My Fat Spouse

I have no idea how long My Fat Spouse has been around, why I haven't heard about it, or really what to make of it. Thank you Anonymous for your comment alerting me to this... phenomenon. The site seems to be a place where you can go to complain that your partner is too fat. There is also a picture gallery where people post pictures of their fat spouses, and other people rate them. (Grounds for divorce, right there.)

In the FAQ, they respond to the idea that the site is about making fun of only fat women by saying.... that women who object to being objectified are ugly, angry, and fat. Well obviously that's not sexist at all! My mistake!

"The simple fact is that those who are trying to portray this site as 'sexist' have an agenda. Basically that agenda is that any mention of an overweight female constitutes sexism. You will typically find that these people also take issue with a woman being evaluated by physical attractiveness no matter what the criteria. I imagine this stems from some kind of personal hostility toward female attractiveness. Translated: ugly, angry, fat, women who are hostile to men and pretty women in general steming from years of jealousy."

I kind of think that if I read further I will probably want to kick someone in the balls. Perhaps the site founders, who are skinny and married to "definitely not fat" women, thank god. This is the kind of horrifying site that will end up making its founders rich and famous, isn't it?

Do As I Beyonce

Beyonce is back to Bootylicious, after starving herself for two weeks and then living off protein shakes for her role in Dreamgirls:

"The singer has gone out of her way to fatten up again, after shedding two stone for a recent film role. Beyonce fasted for 14 days and then existed on protein shakes to drop weight for Dreamgirls. 'It was hard, I felt weak, but I did it. It wasn't healthy though. I didn't look like me at all in the film, which was the point.'"

1. Well, at least she's honest about how she lost the weight and that it isn't healthy or even desirable. But I hope she doesn't give any teenage girls looking to crash diet any ideas! I'll admit my first thought was "Hmm. Could I pull that off?" I decided that no, I could not.
2. What was it about the part in Dreamgirls that required her to go to such extremes? It sounds like she had to seriously starve herself to change her natural body shape. Is she playing an anorexic? A heroin addict? I'm not being facetious, I don't know much about the part.
3. I hope they didn't make Jennifer Hudson crash diet too. I like J. Hud.

Sucks Weekly

The big news in celebrity fat-watch this week is that Janet Jackson gained about sixty pounds for a movie role, and has sensibly lost it once more through diet and exercise.

"'I’ve never had someone love me for me, so unconditionally, the way [my boyfriend] does, regardless of my size,' she says. 'He was never any different toward me.' When asked about reaction to her plus-size body, Jackson says, 'People didn’t treat me differently to my face, but I’m sure they had their whispers behind my back. But I didn’t feel bad about myself at all. It was part of my job.'"

So far so good, right? Well check out the Us Weekly cover featuring this story. At 180 pounds, she is depicted on the beach in what looks like sweats, with a hat pulled down over her eyes. Obviously if you are fat, you must dress like Fat Albert at all times, even if you're going to the beach. And now that she's skinny again, she's tarted up like a sex worker in this horrible, objectifying cover photo. Jesus, Janet, have some self respect. Demand some pants next time.

The Inmates Run The Asylum

Otherwise known as an "open thread" since I'm spending the day at a six-hour job interview. So if you have any interesting links or comments, fire away! I'll even turn off comment moderation for the day.

Fat Animals Are Cute

Maggie, the overweight elephant at the Alaska Zoo, hates her treadmill:

"'She has two feet on the treadmill and has touched a third one on it,' zoo director Pat Lampi said on Tuesday... Lampi said he wouldn't be surprised if it took a year or more to get Maggie actually walking on the treadmill."

Maggie's right: treadmills suck. I'm sure she'd love an elephantine elliptical trainer, though. Those are awesome!

Coffee, Tea, Or Kelly Clarkson?

Indian Airlines has instituted a policy of grounding cabin crew members who are one kilogram or more overweight (one kilogram is approximately 2.2 pounds):

"We are part of the service industry, and have to be more presentable. So we are trying to get the cabin crew members to be fit. If any cabin crew member — male or female — is found to be exceeding the ideal weight according to his or her height, the person will be grounded and not allowed to perform in-flight duties."

There used to be a three-kilogram "weight grace," but that has been eliminated. Now, if you're more than two pounds overweight, you have 45 days to shape up or, I guess, you're fired. Charming.

How Big Is Your Kitchen?

An analysis of the evolution of the kitchen, and how that might contribute to the greater incidence of overweight among Americans. The headline of the article ("Do bigger kitchens equal bigger people?") may seem pretty ridiculous, but there are one or two interesting points in the article that I think make it worth checking out.

Blatner generally admires the trend toward big, open kitchens, which she says foster positive feelings about cooking and discourage people from eating high-calorie takeout or going to restaurants, where portions are almost always too large. But she's not crazy about using the kitchen as an ersatz media center or office space. 'Americans become very mindless when they eat while watching TV, paying the bills, answering the phone, doing e-mails,' she says. 'When we put all those tasks in the middle of the kitchen, with all that food around, we're creating a recipe for a lot of mindless munching.'

My kitchen and my living room are one and the same, but that's because I live in a miniature apartment. I don't have any food though, so that's probably meaningless.

Star Jones Breaking News

Thanks to Pasta Queen, who thought we should be the first to hear the gossip that Star Jones is apparently being kicked off The View, apparently because Barbara Walters and Rosie O'Donnell both hate her!

"'It was always Rosie's condition of joining the show, and Barbara agreed to those conditions from the outset,' our source said. There's been bad blood on the set... Star was secretly dubbed 'Bridezilla' two years ago after she took untold freebies from wedding suppliers in exchange for plugs on the show. Recently, Jones enraged Walters and her crew by bragging about her dramatic weight loss while refusing to confirm that she'd undergone gastic bypass surgery to achieve it."

One thing I wanted to point out was all the slams about her being fat in this article. Now by all accounts, Star Jones is a horrifying diva of epic proportions, but is that really necessary? I mean, she's being referred to as "hefty," "big-boned," and "waddling" off into the sunset. It would be insulting regardless, but she's not even fat anymore!

Celebrity Moms

We've all seen the pictures of Katie Holmes, who is wearing a nursing bra and according to maternally inclined friends of mine, looking plausibly like a woman who's just had a baby. So here's an article that doesn't mention her at all, but does mention the "celebrity mom" hero worship thing that's all the rage these days.

"'The theory I use to explain all this is "parasocial interaction,"' says David Giles, a psychologist and celebrity-worship researcher at the University of Lancaster in Britain. Parasocial is the process by which we come to feel we 'know' celebrities even though we have never encountered them in an actual real-life social context. 'We see and hear so much about celebrities that we sometimes feel we know them as well as, if not better than, people in our immediate social circle'...

In previous times we would use neighbors, friends and family as benchmarks for our own behavior — the 'keeping up with the Joneses' phenomenon. That was hard enough. But now the new Mrs. Jones is Mrs. Smith (Angelina) — or Gwyneth or Sarah Jessica Parker...

If celeb moms like Denise Richards and Reese Witherspoon lose pregnancy weight in a flash and don’t skip a beat in their careers, the rest of us start to think that’s how life should be. If Angelina is globe-trotting, flying planes, saving the world’s children throughout pregnancy and mothering two young tots already, we start to ponder why we’re such losers."

I definitely do feel like a loser when I stop to ponder that Angelina Jolie and I are the same age. If there was every anyone born to make a woman feel inadequate, I'm thinking it's her. But I'm mostly just fascinated that there's a such thing as a celebrity-worship researcher. I totally want that job!

International No Diet Day

Is today:

"* I will not diet for one day, on May 6, International No Diet Day (INDD).
* Instead of trying to change my body to fit someone else's standards, I will accept myself just as I am.
* I will feed myself if I'm hungry.
* I will feel no shame or guilt about my size or about eating.
* I will think about whether dieting has improved my health and well-being or not.
* And I will try to do at least one thing I have been putting off 'until I lose weight.'"

The article linked above also talks about the origin of INDD and gives some statistics about body image and weight. "Young girls are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer, or losing their parents." Sadly, I believe that could be true.

Happy International No Diet Day! I myself had a cupcake.

Rocking My Fatness

I see you, my commenters, posting in the comments of this post in which The Fat Girl thinks about weight loss surgery. When there are fabulous blogs and posts out there like this one, you have to tell me about them, my friends! I feel so out of the loop.

"I'm kind of having fun being fat right now. I'm kind of having a lot of fun being fat right now. I am rocking my fatness... So why haven't I chosen weight-loss surgery?... Currently I'm having a little bit of difficulty answering that question because I'm not really feeling any penalties of being fat other than residual emotional stuff, and I'm so enjoying all of the stuff surrounding fatness—getting to shock people by shocking about it, the thrill of the chase of fat clothes shopping, the thinking about fat semiotics, &c. Nevertheless, I think if the question were if I'd rather never have been fat, the answer would be affirmative. But that's not going to happen. And weight-loss surgery won't take away the pain I've already come through. It won't take away my stretch marks or my loose skin or give me unblemished years as a taut teenage beauty-ideal girl. I'm sad that I never got to be that girl. But weight-loss surgery wouldn't fix that."

The whole entry is great, so go read it if you haven't already. It seems like a lot of people are choosing weight-loss surgery these days (Robyn of course comes to mind if you want an honest account of a very successful WLS experience) and as a fat girl, over the years, I've certainly thought about it. This despite the fact that I am terrified of surgery, and also the word "pouch," a kangaroo-esque word that I find creepy. But I don't know that I've ever been completely honest about what I would want out of it. Not necessarily surgery, which is basically off the table for me, but weight loss in general.

That's why this post hit me as such a revelation: I'll never get to re-live my childhood, or my high school years, or my college years, or the past year, as a thin person. Is that what we imagine surgery would do for us? Is that what I imagine losing fifty pounds would do? I do, I think, have this sort of concept of weight loss as retroactive. Like the new skinny me will override the old fat me, and she will never have existed. People will forget her, because she isn't the me they want to see. People will forget her, because I've admitted there was something wrong with her, and killed her off. People will forget her, because I will have forgotten her.

And goddamnit, I'm with The Fat Girl. I don't want to forget her. I dig her.

Tom Cruise Continues To Be Creepy

Well, it’s been at least two weeks since Katie “Kate” Holmes has had her tiny Scientology baby, so that means it’s time for her to get that ass in shape for the wedding.

"Hubby-to-be Tom Cruise has signed her up to a company called Buff Brides, in preparation for their wedding later this year. Buff Brides' Sue Fleming told the Daily Mirror: 'Katie can and will do it... She has great motivation. She loves her fiance and was proud that Tom oversaw this programme…He told her he wanted her to be the most beautiful bride ever. She was in tears when he said that.’"

Yeah, I'll just bet. That reminds me of this awesome Go Fug Yourself entry from a couple of days ago:

“She kept crying but this time IT WAS FOR JOY BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME AND MY REGULAR OLD FASHIONED MAVERICK HAIR. MAN! I feel so GOOD!”

Link via The Usual Suspects.

What Not To Wear

Clinton Kelly of "What Not To Wear" offers awesome advice for how to flatter a larger frame.

"Women should also be careful with things that look dinky, carrying a little bag or wearing itsy-bitsy jewelry actually makes you look bigger. Pay attention to proportion when it comes to bags, accessories and jewelry."

That's pretty good advice. It's all about proportion. And if you have money to invest in nicer, tailored pieces, there's this:

"What you do is to find something that fits the largest part of you and then take it to the tailor. Don't feel like you're a victim of designers and stylists. Women have it in their heads that they have to find something on the rack and that it has to look good, but men when they go to stores to buy suits, they have to have them altered. And women have more curves than men, so how does that make any sense?"

Link via The Pretty Pear