Hey Plus Science community, before we jump into the podcast, do me a favor, like, subscribe, and share if you haven't already. This helps us get referred up in the algorithm so we can find more people that need our help and guidance from our doctors. Thanks so much for supporting the show. Let's jump in. Are you interested in understanding GOP1 medications like OSemphic, Wolfie, or Manjaro? Then join us on the Plus Sides, Cracking the Obesity Code, the groundbreaking podcast helping people change their lives one episode at a time.
SPEAKER_00The Plus Sides podcast is Destructor.
SPEAKER_07We're breaking down barriers, smashing stereotypes, and sharing inspiring stories that'll leave you feeling informed and empowered. Join us every week to learn from doctors who are specialists around GLP1 medications like OSINT Pogovia Manjaro. We'll provide you with science and facts to validate these incredible stories. But that's not all. We'll also bring you the voices of the GLP1 Manjaro TikTok community. Real people who face the challenges of obesity-related diseases and disorders and discover the incredible plus sides of GLP1 medications. Our episodes are filled with heartwarming stories, laughter, and moments of triumph. You'll connect with our amazing community members who are reclaiming their health and experiencing their fullest lives. Are you ready to embark on a journey of discovery and empowerment? Tune in to the plus sides, cracking the obesity code, and together we'll change the narrative around obesity and in the stigma. Subscribe now on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform and join our incredible community. Let's celebrate the plus sides of life together because every story deserves to be heard. Every life deserves to shine, and everyone deserves access to expert knowledge and medication. The Plus Sides Podcast. You're not alone. It's not your fault. Friends, the GLP1 math is just not mathing. When I look and see 104 million people in America are struggling with a disease of obesity, and about 11,500 obesity specialists, that breaks down to like one obesity specialist per 9,000 patients. I saw the stat that said 72% of GLP1 users say that they want more support on their journey. Because I think we all realize you start on these medicines and you think, oh, it's just going to be like better mean or anything else ever taken in the past. This ain't like that, bro. Like it's just not. It's different, you know? And I provide a lot of that here by interviewing doctors and things like that. But I have had people been asking me, emailing me for years, asking me to do one-on-one consults, which I do do, but they're expensive, right? So I decided to make a group where 10 people at a time would come in with myself and with Kat. We could talk about recipes, we could talk about exercise, we can talk about side effect management. Um, we could talk about, you know, ideas on breaking stalls or things that we've tried. None of it's medical advice, but it is community support. It costs $50. If you're interested in that, there's a link in my bio. You just fill out that form. If you're not and you just want to go this route, that's okay too. I love you. You're not alone, it's not your fault. And hopefully you'll sign up to hang out with us. All right, now back to the show. Hey, friends, I need to prepare you a little bit about what our episode is going to be about today. And though I'm sure you've seen the title and the description, like it can be a little bit confusing. If you've followed me and followed the podcast for a long time, you know I have said things like, gosh, wouldn't it be great if like the body positivity movement could like get together with like the GLP movement and we could like take over all the things and like actually get people the care that they need to get. Um, and I think at the end of the day, I'm not really sure I know a lot about what the body positivity movement even is anymore. Um, there's like a no-lose movement, there's a um fat liberation movement. There's a lot that I don't know. And anybody that knows me knows that I'm always seeking to understand, right? I may not agree with whatever the outcome is, but I am seeking to understand. And I want to get us there as well. I think that with all the things we see on social and the way that social media works in general, where it's pushing the extremes, it continues to do nothing but divide us. And then we meet miss like the meat of really important conversations. And I want to change that. And I want plus sides to be a part of that. I feel like we've been doing that with obesity. And I think we need to think about things outside of just weight, outside of just weight loss, right? So what happened was, I'm preparing a little bit, is I saw this thing on YouTube that was Gillian Michaels. And she was actually, I don't know, like sparring, if you will, with people from the body positivity movement. And I actually think she behaved herself pretty well. Um, but for the most part, she was just like sort of saying, like, there's no such thing as like health at every size and all these different things, you know? And at one point, she met with the guest that we're going to have on the show today. And I just loved her approach and how she handled things. Now, she is a civil rights activist. So this is going to be different than we've been in the past. We're not going to be getting all political in terms of partisan, right? But we are going to talk about some issues within our system and how that affects people in big bodies. Okay. And I think a lot of that is really important, honestly, because there are plenty of people at the end, quote, of this journey, whatever that equals, that are still in big bodies. I'm one of them, Kat's one of them. And while we're okay with the fact that we're still in big bodies and we like our big bodies, it's still, it's still something a lot of people experience. And there's just a lot to this. I think so. Over time, I do think that with body positivity, if you will, we may have lost the plot. You know? And I think that it's important for us to understand. This is my first episode in trying to better understand. Okay. And I hope that you will listen with an open mind and an open heart and just think it's okay if I don't agree. I'm just gonna listen to better understand. Okay. We're not gonna have any ads on this episode, uh, out of respect for our guest. So I hope that you enjoy it. Have a great day. Thanks for being here. I love you, but you're not alone. It's not your fault. Okay, here we go. Welcome, welcome to the plus sides podcast. Hi, Kat.
SPEAKER_06Howdy. How are you doing? I don't know what date or time it is. I know we had a little situation. I thought it was 5 30.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's cool.
SPEAKER_06That's what we were supposed to be seven. I've been in the time warp, but anyway, I'm yeah, but I'm I'm back. You know, I I I was in a time slip, maybe, you know.
SPEAKER_07Well, you've had a busy, a busy couple weeks, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, it's busy. All right. For um people that are new here, we're gonna do our intros. But if you are a loyal listener and follower, this is your cue to fast forward. If you're new here, I'm Kim. Uh, I am an obesity care advocate, and this is the Plus Sides Podcast. It's an education advocacy podcast all about the disease of obesity or how we speak of it from a medical perspective, and then all the things that go with living your healthiest life. And so we talk about everything from different treatments for your disease to nutrition to movement to mental health, uh, etc. And even fashion. Can't be you talking about fashion and all these different things. Yeah. Yes. This podcast is um multi-award winning. It is ranked in the one top 1% of all podcasts in the world. And I'm telling you that because there's a lot of stuff out there. And I just want to make sure that you're getting like the most reputable information possible. And I want you to know that you can trust what you hear here. Okay. We share our opinions like everybody else, but I'm gonna let you know when it's my opinion and then when it is when we hear from other people. Okay. So uh, we're so glad to have you. Uh, I have had obesity the majority of my life. I uh my first diet was when I was eight, and um, I still live in a big body and I don't mind that at all. Uh, actually. And I think if I didn't, I would feel not myself. As a matter of fact, Kat and I had many conversations about as we were getting closer to that size 14. I was like, I don't know how I feel about this because I identify as a big, beautiful woman. And so as time has gone on through the show, and I've changed size bodies up and down and up and down many times, um, and Kat has as well. We've talked a lot about this movement uh around body positivity and how even really important that was as we were coming up, um, and what that meant for us, right? Uh, because I've always, again, always been in a big body. But I feel like things have changed. And ironically, um, I came across something on YouTube one day where Jillian Michaels was talking and she was she was having a debate with people from the body positivity movement. I believe that's what it was titled. And our guest that's here today, uh, I found their debate or the discussion, and it was just so intriguing. I thought I just I have to have her on my show. And that is Tigris. And uh, so we'll go do some intros real quick. And so, Kat, I want to make sure you have a chance to say hello and tell us who you are.
SPEAKER_06Hey, I'm Kat. I'm Kat, Kat Carter on uh Kat Carter 7 on TikTok. I feel like I'm not gonna um really focus in on the struggles of up and down with obesity. Um, I have always likened myself to being a fluffy fitty, even at 320. Um, and at 220, I'm still in the big body. Um, it's funny you said that um about being uh, you know, people identifying as plus sized. Um, I I had a conversation with some friends that were um asking me like how low I want to go on my journey or how much more do I want to go? And it's like, what's wrong with the way I look now? Like, yeah, I guess that's it. But um uh but yeah, I've like I've always loved fitness when I was when I was um a fluffy fitty, as I called myself, or fat fitty, right? Um always I felt like that was definitely the the misconception that a lot of people have is that we don't um no matter what size, we don't take care of ourselves, we don't get fitness, we don't get a good sweat in, we don't eat apples, and that's completely untrue. And apples, yeah. Well, it's it's freaking serious. It is. They think that we like yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I am yeah, there's always specific foods. There's always specific foods they think we do absolutely eat. Yeah. Um, and that usually involves Big Macs. It used to be they used to say bon bonds a lot, which probably I remember that. Yeah, yeah. And um, but then they're always like, you know, yeah, you never bet you never eat an apple or you never, yeah. There's always specific foods. Sorry, I didn't let it be.
SPEAKER_06I love that. That I this it's really quickly. I took a German, this random memory that pops in my head just now. I took a German cinema uh course when I was an undergrad. And it was the German version of I think Baby Cakes or Sugar Baby. Um it was made in the States. It's a very it's an 80s movie. Uh, what's her name? Ricky Lake was in it when she was heavier. So, but the original version was uh a German film. This woman was a mortician, and all they did was show her like how her her life was before she started going after this guy that she wanted to to date. She came home and like quite literally ate from when she got home until she got to bed. And then she woke up and in the middle of the night and ate some more. And I was like, this woman is like maybe a size 14. Like the just yeah, I was like, I I had to have it like in class, I was like, excuse me, can we talk about this? Because this is completely untrue. How can anyway, but yes, and that's where we are as a society, right?
SPEAKER_07Yes, yes. Um, so uh Kat and I have been friends for a really long time. Um, we used to work together, uh, newer before I even procreated. So uh we were very good friends at start of the show together because we just wanted to learn everything about this. And we have the ADHD real bad. Uh, but this should just be a really nice conversation today. And we're hoping to learn and listen to each other. And that's it, you know. So come hang out with us, would you? Um, Tigris, tell us a little bit about who you are.
SPEAKER_01So I'm Tigris Osborne. I am, I I use she, her pronouns. I live in the Phoenix area. I'm actually on the road now. So today I'm uh with y'all from Albuquerque, but I am the executive director of NAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which is the world's oldest fat rights organization. Um, we were founded in 1969 by Bill Fabry, a man uh who was passionately in love with his fat wife and horrified by the way the world was treating her and how that was affecting her economically, psychologically, socially, and uh gathered a group of friends, a mix of fat and thin people, uh, including Joyce, his wife, and um, and founded this organization to try to make a better world for fat people. And so part of what we do is um our mission is officially to change perceptions of fat and to end size discrimination through education, advocacy, and support. And we do that by trying to get people to think differently about fat and what fat is and what fat people's lives are and what fat people's lives could be if we removed anti-fatness from all of our systems. And we work on some of that system's change through our campaign for size freedom, which is our work to support local communities in getting height and weight added to protected classes under the law, because we can talk about this more as the show goes on, of course, but most places in the world have not made it illegal to discriminate based on body size. Um, and that is true here in the US. We have nine cities and two states that have some forms of protections, and they're still not comprehensive protections. So yeah, we can get into that. But so that's where I am and what I do. I came into this work through by way of nightlife, actually. I learned about NAFA when I was a college student. Um, a woman on my college campus, Carrie Hemingway, was a member of NAFA, and she did a workshop about it for students. And so I've known about NAFA since my 18th birthday, which is when that workshop was. And um, but I didn't get involved until much later. I got involved in the world of body positivity through nightlife. I was uh the host and producer of a plus size um uh hip hop party in Oakland, California called Full Figure Friday. And so I did the modeling, and the women who modeled for my flyers did local fashion shows, and we did parties at big conventions at BBW bashes and other kinds of gatherings. And that's how I came to NAFA. They invited me to produce one of their fashion shows, and then that led to me being on the board and eventually now the executive director of the organization.
SPEAKER_07Awesome, awesome. I love it. Um, I uh I think we should probably talk a lot that we one of the things I said when I or when we talked, when you and I discussed, I reached out to you. You said, Kim, I actually think that we see things very similar. We just go about it different ways, right? We use different language, um, we have similar values, similar things that we work towards. We just do it differently. And I think it might be good for us to just sort of talk about how, again, like the language piece, we do say different things, right? Um, on our community RN size, we talk about obesity, we talk about it as a disease, um, as a chronic progressive disease that is not your fault. And that is how we focus on it from like sort of a medical perspective, if you will. Um, and then uh on your side, you see things a little bit differently. So I thought maybe good be good for us to talk a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we um so I identify as a fat liberationist. NAFA is uh was founded as a size acceptance organization, but we now in our modern era identify as an intersectional fat liberation organization. And what that means is we move in our work with the belief that fatness is a natural form of body diversity, and that anti-fatness is one of the most pervasive um forms of injustice and under-recognized forms of systemic injustice, not just individual difference or difference of opinion or thoughts about people's bodies medically, but but systemic injustice. And fat liberationists believe that um that we should not be thinking about bodies in a pathological way when it comes to body size. And so we actually object to the designation of obesity as a disease. We have a lot of questions about that framework, whether it's actually helpful to fat people, and whether it's actually true, and whether it's really motivated by science or like selective science about which things are funded, and and how much it's tied to capitalism. And so we um we don't use, we call them the O words. And I'm just for folks who got here, because you know my work, you're gonna hear language that you don't hear from me and my work unless you hear it in a critical setting. So I always tell people I use the O words in three ways. Um, and by the O words, I mean any derivative of the word obese, right? Obese, obesity, anything like that, and also overweight. We don't use overweight because it implies that there is one universal weight that people can be over and under, and we just think there's more of a spectrum of body diversity, and there's not a fixed point that people are wrong on one side or right on the other side of. Um, and we don't use the terms obese and obesity except when we are reclaiming the term glorifying obesity, which gets hurled at us all the time as like if you're saying anything positive about fat people or even anything neutral about if you're not demonizing fat people, you're making it okay for them to be sick. Oh my gosh. Yes. That is you get that too, I'm sure. But like fat activists get that really a lot and in a really um trolly way, even when it's from so-called health experts or health advocates. And so we embrace that term. If you're gonna accuse me of glorifying obesity for saying that fat people are humans, beings who deserve to be treated well in the bodies they have now, not in some fictional future body, then I then I'll take it. I'll be that if that's what you're gonna say about me. So I use the word in that context. I also use the word when we are criticizing or raising questions about this framework. Um, we do not think anybody should be blamed for their body in the first place. So, like, you know, you said in your intro, like, we don't think you should be um, it's not your fault you have this disease. We don't actually want to associate words like fault or any kind of like moral words with what somebody's body is. It is what it is right now or forever. You know, you go up and down, you go up and down height wise, you go up and down width wise, like whatever happens to your body. We want to remove that moral framework. Um, and but we do want to be really critical of the sort of obesity industrial complex, like the businesses that benefit from treating obesity as a disease versus treating it versus treating body size as a natural form of adversity. Um, we don't deny that there are correlations between body size and health. Sure. We have a lot of questions about whether the path of designating obesity at disease is the best way to address fat people's health. And so we're always really critical of that, so much so that many fat activists will not even say the words aloud. They will only use the term like the O word to talk about the words. Um, or we will often, in writing, asterisk out one of the letters the same way you do with a slur when you're writing it, to indicate, we have to use this language because we're working in a system that uses this language, but we want you to know that we protest this language and we want you to ask questions about this language. Um, so we like we've always used fat NAFA, the word fat has been in NAFA's name since the beginning. Originally, the organization was the National Association to Aid Fat Americans, and that was updated um, you know, a couple of decades into our uh long history, just to sort of clarify that we're an advocacy organization, not an individual support organization, although we do some of that too. But um, but we've been using the F-word, that F-word, from the very beginning. We acknowledge um and recognize that it is a trauma word for a lot of people because of the way that it is used against them.
SPEAKER_03Yes, right.
SPEAKER_01Um so when we're talking about individual people, we want to use the language that they like to use for themselves. And in a scenario like this, where the language you like to use for yourself and many of your listeners like to use for yourself is person with obesity, and we have an objection to that, but you may not want to be called fat. We have to have a conversation about what you want to be called.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01When we're talking about the movement, it is not the persons with obesity movement, it is the fat rights movement, and we always want people to use the F-word when they're talking about the fat rights movement and when people ask you to use it for them. When someone says to you, I am fat, that your response is, oh no, don't say that, honey. Like we we don't want any of that. Um, we want it to just be used in a neutral way and in a political way, we use it in a very political way, um, and sometimes in a celebratory way, because we you know, we need to be celebrated in all of the body diversity that we have. So, you know, so for this show, like the word's gonna come up between us in the way y'all use it and the the and the way I critique it and you know, and where where our middle ground is. But for folks who are uncomfortable with any of the terminology, what I always say is like first and foremost, take care of yourself as you're listening to this. Whichever of the words are activating or triggering or or remind you of trauma. It's hard for you to hear them, whether it's the O word or the F word, take care of yourself as you're listening, but also think about how the other people are using the the language they're using and why, and what questions you have about that. Um, and and how you can find middle ground when you can't agree on the language.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's important, whether it be for, you know, how you see yourself, you know, during if you're, for example, a lot of people that watch the show take GLP one, um, you know, whether you're on that journey, right, or where you would be. After or how you felt about your body before. It is quite the journey to really think about that when your body is changing. And I always tell Kat a lot of times, it's like there's more mental work to do than there is really the other stuff. You know what I mean? With the losing of the weight, if you will, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And what so part of what we do as an organization and what folks who identify as fat activists do is we want to think about that mental work, that personal work that you have to do to undo the internalized anti-fatness that you definitely got from this culture, no matter what size you are, no matter what size you are, what you have to do to undo and unpack that and hopefully help deconstruct it for the next generations coming up behind us, but also what you can do about the systemic stuff. And part of our concern with the framing of obesity is that the medical system is one of the places where fat people encounter the most discrimination. And sometimes, and I understand that there are many folks in the sort of obesity awareness and advocacy world who like who genuinely want to have talking about this help destigmatize body size. But we also know that the obesity treatment world has been promising us for decades that talking about it that way was going to destigmatize it and it hasn't. In fact, it's increased stigma in a lot of ways, and it's medicalized fat bodies in a lot of ways. And in and and brought to other discussions about what fat people uh face the idea that we can only talk about the health pieces. And so, um, so you know, the sort of like, like I said, I think I said the term obesity industrial complex, right? Like all of the pieces that feed the sort of like, how do we do treatment? We have the same critiques as a lot of folks have about a lot of the rest of the healthcare system. Are we doing treatment that is what is actually best for patients, or are we doing treatment that is best for the bottom line of these industries? And we just have a lot of questions about that. And there's a lot of history of these in industries sacrificing fat people's health and well-being and even lives to the gambles that they take on these things, right? And so that is part of our like part of our systemic justice work. NAFA is primarily a civil rights organization. There are some audiences where I will say, I'm not gonna talk about health at all, except to talk about the systems related to health, because all we do is talk about fat people and health. But I know you guys are a particular community of people who are thinking about their health and thinking about how pharmaceutical treatments can fit into their health profile. So I'm definitely willing to talk about health with you, but like it's it's so pervasive that we only think of fat bodies as a health problem to be solved that there have to be places where we can escape that dialogue. And so a lot of times in fat liberation spaces, if we are not talking directly about advocacy to change the system or advocacy to help an individual who is struggling within that system, then we're not talking about health because there are a million other places where you can hear that, and not a million other places where you can come and hear no weight loss talk, no weight loss, right? And so that's what's a little bit, you know, that's what's a little bit different. Um, I won't do some media opportunities like this because I don't think the hosts or the producers or whoever is open enough to being critical about these questions. I agreed to do this with y'all because I think you have a lot of curiosity. I think your listeners have a lot of curiosity. Um, and I just want people to know that we're out there, that this perspective is out there for folks. Yeah. So I'm really I'm gonna thank you for the opportunity and for your a lot. Because a lot of if I tell a lot of people I'm gonna come on your show where you talk about obesity, I'm gonna criticize the very idea that obesity is a disease. A lot of people are like, oh, sorry, we didn't know that's what you were gonna do.
SPEAKER_06We can't oh no, I guess inherent, like kind of like I I feel like after after listening to you speak, um, I feel like I need to go back a couple more steps, like in the whole, like I'm I'm working on kind of processing this this crux of life where we live in, where I currently am in, um in body pause, um health and fat acceptance and obesity treatment. That's I'll say it for the sake of the show. So I I feel like I, you know, um, but I feel like I after just listening to you, I I I have to go back a couple of steps. Let's get to the foundation, you know?
SPEAKER_01Well, tell me if I can go back a couple of steps for your audience. Like, did I did I jump too far forward without asking like talking about more in the beginning?
SPEAKER_07No, no, I think it's more like in my opinion, like let's think about there's pieces here that you and I talked about. And as you were saying them to me, I was like, Yep, all that's true. You know, and at one point I went, can it be both? And you went, maybe it's not my testimony, but but maybe, you know, like we can, you know, we can talk about it.
SPEAKER_01That's not that's not my ministry. My ministry is not figuring out how the you know, how the obesity advocacy organizations can do better at what they do. My ministry is figuring out how we can get more people to do the other pieces, right? The the pieces around the civil rights. And like for a lot of people, um, you know, we tend to think uh what I get asked a lot is like, what's what is the difference between this and body positivity? And this is part of where I was trying to go with Gillian. So Kim mentioned that I was on the show surrounded and arguing with Jillian Gillian Michaels, and I agreed to do that. The argument was Gillian Michaels versus 20 body positivity advocates or body positivity activists. And um, and that was kind of true. I mean, the show is a little gamified and a little construction and whatever, but uh, you know, I'm I'm the the fat lady from the fat rights organization and and I usually don't identify at this stage in my life and career as a body positivity advocate because body positivity sometimes gets really reduced to the very personal piece. Do you feel good about your body? Right? Can you look in the mirror and say, you go, girl, no matter whether you have bumps and wrinkles and whatever, right? But body positivity grew out of much more radicalized movements like fat liberation. And it was fat liberation, fat, fat liberation and size acceptance people have been using the term body positivity for decades. But when we say body positivity, we're usually talking about that sort of like Tumblr Instagram movement that starts in the like early 2000s, and it's bloggers and creators and influencers eventually. And then eventually it's also corporations trying to sell you lotion or whatever. And um, and you know, it it can have this very like you go girl piece to it, but it's it's really it's created by body rebels, right? It's created by people who are being told they're too fat, too queer, too disabled, they have too many scars, they're amputees, their bodies are weird and strange. And those people are like, well, then we'll create our own media to show who we really are that represents us. And they start creating these blogs and books and social media pieces and you know, TV shows and whatever. And um, you know, but as it gets more mainstream, it gets farther from that sort of radical, like the system is wrong and more towards the like, I can fit into the system too, right? And so body positive I want you to feel positive about your body. I hope you can. I hope at a minimum you can feel neutral about your body, but I hope you can genuinely feel positive about it. But that's really depoliticized because if you live in a body where your skin color or your hair texture or your body size or your visible disabilities or your invisible disabilities or any of those other things make you a target for disenfranchisement and oppression and things like that, it's a lot harder just be you go girl and let it go, right? You want to actually be thinking about the same. And so body positivity starts with those radical roots. That's what I was trying to get to with Jillian, is sort of she'd kind of reduce body positivity to some combination of you go girl and intuitive eating that was like, that's not what our movement is, right? And um, and I think that um, you know, body positivity these days does get mostly associated with like, do we are we a little bit nicer to fat people? Like, you know, do we like Lizzo? Or do we, you know, it gets like like a little can we have a fat girl on Dancing with the Stars or whatever? And it doesn't take into account all of these other identities that we have and systems that impact our lives and like all of that stuff. And so um, so we we just like but it does start with the personal well, you know, sometimes it does. Sometimes it starts with like an awakening around that more political stuff, and then you bring that, like you said, like you go a few steps back and think, right, how does how does that impact me? How has the way I've treated myself all this time or I've let other people treat me been because everything around me told me I was supposed to? Why am I only questioning myself and not questioning everything around me?
SPEAKER_06It's so normalized, yeah. Like it's so normalized. It makes me think, Kim, when we we talked to Dr. Catherine Toomer, like obese fat discrimination is like the last the last accepted way of discriminating that like people allow.
SPEAKER_01Um well, I'm gonna push back on that just a little bit because one of the things we hear that phrase a lot in size acceptance work, this is the last acceptable prejudice. If you remember that fat people come in lots of other kinds of bodies too, and they're experiencing all these other kinds of discrimination too, and you're looking around the world and seeing civil rights being it is absolutely true, as I said at the beginning, there's not civil rights protections for people in larger bodies or for people in extremely tall bodies or extremely short bodies, like there's just no protections around bodies, but we're also watching protections around other kinds of bodies being rolled back. We don't want to say it's the last acceptable prejudice, you're right, because there's a lot of prejudice that we are accepting in our culture, and if you're a fat person who also has one of those identities, you're catching hell from all the directions, right? We're starting to, yeah, all right, yeah. But make sure reminding me that, yeah, but but where you what but the but the distinction though of what you're saying though, there are ways that we have some more social allowance for anti-fatness, and there are ways that it works different legally because there aren't those legal protections. Um, and you know, and it is culturally sanctioned in a lot of ways, it's encouraged in a lot of ways. Um, and so we do want to talk about how it works differently than some other kinds of discrimination. We just don't really want to play that game of like, is it worse or is it, you know, is that's we don't want to forget how they all work together. Is it last? Is it only right? And how much of it is made up of those other discriminations? Because one thing that is really um getting a lot more talked about these days is where our ideas about how wrong fat is come from, and a lot of them come from colonialism and white supremacy. So it is baked in like anti-fatness and racism are are like partners in crime. Um, and and sometimes that's because of racism is the first crime, and the anti-fatness comes along as you know, as the sidekick. And, you know, there's really important work that's been done about this. Like for folks who like the deeper dives, right? Y'all should look at Dr. Sabrina Strings, who wrote a book called Series of the Black Body. I read Dayshan Harrison, who wrote a book called Belly of the Beast, that's about anti-fatness and anti-blackness working together. Um, Deshaun says, like, you can't get rid of one without the other. Deshaun says it more eloquently than I do. But, you know, and there's a bunch of like um scholars who are particularly looking at anti-blackness and anti-fatness in connection because some of our very ideas about fat people are dumb, fat people are lazy, fat people don't take care of themselves, come from trying to create those ideas about black people to separate them from white parity. And so, like, I know that's like, you know, that feels very scholarly to some people or very sort of like historical, but what does that have to do with today? It has everything to do with today. If our ideas about body are created out of racism, then we always have to be thinking about racism when we're thinking about bodies, even if we're not people who are experiencing directly racism ourselves.
SPEAKER_06I if for our listeners, if you I I read the Sabrina Strings, the the book, the Fearing the Black Body. Um, if it's I always I tell every tell everybody that we talk to. I'm so glad I spoke with somebody actually who read it too.
SPEAKER_07I got a little excited. Um always asking about the book, and they're like, no.
SPEAKER_01Dr. Strings book is really academic, she's a historian. But if you want to, like, I can give you a resource for like folks, if you if you want to baby step into this a little bit and you're not ready to read what is essentially a history textbook on this, I interviewed Dr. Strings on our NAFA webinar series, and you can go to our YouTube channel. We've got a bunch of free videos at YouTube.com, of course. Um, our our uh YouTube channel is NAFA Official, N-A-A-F-A Official. And we've got most of the interviews I've done with people over the last five or six years, and that includes Dr. Joy Cox, who wrote about being, you know, black women in a fat body, and um Leah Vernon, who wrote about being a fat black Muslim woman, and Dr. Sabrina Strings and Deshaun Harrison, and like so. If you're not a reader or you're not a reader yet, or you want something to chew on while you wait for your book to get here, please order it from your favorite local independent bookstore. Um so it'll take a little longer than that one place. But while you're waiting for it to get here on our YouTube channel, all that stuff is free and is a place where you can, you know, you can do some of those deeper dives around some of those concepts, including that piece about do y'all talk about the term intersectionality? Should I say a little bit about what that means? Talk about all of it.
SPEAKER_07Um I think I think my goal at the end of this is to better understand. I think that um each other, all about this. I think there's no way that we just like got here. Like there are many things that have happened in the world and in the country and all these different things that we are at where we are at. Yeah. What you said to me specifically when we talked is you said, yeah, exactly what we said about like we are now trusting again, right? Like the medical system and other systems who have done nothing but profit off of our fatness, right? And and that is true. That is true. Like, you know, so and that piece of it is really difficult because we know that there's a tremendous amount of you know, fat bias uh when it comes to medicine. I mean, they've they've studied it, they know that it's true. And so it's hard sometimes when we're sort of like, okay, you know, let's do the trial, let's take the medicine, you know, all these different things. And I just think that we should talk about it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, so let me so let me do what I just said and let me talk a little bit about what intersectionality means because I know I told you this was I run an intersectional fat liberation organization. So here's what that means. Um, because it kind of goes with this thing about, you know, identity and and privilege and stuff. Uh, intersectionality is a term that was termed by Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw, who's a a legal scholar and who writes about race, and and coined that term specifically originally to talk about the experience of black women and the class experiences of black women and how they are different than the experiences of other women, especially white women and other black people, especially men, and and how like your various identities interact differently with our power structures based on what the combination of them is, right? And so that combination she was originally writing about was the identity of being like black and female in the in America. But we now use that term in social justice spaces to talk about sort of power and identity and privilege and making sure that we understand the ways that even though our lives may intersect around like there's sort of like a Vinn diagram of like what we all have in common as fat people, but that that space in the Vinn diagram where we all have something in common, the other spaces where we don't are just as important and sometimes are actually impacting us more. So that's kind of how I help people understand that concept of intersectionality. And that becomes really important when we talk about the medical system because we know that there's bias about people in bigger bodies. We see that you know there's plenty of research about medical professionals' attitudes about us, how they think we take care of ourselves, what they see when we walk in the office before they even ask us any questions or run any tests, right? But we also know if you are a transgender person trying to get gender affirming care and you're over a certain BMI, that is preventing you from getting gender affirming care. If you are a black person and you go into a medical setting where we know that there are all kinds of horrible stereotypes about you that are affecting your health and your mortality as a pregnant person, or your way people believe you experience pain or like all of these things that are connected to race, and you are also fat, you're dealing with two kinds of bias in the system or whatever, right? And when we're thinking about things like JLP1s, which I know is like the heart of what your show is about, they're not tested the same way on different demographics, right? They're not as widely tested on people of color, they're not as widely tested on people over certain ages, they're not as widely tested on people over certain BMIs. Um BMI is its own whole problematic issue in and of itself, right? But if that's the tool we're gonna use, and then we're prescribing something to people who we're not testing it on as much as we're testing it on other people, what does all of that mean? And how is it a different experience of whether the drugs are accessible to you, whether the drugs are safe for you, whether anyone will care if the drugs harm you or kill you? Like all of those things are also impacted by all of our identities, not just our body size. And so, um, as we, you know, if you have an intersectional approach to thinking about size discrimination or how people how people live in their bodies, how they survive and thrive in their bodies, you have to be thinking about how these issues affect different people differently.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, absolutely. Can you break down a little bit more about some of the things around the system outside of just some, and we talked, we talked a little bit more about it, but I want people to really understand. Like, um, especially as it pertains to um, because a lot of people haven't read Fearing the Backbot Black Body. I haven't read it. Um, and so I only know the gist of it. Could you explain that to our audience a little bit more? Like, what where did that begin? I think it's fine, like we can go that back that far. Where does it begin and how does it become?
SPEAKER_01Um, well, yeah, I'll definitely go to the sources and learn more about these things from the people who are the direct scholars of this. But yes, the the if we think about what an idealized body is in Western civilization, and especially I run a US organization. I think most of your audiences, I know you have global listeners, but I think most of your audience is probably here in the US, right? When you think about what we think an ideal body is, and what that has to do with um, you know, who we think is fit enough to serve, who we think is fit enough to protect themselves or us, who we think is fit enough to work, um, and where white supremacy fits into all of that. You arrive on somebody else's land and you tell them everything about their diet is wrong and their body is wrong, and they're supposed to look like you and eat like you and be like you, um, that's where the colonialism piece, you know, coming in that sort of anti-indigeneity piece, right? These are the indigenous people. This is what they eat, this is what their bodies are like. That's not good enough. They're supposed to eat like us and be like us, and so we're gonna make that part of our historical attempts to dominate them. And then when it comes to anti-blackness, we are looking for ways to justify enslaving people. And one of the ways we might justify enslaving people is by establishing their inferiority, and part of how we do that is by talking about their um rebellious bodies and appetites, right? Their um, their animalistic ways of eating, their their fleshy bodies being representative of not being in control of their appetites or not being in control of their physical selves. There's a history of this that that is connected to um the slave trade, and that's part of what Dr. Strings talks about in her work. And then there are other, there are also other um, you know, scholars looking across US history at where we established ideas of sort of like white Christian purity, things like um uh cotton mathers and the uh and Kellogg and Graham, like y'all know these household names, Kellogg and Graham Graham. And I do you know that these food products were established to be bland and low calorie and control your appetite, so you wouldn't be like those people, right? So you'll be like these people, not like those people. And so there's um there's all these different points in history where you see, like also Atiya Chowdery, who's a Incredible fat study scholar does all this work around like milk and calories and the way that the way that some of our beliefs about calories and wholesome foods are shaped by sort of like nationalist ideas about getting people ready for the military and things like that. It's all very interesting, and there's a lot there around this is not just like you're in sort of inherently born to look at a fat body and be like, ooh, gross, right? That's not historically true. Some of our oldest depictions of bodies include fat bodies that we sometimes think we think of things like the statue of Willendorf, which is one of the oldest historical figurines, often called the Venus of Willendorf. Um, some of us refer to it as the statue of Willendorf instead of Venus, because that Venus image is tied to sort of like like white Europeans' ideas about what beauty is, right? So the statue of Willendorf, you know, looks that body looks like my body, right? Certainly as I'm aging, right? The older I get, the more I look exactly like the statue of Willendorf. And if y'all you've probably, even if you don't recognize that name, y'all have probably seen her or seen it. I don't know, like we assume that this statue represents a female form because it has boobs, and um, but you know, but also we know lots of different kinds of bodies have boobs, we just don't talk about them that way, and um, and so the statue of Willendorf is like this little brown figurine, and it's like one of the oldest depictions of humans, and we will still try to say fat people never existed until modern times. We we have evidence that fat people existed long before modern times. We have that evidence through art and archaeology and all these other things, and and we don't always know what those cultures thought of those bodies or why they were capturing them, the why they were depicting them the way they are, but we know that there's evidence of existence at least. And so, so where did we go from? You know, people are different in different parts of the world and different times in history, to yeah, they are and they were, but they shouldn't be because they should all look like this, they should all look like this standard that we have now, and they should look like that, and their bodies should operate the way we think they should operate, and anybody else is worthless, right? How do we get to a point where we have, you know, the use is a history of what were called the ugly laws, right? You can't be seen in public if you have a quote unquote deformity, if you have a disability, you're supposed to be hidden away. But why aren't those why aren't disabled people worthy of being valued parts of our community, right? Why aren't fat people worthy? Why aren't dark-skinned people worthy? Where did we get these ideas? Um, you know, and so many of them is like, you know, it's like the when you take off the mask of the Scooby-Doo villain and you reveal, oh, it's Mr. So-and-so from the carnival, is you take off the Scooby-Doo mask and it's racism. That's what it is, right? That's what it is in a lot of cases. Um, and that's what it is when it comes to anti-fatness. That's where the root, that's where the roots are. And sometimes we say that's where the roots are, and then we don't believe we still see it carry through today, but we do still see it carry through today.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think um when it comes to you know, working within the system to try to change it. Um, and you mentioning things around people can't necessarily like not or fire you because you are in. I'm I say we a lot of times we say in a big body. That's how we talk about it here because you're in a big body, or will not not hire you because you're in a big body. And I'm wondering, like, it hasn't been my experience. I am sure that there have been times where I wasn't hired because I was in a big body. I'm sure, you know, but it was anything I knew about. And so I'm I it was it hasn't been my experience, but doesn't that does not mean it doesn't happen, you know? And so, or that it didn't happen. But I'm wondering, like, can you talk to us a little bit more about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of research about employment discrimination in particular, um, that you know, where where we see people not get hired in the first place, where we see people not even be accommodated at interviews, you know, you've if you've you're at a disadvantage. If you come in for your interview and you have to stand in the waiting room because they only have teeny tiny chairs, you're already at a disadvantage. You're already othered before you even go in the door and open your mouth. Um, the, you know, there are accounts of and research about people, you know, being doing really well in the interviews until the in-person interview stage, and then oh, oh, suddenly something the vibe check is different. Um, I get asked a lot, like, well, how do you even know if it was because of size discrimination? It could have been because of something else. You'd be surprised how often people just admit, you know, we didn't think, you know, you didn't have the look. And what that means is you're too fat. Um, you know, what when Bill Fabry started NAFA, one of the things he was witnessing in his hometown was that the fat people were all working on the second shift at the post office because that was the shift where you didn't interact with the public. So the post office would hire you, but they wouldn't let you be at a front desk where you interacted with the public. Um, and so that limited opportunities for advancement or, you know, whatever. And so it was very much a part of the beginning of our history. Um, Esther Rothbloom is a scholar who did a lot of research about employment discrimination and especially against fat women, and looking at how um salary differences across lifetime for people who have the same kind of skill sets are even more dramatic when you think about the gender um wage gap, that that gap gets even bigger when it comes to people in bigger bodies, um, particularly women. We see a little bit more research about men. Um the um the employment discrimination piece also shows up in looking like not getting mentoring, in being in a workplace that has a workplace wellness program. That means that your insurance is more expensive if you're a higher BMI than someone else's insurance is, and not just for you, your whole family's insurance is more expensive because your BMI, where your colleague has, you know, some other in, you know, some other discounted in incentive or something like that. And workplace wellness programs are protected by federal law. So even in places where there is some anti-discrimination law, there are some, it's one of the places where people can kind of wiggle around it a little bit. And, you know, we don't think of that as wage theft, right? Like, but if you're if you were if you work in a system where your benefits are part of your compensation and somebody else is getting cheaper benefits than you, that's a wage disparity. Um, you know, and so the employment stuff is really big. Um, and it's it can be hard to nail down in the research. Like one of the things we know is that when we look at statistics about fat people where they have to self-report discrimination, that can be those outcomes can be affected by people not wanting to think of themselves as a victim, by people having internalized anti-fatness and blaming themselves. So they are not the victim, they are the person who deserves it. Is this this should be motivational to me to make change? Or they just have never been taught to think about it as discrimination when it's about fat people. And so sometimes what happens is researchers will ask these questions, you know, have you experienced size discrimination? No. And then, you know, the next set of questions is well, have you experienced this, this, this, this? And it's yes, yes, yes, yes. But you said you'd never experience size discrimination, and these are all functions of that. You just don't think about it that way. So, like, we did some partnership work with Dove a few years ago. They actually helped us launch the campaign for size freedom. And Dove's a little bit of a mixed bag in the body positivity community because they did a lot in the early days of body positivity mainstreaming. They did a lot of like, oh, how can we use this to sell our products, right? But they've they've also they really did, they really did, and um, but also we ultimately decided to do some work with them uh because they were funding this civil rights work, they were funding us trying to help get more of this legislation off the ground. And they've done some really good work in that way around the Crown Act, which is what about hair discrimination, like against black people's natural hairstyles, and they've done some really good work around that. So we decided we would, you know, take the chance of working with them and they did some research that was really helpful in establishing some numbers for us around um US reports of size discrimination. And according to their research, 34 million people at least in the US every year experience size discrimination. That is the equivalent of if you took the 20 biggest cities in the US, New York, Chicago, LA, Phoenix, Houston, you know, and all the rest of that list of the two San Jose, Minneapolis, you know, all the biggest in the country, and you took every person in those cities and they were experiencing a kind of discrimination, and we don't talk about it. We don't talk about it as discrimination. So that's that piece, you know, Kat, where you were saying, like, there's there's, you know, is this a way that it does operate differently than other kinds of discrimination? Because at least we know the other ones are discrimination. We might still tolerate that. At least we know they're discrimination. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, it's like big and pervasive, and it's a lot of it is employment discrimination, a lot of it is discrimination in the medical setting. And then, you know, it's other things though. It is housing, it is people being told that they can't have a place because they are too big for it, right? You will let me move a refrigerator and a piano into this apartment, but you won't let me move my partner in because you think they're too big. Come on, come on, right? Um, it is we see it in parental rights cases where like somebody's a really great parent, but they're being accused of not being a great parent because they or their kid is fat. Um, you know, we see it in um uh we see it in criminal justice cases where people are seen as being more scary because of the combination of their skin color and body size, or that when they are um victims of police brutality, that their body size is blamed on what happened to them, they didn't they didn't die because we were choking them, they died because they were too fat and they couldn't breathe because they were too fat. So, like we see it across society in all these different really, really serious ways. And I don't know if your audience can do this. I always challenge audiences when I'm speaking in in person um to ask me during the QA if there is a thing that they they care about that they think there's no way at all that anti-fatness shows up as part of that thing. What is a c I don't care if it's you know like animal protections, environmentalism, like whatever the thing is that you think there's nothing at all that has to do with body size that can ever show up in this way, and not a single audience member has ever been able to stop me. And it's not because I'm so great at this, right? Like it's because it's that pervasive and it shows up everywhere. It shows up at your Star Trek convention, it shows up at your grocery store, it shows up when you're trying to get your PhD and there's some, you know, uh law professor in the New York Times saying that fat people shouldn't even apply to PhD programs because they don't have the discipline to finish them. Like it really shows up. Can your kid get a desk at school that's big enough for them if they're a chubby kid? It's all over all of our systems everywhere.
SPEAKER_06I am intrigued. I'm I'm thinking because I I'm in agree agreement. I I feel like it's definitely everywhere. Um, but I'm I'm I'm challenged now. Like what where yeah, no, even like what in manufacturing, let's say factory. Of course, there's yeah. And I think sometimes um I've had conversations with people that feel like you don't really know your bias. There's there may have you may have been interviewed by somebody who had good intentions, but they don't realize they don't know what they don't know, what they don't know. And we're working with that as well, not just the covert or excuse me, the overt, but also the the the covert, the yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, the the explicit bias piece, there's right, there's the explicit bias. We we know we hate fat people, we're just gonna say that, and we see plenty of examples of that. And y'all live. That's the other story. I I know what kind of comments you get on YouTube. YouTube is a set pool of and attacking fat people all the time. So there's that kind of explicit bias. And when we do things like when we are successful at helping local organizers pass these laws, the most recent two laws were in Minneapolis last year and in New York City a couple years ago. And we're just the every media piece about it is just flooded by people. Oh, so now we're just supposed to let everybody be fat, and now we're supposed to taxpayers are supposed to, businesses are gonna go out of business because they don't want to accommodate these fat people, you know. Like we get all kinds of stuff, and also we get the people who just show up to say fat slurs and fat whatever, they're not making an argument, it's just an audience for them to call somebody, you know, a whale or whatever. And so we see that explicit bias all the time. But you are absolutely right. The implicit bias, the things we we think and act on without even realizing we think and act on them are rampant with anti-fatness too. And if you're curious about that in yourself, as like you're reflecting on yourself, one tool that some people use is that Harvard has these things called implicit bias tests. And you can if you just Google, like, or just you know, use your favorite search engine to find Harvard implicit bias tests. There is one about body size, and what it does is sort of like measure your how you react to different images and different words together and and helps you have. I mean, these have been criticized, but they're but a lot of people find them useful as like a beginning place to think about this. Where am I, where did I not even realize that I connected that word with the fat person, but I didn't connect it with the thin person? They have tests like that about race and gender, but there is one about body size that you can take and you know, see, like I think a lot of people find that, like, oh, oops, I didn't, I didn't realize I had some of these biases. And some people find that after they've been in a lot of fat positive spaces, like really kind of politicized fat positive spaces where we're asking these questions and thinking about systems, that they can take a test like that and still be surprised that they still get some more bias than they thought they would have. Because it takes a it's hard to unpack something that's that pervasive, that that's you know, yeah. We always say we're like we're swimming in the water of it. And when you're the fish swimming in the water, you don't you don't think about water, you just think about being a fish, right? And the water is diet culture or the water is anti-fatness all the time, and for people in all body sizes, because size discrimination does not only affect people who are fat, um, perceptions of fat it affect people in their jobs too, and in the realities of their jobs, and other kinds of size discrimination too. I mean, the oldest civil rights law in the US is called the Elliott uh Larson Civil Rights Act. And I actually learned this from my my intern, uh, my intern Anna Ardeline, who worked with us a couple of years ago when she was a master's student at Brandeis, that um part of the way that law was created had nothing to do with fat people. It had to do with women being told that they were too small to try out for the fire department. But because the legislators wrote the language to just say height and weight discrimination is wrong, now there are protections for people around any kind of height and weight discrimination. Whether someone thinks you're too thin, too fat, too tall, too short, that is written into the law in Michigan. That it's not okay to discriminate based on that. It's just not written into the law in enough other places.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
unknownThat's really interesting.
SPEAKER_03God interesting.
SPEAKER_06You've rendered us speechless and we are yabber.
SPEAKER_01I'm telling you, one of those chat chat at me some more. You guys are usually a chattery or podcasting. You're listening to you. This lady listening.
SPEAKER_06It makes it too much obviously that is that is how we are. We are very obvious. Yeah, we are yabber yvers. It just makes me think of like state military when I remember when I was graduating from high school way back in the 90s when history started. And and I remember not being able to get it. That's of 92. Chandler Wolf, Class of 92. Okay, see, close. I was 95. Um, she's the baby of us. Um, but uh I remember I couldn't get into any brand.
SPEAKER_03I'm not that big of a baby. I know.
SPEAKER_01Because his own whole thing. So this is part of what's interesting about being like a sort of radical lefty organization, right? Because I don't want to advocate for people to go into the military. I want people to have other economic choices and other like, but I I mean I want people to have the right to do that if that's what they think is best for their life. I'm not fighting for that. Again, that's not my ministry. My ministry is not please go into the military. But at the same time, if the military is one of the biggest employers in the country and you can't be in it over a certain BMI, you are cut off from that form of employment, opportunity, scholarships for college, all of that. If you're go into the military and you're not fat when you get there, you're not fat when you get there, and you get too fat, they can kick you out.
SPEAKER_02They can.
SPEAKER_01And if you want support through your medical military benefits, again, I don't want people to have weight loss surgery. I think there are, you know, I understand that people have found pros and cons to it. I don't want it for them. I want them to live in a world where they don't feel like they have to do that. But if that's part of your choice and you should have autonomy to make decisions about your body, and your health care is provided through the US military, and you want to have weight loss surgery so you can keep your job and they won't pay for weight loss surgery, that's not fair. Right? So I don't want any of those things for you. But I also don't, I like I don't want the first things for you, but I also don't want the second things for you. One of the most complicated things about this work when we're working within the system, because a lot of fat activists are more radical than NAFA, and they're not interested in working in the system because they're interested in deconstructing the system. I am interested in that too in my heart, but I'm practical in that this system isn't going anywhere anytime soon. And the harm reduction to me is getting some whatever we can out of the system for however long it exists, right? I want you to have body autonomy. Everybody hear me say this. As a fat liberationist, one of the most important things we believe in is body autonomy. Your right to make the choices you want for your body. And we get a lot of like, oh, the fat activists are mad at me because I lost weight. No, baby, we're mad at you because the way you're acting since you lost weight, or we're mad at the system for making you feel like you that was the only thing you could do, or you know, you're throwing fat people under the bus now and we're mad at you. You actually losing weight is your business. If you, you know, if you've been given the appropriate information and the truth about the harms of going up and down in weight loss, and the truth about the side effects of the things you might be using, and the truth about the risks of weight loss surgery and all that. My my ministry is do you actually get all of that real information in a fair and unbiased way so you can make a fair and unbiased decision? And then you get to do whatever you want to, and I don't have to like it. Yeah, when I'm advocating for a civil rights law that says you should not be discriminated against based on your body size. That means everybody, even the people I disagree with. And that means I want that protection for you, even if I don't like what you're gonna do with that protection. Um, and so that is, you know, that's complicated, right? It's complicated when you get into that part of the sort of ethics and values and things like it is terrifying to me to think about federal law that creates greater access to GLP ones, because I don't think they're tested well enough and I don't think they're safe enough, and I don't think we've considered enough about the harms that could be coming down the road. So it's terrifying to me. And also, I want you to be able to make that choice if that's what you and your doctor think is best. I want your body to not be biased, I don't want you to have a fat coke doctor who's helping you make that choice, right? So I want all these systems to get clearer and cleaner so you can really be making an informed consent choice. Because if you don't have the right information, then you're not making an informed consent choice. You are making a coerced choice. If you feel bullied into weight loss by the healthcare industry, by your mom, by your employer, by your husband who's divorcing you, and now you got to lose weight, so you look thinner when you go to divorce court, whatever the thing is, right? Yeah, everything I don't you're not being that's not an autonomous choice to lose weight. That's you being bullied in. That's extended. Yeah, I don't want that for you. But but I do want you to get to do what you want to do with your body, right? And so that is that can that can criticizing the systems, even if I want you to have what you want to have for yourself, um, can get really complex and can get misread as I don't want you to have that. Yeah, yeah, you know, but I don't think I want you to get the right information. I want everybody who takes the GLP1 drug, and I am a person who takes a GLP one drug. I take Olympic for blood sugar management. I won't take it at the weight loss doses because it's less researched at the weight loss doses, and because weight loss is not a goal for me. Other aspects of health are a goal for me. I don't think weight loss is inherently connected to health. I'll work on the other stuff. But I'm a person who takes a GLP1 drug. I want everybody who takes these drugs to know the history of fen fen before they put a single pill or injection into themselves. Fan fen with killing people, right? And what the industry will tell you is, yeah, but this is better research than fen fen. Okay, but also millions more people are taking it than we're taking fenfen. What's happening to them? Are we getting the truth about what's happening to them? Is this as effective as you claim it is? Um, is it as safe as you claim it is? And if it's not, are you going to be held accountable when it Blows up. And I want that to be happening all the time. Are you asking those? I don't want anybody to be so desperate to take these drugs that they don't care about any answers to any of those questions. That's why the compounding of the drugs terrifies me. That's why easier access to the but we don't like easier access to the drugs terrifies me. And I don't want your insurance company to be the decider of what you and your doctor think is best for you. So when we have these federal bills and state level bills that are like, we're gonna make insurance cover these, that concerns me. And I will show up to testify, and I will show up to testify, not to say, do not pass this bill. I will show up to testify to say, do not pass this bill unless you include these safety provisions. Include eating disorder screening as a requirement, include that it has to be prescribed by you know an endocrinologist, not some random online distributor or whatever. Like include these safety provisions and include coverage for other things that people want to do about in their fat bodies, regardless of whether they have these weight loss goals. Let me see a weight neutral nutritionist, make sure that my insurance covers that. Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. More than you think. Yes. So, folks, if you're looking for weight neutral nutritionists or weight neutral practitioners for healthcare, people who are not going to force you into a weight loss goal if you don't want one. If you want a weight loss goal, that's your business. But if you are a person who, like y'all said at the top of the hour, I don't, I want to be managing this differently, but I don't, I'm not doing that to pursue thinness. If you want to work with the doctor who has that attitude, there are some really great organizations that can help connect you with folks. Asda is the Association for Size, Diversity, and Health. They are the health at every size folks. They own the trademark to health at every size. They trademark it was like a community effort to trademark that term so that pharmaceutical companies and corporate diet companies and stuff could not take that term and twist it into something else. And they have, there are a lot of um nutritionists and dietitians, registered dietitians of all sizes that are members of that professional organization who will work with you on nutrition counseling that's not based around a weight loss goal, but is based around your other numbers, your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your like whatever your goals are, right? Um, Awesome, the Association for Weight and Size Inclusive Medicine, is a physician's organization. It is doctors who are asking the questions about are we getting fat people healthier by focusing on weight loss, or are we getting fat people healthier by not focusing on weight loss? And so um, you know, awesome, as has been around for 20 years, awesome's been around for just about a year and a half, but a lot of those doctors have been doing weight-inclusive healthcare for years and even decades. And now I'm so proud of medical students for size inclusivity because they're all over the country at different medical schools training young doctors or new doctors of new doctors of all ages, um, to think about where does the research show us that pursuing weight loss and pursuing health are not the same thing? And sometimes pursuing weight loss is counter to pursuing health. So, how do we make health improvements without that focus? Um, like it's not just NAFA, because like a lot of times people just think like NAFA is a bunch of crazy fat people who got together and made up a bunch of excuses to stay fat. Oh, right. That's how fat activism gets talked about a lot, especially. Um, especially by people who don't actually listen to what we say, they just see a room full of fat people and think that must be either a Weight Watchers meeting, a problem, or a joke. It's it's either a it's either a funny scene from Family Guy or it's a Weight Watchers meeting, or it's some weirdos, right? We're not science denying weirdos, we are science questioning um fat people who stand in our body sovereignty, right? We want to be in control of our own bodies um on our own decisions, we want to have eating disorders treated as eating disorders, even though we're fat, not that good job, you're at least you're losing weight through your eating disorder. We don't want that shit. Um, you know, we want to be able to um, you know, get the surgeries we need, which can be done at the sizes we are. We know they can, because if you can perform weight loss surgery on a 400-pound person, you can perform other surgeries on a 400-pound person. Like, are there greater risks? Maybe what should you be developing to mitigate those risks besides just you can't have this until you lose weight? Like, there's all of these things that we want that are, I don't think, crazy. I think I think would make a better world for everybody. Same. And the less everybody else is afraid of being fat, the more we treat fat people terribly, the more everybody else is afraid of fat. And that's how you get the other people to spend the money on the drugs and the treatment of it, right? That not everybody, when you look at the stats, like, oh, one in eight Americans is taking a GLP one. That's not all fat people. No, no, and it's definitely not all visibly fat people or very fat people, or what the medical industry would classify as type three obesity. It's not only them. In fact, sometimes it's harder for us to get the stuff, so it's actually the people on the other end who have processed, right? And so, but why are they so scared? And what are they so scared of? And what are they willing to sacrifice about their health in pursuit of health? You know, some of the earliest fat liberationists, Lynn McAfee comes to mind. Lynn McAfee is one of the founding members of the Fat Underground, which was like this radical feminist fat group that started a couple years after NAFA. They started working with NAFA and they were kind of like, Yeah, y'all aren't radical enough. You're still trying to be like the nice fat people, and we want to burn shit down. Like we're not gonna think they were more like that. And um, and but I but Lynn was um part of what revolutionized Lynn was she was like a research librarian, and as she was poking around in the research, trying to figure out why she'd been fat since she was a baby, and why couldn't she ever lose weight and keep it off and whatever? And she found all this research that basically said, Hey, almost no one can lose weight and keep it off. And she was like, Why aren't we telling people this? Why aren't we? I just learned it.
SPEAKER_07I just learned it. That's that's what's crazy. Sorry, hallelujah. I I and I I didn't know it either. Like, that's that's the thing is I start this podcast because at the end of the day, I was just wildly curious and I needed to know everything about this because if I'm gonna be doing this and talking about this, I'm gonna know. And I'm gonna make sure everybody else does too, right? Yeah, and as it happens, I accidentally crowdsourced, right? So as three years of doing this, we're interviewing all these experts, you know, um endocrinologists, bariatric surgeons, dietitians, um, you know, obesity specialists, um, just regular people who've been treating Wade forever and all the different language that they use. And as this is happening, I'm just sort of starting to see these like dots connect. And at some point over the past season, I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. So are you guys telling me that I'm probably gonna take this medicine right right now, like in my in my size 16 body, right? Do all my nutrition, do all my movement, continue to lower my deficit, and I'm never gonna be in a skinny body because it's actually mostly out of my control. And the answer is yes.
SPEAKER_01And the answer is yes, and that if you are one of the small number of people who get there, you're probably not gonna stay there. And if you are one of the people who go up and down in the pursuit of getting there, you're making your health worse, worse than if you had just stayed fat. Like there's all of these things that we just don't talk about enough. And when the fat advocates talk about them, people go, Well, of course you would say that because you just want an excuse to stay fat and lazy, right?
SPEAKER_06That's not the healthy like excuse to stay stay fat. I think it's yeah, you're you're we're getting to the core, like but it's the popular misconception that we just don't we just don't do anything, like obese or fat people just it's too hard.
SPEAKER_01You know, like we said at the beginning, right? You just won't you don't want to eat an apple, you want to eat a candy apple. So of course you're building up shit so that you can keep on eating apple.
SPEAKER_06You want to sit in that bed and just sit there all day, like you don't do anything. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07And it was really blowing my mind when when it came time talking about like regain. So, like having um like our body is sort of adjusting and changing. So my sister died recently, I've gained some weight before that. Um, I started going through Perimod again gained some weight. I'm on the GM1 in a deficit, doing all the right thing, you know what I'm saying? And I was like, what the wait a second, right? Like what nothing that we know at all, right? And so that's why when I I really started being like, there's just way more to this, yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01Well, and you have a cultural narrative that says it's always your fault, right? Because going back to that, it's a tremendous, I understand for many people the first time they hear you've been diagnosed with obesity, and it is obesity, is a you know, is a chronic um condition, and it is not your fault, even though like I'm skeptical of some of that message is because it comes from the wolves in sheep's clothing of the pharmaceutical companies like it's not your fault here, take this. But like, but but I understand how powerful it is. I've witnessed it firsthand because not all the fat people in my life are fat liberationists, right? I still have fat people in my life who are fully bought into everything about the cultural narratives about fat. And I've watched some of them get this diagnosis and feel a tremendous sense of relief because they've been spending their entire life with somebody saying, You, you know, you're only a you're only a loser, you know, you're only a loser because you're not losing, right? And you're only, you know, and something's wrong with you, get it together, discipline yourself, you know, eat better, move more. You must be doing something wrong, you must be doing something wrong, you must be doing something wrong. The first time you hear somebody say, It is not your fault, that's a tremendous relief. Absolutely, it is. And there is real stuff that is actually physically going along in your body, besides just what you eat and when you eat and when you exercise, that's some of the difference between the size you are and the size you could be, or the size you are and the size someone else is. There are physiological things here. We're not denying that because again, we get we get accused a lot of like, oh, you just don't believe in science. No, I believe in science more than you do, because I believe in actually looking at what the science says and not only looking at the science that confirms what I believe.
SPEAKER_07There's science confirmation bias is very real for everyone, especially on the internet, even people with the best intention. I tell people all the time, it's okay that you have bias, it's normal, it's human, right? It's about when it does happen, how do you examine it and how do you adjust? Right. Like that's that's I mean, because I I don't think that it's anything that you should be ashamed of. If you have it, you can go.
SPEAKER_01How do I do that? If you have a if and if you have a dream of being thin, I don't blame you for that either. But again, I don't want to be blaming people for anything, right? But you live in a culture where we have evidence that you'll be treated better if you're thin. Absolutely we do. We have evidence everything that I'm fighting for around. Yes, everything you're talking about proof, yes, of why, like the the why we need all of those things, we don't have them yet. And some people feel very much like, girl, I hear you, I I believe you, I want that too for the next generation, but we don't have it yet, so I need to take this drug so I can get smaller, so I can get you know, get my wedding dress, go on my honeymoon, get get this knee surgery that I need, you know, play more with my kids, whatever, whatever people's reasons are. My question is always can you actually have those things and could you have those things anyway? Could you play with your kids anyway by making some other changes? Could you have could you just get a wedding dress that looks good on you now? Can you get can you listen to what some of the travel bloggers are teaching you about how you can still have a really incredible honeymoon, even if you haven't lost 50 weights before you 15 pounds before you go? Like, is there a way to do it now while we work on changing the system? And if you think the only way to do it is by you getting smaller, then I don't blame you for that. You're right. You're I mean, you're right that it could have material impacts, yeah. Yeah, it could have material impacts on you surviving, and especially if you are somebody who is also living with all these other forms of discrimination. I can I can delete, I can eliminate one of these by taking Ozimpic, let me add it, right? But then the question is, are you really gonna eliminate it? I if I listen to Novo Nordisk in their own best research, their own best research, and so again, folks who listen listen to me in other settings, we don't always name numbers and talk about like sizes specifically. I'm gonna say some some things about myself in terms of like my weight and size. If I am designated, you know, type class three obesity, right? What many people still call morbid obesity. The obesity morbidly obese right here, hey.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, we don't use that disrespectful language anymore, but that language gets used out in the world. It was yes, it was serval language, all the time still gets used all the time. They don't do it anymore, but it's because of work like yours that they don't. In theory now. Well, yeah, and in theory, they don't do it anymore.
SPEAKER_01But that hasn't trickled down to the whole system. A lot of people in the medical system are still using that language. So what whatever you call it, I'm type three obese, I'm class morbidly obese, whatever. If I went up to the weight loss, you know, the weight loss doses of my GOP1 to try to make that one of my goals instead of just blood sugar management, which is doing just fine at the level it's approved at for that. Um, if I decided I'm gonna pursue weight loss and I'm gonna go up by their own best research, I would lose probably up to 20% of my weight. And I might not lose any of that, because only about 80% people lose up to 20% of their weight. If I lose 20% of my weight, do you know what I am? You're still obese. Type three obesity, right? If I lose 20% of my body size, I am still all those things. And the next doctor's office that I walk into that doesn't know my history, they're gonna say, if you would just lose 5%, just 5%, it's gonna make a huge difference in your whole medical profile. Well, what I've already lost 20%, right? It doesn't the you know, like we the math gets manipulated however it gets manipulated to to sell us the stuff to make us feel like it's to stay hopeful. And it might be if you feel like it's your best hope and it's what you're gonna do, bless. And like I hope you stay protected in all the ways, and also I'm gonna still be over here being very, very skeptical. You know, when I say that I want everybody to know the story of Fen Fen, one of the things that sort of it wasn't like the biggest leap forward for me in getting like sort of radicalized around body size stuff, but when I was when I was 21 and working in this after school program in San Francisco, and I had a colleague who was the same size as me, we were both like around what would be like today, probably like a 16 if if that. And um, and I had been like a little bit exposed to NAFA and some books about fat stuff and whatever, and she'd had none of that, and she was very much in a diet culture mindset, and she started taking fanfan and they pulled it off the market because it was creating heart problems for me, it was killing people and creating hypertension and heart problems for people. They pulled it off the market, and she came into our center and said to the rest of the staff, me and the rest of the staff, we're all like young, 20 somethings working in this after school program. Um, I'm gonna keep taking this drug. And I wanted you guys to know. So if I have a heart attack in front of the kids, you know what to tell the paramedics. Oh my gosh. And I was like, this is what we're doing, right? This is what we're doing. We're this is what we're doing. I rather take my chances on having a heart attack with this drug than take my chances on getting any fatter. Yeah, I wasn't, I wasn't with it. I was not ready to make that choice. And I know that there are people who will say, Well, you're gonna have a heart attack anyway, fatty, because you're fat. I mean, maybe my stepfather had a heart attack at 36, he wasn't fat. You know, my great-grandmother lived into well into her 90s and she weighed about the same that I weigh. Yeah, so you know, I just want again, like I just want I want people to not sort of knee-jerk to like those crazy fat activists just make stuff up so they can stay fat. Really, what it is is many of those fat activists understand that even if we choose to pursue intentional weight loss, it is it is a rough road, including a lot of disappointment and possibly making your health worse along the way. And we just decide to opt out of that. Um, it doesn't mean we want to take away the dream from everybody else. You know, it doesn't mean we want to take away the dream from everybody else. What I want your listeners to know is like if you heard me say all of this, and what you still want is to lose some weight with your GLP one, bless you on your journey, and I will still be fighting for your civil rights. And if it all crashes out, if 10 years from now we're having the fen fin conversation about the GLP ones, the fat activist movement will still be here trying to change some of these other systems to make it more possible to live well in fat bodies, regardless of whether these drugs work or not. Yeah, we'll be here. We're on 57 years. Yeah. And we're not, you know, and and I've been being told since I was in my 30s um that I was gonna die at 30, and I'm 51 now. And you know, the trolls love to tell me that I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna die before I ever make it to 50. Yeah, you know, I could I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and they would be like, that fat lady battery being fat. So it is what it is, right? But like I'm gonna be doing this work for probably the rest of my life, and there will be people like me doing this work, and and you know, and and NAFA might not be your place, but maybe there are some other folks that you can connect with that have, you know, that have some of these thoughts or some of these philosophies or are doing some of this action, and um, and you know, it and it's like we and just be be cautious when you hear that sort of like the fat activists are just haters who are mad because you lost weight and they didn't. It is that what I mean, there are some haters, there are some haters, but it's it's not a hater movement, it's a love movement, right? Like we're we're trying to build community and safety and liberation for people. And you know, it at NAFA we do that in a really systems-oriented way, so it's tiny in increments, but hopefully, some of the other things we do create a lot of space for people to be who they are and who they want to be, regardless of their body size. And if NAFA's not for you, but you like some of this, you can still contact me through NAFA website, and I'll I'll I'll help you find the fat group that is for you, your local fat group, your more radical fat group, the ones who are gonna burning it down more than we are, you know, who whoever that is, I'll I'll help you connect.
SPEAKER_06I was just about to ask you, I think there's definitely like we say there's a place for all of us to get together, but if us in this audience, where where can we, yeah, can can we can we come to your party? And it sounds like it's gonna be, yeah, we all come into the party, we're all invited.
SPEAKER_01You can come to our party. I will tell you that when you come to our party, one of the things we do is we create a space where people don't have to be exposed to some of this language. So, yes, if you come to our party, you gotta you gotta talk the way we talk, or you gotta talk in that middle middle ground area, bigger bodies are talking about you know, and we don't do weight loss talk, and we don't like you know, we have spaces where we protect people from that because again, it's so relentless every place else. But that doesn't mean we don't want you there, right? Um, we want you to be there with with the attention of holding that space that way. And um uh, and you know, like we don't want some of some of the folks in the sort of obesity advocacy world, we don't want you there because that you are part of the problem, right? No, I'm not talking about you guys and your podcast, I'm not talking about your audience. Um, I may or may not be talking about some of your sponsors, but um, but I, you know, we haven't we haven't built enough faith with some of the bigger like obesity advocacy organizations that they like they're too connected to the folks who we think are putting us at risk. So even though we have um we cannot like I cannot partner with the obesity action coalition. I can believe that there are some people in that organization that have the same intention for improving fat people's lives that I do, but those methods are so far removed from how we do our work, I can't partner with that. Um, but I still want my work to benefit every fat person in the obesity advocacy coalition and and everybody else too, right? And so here are some things you can do, right? You can come be in our spaces if you can um, you know, like if you can hold those boundaries, please come be in our spaces. All of our resources are available to you, whether you can be in the space or not, right? We have our YouTube channel, we have a podcast launching in the fall, the fat spotlight, or would we just be talking to fat ass, badass people about how they live in their fat bodies? Um, so that's coming, that's coming in the fall. August is fat liberation month. We spend the whole month just educating and entertaining people and embracing um the right and the space to be fat and to use that language. So we have all kinds of virtual events, they are all free. Some of them are for fat people only, most of them are for people in all body sizes. Um, and um, and like I said, if we're not if we're not your jam, I'll help you find your jam. Um you can find NAFA online at we're NAFA official on most of the things for social media. We're most active on Instagram, but we're on, you know, most of the other things. And Our website is nafa.org, n-a-a-f-a.org. And you can use our contact form to send me your message directly. You can sign our petition for the campaign for size freedom. And then if we start working in like where you live on a law, you will get alerts from us. Like, oh, the local activists in Delaware are working on something. The local activists in Seattle are going to start working on something. And then if you want to be part of that work to pass the law, um, that's part of how we can help make sure that you're, you know, that you are tied in. Um, and sometimes we have other campaigns. We had a petition going to Southwest Airlines to try to get them to um not reverse some of they reverse some of their policies around plus size travel and um they're not as as accommodating as they were a year ago. We have a Southwest page on our website that has all that information broken down, and so you can know what the policy really is now and how people are experiencing it. And we'll keep advocating with Southwest and other airlines and other forms of transit and you know, like wherever we can. We're a small organization. So if you heard things that you believe in and you want to help fund this work, like there's um, you know, we definitely would love to hire more staff. Um, we are always looking for great volunteers. Uh, we'll be looking for new board members in the fall to start in January on our board. So, you know, if you heard something that you like or you heard something that you want to learn more about, just connect with us and and see what else we can learn.
SPEAKER_06That made me think of you're talking about where is there discrimination everywhere? I'm thinking grant writing. Oh my gosh, I know NAFA probably goes through yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean NAFA spent 50 years being left out of the room for most grants. We are the recipient of a grant from the Unitarian Universalist uh organization. They gave us one of their social justice grants to support the campaign for size freedom. They are out there doing spiritual work that is also very connected with making sure people in all bodies are welcome, you know, in their congregations. And um, we got, you know, we got some money from Dove to start the campaign for size freedom. We've worked with Pinterest, we did a little bit of work years ago with Google. So, like, we've had some a little bit of corporate funding and some philanthropic funding, but most of our money to do our work comes from like individual donors and usually from people who are making like five and ten dollar donations. So if you heard something you liked, you can also give on our website. Um, we'll have a silent uh virtual auction during Fat Liberation Month where we'll be, you know, auctioning off a bunch of cool items by fat and fat positive creators. So that benefits NAFA um and it benefits those businesses, and you get to buy cool stuff. So, like there's there's a lot of different ways that we do this work and a lot of different things we do, and a lot of different places where people could tap in if they're interested.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. I think I and one of the biggest reasons I think that that's so important is that it's exactly what you said, especially for people class three, class whatever, right? And we're looking at their numbers. I mean, I I would say if you look at the studies, I've probably done twice what the studies was were, right? But I I still have obesity in my terms, and I still live in a big body in my terms, right? And I'm okay with that. But there are there are a lot of people that aren't. There are a lot of people that internalize that when they only lose 24%, or when they only lose 10%, or when they only lose 5%, that is then their fault. And that piece, that that mental piece that I was talking about in the beginning that I think is so important, that is very, very real. And I tell people, and I I've been criticized significantly in my community recently for making content about this, because I think it's important, because the numbers already show that the majority of people are going to that if you have had obesity, the disease, right, a way we speak about it for a very, very long time, that you are going to need additional medical intervention, more time, whatever it is, if you want to continue to shrink yourself, be in a smaller body, whatever it is, right? I'm trying to shift that with my content to focus more on just be the healthiest you you can be. And if that healthy you is the body size this, but your numbers look good, your blood sugar looks good, you feel good in your body, you're, you know, all these different things, then that's how I'm trying to talk about it. But the amount of people that come at me because they say that I am being negative and then I'm not being like rooting them on, or I'm not this. And I say, I am not your coach, I am your advocate. That is not these are different things, you know. I'm not your coach, like I'm not your swim coach, I'm not your weight loss coach, you know. I'm here to advocate for you to be able to have access to quality care, quality treatments, whatever those equal, right? And that's why I always quote the obesity care of dispute, because it's like all of these things, right? Mental dietitians, all those things and the different types of dietitian and nutritionists, like all of that is so important. And things I didn't know until you and I had this discussion, you know. So I think those things are I'm trying, I I get it a lot, like in my community, people, but your your content's negative. I mean, some of them are gonna love they oh no.
SPEAKER_03Oh no, me too. Yeah, this is gonna be interesting. Oh, no, look at national politics.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, you know, and again, like we believe in body autonomy. We want those people to be able to pursue those things if that's what they think is right for them. That doesn't it it works a lot like how um you know people will talk about like for the first amendment and then be like I'm allowed to say anything I want to, yes, but not without consequence. The first amendment protects you from the government punishing you, the government, exactly, like your neighbor criticizing you, right? A lot of people don't know that. I didn't know that, I didn't know that until the past couple years. It kind of works the same way as like people people will do this, like I especially we see this a lot from people who were plus size influencers and now they're on you know a journey. I I don't the the word journey as a as related to weight loss stuff is always a little to me like I I don't know, man. I I want to be on other journeys, but I but we will see sometimes what happens is like somebody who was very plus positive and now they're on a weight loss journey and they're talking about it differently, and then they do this sort of like you know, everybody turned on me because I lost weight. I think again, like did they turn on you because you lost weight, or did they turn on you because you turned and they didn't want to turn with you, or they didn't like the turn you took? Is it about the weight loss, or is it about the way that you've shifted your worldview? And you can't have it both ways, you can't have a new worldview and be in alignment with all the people who had your old worldview. That works, you know. You just like you can't expect people to stand down on their most deeply held beliefs just because you've let go of them. And for some people, fat liberation is one of their most deeply held beliefs. It is not about making excuses to not lose weight, it is not about um, you know, giving up, it is about actually having come to the realization, you know, sometimes by learning new information, more information. I I think about Angela Meadows, who started the in what is now the you know, 12th year of International Weight Stigma Conference, where researchers from all over the world come together to talk about where wet weight stigma shows up in our culture and our systems and and in research. But Angela started as an obesity researcher, and then it was looking at the actual research and being like, this doesn't say what they've been leading us to believe it says that transformed her, and now she runs this gathering of people from all over the world who've had that kind of experience of like, oh, when I actually stop and look at this, or when I follow the money to see whether maybe I'm a little suspicious of what you know, who funded this research or how it was broken down or how it was presented, or what research got tilled because it didn't come up with these answers or whatever. Like there are people who sometimes, like they've, you know, they've we've come to where we've come as fat liberationists, not because we're in denial, but because we're actually exposed to more information than other people, and we've exposed ourselves to more information and different information. And and so it is a really deeply held belief for a lot of people. Like a lot of us believe this is life or death. Getting people to treat fat people fairly is life or death work. So if you seemed like you were doing it and now you seem like you're doing something else, we're gonna be upset about that. Yeah, that's not because your body changed, that's because some other shit you're doing. So if you because there are people, it's rare, but there are people whose whose bodies change by intention or not by intention, and they live forever or for a long time in those smaller bodies, and they don't turn in what they think about fat liberation. They were fat liberationists when they were fat. Yeah, whatever circumstance led to them being smaller, they are still fighting alongside fat people. Yeah, and that that is we need to see more examples of that because they are out there.
SPEAKER_06I'm not trying to change you, like you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_01Like, yeah, uh yeah, and not trying to like, you know, but there's less reward for that. There's less reward for I lost weight and I still like the other fat people, and I still want to be around the other fat people, and I still think the other fat people are beautiful, because that doesn't get you the same number of clicks, it doesn't get you the same number of contracts, it doesn't get like it doesn't have the same so sociocultural and economic benefit as I've lost weight and now I'm gonna be a spokesperson for weight loss. Doesn't have the same impact, yeah, and so but it but they are out there and there are examples of that, and that's the other thing I would say to your audience you don't have to be an asshole to other fat people if you get thinner, yeah. True. If you are taking drugs, if you're taking these drugs and they are making your body do what you want your body to do, and you feel great about that, you don't have to be an asshole to fat people, and in fact, you could be an even more active ally to fat people because now you are speaking from the position of privilege as somebody who is who's not seen as having an ulterior motive for making these claims, you know, you're changing having credibility, yeah.
SPEAKER_06It could change things if there are more of yeah, more of that happening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So is I mean, I feel like um this is a good conversation. Great conversation. I I think so. I I mean, I think so. I think it's you know, I don't want to only talk to the people who already believe what we believe. Yeah, um, I won't I won't get other people helping us do this work and other people changing their lives. Everything that diet culture promises people, except thinness, that you can have more friends, that you can have more love in your life, that you can be more connected, that you can be physically healthier, you know, all that you can find clothes that you like better. Like, yes, it's all still hard for fat people, but all of those things become less hard when you have a community of people supporting you. And that's what fat liberation does for people at its best, right? At its best, it gives you all the things that you were fantasizing about, or it can at least give you access to, you know, more of the things that you were fantasizing about, and except you still have them in you just have them in a fat body instead of having them in your fantasy thin body. And you know, and and um, and so you know, if it works for you, great. If it doesn't work for you, come try us. We got a lot of we gotta do it.
SPEAKER_06How about it does work if it does work and if it doesn't, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, try that. I mean, that's the thing though, it's just like most people though, like who have been struggling this for a long time, it's not it's not going to end like they tell you. It's it's and I'm I'm I'm I don't I again like I'm not trying to I'm not trying to make anybody feel negative, it's not going to end, quote, end with or what even they even mean.
SPEAKER_01Of course, you know that attitude, right? That's what they say. Um, I can be so what if only five percent of people can lose weight and keep it off? I can be one of the five. Okay, but if you're one of the 95, we'll be here.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, what I tell people when they say it to me, I go, I am so happy for you. This TikTok is not for you. You know what I mean? I'm so happy for you. But this moment, I'm talking to these people right here, right? Because all they're hearing is this nonsense. And I, and it's okay, like I have no problem with people being positive and thinking you can do it, but I don't think it's fair when I have learned accidentally by doing this with Kat, right, that most of this is out of your control, whether you were on one of these or not on one of these. Yes, you can be the healthier, a healthier version of yourself. Yes, there's many benefits to your health being on a GOP1 or being treated for obesity or managing your food noise or your mental health capacity, all the different things that come with this, less weight in, less lymphmation, all of those things are you know are important, right? And and honestly, why I think a lot of people stay on the medicine. But there is a a false thing that people think they will be skinny at the end of this, that this is that med. And that is just not true for most people.
SPEAKER_06And let's dig into it, let's dig a little deeper. Well, it's we're kind of getting coming too late to it, right? But why does every why do you want to be skinny? Like, let's let's dig into that. Like because of all the actual benefits that are being like right. The actual person, I'm talking like if I was playing like psychologist or something, let me ask you I want you to think about it. Why do you want to be so like this small?
SPEAKER_01And why is this the only like yeah, and is this the only path to those other things you want? Agree, agree with those other things you want, or are there ways you can start getting some of those other things that you want right now? You know, and when we tell people all the time, you know, you gotta lose weight to find a person, and then if you actually look around the world, all kinds of fat people have a person, you know, you gotta, you know, yeah, maybe you do have to lose weight to be in your dream job because your dream job is in an industry where the bias is that firm. Do you want to sacrifice everything else to that, or do you have a different dream job? You know, like what are the things that you you know, or do you have a different dream job?
SPEAKER_07Or do you have a different or you have a different dream, right? Absolutely. I I made a video recently because we've had some people that when people will regain weight in the community being a little nasty lately and judging them and stuff, and it bothers me because I'm like, if you if I weren't doing that, then that's you wouldn't yeah, like you're like you didn't build good habits and all this other nonsense.
SPEAKER_01And that's everything that you just said is what we did, it was what we did 10 years ago to people who had weight loss surgery and regained weight. Absolutely people who had, I mean, that is how some people who've had weight loss surgery ended up in fat activist spaces, yeah. Because they didn't know about them before they had the surgery, then they had the surgery, and they, you know, they regained weight or didn't lose as much weight as they thought, or whatever. And this and the sort of support community did not, I don't want it, I don't want you around as an example of how I might not get my fantasy. So I need to tell you what you did wrong, that is the reason you didn't get yours. And I need you to not be here. And we heard that story over and over again of people being like sort of ostracized out of weight loss support groups of weight loss surgery support groups because they weren't they weren't maintaining the fantasy, yeah. You know, and and that, and then they had no place to go for support. And that's how some of them ended up with us, right? Is like, okay, you know, we're now you're over here. I think I really love Jay Salazar. He's a TikToker and um and Instagrammer who is a teacher by day and has all this, he's made all this content around how he was changed because he had weight loss surgery and he discovered fat liberation after he'd already had it. And you know, and like what it meant to him to switch from doing like this diet culture content to being a creator who does this content that is about like I loving loving the body that I have and whatever it's gonna be, um, and and fighting for other people to be able to have that and to know what I now know about some of the side effects or some of the dangers or whatever. And I love his content, and we don't get to see this kind of content from men a lot either, like being really raw about body image and size discrimination and stuff. And I love Jay, but it is like, but but like the way people turned on him when he went from I make weight loss content to like, hey, what about if I actually talked about it being okay to be fat?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's you know, I mean it's it's kind of he talks about it and yeah, I I I I talk about and that's been a big thing for me the past like two years, right? It's just like, wait a minute, like, first of all, BMI's bullshit, right? And then like that, but I mean, people do come at me and it and I have sort of accidentally sort of built this own little area of people that are like me, right? We're and then like cat who we lose weight and we feel better, but we're not skinny. And okay, what's now? And okay, what's next? And okay, is that okay?
SPEAKER_06We live life's thickness. I buy all the thick shirts, the T H I Q U E. We're we're gonna re-reframe the word, yeah. Just anyway, I don't know, own it, just own your shit.
SPEAKER_01I mean and you know, and but that but that I'm just what I what I want to say about that is like that pattern of um people getting angry at anybody who lost weight and starts gaining it back because they're evidence that that could happen to me. Yes, um, I need to understand, I need to figure out what they did wrong so I cannot do what they did wrong so that I can stay thin or I can get thin or whatever.
SPEAKER_02And then I gotta post it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and then I yeah, and then I gotta post it, and then I gotta post it, and then I gotta call everybody a hater if they disagree with me. That's the playbook. But like even since before social media, like again, we've been seeing this, you know, from like weight loss surgery stuff, from you know, well, I took fan fan and I didn't die, so why should it be taken off the market for me just because some other people had weaker hearts that it attacked them or whatever? Like all of the the same patterns of um something's gonna work for everybody, oops, no, it didn't. Now we're mad at the people it didn't work for, eventually it works for even fewer people, now it's even more dangerous. Now it's like these same patterns repeat over and over. And what's really interesting with the patterns around the GLP1s is how much some of the patterns match the patterns of what happened with how we talked about pain, and then how we learned to talk about pain so we could prescribe more opioids, and then how we had a crisis on our hands and what that all looked like, and what the pharmaceutical companies knew it was looking like and did anyway because it was making them so much money, and like there's a lot of parallels there with the pharmaceutical companies and the way that they have tried to shape how we talk about and think about obesity in order to create more of a market. They admit that they say in their own documents we're gonna create a market for obesity treatment. This is not like, but if I say that I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I'm no, but that's true though. But but but I mean, I'm I do, I mean, I'm in this faith that it that's all true, and it's and you know, and it doesn't mean that the drug itself is inherently bad. Opioids are not inherently bad. Opioids have had incredible pain relief benefits for people, and for other people, they destroyed lives and entire communities. And we just like I just I'm not again like I'm not trying to be the boogeyman of anyone's fantasy of thinness. I understand why people have that fantasy. I've been doing this for I don't know, 18 years now, and there are still moments when I have the the diet culture gremlins pop up in my head about what my body should look like or what it's disabled to do or whatever, especially with yeah, it runs deep and you know, and bodies change. I, you know, I started doing this in one kind of fat body, I have a different kind of fat body now that I'm menopausal and have some uh disability I didn't have before, so I can't move in the same way, and like everything changes, and you have to do it again, right? You have to recalibrate around it. But when you have when you have a sort of political framework, not just the sort of like, oh, am I cute and this dress at a size 16? But you have that sort of political framework. The political framework teaches you how to ask the critical questions and it teaches you where to look for support when you're struggling, and that helped me around all of my body changes related to age. That after I had COVID, I started losing all my hair and some of the things that got me through like, oh, I'm gonna be bald and I'm not sure I'm ready for that. And I will, what's that gonna mean for me aesthetically? And are people still gonna think I'm attractive? And like all of that stuff, because I had worked those questions through body stuff, through size stuff. I had a playbook to work those questions, and it helped me make other adjustments. And so now it's I'm older, everything's saggier, grayer, wrinkly, or whatever. It's the same thing, right? I know my worth. Um, I know the way that I don't feel like this just out of nowhere. I'm not feeling these things in a vacuum. There are cultural messages that make me feel these things and you know, keep me feeling these things and try to sell me stuff to not feel these things. I have to do the same like, am I gonna buy this eye wrinkle cream? It's the same conversation that it would have been about the slim fast 20 years ago. Of like, is this what I actually want to do? Is this what I actually care about? Or is this some kind of other pressure? But like all of that, I all of that skill building came to me through fast liberation work, even before I was calling it that. And so I'm just that's why I'm grateful for the generations of people, you know, especially but not exclusively women who did this work before me, um, that I benefit from. And I, you know, I just I want people to take from that what they can. Yeah, we're all out here trying to survive in a capitalist hellscape. Right. Power and privilege and other things pre-shape our access, they shape our information, they they shape the way we treat each other, and we have to interrupt that wherever we can. Um, so yeah, so thank you for like, I know y'all identify as interrupters. Um I know that not everybody in the community I work with would be like a GLP1 podcast is an interrupter. Come on, but I think like creating dialogue like this, being willing to um challenge and maybe even piss off some of your audience, and being willing to challenge and piss off some of my audience because I'm here, right? Like you're challenged. If you're pissed off, you're challenged, right? And then do something with it, and then then then do something with it, besides just don't yell at one of us on the internet, right? Sure. What do you want to do instead? Right? What do you what do we want to do instead? So thank you for giving me the time and like letting me tell your friends movement and the work. Um and is there anything else you want to get? I know this is like an extra long episode. I do this to possibly all the time.
SPEAKER_07No, it's okay. I mean, most of our, I mean, I'm telling you, like, I think our our our episode is usually one and a one and a half like hours or so we ran over, but I think it's great. Um, no, this has been wonderful. I think um, you know, I I ask everyone, and I maybe you should have said a little more in the beginning, if there's anything I've realized now that I'm on the internet and make content, is that the way things work with algorithms, and we're all on them, every like whether it's social media or whether you watch a certain channel, everybody's tailoring something that is going to tickle parts of your brain, right? Um, and the more you engage with it, the more it's going to deliver to you. And so it's very easy to get to where you're just affirming your own bias all the time. And then that can become your doctrine, and then it can become your almost like a religion and something you'd be willing to, you know, fight for and something to fight against and something you'd be willing to hurt others for. And I started seeing that happen a lot, just the way that the technology works, right? And I just thought, I want to make sure that we have spaces where we can have conversations that have us consider other perspectives that we don't necessarily have to agree or even agree to disagree, but just better understand, you know. And I think that there's many things out there that don't get, you know, the attention or the air time or the space, right? Because everything's so short form and stuff like that, that we don't get to have a discussion here. There were so many things that you said, like nuances and details and things that never get anywhere. It's always the beginning of the end.
SPEAKER_01Pops up with this warning of like, well, we might not show this to people then unless you guys host it anyway. But yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_06Yes, you'll get two views though, but yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07So, you know, we have long for content people do things like this, and I just think this is a bigger conversation than a three-minute TikTok, and that's why this podcast exists. And I hope if you're a listener and watcher of this podcast that you understand my intent is only to bring you right um different perspectives because I want you to make the most informed decision possible about what you do with your health, mental, physical, otherwise, especially as it pertains to the size of your body, you know, and so I and and and the mental health of it, you guys know how important that is. So that's what this was for. And I hope that you learned something and considered a different perspective today. And if you want to learn more about uh Natha, and if you want to learn more about Tigris, then we'll put all the links in the show notes so that you can click and go and help and find and all the things that you want to do. And we love you guys so much.
SPEAKER_06And we love follow, share, and give us five stars.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah. Ask them to do all the things. We would love for you to follow, share, give us five stars.
SPEAKER_07Yes, yes, like, share. Yes, all the things. And um, it's been a lovely conversation, and we will see you next week. Asta La Pasta.
SPEAKER_01Bye, everybody. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_07Friends, the GLP1 math is just not mathing. When I look and see 104 million people in America are struggling with a disease of obesity, and about 11,500 obesity specialists, that breaks down to like one obesity specialist per 9,000 patients. I saw the stat that said 72% of GLP1 users say that they want more support on their journey. Because I think we all realize you start on these medicines and you think, oh, it's just gonna be like Venomine or anything else ever taken the past. This ain't like that, bro. Like it's just not. It's different, you know? And I provide a lot of that here by interviewing doctors and things like that. But I've had people been asking me, emailing me for years, asking me to do one-on-one consults, which I do do, but they're expensive, right? So I decided to make a group where 10 people at a time would come in with myself and with Kat. We could talk about recipes, we could talk about exercise, we can talk about side effect management. Um, we could talk about, you know, ideas on breaking stalls or things that we've tried. None of it's medical advice, but it is community support. It costs $50. If you're interested in that, there's a link in my bio. You just fill out that form. If you're not and you just want to go this route, that's okay too. I love you. You're not alone, it's not your fault. And hopefully you'll sign up to hang out with us. All right, now back to the show. Are you interested in understanding GOV1 medications like Osempic, Wolfovi, or Minjaro? Then join us on the Plus Sides, cracking the Obesity Code, the groundbreaking podcast helping people change their lives one episode at a time.
SPEAKER_00The Plus Sides podcast is a disruptor.
SPEAKER_07We're breaking down barriers, smashing stereotypes, and sharing inspiring stories that'll leave you feeling informed and empowered. Join us every week to learn from doctors who are specialists around GLP1 medications, like Ozinfit, Bogovia Manjaro. They'll provide you with science and facts to validate these incredible stories. But that's not all. We'll also bring you the voices of the GLP1 Manjaro TikTok community. Real people who face the challenges of obesity-related diseases and disorders and discover the incredible plus sides of GLP1 medications. Our episodes are filled with heartwarming stories, laughter, and moments of triumph. You'll connect with our amazing community members who are reclaiming their health and experiencing their fullest lives. Are you ready to embark on a journey of discovery and empowerment? Tune in to the plus sides, cracking the obesity code, and together we'll change the narrative around obesity and in the stigma. Subscribe now on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform and join our incredible community. Let's celebrate the plus sides of life together because every story deserves to be heard. Every life deserves to shine, and everyone deserves access to expert knowledge and medication. The Plus Sides Podcast, you're not alone. It's not your fault.