And if you listen to our show a lot, you know him. She got into a fight with the paper's editorial director. She was working at a weekly newspaper, The Stranger, in Seattle.
She says it took years, involved many humiliations, things she realized.īut the biggest turning point- the moment that she actually came out and said to everyone she knows that she's fat- happened as the result of a fight she got into with her boss- or, to be more precise, the boss of her boss. How she went from somebody who never wanted to be noticed as fat or at all, to somebody who tells her well-meaning friends that, yes, she wants them to call her fat, even though it makes them feel a little uncomfortable at first. In fact, the question she's asked most often these days is, where do you get your confidence? Which is kind of a messed up question, because the subtext is, if I looked like you, I'd definitely throw myself into the sea. For WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. And we're going to hear from people who definitely do not feel the same way that Lindy does about all this. And it made me see this whole thing differently.Īnd so what we're going to do today is we're going to present some excerpts from her book. And we're doing this show today because I read the book that Lindy just published about this. It's saying that no weight is better than any other weight, which, given the health risks associated with greater weight that Lindy acknowledges, it can be hard to get your head around. She said the problem with "overweight" is that it implies that there is a correct weight for people. I used the word "overweight" a few times.Īnd at some point, she stopped me and said, the word "overweight" is not preferred. That's why deciding to stay fat and be OK with it is at a peculiar frontier right now, where things are shifting and people do not agree about what is acceptable to say and think. They talk down to you like you're stupid about nutrition and calories, as if pretty much every fat person has not been around the block 500 times on that one already. They shoot you dirty looks when they see ice cream in your shopping cart. When you're over a certain size- it's been explained to me by a few people now- complete strangers walk up to you on the street and tell you to lose weight.
But coming out as fat, doctors and your family and kind of the entire culture is organized to point out how wrong-headed you are. When you come out as gay, most people accept it, because they know you can't do anything about that.