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The most important thing I do on this show is talk about my regular life experiences. There’s just so little representation for fat people (and especially infinifats) that it is so valuable to hear that we’re not alone in the things we go through. On today’s show I’m talking to my friend Kelly (@lividlipids on
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Last week’s Huffington Post article “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong” is a big step towards mainstream acknowledgement of the things that fat activists have been talking about for years. And it’s about time! But it’s not perfect, and there’s still a lot of work to do. Today on the pod I’m talking through
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You may remember our guest this week–Chelsey was with me for Episode 31 on fat pregnancy and delivery. We’ve become internet friends since then, and today she’s back on the pod to chat. We’re covering tons of topics–activist exhaustion, fatshion frustration, and the struggle of raising fat positive kids in a fat negative world. Follow
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I get a lot of questions on social media and via email, and I love that listeners ask me about things! Many of them are great questions that probably a lot of you could use the answers to! Annnd some of them are just personal questions about me, and I enjoy talking about myself so
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Earlier this Spring, AMC premiered Dietland, a show based on the novel by Sarai Walker. Dietland features a fat protagonist who has been pursuing thinness her whole life, but she has finally started to see another way. It’s no secret that representation of fat people in mainstream media is often pretty dismal and even offensive.
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Last week SELF magazine, after 40 years of thin-centric health writing, released a Weight Issue that featured some of the fat liberation’s most important champions. Overall this Weight Issue is kind of a revelation and it feels like a new day in mainstream media is finally starting to dawn. Now if only they’d chosen someone
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Following the tragic death of Anthony Bourdain, social media was full of tributes to a man who spent his life showing the world the importance of sharing time and a meal with someone of a different background. For all of the ways he stood up for other marginalized people, though, Anthony Bourdain was also vocally
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Go to FAT CAMP with Annette Richmond of Fat Girls Traveling! Annette Richmond is a fat woman who loves to travel, but she just wasn’t seeing herself or people like her on the big travel social media accounts. So she decided to make space in travel for herself and women like her by creating Fat
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Finite Possibilities: Car Shopping for Superfat and Infinifat People A couple weeks ago I got a frantic DM on Instagram from a fellow infinifat. She needed to know what kind of car I drive and if I had any recommendations for vehicles she might fit in. Unfortunately, this is one question that I don’t have
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A little over a year ago my friend Alison and I recorded an episode about air travel as a superfat, and it was fun and there was lots of important info in it, but there has been a little change in policy at Southwest that affects how Customer of Size works, so I wanted to
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Give Me Fat Serenity–Petrina and Overeaters Anonymous Petrina was taught when she was young that her body was a problem, so she spent much of her life trying to solve it. That pursuit of thinness led her through incredible personal turmoil and culminated in seven years in the rooms of Overeaters Anonymous. What she found
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/Warning: This episode is about fat burlesque, but it’s probably not work safe–there’s some humorous discussion of a simulated sex act, so maybe don’t listen to this one at your desk unless you’re wearing headphones! Episode 39: Pretty Hurts–BlackEyedBliss’s Inspiring Fat Burlesque Society would like us to think that fat people aren’t sexual beings–that we’re
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I’m Gonna Keep Enjoying My Life–Infinifat Mom Deanna on Universal Fat Experiences and Raising Body Positive Teens Deanna is an infinifat mom, but her size doesn’t stop her from having a happy life and raising happy kids. Today Deanna and I had a long chat about existing in this world in a body that makes
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Overcoming Shame–Pod Listener Angel Finds Her Freedom I have to tell you that I’ve been having some mixed feelings now that we’re at the end of #infinifatshionfebruary. I just wasn’t sure that what I’ve been trying to do was really getting through to anyone, but then I met Angel. She emailed me on Monday, and
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Infinifatshionfebruary: Why Clothes Matter Plus fashion is a booming industry, and every year more and more retailers are getting with the program and offering plus options. And slowly (very slowly) more of these retailers are beginning to offer extended plus sizes, which is very exciting and gratifying for people who wear above a 24. Unfortunately,
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Fat Positives – Favorable Representations of Fat People in Entertainment I’ve done a lot of talking on The Fat Lip about negative portrayals of fat people and about entertainment that just doesn’t get it right when it comes to fatness. But there are also many cases of positive representation of fat people in media today–probably
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New Year, New (Old) Gripes This wouldn’t be The Fat Lip if I weren’t mouthing off about something, and today (and it seems like always) I have a lot to say about fat stories that are happening around us. Get ready for our first gripes of the new year! In this episode I’m addressing the
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Ah, the holiday meal. Who doesn’t love turkey and mashed potatoes and pie and your great aunt Laura side-eying you for eating said pie? You go along to get a long, try not to hope Laura catches laryngitis, and you come out of your holiday gathering only a little worse for wear. But why should
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Jasmine Kent is not plus sized, but when she was crafting her thesis for her Master’s in Industrial Design, she wanted to fill a gap in the activewear market and give a wider range of sizes access to a better sports bra. She spoke with biomechanical researchers at Hanes and is collecting survey data from
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Doctors often tell us that being fat is an obstacle to having children. Many doctors tell fat people to lose weight before even attempting to start a family because even if they DO get pregnant, they will likely be unable to carry the baby to term otherwise. But fat people get pregnant and deliver healthy
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From time to time we like to check in on what’s going on in fat news, and there are a few subjects to touch on this fall. This is Today in Fatness–Fall 2017 edition. In this episode I talk about This is Us’s fat lead character, Kate and her evolution since the last time we
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I’ve been involved in fat acceptance for over 15 years, and on my best day I can raise all kinds of hell about misinformation and fatphobia in medical care. But on my worst day, when I’m the one who is sick and vulnerable and on the wrong end of a doctor’s weight-related lecturing, it’s a
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I’m sure many fat people can relate when I say that I have a very fraught relationship with mattresses. It has always just seemed like beds weren’t made with fat bodies in mind. They sag or the materials scrunch up or sometimes they just break entirely. I’ve just never been perfectly happy with any mattress
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Like many fat women–more than we could even count–Nush is in recovery from a near lifetime of disordered eating. But she’s finding her own way by using social media. Nush’s insta is a beautiful collage of selfies and outfit photos that are for her more than anyone. When she looks at these photos she can
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We know by now that “inclusive” in beauty and body positive campaigns doesn’t necessarily mean that people of color are represented. Slowly, though (very, very slowly) the tide seems to be turning and retailers seem to be hearing our calls for non-white representation. But it’s still so incredibly rare to see fat Asian people in
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As a superfat woman and fat activist, I’ve always felt a little skeptical about Health at Every Size. “Health” just isn’t a word that treats fat people very well. In fact, it’s very often used as a weapon that attempts to derail fat pos discussion. I’ve always assumed that it was part of the “good fatty”
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White women think we have a monopoly on body size oppression. We’ve all heard (and probably repeated at some point) the racist stereotype that fatness is more accepted in black and brown communities. This is simply not true, and we white people should get out of the way and let fat POC tell their own stories about
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It’s kind of our culture’s greatest tradition to tell each other how to act and what’s good for us. “Just be confident!” is one of those vague directives that we’ve all heard a hundred times–it’s the apparent solution to all of our problems. Episode 24: “Just Be Confident!” and Other Useless Advice for Fat People
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“Or I could just say whatever and open a plus size thrift shop…” What do you do when you’re a fashion-forward, business-minded woman who is fed up by how difficult plus size shopping can be? You create something different. That’s what Cat Polivoda did when she created Cat’s Closet. It started with just selling her
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Between TFL episodes there are often stories about fatness and activism that I want to comment on, but most of the time they’re just quick little things that are either too small or too new to talk about in a full episode. Some of these are things that I feel are actually incredibly significant for our movement,
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Elizabeth Terry was a big kid who started attending Weight Watchers meetings with her mom before she even hit puberty. She learned body shame before she learned algebra, and she carried that shame with her throughout middle and high school. In her first email to me, her opening line was “I have had the wonderful
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So This American Life is rerunning their “Tell Me I’m Fat” episode from last summer this week, and I keep seeing people discover this episode on NPR’s facebook page and talk about how life-changing it was for them. But if you’ve heard Episode 4 of The Fat Lip, you know that I didn’t think it
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The fat positive community was shaken up last week when Ashley Nell Tipton, one of our few fat representatives in mainstream entertainment, announced that she had weight loss surgery last month. But the community’s shock and hurt wasn’t for the reason you think. Sure it smarts to hear that we’re losing one of our tiny
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If you’re a fat person (particularly a fat woman,) you are no stranger to the “I like big women” comment. It’s awkward, and it often feels like the speaker feels entitled to special privileges or access based on this admission. For fat people this can be a wholly unwelcome message. We want to date people who want
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Cheryl Fuller is a Jungian psychotherapist and a fat woman, and throughout her career she has confronted the common approaches to working with fat people in therapy. Her new book, The Fat Lady Sings: A Psychological Exploration of the Cultural Fat Complex and Its Effects, explores the trauma of fat stigma and the troubling practice of recommending
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I recently got an email from a listener asking for my thoughts on My 600Lb Life, a TLC show about very fat people, most of whom are pursuing weight loss surgery. I have been thinking about this show for a while, but my problem with shows like these have nothing to do with the fat people
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Alison covered superfat air travel extensively in her blog post (Read it here!) but we wanted to take an episode to go over some of the most important things to keep in mind when you’re traveling by air. In this episode we talk about how to prepare for your flight, how to get through security,
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In the last couple of weeks especially, we’ve seen millions upon millions of people around the world protesting the actions of the new US president. Immediately following the election, Ann Coulter tweeted in response to protests that “without fat girls, there would be no protests.” And for once I think she’s absolutely right! But some
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This year is already pretty intense, so it’s been hard to figure out how to talk about fat positivity lately—it just feels like there are so many other things of critical importance right now. But making fat peoples’ lives better matters and it’s a worthy cause, so we have to keep going. In today’s episode
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The holidays can be a real shitshow when you’re fat. Travel is terrible, family dinners are a minefield, and sometimes you just have to find a place to hide and cry. Or read a book on your cat, apparently? In today’s episode Alison and I are talking about strategies to get through the holidays, no
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Believe me, no one was more hopeful than I was when I learned that NBC’s new show, This Is Us, featured a very fat woman in a lead role. But we’ve learned time and time again that mainstream media doesn’t treat us well, and this time is no exception. This is Us treats its fat
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Fat dating (and sex and love) is just a subject that mainstream culture doesn’t talk about. If popular media were to be believed, fat people barely date at all because we’re too busy dieting and hating ourselves. But fat people of all sizes, cultures, abilities, and orientations do date and have sex and fall in
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In the last year or two, the Body Positive movement has had some incredible momentum, and it’s even getting some mainstream media coverage. But is the actual message of body positivity actually getting through? It’s not hard to find a tweet that says “I’m all for #bodypositivity as long as you’re healthy” or “#bodypositive does
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What do you do when you wake up one morning to find that the whole country is mocking a body like yours? If you’re Shane Brodie, you tell people how hurt you are. And then you do something about it. Shane Brodie is a fat trans man who lives a quiet life as an artist
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The fat positive movement is bigger than ever, and it’s starting to get noticed by mainstream media. Fatshion bloggers and fat activists are building real bridges to mainstream culture, and the benefits to fat people are incredible. Unfortunately, though, in some spaces fat-positivity doesn’t reach those who are outside of regular plus sizing. We call these
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On August 18, 2016 an activist art collective erected five nude statues of Donald Trump in five major American cities. The project was meant as a criticism of the candidate, presumably for his racist, regressive, and violent opinions, but the message that the American public received is that Donald Trump is fat and gross. There
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When The Fat Lip started, telling real fat people’s stories was a big part of the mission. As fat people, we don’t really hear ourselves in media. We don’t see relatable stories about people like us that often, and that lack of representation can be very alienating. When Maura Penn wrote to me about her
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Last week This American Life, possibly the most popular podcast there is, ran an episode called “Tell Me I’m Fat.” Leading up to the episode’s release I had read and listened to some teasers and learned that Lindy West and her book, Shrill, were featured, so I was really excited. I love Lindy and loved
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When I started this podcast I didn’t tell my mom that I was doing it, but one of my brothers did. Then after the first episode was up, she texted to tell me that she had listened to it and that she wanted to talk about it. For a split second I was completely terrified that I
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In our culture, fat people are expected to be making every effort to become un-fat. Every day we must be proving that we’re trying our hardest to lose weight in order to make sense to the rest of society, and as long as we continue to prove our efforts and talk about our healthy decisions
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“Fat” is a loaded word in our culture, and it can take years to unpack the feelings and shame this tiny little word can create in a person. But “fat” is also bold and powerful. That’s why it’s so integral to the name of this show, and that’s why embracing it can change your life for
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Welcome to The Fat Lip! We’re calling this Episode 0.1 because it’s not a full length episode but just a quick introduction to the show and to what you can expect going forward. Take a listen and let us know what you think! A transcript of this or any episode of The Fat Lip is
