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My offering for you this week: Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), disabled folks and people with hip measurements over 50″ can take $20 off The Exhausted Entrepreneur’s Complete Marketing Toolkit with code EQUITY.

Hi friend, 

 

Once a friend of mine observed that in their daily life, they just felt like they didn’t see many fat people at all. And it’s true: fat people are often missing from public life, especially very fat people. Why might that be?

 

BMI is bull, but let’s use the master’s tool for a moment to examine the master’s house. I live in a body that is quite fat and my BMI is 42, so let’s use a BMI of 40 as our starting point. Depending on which source you reference, people with a BMI of 40 or more comprise 6-10% of the American population, so around 10% of the population is fat of the kind that you’d notice walking around in public. So where are they? Why isn’t at least 1 in 10 of the people you see out and about (in non-COVID times) very fat?

 

Well, that 10% of the population is also a group of people who face significant barriers accessing public life at all. Thin people have designed a world that excludes us.

 

💔 If I can’t buy professional clothing, you won’t see me in your office.

💔 If I can’t fit in an airplane seat and people stare and glare at me when I buy two, you won’t see me on your flight.

 

💔 If I can’t wear any of the clothing sold, you won’t see me at the mall.

💔 If I can’t fit on the rides, you won’t see me at the theme park.

💔 If I’ve been discriminated against in hiring, you won’t see me in the elevator.

 

💔 If I can’t fit in the chairs, you won’t see me in the waiting room.

💔 If I can’t fit in the desk/chair combos, you won’t find me in the classroom.

 

💔 If I can’t fit in the booths, you won’t see me at the restaurant.

💔 If I can’t fit in the seats, you won’t find me at the theatre.

 

💔 If all the casting calls include “attractive” as a proxy for “thin,” you won’t see me on stage.

💔 If I can’t have knee surgery, you won’t see me at the gym.

 

💔 And if I’ve been denied knee surgery and gotten too many glares and stares for using a scooter at the grocery store, maybe I just stay home, get all my groceries delivered and stop offering myself up to the pain and abuse of even attempting to exist in a public sphere that was designed to push me out.

 

I want you to note that I’ve done something very deliberate here: Most of the statements above start with If I can’t. If I can’t. If I can’t. Now, I’d like you to go back and re-read those statements, replacing “If I can’t” with “If people with thin privilege have arranged it so that I can’t.”

 

How does that change the responsibility for those outcomes?

 

The motivations, of course, vary, but every single one of those broken-heart bullets is the consequence of deliberate decisions made by people with a specific type of privilege (that of thinness). This is what oppression looks like.

Warmly,
Lindley

 

P.S. If you'd like to share this week's thought, it exists in blog form here.

My favorite photo this week:

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Image description: A Black woman closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sky in front of water and low mountains, holding a scarf with a wing design above her head so that it flows in the wind.

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Image description: Two women smile and relax on a couch in a room with a glass coffee table. A teal overlay contains the text, “HAES-Aligned Support Groups, Courses & Workshops.”

Everywhere we go, we’re surrounded by diet culture, the cultural forces that cause us to feel bad about our bodies and want to shrink them into acceptability. Diet culture causes poor body image, encourages eating disorders and makes $71 billion in profit for the diet industry every year.

 

More and more often, people are pushing back against systems like these that arrange bodies in a hierarchy and call some of them “better” than others. Being anti-diet or recovering from dieting can be a lonely place, though, especially when everyone around you seems to still be jumping into every fad diet out there. Though diet culture encourages us to be vicious and toxic towards our own bodies and other people’s as well, it’s also an important bonding mechanism in our society. What are people supposed to do when they feel left out (or shut out) by diet talk?

 

As we move forward in our body acceptance journeys, support from people like us — along with experts to show us the way — is vital. Online support groups of every kind have sprung up to meet this need for community and support. (Many in-person and local support groups have as well, but due to the current COVID-19 situation, those have been put on hold.)

 

These groups include:

 

🤗 Health at Every Size (HAES) and intuitive eating groups

🤗 Meal support groups for eating disorder recovery

🤗 Anti-diet, body positive and fat positive book clubs

🤗 Eating disorder recovery support groups and group therapy that welcome people in larger bodies

🤗 Fat-friendly fashion, fitness and hobby groups

🤗 Diet-free support groups for people with chronic illnesses and medical conditions

 

I've created a living resource of over 95 support groups, programs, resources and courses that are Health at Every Size-aligned, body positive and/or fat positive. It's one of the exclusive rewards over at my Patreon, and you can access it at any level of support, starting at $1/month.

The Conversation

Here's what's being discussed this week in the world of body acceptance, HAES, body positivity and fat liberation:

 

> Submit your work to FAT ASS Zine by March 1

> Fatphobia is a Social Justice Issue: A Virtual Workshop, Feb. 24

> Fat Torah: Building Communities of Belonging for Every Body, March 7, 14, 21; April 11, 18, 25 May 2 and 9 (8 sessions)

> Plus Size Climbing Panel with Climb Big, Feb. 23

> The Confidence Klub

> The F*ck Shame Group

> Support Fat Self Care: Volume 1 on Kickstarter

> Talk on misgendering and yoga, March 1

> Unicorn chaser: Aquarium of the Pacific live cam

 

Need a good 101 or refresher on bodies, fatness and science? I always recommend Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor.

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Image description: A teal square with two round images of a fat pregnant woman in a deep pink dress in the woods, one cradling her belly and one holding a HELLO BABY sign. Text reads, “Plus-size pregnancy collection” and the post URL. End image description.

Quick Resources for Better Body Image

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Image description: A fat white woman wearing holiday-themed clothes and a Santa hat sits on a low wall with shopping bags.

February Free Stock Images

Click the link below to claim your free stock images for this month. The link will expire in two weeks, so be sure to grab them soon.

If you enjoy the free photos I provide each month, please help support Body Liberation Photos by purchasing stock images or becoming a supporter. Low on budget? Consider linking and/or giving photo credit to bodyliberationphotos.com when you use these free photos. Your support makes it possible to continue creating and offering these images. 

Hi! I'm Lindley.

- she/her

- photographer

- author

 

Image description: Lindley, a fat white woman, is shown sitting in a cafe with salmon-pink walls. She has shoulder-length blonde hair and glasses, and is wearing a black top with a translucent blue-and-white patterned jacket. Her hands are on the tabletop in front of her.

Hi! I'm Lindley.

 

I'm a professional photographer (she/her, pronounced LIN-lee) who celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside conventional "beauty" standards. I live outside Seattle, WA. 

 

I talk about and photograph fat folks because representation of large bodies in the world is vital to our body liberation.

 

 

People come to me for:

  • Body-safe portrait, boudoir and small business photography sessions
  • Diverse, body-positive stock photos
  • Fat fine art photographic prints
  • Health at Every Size (HAES)-aligned consulting, writing and editing
  • The Body Love Shop, a curated resource for body-positive and fat-positive art and products

Pssst! Did a friend forward you this email? If you'd like to get your own body liberation guide every week, just drop your email address here.

 

You're on this list because you're a current or past client or customer, or you signed up on my website.

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