dashing Laurence Olivier model of the melancholy Dane.”* An interview from the time of Beale’s Hamlet reveals how the actor’s body shaped his career, confining him to both the stage and comic roles at the beginning of his career while contemporaries like Ralph Fiennes decamped for Hollywood. The only way to break this cycle is to create a counter-tradition of overweight Hamlets, opening up the role to actors we would not have normally considered. Some lean actors will be disappointed, I’m sure. But they can comfort themselves knowing that nearly every other leading role ever written was made for them.

One day a while ago, my husband asked me, “Why do you have three-thousand pictures of yourself on your hard drive?” This was not an easy question to answer. A little background: From the time I was about nine, I was told almost daily by my peers that I was unforgivably ugly. During childhood, for a long time, I appreciated the way I looked. I liked my face, my shoulders, even my wispy baby-hair. I knew that no one else could see what I saw, I knew that I was not “pretty” in the tightly-defined way girls are supposed to be, but I liked myself. I looked in the mirror with some amount of pleasure, a recognition that what I saw there was human, that it was me, and that I liked being me. This liking was slowly eroded by two things: 1) being told, over and over again, that I was ugly, would always be ugly, and 2) being told that if I betrayed any sign of liking myself, I was vain. I wanted to be pretty, and I was supposed to be pretty, and if I wasn’t naturally pretty I was supposed to work at it, but I wasn’t supposed to let anyone know I was working at it. It was a confusing way to grow up. By the time I was 12, I started to suspect that the whole idea of “pretty” was bullshit — that year, I kicked a dentist who yanked my tooth without any warning/consent/anaesthesia, and who then tried to sell me braces with, “Don’t you want to be pretty?” I left the room with crooked teeth and blood on my chin. There were several confusing years after that, culminating in a moment, at 16, when people suddenly decided to find me pretty, and to loudly and aggressively tell me to my face that I was pretty, and to treat me as though I were now a more valuable and sought-after person because of it. I messed around with people’s perceptions whenever I could, dressing down at first, then suddenly showing up in my Pretty Lady Costume, and watching the same people who’d ignored me the day before become deferential. I decided the entire thing, top to bottom, front to back, was a steaming pyramid of bullshit. My value as a human being could not possibly fluctuate as readily as people wanted me to believe, based on whether or not I wore certain clothes or put on makeup or didn’t bother with my hair that day or gained or lost weight. I was a person, not a fucking junk bond. A few years later, I got fat, which meant that I was persona non grata again. Bullshit: confirmed. I didn’t look in the mirror for a long time, still believing in the misogynist fever-dream of “vanit

It’s hard to think of any other disease—if you want to call it that—where treatment rarely works and most people are blamed for not “recovering.”

In other words, follow the money. Doctors want to be paid for delivering weight-loss treatments to patients. Coding office visits for Medicare, for instance, is a complex process that involves counting the number of bodily systems reviewed and the number of diseases counseled for. If Medicare goes along with the AMA and designates obesity as a disease, doctors who even mention weight to their patients could charge more for the same visit than doctors who don’t.