Image Text: Fat patients shouldn’t have to accept “maybe if you were in a different body you wouldn’t be in pain” as a treatment plan or prescription. They should be given the same options for dealing with aches, pains, injuries etc. that thin people get. I often hear from people who say something like “I just want to get back to the weight I was when I felt the best.” or “I know that when I’m a size x I’m healthier, my body is happiest at a size x.” When I ask them how they know that they will typically point to a time in their life when they were that size as proof. Often in a conversation l ..read more

Image description: A fat, white woman with long brown hair and pink glasses smiling in a red dress. Text: Full and Thriving – An Eating Disorder Recovery Podcast “Let’s be honest. Health is not a barometer of worthiness. That’s just healthism.” – Ragen Chastain Picture by Lindley Ashline I got to join Meg McCabe on her podcast and discuss my personal body acceptance journey and experiences with weight stigma, as well as medical fat phobia and the impact it has. As a cool side note, Meg shared with me that I was the first person to introduce her to the concept of HAES (at a conference I spoke a ..read more

Picture of a white woman with curly brown hair and red lipstick smiling. Text: 5-10% Weight Loss is Good for Your health and other BS with Ragen Chastain All Fired Up Ep #75 If you don’t know about Louise Adam’s Untrapped, then you are missing out on incredible activism and commentary. As part of her seriously impressive body of work, Louise has a podcast called All Fired Up and I got to be a guest to talk about the issues with weight loss research. You can listen to my episode (and all the other incredible episodes!) here: | https://untrapped.libsyn.com/5-10-weight-loss-is-good-for-your-healt ..read more

Logo for the @ExpandTheCurve podcast I had the honor of being a guest on the Expand the Curve with host Olive Bassey. We had a great chat about lies the diet industry tells us, weight discrimination, and finding self-love and confidence in a fatphobic world. You can listen to the episode (and check out all the amazing guests) here! UPCOMING ONLINE WORKSHOP: Creating A Weight-Neutral, Body Affirming Health Journey The weight loss industry works hard to conflate weight loss with the concept of health, so even when we realize that diets don’t work and we get off the diet roller coaster, it can be ..read more

“Do you need to eat that?” Has this question ever been asked in a way that wasn’t passive aggressive fat/food shaming? As we eat with our families and/or friends (perhaps over zoom) this holiday season, I wanted to give some options for responding to this utterly bullshit question, put together in a not-so-silent movie. (Hint: After watching the video below, you can keep watching to see a truly fat-positive holiday sing-a-long. If you can’t watch the video below, you can find it here!) UPCOMING ONLINE WORKSHOP: Creating A Weight-Neutral, Body Affirming Health Journey The weight loss industry ..read more

I spend a lot of time helping fat people deal with the bullshit fat-shaming that comes our way daily, and that often escalates at the holidays (whether we celebrate them or not.)  I always want to be clear that these things are not our fault, even though they become our problem and that the problem isn’t fat people, it’s fat-shaming. So today I wanted to take a second to talk directly to fat-shamers of the on-purpose, accidental, and potential variety – however well-meaning they may be – about how they can stop the problem before it even starts at the holidays, and all year long! The lac ..read more

Image Text:When it comes to what we call people with larger bodies, we must avoid falling into the trap of creating stigma in our attempts to decrease it. We must utilize descriptors that don’t medicalize, pathologize, or euphemize the body size of fat people. I get a lot of questions about the right words to use for fat people in various contexts. Questions like: Can I call people fat? Isn’t “ob*se” better since it’s a medical term? I thought we were supposed to say “person with overw*ight?” What’s with all the asterisks? Over on my Weight and Healthcare newsletter I’m breaking down some comm ..read more

Last week I was a guest on The Doctors along with weight-neutral endocrinologist Dr. Gregory Dodell. During the second half of the show, I was involved in a discussion with Dr. Melina Jampolis about the research supporting the weight loss paradigm, vs the research supporting the weight neutral health paradigm. At one point during the course of the conversation I had listed several studies and their findings to support my case that the research shows that intentional weight loss fails the vast majority of the time (which Dr. Jampolis agreed with,) as well as studies that show greater effi ..read more

Recently I was one of four fat women who were interviewed for an article about the issues that weight stigma creates around eating in public while fat, and how we overcame them. You can read the full article here. We did this interview by email, and of course it’s normal for articles to use partial quotes and so here, for posterity, are my full answers to the interview: When did you first notice that there was a certain level of attention placed on you when eating in public? As I moved from high school to college I became deeply involved in diet culture and I began to notice that people would ..read more

Reader Alison let me know about a new campaign that Novo Nordisk has launched to sell their new “weight loss” drug, that is part of the long-game of those in the weight loss industry to expand their market by pathologizing living in a fat body. I was even more upset to see that The Mighty was a partner, since they should absolutely know better. Having written for them before I reached out to my editor and received an explanation, an apology for their mistake in promoting it, and an offer to write a paid piece on their site critical of the program and their involvement. You can read that piece ..read more