The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

208 Pages·2012·1.43 MB·English

by  Hanne Blank

Copyright © 2012 by Hanne Blank
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Front cover photograph copyright © 2012 by Substantia Jones of Adipositivity.com Interior photographs,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blank, Hanne.
The unapologetic fat girl’s guide to exercise and other incendiary acts / Hanne Blank.
p. cm.
Summary: “This empowering exercise guide is big on attitude, giving plussize women the motivation,
support, and information they need to move their bodies and improve their health”—Provided by publisher.
1. Overweight women—Psychology. 2. Overweight women—Health and hygiene. 3. Exercise for women.
4. Physical fitness for women. I. Title.
RC522.O25B53 2012
613.71082—dc23
2012023600
eISBN: 978-1-60774-287-6
v3.1
For Benjamin Lee,
who understands that sometimes,
push-ups are performance art.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Excuse Me—I Think This Is Yours
Incendiary Act #1: Refuse to Apologize for Having a Body
CHAPTER 1
Why Bother?
Whys and Wherefores
A Note on the F-Word
30 Things to Love About Exercise (None of Which Have Anything to Do with Your Weight, Your Size,
or What You Look Like)
What Do You Think You’re Doing?
Body Practice
What Do You Want to Do with Yourself?
25 Sample Goals for Your Body Practice
What Do You Call It?
Health At Every Size
Getting the Right Feedback
Incendiary Act #2: Pay Real Attention to Yourself
What’s So Bad About Boredom?
Give Yourself a Break
Incendiary Act #3: Have Your Own Reasons to Do the Things You Do
Getting Back on the Horse
CHAPTER 2
Chub, Sweat, and Jeers
That Target on Your Back
Incendiary Act #4: Don’t Make Yourself Responsible for Other People’s Bad Behavior
Voices in Your Head
Opinions Are Like Assholes
When Compliments Aren’t
Concern Trolling
Incendiary Act #5: Don’t Do the Assholes’ Job for Them
Get Out of My Way
Teachable Moments
Incendiary Act #6: Claim the Right to Be Unattractive (Just Like Anybody Else)
Finding and Creating Fat-Friendly Space to Move
CHAPTER 3
What Am I Going To Do?
Stealth Exercise
Outdoors Versus Indoors
Solo Exercise
Exercise Partnerships
Group and Class Exercise
At Home in Front of Your TV
Incendiary Act #7: Flail Proudly
Team and Competitive Sports
Personal Trainers and Coaches
Functional Fitness
101 Things You Can Do with Your Body
CHAPTER 4
Hit the Ground Running
The Unapologetic Fat-Girl Lowdown on Gyms
Choosing a Gym: A Checklist
The Locker-Room Thing
Hitting the Showers
Incendiary Act #8: Know That You’re Not Alone
Play Pool
Safety and Weight Limits
Comfort and Ergonomics
A Fitness-Equipment Shopping Note
Dressing for It
The Well-Shod Fathlete
A Word About Bras
Coping with the Belly Flop
CHAPTER 5
Action and Reaction
The Long Haul
Play, Work, Meditation, and Vitamin Pills
The 80 Percent Rule
Building a Workout
Two Sample Workouts
Modifying Movements
Incendiary Act #9: Play to Your Strengths
Managing Your Expectations
Incendiary Act #10: Dare to Not Compare
Change Is Inevitable
What’s Buzzin’ Cousin?
Wanted Versus Unwanted Changes
Incendiary Act #11: Focus On What Makes You Fierce
Body Weight and Size Changes
CHAPTER 6
Troubleshooting
Stop Right There
Common Sports Injuries and What to Do About Them
Some Insider Secrets for Happier Body Practice from the Ancient and Exalted Sisterhood of
Incendiary Fat-Girl Exercisers
Getting What You Came for at the Doctor’s
Strategic Advisors
Nutrition and the Active Eater
Getting Down (and Up Again)
Incendiary Act #12: Know That You Are the Authority on You
Institutionalized Body Hatred and the Unapologetic Fat Girl
Epilogue: What Moves You
Resource Guide
About the Author
Acknowledgments
So many people became part of this book, through interviews, conversations,
reviewing material as I wrote it, working out with me, supporting me as I
developed my own body practice, teaching me, and caring about this book and
about fat women’s right to joyful and whole-hearted exercise. I thank each and
every one of them, from the bottom of my heart. Special thanks are due to
Michelle Allison, Linda Bacon, Bear Bergman, Kelly Bliss, Benjamin Lee
Buckley, Casey Buss, Leigh Ann Craig, Jeanette DePatie, Malcolm Gin, Abby
Lentz, Natalie Luhrs, Keridwen Luis, Jude McLaughlin, Margaret McManus
LPN, Michaela Null, Ragen Chastain, Molly Price, Jeannette Smyth, Mary
Sykes, Cheryl Wade, Rhetta Wiley, and each and every one of my Warrior
Chickens. Additional thanks are due to the gifted and caring professionals at
Chase Brexton Health Services, the staff of the 33rd Street Weinberg YMCA,
Union Memorial Hospital, and the Welch Medical Library of Johns Hopkins
University (all in Baltimore, Maryland), and to Lisa Westmoreland and
Christopher Schelling, whose collegial faith and support are the stuff of legend.
Introduction:
Excuse Me—I Think This Is Yours
I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock.
I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty
prowess of a brick—a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so
myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless.
Nor do I count a boundless and cheerful appetite for physical activity among
my virtues. I will admit that I have grown to appreciate movement and exercise
very much, and often now I even enjoy them. But I am bookish and brainy by
nature, which, combined with my lack of organic athleticism and physical
talents, has made me a lifelong fan of sitting on my abundant and resilient tuchis,
doing things like, oh, say, writing books. Also I am, quite frankly, not terribly
fond of sweating. Much as I might wish it were otherwise, I could count on my
fingers the mornings on which I have woken up thinking how much I was
looking forward to going on that long brisk walk or that invigorating stint at the
gym, and I might not even have to use both hands.
I want to begin this book by telling you this because I need you to know that I
am so very not the kind of girl anyone would’ve voted “Most Likely to Write an
Exercise Guide” in the high school yearbook. I am, and have always been, pretty
geeky. I live, and have always lived, in my head a lot. I have always been, and
most definitely still am, a bit of a klutz. And, although I have been a number of
different sizes of fat in my time, I am also a lifelong fat girl.
By this I don’t mean pudgy or a little thickwaisted or “someone who could
stand to lose a few pounds.” I mean actually, honest-to-God, Lane Bryant-
shoppin’, belly-and-butt-shots-on-the-TV-news-resemblin’, nasty-comments-
from-random-strangers-gettin’, fat. In my adult life, I have never weighed less
than two hundred pounds. I have often weighed quite a lot more. The phrase
“morbidly obese” was first used about me, in my presence, when I was still in
grammar school, and despite the frequency with which I have been described—if
you’ll excuse my translating the phrase slightly inaccurately—as “sick fat,” I
continue existing, healthily, and fatly.
I also exercise a lot. You heard me right. I exercise. Frequently. Five or six
days a week, most weeks. Sometimes seven. Once a day. Or sometimes twice.
Occasionally three times, but I reserve that sort of silliness for weekends and
vacations, because who has time to go swimming and for a nice long walk and
ride bikes during the workweek? Sometimes I exercise energetically, sometimes
lackadaisically, sometimes joyously, sometimes meditatively, and sometimes
with a virtuosic and well-honed grumpiness that puts even my eighteen-year-old
cat to shame. (Some days I manage all of these emotional states in a single gym
session. It’s very The Many Moods of Me Moving My Big Ol’ Carcass around
here sometimes.)
The point is, I exercise—not, as I think I have made pretty clear, because I’m
one of those folks who by gosh, just lives to exercise. Nor do I think that
exercising makes me or anyone any sort of model citizen or moral paragon: to
me morality has more to do with how one treats other people. I exercise because
I think it’s important. Rather, I know it’s important.
It may be that exercise is somewhat more important for me than it might be
for some other people. My particular body has a very specific and dramatic
relationship to exercise. For me, finding out firsthand just how profoundly
regular exercise affected my body’s ability to use its own insulin convinced me
that exercise was more than just Something You’re Supposed to Do; it was quite
literally powerful medicine. Also there are a number of other ways that
exercising regularly improves my physical and mental health. And I have
noticed that this seems to be true for many other people as well. It’s been very
illuminating to observe what happens for friends and loved ones when they do
and don’t exercise regularly: the seasonal depression that responds as much to
walking to work as it does to the big expensive full-spectrum light box, the
angina that only acts up when someone’s been too busy to get to karate class, the
edema in the legs that gets so much better after a trip to the pool. It doesn’t seem
to matter what size someone is. The beneficial side effects movement has on the
body’s ability to maintain a healthy physical equilibrium appear to be among the
few things in this world that seem genuinely to be one-size-fits-all.
But the whole “exercise is good for your health” thing isn’t what I find most
important about exercise. It’s not even the most compelling, in the long run.
Exercise, after all, doesn’t make you immortal or even bulletproof. There are
plenty of health conditions that exercise can’t and won’t change. You have no
idea how much I wish exercise could rid me of my allergy to dairy products, for
example, but I could run and lift weights and do sit-ups from sunup to sundown
and the math would still look like me + mac and cheese = Technicolor Yawn.
Nor does exercise permanently solve my body’s ongoing and entrenched
tendency to refuse to use its own perfectly good insulin. If I stop exercising
regularly, my body turns up its metabolic nose like a thirteen-year-old girl with a
grudge at the insulin it produces.