I've been catching up with Big Fat Blog today and after watching a few more YouTube video clips on fat acceptance that always seem to involve that MeMe woman (what a ridiculous name...it sounds like a petulant toddler) I was reading the comments from the Rachel and Monique interview that I plonked on here yesterday. This one from Rachel after the show struck me as ironic.

I never thought of myself as an activist, although I can be an opinionated so and so when I want to be. So I was very chuffed and frightened in equal measure last week when I was contacted by a journalist who wants to write about this very blog for the newspapers. Gulp. Apparently the 'Fatosphere' of bloggers in the US has veen getting a lot of publicity over the pond, and so 'Fat Acceptance' is becoming a bit of a hot potato.

I watched this for some inspiration:

What do you think?

The whole 'Fat Acceptance' movement is one that I'm not actually sure I'm a part of. It seems to have a reputation, especially with thinnies,  for being a glorification of being fat, a two-fingered salute to the doctors and dedicated slim people of the world, and some kind of crass assumption that if we 'accept' being fat we are dedicating our lives to conspicuous pastry consumption and balls to the rest of the world. I have to confess that I'm NOT about that.

I think we should all accept ourselves as we are...whether we are fat or thin. I don't think that obesity should be held up as an aspirational lifestyle choice, because it isn't one. It's a pain in the arse to find clothes and people think you eat lard. But I don't accept that being fat is the end of the world, and I do know from bitter experience that the more I hated myself when I was trying to get slim, the more I cried and screamed about my fat, the more I starved myself (and then gave up in an almighty eating frenzy that led me around the kitchen to hoover up diet snacks because there would be nothing decent in the house while I was trying again to diet) THE FATTER I ACTUALLY GOT.

Since I stopped mindlessly dieting, and attempting to make myself into something I am patently never going to be, a size 12, I have been a lot healthier. Mentally I am a lot stronger for accepting that I may not be a size zero but I am just as good as someone who is. And I'd probably beat them in an arm wrestle, too.  I've saved a fortune on subscriptions to Weight Watchers website and Slimming World too. Not forgetting weightlossresources.com. I have been known to have active memberships to all three...at the same time...

Accepting myself for the chubby bundle of fun that I am means that I have saved a fortune on diet magazines, too. And classes that I sign up to for ten weeks in advance "to keep me going" - but only actually go to once or twice because I realise that I'd rather beat my head on a brick wall than listen to another grown woman try and justify eating a biscuit.

Not dieting any more has given me the freedom to fill my brain with other things...it's no coincidence that I gave up dieting at around the time I started Relentlessly Positive, because Sue Thomason, the woman I credit with helping me make the decision to stop dieting, also gave me the practical advice on setting up a website, which is something I'd wanted to do for ages anyway. If I was spending my time writing down calorie charts and posting inane rubbish on diet message boards to try and keep myself out of the fridge, I'd never have found the time to come up with Relentlessy Positive, which has been a big part of my life since 2006.

But, I hear you cry, what about my health?

Well. I haven't had a full-on cold or flu for best part of two years now. I can't remember the last time I had a really bad cold, flu or virus, to be honest. I used to have a terrible time with my hormones but that's sorted itself out now and my periods are as normal as I expect they are ever going to be. I haven't had my blood pressure checked since 2007 but it's always been on the low side of normal anyway. I haven't needed to trouble a doctor for a long time unless you count the repeat prescription for an adrenaline injection - I've been allergic to peanuts since I was a *thin* toddler. I'm training for the Race for Life this year. I walk every day, and swim when I can. All the clothes I was wearing when I started this journey still fit me...although I haven't weighted myself since last year.

I don't know what's going on inside my body, but I feel absolutely fine. No puffing, panting or stereotypical wheezing from me...well, unless you count the first attempt I made to run - I managed a minute or two and felt like my shins were burning.

So maybe I *am* a part of the size acceptance movement after all.....

Recent research has come up with the gem that it doesn't actually matter if you have a backside that could support its very own solar system, so long as you are fit. Now, it's something I've long suspected, but having it confirmed has niggled away at the back of my mind. I used to be able to smugly head off the comments about being fat with the knowledge that I was actually pretty fit. My daily routine meant that I walked a good two or three miles a day, sometimes more. And I was used to the whole 'running for the bus/train' scenario.

Five months as a freelance writer, based at home, has altered my fit to fat ratio in the opposite way to the way I would prefer to see. Working from home has become a lovely lifestyle, and the revolting weather we've had most of 2007 and so far in 2008 has done nothing to persuade me to take up my walking habit again. I realised just how much my fitness levels had declined this morning when I decided, as you do, to try an early morning run. Ha ha!

Five minutes and a lot of huffing and puffing later, I realised I'm not cut out for running. Even that girly running that women do when they are really unfit and trying to pretend that they aren't. My sports bra just couldn't cope with the boobage and the straps were coming off my shoulders with each footfall, the leggings were falling down and exposing my bum and the top was riding up and exposing my belly. I think I spent more time adjusting my outfit than I did running. Either way, I stopped after a minute or two, panting like an Alsatian. I power walked (OK, walked a bit faster) a bit, then ran as soon as the front door came back into view!

I took me a lot longer to recover than it used to a few years ago. There is no getting away from it...I am unfit. Bugger.

So, I thought, I need a goal. I need something to inspire me to get out of bed or off the sofa when the weather isn't great (or there's something good on the telly) and I decided...RACE FOR LIFE!
 
My reasons for this are very logical. It's not until 1 June. You don't have to RUN the Race for Life. You can walk it...alhough I have no intention of walking so slowly that I come last, so I still need to get training. Most importantly - it's for a good cause. Race for Life supports Cancer Research UK and most of us, myself included, have had someone close to us affected by cancer in some way.

It's also dead easy to sponsor people. Which brings me to the nitty gritty...if you think I should be pulling on my snazzy MBT trainers and walking like I've never walked before, all in a good cause, click here:

Sponsor me, pretty please

The more people sponsor me, the less likely I am to wuss out...thank you!

Fitness, here I come!

More words of wisdom from Sue Thomason....

"I got a text last night from a friend saying: “You must watch Channel 4 now! Jamie Oliver is about to cut up a dead body to see why unhealthy eating kills!”

As it happens, I’d just switched channels from C4 after watching Jamie pour some cooking oil over a woman in a wet suit lying in a bath – a useless and pointless illustration of how much fat she eats in five years. I was getting annoyed and I felt I’d rather get depressed by watching the news than have to look at both publicity hungry celebrity chef Jamie and a corpse on my screen at the same time.

Jamie Oliver has done some good things. His School Dinners programme was excellent, as he did introduce some variation to school kids who had been brought up thinking that the only food that exists is chips. His programme about chickens last week was admirable and he is definitely the most talented celeb chef on our screens at the moment – his cooking is outstanding.

But all he has achieved by last night’s clumsy programme, Jamie Oliver: Eat To Save Your Life, is to drive more people towards consuming the food he was advising against.

I can imagine how the programme was conceived: a lot of young TV journalists with gelled hair in a board room round a big table doing some brainstorming. “Yeah and we could get the fat woman to wear a wet suit and we could smear her in lard.”

“Great idea Delicia!”

“Thanks Carissa.”

“Helmut, what about you? Any ideas?”

“Yeah, we need something shocking - how about we exhume a corpse?”

All this gets passed on to Jamie via his publicity agent – Jamie who knows less about the psychology of compulsive overeating than the average magazine-educated shop assistant. The programme gets made and the public sucks it all in. The trick behind the programme is that its sensationalist content magically blinds the viewers into not noticing that they’re being served up the same old recycled, rehashed healthy-eating advice that they’ve been forcibly fed for the last 20 years!

Recycled, rehashed information that has been proved over and over again as inefective! There's a reason why the obesity figures rise in parallel with the amount of diet and healthy eating advice that's pumped into the media. The more this type of information is downloaded into your brain the more difficulty you will have in controlling your compulsion to overeat.

If you’re not a compulsive eater, then fair enough, but more and more of us are losing control BECAUSE of this type of advice.

I challenge you to try to stick to Jamie’s advice and I also challenge you to tell me how and why it’s any different to the way you’ve been trying to eat for the whole of your adult life – a way of eating that has led you to living on a hamster wheel of yo-yo dieting and loss of control over food, years of weight loss and inevitable weight gain and led you further and further into the overeating trap.

Go on, go away and start your healthy eating regime. Then when you’re up in the middle of the night with your head in the fridge, face first into a Black Forest gateaux that you don’t even like, then think about how you wouldn’t be doing that if you hadn’t tried to follow what is essentially just another diet..."

REMEMBER, The Food Philosophy is offering a pay afterwards scheme...see the website for details...

Liz Jones usually annoys the beJaysus out of me, but I totally agree with what she says in the Daily Mail today so I'm going to post a link for you to read and...excuse the pun...digest!

Liz Jones' column 10 January 2008

"In 2008, women are suddenly trying to obtain abdominals like Flavia's on Strictly Come Dancing, and we have to ask ourselves precisely why we feel the need to aim towards (and, necessarily, fail, given that most of us have jobs, and children) such extreme levels of physical perfection.

We are told, over and over again, that if we "make the most of ourselves", and "try hard", we will be happy and fulfilled.

You will always be shown the "after" pictures of a woman who has been on a diet and exercise regime, and she will be happy and excited twirling in front of that full-length mirror.

"But once a woman realises that her life hasn't fundamentally changed all that much, she will, inevitably, go back to her old, bad habits - but this time, with a vengeance of defeat and guilt."

Much as I moan about not being able to get into clothes in Karen Millen, I can't comprehend what it would be like to weigh over 700 pounds. Most fat people, if they are honest, want to reduce their weight because they think it looks nicer, or because of pressure from society to look a different way.

Nancy Makin was different - she thought she would always be morbidly obese and had resigned herself to life feeling like something out of 'Barnum and Bailey' 

"I spent more than a dozen years in a self-imposed lockdown, rarely leaving my seventh floor apartment's door and then only when pleadings to my doctor for a needed antibiotic without an office call were met with a firm "No." What "normal" person would welcome going out, when each time you did you were met with stares, people huddling to giggle and whisper or, once the attempt at eye contact was made by me, having people find anything, anything to look at besides my eyes?"

Nancy moved around in a double sized wheelchair, which she only used for visits to doctors...who would invariably pack her off with a food chart and stern advice to lose weight. Like a 700 pound person needs to be told that. And given that most women less than half Nancy's size have been indoctrinated about what to eat and what not to eat since they were old enough to understand the word 'hungry' - totally pointless. No wonder Nancy was miserable.

But things changed for Nancy when she stopped worrying about her weight! She had been given a computer and was using it to focus on interacting with people in politics chat rooms, people that had absolutely no idea of Nancy's size. She developed friendships online, and found that the people she spent hours chatting with gave her a focus outside of herself...and a reason to look forward to getting up in the morning. As a side effect - Nancy realised she'd lost some weight.

"When you weigh over a third of a ton, you don't notice even what would be considered a large loss to most. I don't recall this new information as particularly impressing me, not only because I had long since believed I'd never be of normal size again, but more because losing weight was not my focus."

"Communication had become my obsession; no longer did ham and Swiss on rye whisper its torment from the fridge."

Nancy didn't diet. She didn't haul herself to the gym for a punishing exercise routine. She didn't simply 'distract herself' from food with another activity, paint her nails, have a bath, read a book. Nancy connected with people, discovered that she was worthwhile as a person and that when she stopped focussing on the one thing that had defined her life for so long, she did the one thing she thought she could never do during all her years of fruitless dieting...she lost weight and is now a 'normal' size.

If that isn't a wake up call to unhappy dieters everywhere, I don't know what is. Nancy says:

"Being obese is an external symptom of an internal turmoil.

My weight loss was a "side effect" of regaining my worth, of rediscovering my value. It was no longer a struggle to control what I ate. It came naturally to me. I was valued by others and in turn valued myself. I was being loved and nurtured by faceless strangers. In a world where you are given levels of worth dependent on first impressions, these friends accepted who I was based on my mind and soul. The anonymity of the computer gave me access to a world that would've just as well have left me alone, alone to die. But I did not."

Nancy lost 530 pounds. But more importantly, she gained a fulfilling life.  If this story doesn't inspire you to ditch the bloody diet and go and do something useful instead..I don't know what will!

If you are as fed up with sanctimonious Weight Watchers adverts as I am (yes, they insist on replaying the same one that made me want to throw the TV out of the window last year)

Make this the year that you stop overeating for good!

Do the Food Philosophy six-week online course and pay afterwards - but only if you're happy!

Treat yourself to one of the best gifts you could ever wish for - an end to the suffering that comes with being an overeater - you deserve it.

You won't need willpower and you won't have to stick to a difficult eating plan. You'll be given some simple tools that will end the desire to overeat and leave you fully in control of food. Don't miss out.

Take advantage of the 'pay-afterwards' offer and do the whole six weeks with no obligation to pay unless you are happy with the course. Make this the year that you change your life for the better.

Check out the Food Philosopy Blog: http://foodphilosophy.blog.co.uk/2008/01/07/happy_new_year~3541929

....from http://www.acelebrationofcurves.blogspot.com/

Add this one to your favourites, my fellow curvy goddesses, as it's really positive and it will put you in a good mood. As will How to look good naked, the show that Corinna Makris is waxing lyrical about. On the blog today, Corinna says, among other great things:

Happy New Year everyone! I have one resolution and that is to Be Nice to Myself. This is my resolution because:

(1) Being nice to myself will make my life more pleasurable and gratifying.

(2) Living a more pleasurable and gratifying life will give me more surplus and since

(3) it feels good to give from surplus and feels bad to give beyond surplus

(4) being nice to myself is truly a gift that I give the world and is ultimately the best way to be nicer to others. See how that works? Fun is my goal and Love is the way. I don't think it works the other way around because if love is the goal, let's face it - it isn't always fun.

I'll stop there, as I have stuff to say about How to Look Good Naked.

I love Gok Wan, and I want him on the New Years Revolution blog but he's too darn busy. I think he's the cutest thing ever, despite being as gay as they come, and he absolutely LOVES women, there's none of this po-faced 'look ten years younger with copious surgery and a huge dose of self hatred' malarkey.

He genuinely seems to want to make his women feel good, whether they are fat, thin, tall, ginger or just plain frumpy. Whatever their pet neurosis is, the Gok Father will make you ignore it and come to see what a goddess you are!

I harbour a secret ambition to be on the show but haven't dared apply yet...

The word is getting out about the pointlessness of diets!

Another programme that smacks the dieting industry around the face and tells you to eat whatever you like and start taking care of YOU is Beyond Chocolate. You can sign up to their free newsletter here.

Here's what they say about diets, new years resolutions...oh, and Relentlessly Positive!

Happy new you!

So, we're four days into 2008. That's three mornings of waking up resolved and really ready to make this new year different. Two nights of going to bed feeling smug and saintly at our success, having cut down, cut back or cut out altogether whatever we normally crave. And in ten days' time? Well, we'll protest, we did try - but, somehow, life got in the way...

That's the trouble with resolutions: they're all about what we can't do, rather than what we can. The minute we tell ourselves that we shouldn't, we oughtn't, we mustn't, our little inner devil takes up position, ready to aim a swipe at our halo and lead us off down the path of hellfire and damnation.

Hopes and dreams, on the other hand, focus on possibilities rather than impossibilities. They encourage us to flourish not flounder. They say 'Be more...not 'Be less...!' They remind us that we should aim to live bigger not smaller lives. The website Relentlessly Positive knows this. It declares on its homepage:"We're dedicated to making people feel good." Join its New Year's Revolution and make the one resolution you can stick to - "Be nice to the person who you're expecting to do all the work: you."

This week, every magazine and newspaper in the land is competing for our lucre, luring us in with the latest weight-loss plan and wily promises that, this time, it'll be different. If you need any more evidence that it won't, then ponder this - in the course of her lifetime, the average British woman spends 31 years on a diet, reported Ipsos Mori, and expects to shell out £150,000 on getting into shape, according to a survey by More.

Tune in to what you really want. If one of your dreams for 2008 is to ditch the diets but still lose weight, then spend a fraction of that time and money and do something that isn't just for January - come on a Beyond Chocolate 1 Day Experience.

If you want to...

Hear more about a life-changing approach to weight loss that really works
Learn to like the body you're in while working towards the body you want
Discover new ways of moving your body that have benefits that will last years, not weeks

...check them out!

IN MODEL HEALTH

As the papers bombard us with diets and we realise that we might have to breathe in to get the zip on our jeans done up for a bit, there's some news from the the British Fashion Council. The BFC has published a 14-point action plan in response to September's high-profile report from the Model Health Inquiry on safeguarding the well-being of models working in the UK.

The recommendations stick closely to the suggestions made by the Inquiry - which was chaired by Baroness Kingsmill and included clinical experts and industry insiders such as Giles Deacon, Erin O'Connor and Betty Jackson ? and include banning the use of models under the age of 16 at London Fashion Week, requiring health certificates from models appearing in catwalk shows, establishing a representative body for models and taking action against digital manipulation.

"Several key recommendations have already been implemented and in some areas the BFC is taking additional steps to support models," the action plan states.

"A number of proposals - especially those built on partnerships with international organisations - do require further work; this work will continue. The BFC is determined to take advantage of the 'window of opportunity' identified by the Inquiry, while sustaining and developing our vibrant industry to further strengthen London's position as the most creative and dynamic of the fashion capitals."

I especially like the bit about taking action against digital manipulation of already uber-thin models, as if it wasn't impossible enough to look like some 17 year old from Albania, we could all do without the fashion editors airbrushing their skinny perfection so that everything that might make her look a bit more, well, normal is deleted!!

Visit www.modelhealthinquiry.com if you feel like reading the action plan in full.

This comes on the same day that an article appears about the amount of money women spend on FAILING to lose weight.

The women who spent £300,000 on diets..but who can't keep slim

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=505564&in_page_id=1879

One 31-year-old woman hazards a guess that she has wasted an astonishing £200,000 since going on her first diet at the age of 11. Doesn't that make you want to cry? And what's more, the poor woman is still not thin. What a waste of money. Apparently she's not that unusual - it's not uncommon for women to spend more than £150,000 during their lifetime on trying - and usually failing - to get in shape, according to a recent survey by More Magazine.

And how much is the diet industry worth? £1 billion a year in the UK alone. That's an awful lot of people paying for a pot of gold that doesn't exist at the end of the rainbow thay'll never find.

My plan for 2008?

Swear off diets forever. That incudes 'lifestyle changes' and 'healthy eating'.
Eat when I choose to eat - not when the clock tells me, or someone else tells me I should.
Do exercise that I enjoy doing - swimming, yoga, walking...dancing like a loon to Girls Aloud when hubby is out...

We need to learn to trust ourselves and not the grasping billionaire diet industry to tell us when and what to eat. Why is it *better* to eat a Weight Watchers chemically-processed bird sized lasagne followed by a diet coke and a three WW-point dessert, then a few fat-reduced biscuits later and a banana you don't actually want - but not cook a good quality lasagne yourself from scratch with REAL ingredients and not actually need any of the other things because you're totally satisfied with the meal you made?

Why is it *good* to eat a plateful of leaves and tuna in brine when you're not hungry - but *bad* to have a bar of chocolate you really fancy instead?

Why is it OK to stress yourself out about the calories in a piece of fruit that might take you over your preset limit...but then when you polish off the cake in the kitchen because your points ran out at 4pm and you're still hungry the whole concept of restraint goes out of the window and you eat everything that isn't nailed down, promising to be *good* again tomorrow?

And does anyone ever eat sugar free jelly if they aren't on a diet? I don't think so...and there's a very good reason for that...it's a non-food, it's vile, and designed to fill the stomachs of dieters who would be better off eating something with nutrition in it...

DOWN WITH DIETS!!!!!

It's that time of year again, the time that normal, self respecting, gorgeous people everywhere get seduced into believing that they are somehow not worthy until they sign up to a diet programme and make themselves better. For better, read smaller.

A quick look at the newpaper headlines on January 1 is guaranteed to make anyone who feels a bit delicate after their New Year celebrations feel even more queasy...

"Smokers, drinkers and the obese beware: keep fit or risk losing NHS care" - another one about how fat people and smokers don't deserve care on the NHS...

"The incredible shrinking man: How darts champ Andy Fordham lost 10 stone" - he stopped drinking 20 pints a night. That'll do it!

"Nicollette Sheridan's boost in the derriére sparks liosucation roumours" - I left this headline exactly as it appeared as it made me giggle - seems to me that someone may be feeling a tad hungover in their online sub editing department....

"Hot new diet crazes for 2008"

I love this one...The Lunchbox diet.

"Take one large plastic box and fill it with a nutritious mix of 60 percent vegetables, 30 percent protein and 10 percent fat. Then spend the day grazing on the lunchbox contents, ideally every hour — so you won't snack, or binge at meal times." Go to lunchboxdiet.co.uk to download the 10-page document for just £9.95.

So basically, spend all day picking at tuna salad and nothing else and you'll lose weight. Really? Shocker. And some people will pay £10 for that! But thereare examples of some people's lunchboxes on the site, too:

Traitional Mix 1
Group A Lettuce, Cucumber, Carrots, Sweetcorn, Avocado
Group B Turkey Breast
Group C Vinegar Dressings

Box 2
Group A Shallot Onions, Carrots, Pepper (Red, Green, Yellow), Broccoli, Chilli Pepper
Group B Tuna
Group C Chopped Garlic, Cheese (Grated, Cubed), Lime Juice

I'm sure these are all great lunches but if you tell most people that's all they can eat all day long they will be scurrying to the vending machines by 9:30.

I'm guessing it's not written by a genius either. Read this and tell me if you'd be tempted to pay £10 to download his ebook?

"You will primarily be eating from three different food groups made up from wholesome natural vetetables, protiens and fats. The diet does build in the things you enjoy on a regular basis and you can eat your normal breakfast and evening meal. You can add in 'reward' days as often as you like but this will effect your weight loss / control. It is likely that after a small period of time on the diet your desire for foods high in sugar and salt will reduce naturally as your taste buds change onto the more natural sources of foods as prescibed in your healty 'Lunch Box'.

I spotted four typos in one paragraph but maybe that's a side effect of carb resriction? It sounds horribly dull to me and works on that oft-repeated flawed logic...that if you replace everyday, enjoyable food with a salad you may or may not have to force yourself to eat, it will somehow magically change your taste buds. Na-ah. I have been on sooo many diets where I ate nothing but rabbit food for days on end, and I usually found that the reasons I gave up on the diets were the overwhelming urges for foods like pasta, digestive biscuits and chocolate! I never once had the epiphany of my taste buds telling me that I no longer enjoyed mashed potato or Chicken Tikka Massala...

I guess I've kind of digressed from my point, which is that every year it's the same. You can't open a magazine or turn on the TV without being bombarded with well meaning advice about how to get thin, and every year millions of us fall for it. Maybe this is the diet that will do it? Maybe if I just follow the plan to the letter I can be two pounds lighter a week, and be in a bikini by September 23rd?

Nah. Don't do it. Diets don't work, and the only people who benefit long term from diet books and plans are their originators and authors. Remember Sally Ann Voak, who has written 28 diet books and despairs of the fact that so many people put weight back on after they've lost it on her diets. (Although I'm thinking that she's flattering herself as the accepted industry figure is more like 95%)

If her books were so bloody brilliant, why did she need to write the same thing (eat less and move more) 28 times?

Make 2008 the year you ditch the diet, start to listen to your body and tell the det industry to take a hike. Oh, and I vote that 2 January should be "Lunchbox Day"

And I bet you won't even eat it all.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

PS: http://www.foodphilosophy.co.uk/
PPS: http://newyearsrevolution.blog.co.uk/