1/29/2010

Embrace Your Flawz

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

If you are feeling a little down about yourself, watch this video. See if you can spot the famously “flawed” people.

My friend, Hugh Elliott, recommended the video with the following sentence:

you should watch this. and get a tissue. (not that I needed one but you might.)

My Scar Saved My LifeHe was right. I started blubbering at:

My scar saved my life.

Our flaws ARE the things that make us unique. Without them, we would all be the same and the world would be such a boring place. The next time you find yourself cursing any part of your body, remember this video. We can love ourselves and work to make ourselves better.

1/21/2010

Sara Rue And Jenny Craig

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

People Magazine has a monthly feature called Body Watch. A couple of months ago, they interviewed Sara Rue, current star of Eastwick. More importantly, she was Leonard’s girlfriend for a while on Big Bang Theory and I wish she could have stuck around a little longer. I first saw her on the TV show, Popular, as the effervescent Carmen, but she has been acting since she was nine years old.

You can imagine my surprise when she announced that she was joining Jenny Craig to lose weight.

Click to see full size

I’ve always felt a kinship to Sara Rue. She was the fat girl in Popular, who could dance better than everyone else and wanted to be a cheerleader. I was that girl and I LOVED that she got her chance to shine. Every time I see her in a movie or TV show, I feel like she is making a statement for all of us.

Does that change if she loses the weight?

Seriously. If she loses weight and gets back to that figure she had in 2005, will she still make me happy just to see her? Will she still be making a statement for us all?

YES! A thousand times, YES!

If Sara Rue is able to get to her goal weight, whether she uses Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers or goes back to that low carb diet from before, she is a stark reminder to all of us that it’s possible. She isn’t some actress who gained a little weight when her marriage hit rock bottom (yes, I’m talking to you, Valerie Bertinelli). She was a fat kid. She was a fat teen and now, she’s a fat adult. When she gets to her goal weight, we’ll all be there cheering for her as much as we cheered for Carmen when she finally made the cheerleading squad.

Here is a video of her talking about her decision.

I am embarking on this journey to be a happier healthier woman and I’m doing it publicly because I think that there are a lot of women out there that have felt like me over the years and if I can be an inspiration to just one other person, then I’ve done my job in the world.

I love how she talks about her goals.

I would love to put on a blindfold, walk into my closet and just grab anything and know that it’s going to fit, put it on and feel okay in it. That kind of freedom is something that I really crave.

YES! That is EXACTLY how I’d like to feel. Sure, right now, I can put anything on in my closet, but I NEVER feel okay in it. It’s always just clothes on my body and I haven’t felt like I looked good in my clothes for so long.

It’s possible to do this. I’m starting to believe that, and that little kernel of belief is so exciting to me. There’s something where it’s not a crash diet where I’m going to lose all this weight and white knuckle it until I gain it back. It’s a lifestyle choice. I’m learning to eat like a normal person, which I’ve never known how to do. The idea of waking up and not having to worry about food is a huge weight off my shoulders.

Sara Rue is keeping a video blog for Jenny Craig. Here is the first entry:

I wish her the best of luck with this new endeavor and I just want her to know that all of us fat girls are watching and hoping it works for her.

1/8/2010

PostSecret: Fat People Disgust Me

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

This week, on PostSecret, there were tons of postcards that I found interesting. Here is one of them.

PostSecret: Fat People Disgust Me

It reads:

Now that I’ve lost the weight, fat people disgust me.

This postcard just brings to light the stark reality of fat hatred. I’ve talked about this a couple of times before. The first time, I suggested that people don’t really hate fat people. It’s more complicated than that.

It didn’t take too many comments to realize that I was totally wrong about that idea and that there are people out there who HATE the overweight.

There is nothing that we can do about other people’s feelings about us. All we can control is our actions and our own feelings. Focus on yourself and let those fat haters stew in their own juices.


PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

12/13/2009

Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? REDUX

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

A while ago, I wrote an entry called Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? and the crux of my argument was that people DON’T hate fat people.

Then the comments began piling up:

As a firefighter, I am called upon almost daily to help lift obese people who have just got to low to the ground that they cannot get themselves up. No other reason except they are just to big to lift themselves. I tore out a rotator on one of these lifts, and had to have sugary to get it fixed.

I’m sorry, fat people are disgusting. Humans were not intended to carry so much weight on their bodies. It sickens me to see so many Americans defending their fatness and acting as if it is natural. As the firefighter mentioned earlier, they are stressing our healthcare system, costing us billions of dollars, and lowering the quality of life for millions of people.

I wouldn’t know, but I guess it’s the shame of being fat that causes fat people to make up so many excuses for their indulgent lifestyles and excessive critical mass. The reason why skinny, athletic, muscular people all hate fat people is because you constantly villainize every healthy group of individuals in a desperate attempt to justify your gluttonous lifestyle and resultant unattractive and unhealthy physique.

Funny how the fatty fat mc lardos on here feel it necessary to write an essay length discourse explaining how THEY are the ones who are truly happy and how healthy people are secretly miserable underneath their seemingly more happy and fulfilling lives.

Fat people disgust me. Like mentioned above, our bodies were not built to hold that much excess. People say I’m judgemental and stereotypical when it comes to stuff like this. And I am. I judge you because you are destroying your body; I stereotype you because every single fat person that walks the earth is too lazy to become healthy.

This is just a small sampling of the comments. That entry has MANY comments on this subject and I actually deleted a lot of the really rude ones. So, the verdict is out.

Skinny people DO hate fat people, but why?!

Gluttony Is A Sin

Evagrius PonticusWe can thank the 4th century monk, Evagrius Ponticus, for devising the Seven Deadly Sins and including gluttony on the list (kind of an easy choice for such a skinny guy). From that day, being overweight became an undesirable thing. There are people who are atheists who still staunchly believe that gluttony is a sin. THAT’S how ingrained this idea is in our collective unconscious.

Ironically, the idea that gluttony is a bad thing has some valid points. I wrote about it here:

There is an assumption that fat people are gluttonous. While overeating CAN contribute to obesity, that’s not necessarily the case.

Fat People Are Lazy

I don’t know how the idea that fat people are lazy came about. Even scientific explanations to the causes of obesity link it to sedentary lifestyle. There is a strong correlation to the fact that if people exercise more, they lose weight, so people tend to assume that those who are overweight don’t exercise. This assumption is generalized into the idea that fat people are lazy. It’s not necessarily true, but that’s what people believe.

Burden to Society

Many of the comments I received mentioned that fat people are a burden to society. The most notable was the firefighter complaining about lifting overweight people who have fallen, yet he probably never mentioned the aged who are in the same situation. Society says it’s alright to hate fat people, but not the elderly, so he doesn’t feel put upon by the old people who have fallen and can’t get up.

Others feel that fat people have more medical bills and burden society in that manner. Still others feel that just having to look at fat people is a burden. They say that fat people “cost us billions of dollars.”

It’s Kinda Gross, Dude

As much as I don’t like to admit it, it’s hard to deny that severe obesity is kind of gross. It affects our disgust reaction on a guttural level. I hate to say it, but I have had that reaction to photographs of fat people, despite my belief in fat acceptance. After reading and deleting hundreds of comments saying just that, it was a shocking surprise to me that so many people have this response.

This might not be something that is in our control. The feeling of revulsion could be a response deep down in our genes telling us that mating with an overweight person would not produce healthy offspring. This idea has been argued by scientists, but no proof of it has been posited.

The hard truth, however, is that some people are disgusted by the obese.

It’s Not Healthy

The ones who won’t say these other things to your face will ALWAYS fall back on the fact that being overweight isn’t healthy. I know that it’s more difficult for me to climb stairs. I know that I don’t feel as well as I did when I was close to my goal weight. I cannot argue with these people. I don’t think being overweight is healthy, either.

So, They Hate Me…

The HONEST truth is, there are people out there who hate fat people. They HATE them. They write scathing comments extolling how MUCH they hate them. They list their reasons with poor grammar and atrocious spelling, but the truth of the matter is, they hate fat people.

These people are making decisions about you without even getting to know you. They might even be in positions of power over you. They could be your teachers, advisors, bosses or peers. They decide things about you just by looking at you.

Sometimes, whether you’re fat or thin can decide your success. This is a hard truth and I can’t make it any softer. With these people, you’ll have to work ten times harder to prove you’re not lazy. You can never have a sick day without being considered a burden to the group. You will never be considered a viable love interest.

Unless you lose weight…

You can’t change their minds. I believe in Fat Acceptance, but it’s not working. These people are vitriolic and adamant in their hate and sometimes they are in charge.

There are only two ways to deal with these kinds of people: cut them out of your life or lose weight. More importantly, you never know WHO these people are. Since they are only willing to say these horrible things when they are anonymous, it’s nearly impossible to know if a person who has significant control of your life is a person who HATES fat people.

I’ve never known a better reason to lose weight. They are out there, judging you and some of them control your destiny. Don’t give them an excuse to count you out.

12/12/2009

Movie Review: Disfigured

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

Disfigured at Amazon.comI saw Disfigured a few months ago and it messed me up. It’s the story of a friendship between an obese woman, Lydia, and an anorexic woman, Darcy. They meet when Darcy attends a Fat Acceptance group only to encounter the kind of prejudice and rejection that overweight people receive every day. Lydia is the only one willing to give Darcy a chance at friendship and healing. Their friendship takes a strange turn, however, when Lydia asks Darcy for “anorexia lessons.”

You can see the trailer for Disfigured here:

Anyone who has ever wished they could get anorexia has thought about it. When Lydia asked Darcy for “anorexia lessons,” I sat there in awe of it. Yes! I had always wanted someone to teach me how to get anorexia. If I had to have an eating disorder, why couldn’t it be the popular one?

Lydia and Darcy’s experiment goes wrong, of course, because it’s a story about loving yourself at any size, but that isn’t what messed me up. What really screwed me up and set my healthy eating back for at least a month was Darcy’s view of the world.

There is a scene when Darcy is giving Lydia anorexia lessons. They are sitting in the park, watching girls walk by and Darcy is ruthlessly commenting on their bodies. Any little flaws, whether they be muffin tops or minor bulges, are pointed out and criticized by Darcy in order to get Lydia into the anorexic frame of mind.

This is how it is. This is blood sport.

It made me think that if I were to get to my goal weight, I might become one of those skinny people who hate fat people. I didn’t want to be that judgmental person that Darcy was and it took me a while to realize that I wouldn’t become that person, but I have to tell you there was a lot of bingeing before I got to that point.

It was a good movie and it had a great message, but it messed me up when I saw it.

12/11/2009

The Fat Fight

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

Omag_dec_2009If you haven’t picked up the December issue of O Magazine, I highly recommend it for ONE article. The article is called, “The Fat Fight” and it’s on page 205 and it chronicles the story of a mother, Robin, and her daughter, Jess.

Robin Marantz Henig starts the article, telling her side of the story. She was a health and fitness writer while her daughter was growing up. When Jess was nine months old, a stranger made an off-handed comment about Robin’s baby, which turned into Robin’s obsession with making her daughter thin and acceptable in her mind. From the beginning paragraph, when Robin describes her daughter belly-dancing, she just CAN’T stop herself from demeaning her.

She wore a costume of bright blue and a gold hip scarf with jiggling coins. Her midriff – also jiggling – was bare.

She goes on to pay lip service to the dance by calling it graceful, but I can tell that the “jiggling” belly was the first thing on her mind. From the tone of Robin’s side of the story, you might think that it was all a misunderstanding on her daughter’s side, but one paragraph shows that Robin is still trying to spare her daughter the “pain” of being fat.

When she was 16, Jess sat me down one night and told me she’d been bulimic for years.

That was a VERY brave thing for Jess to do. I never did tell my grandmother about my eating disorder spawned by her desperate attempts to spare me the pain of being fat.

My first thought was she couldn’t be [bulimic], or she wouldn’t be so fat.

When I read that I KNEW with a capital “K” that poor Jess had experienced all that I had, but unlike me, she didn’t have a mother to run home to who loved her just the way she was.

When I read Jess’ side of the story, however, I learned that it was MUCH worse.

When I was 6, my mother, a journalist, wrote an article for Woman’s Day called “Kids Get Fat Because They Eat Too Much… and Other Myths About Overweight Children.” Under the main bar was a sidebar about how she’d turned me from a slightly chubby 4-year-old into a slightly less chubby 6-year-old… by feeding me less.

Let’s be honest. It wasn’t by “feeding her less.” It was by STARVING her. Just like when my grandma fed me 600 calories a day, Robin was starving her daughter because some random woman had said, “I love fat babies,” when Jess was nine months old.

This was typical. When Mom wrote about children and health, I appeared in the role of Fat Kid Saved by Diet or Exercise.

Not only was Robin mistreating her child, she wrote about it regularly for women’s magazines. The kind of magazines that my grandma read. Not only did she starve her own daughter, she recommended the similar treatment of children all over the nation. Maybe even including me.

Somehow the two of them have mended their “fractious mother-daughter relationship,” but I have no sympathy or clemency for Robin. No matter how much she thinks she has changed and accepted her daughter for the way she is, there is monster lurking in there who will never be satisfied, even if Jess were to wither away to a wisp of herself.

Believe me, I know this because I was a wisp of myself when I was 17 years old and my grandparents never accepted me. In their minds, I ALWAYS needed to lose weight. Even as an adult, when I got down to a healthy weight for my height, my grandpa never mentioned anything about my weight loss. Instead, he recommended that I go to Weight Watchers like his friend had done.

There is no satisfying beasts like Robin and my grandparents. Sure, they love us, in their way. They think that the constant negative comments about our bodies will somehow spare us pain, never realizing that the only people causing us pain about our bodies are THEM.

If you have a person like this in your life, I doubt you will ever be able to have a civil conversation about weight. Even if you think you’ve made a breakthrough with them, like Jess and Robin, know that it’s just a truce, not a victory. You will have to find someone different for support with your health and fitness because you can never depend on them to be helpful without bringing up all that pain from the past.

10/4/2009

Are You On Board, Me?

By Laura Moncur @ 9:32 am — Filed under:

IMG_8315 by katester from FlickrI absolutely LOVE this entry by Leah Peah.

Pretty much, I’ve spent my entire life hating the way I look. And I’m tired of it. I want to love myself just the way I am, large or not, with neck rolls, size 26 pants and boobs too large to do anything with. I want to look in the mirror and not worry that those people around me are looking at me in disgust and revulsion. Or disappointment. Are you on board, me?

Leah Peah is the woman who they based Tara on in the show, United States of Tara. Toni Collette plays her in the show and she just won an Emmy for her work last year. I love her entry documenting her bulimic teen years all the way to present time in pictures. Go there and read it RIGHT now!

9/21/2009

Fitness Magazine Review: October 2009

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

Fitness Magazine provided me with a complimentary subscription in exchange for a monthly review of their magazine. I haven’t bought a health or fitness magazine for a LONG time because all the stories seem like a rehash of stuff they wrote last month. Honestly, there are only so many ways to write eat less and exercise more and sometimes I get sick of reading it over and over. So, this month’s magazine actually seemed fresh to me because I hadn’t read this kind of magazine in a long time.

They grabbed me right from the beginning with their Reader Success Secrets. Unfortunately, I was unable to find them online, but the stories were inspiring for me to read.

Fitness Magazine Review: October 2009 by LauraMoncur from Flickr

Even more compelling, however, was the ad for the LunarGlide+ Nike shoes on the opposing page. Unless I look for them, I rarely see advertisements on the Internet. I hadn’t heard of these new shoes, despite the fact that I visit the Nike+ website EVERY day. That surprised me and I’m smiling at that fact that I enjoyed the ADVERTISEMENTS in Fitness Magazine more than the articles.

This article, called Souped Up, was wonderful inspiration for me to cook. Usually, I don’t want to eat something unless I can see it. The fact that they had a photo for EVERY recipe was enough to make me want to cook some food. The included nutrition facts after each one was an extra bonus that made me feel completely at ease with going to the trouble of cooking these healthy meals.

Fitness Magazine Review: October 2009 by LauraMoncur from Flickr

The photos of the soups on the website aren’t nearly as pretty as they were in the magazine. I actually tore out the pages and added them to my cookbook for inspiration next time I want to cook.

Finally, I was so motivated by this story about Kristin Armstrong. She was training to be an Olympic Triathlete, but osteoarthritis got in her way. Instead of giving up, she focused on cycling and won the gold medal in the Beijing Olympics.

Fitness Magazine Review: October 2009 by LauraMoncur from Flickr

I can read almost the whole magazine on the Internet, but having the magazine at my kitchen table was a great reminder to eat healthy. I think I’m going to like receiving it every month and I’m looking forward to the November issue!

8/15/2009

Now with 10% Less of Jere!

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

Jere Keyes has been working hard for the last 16 weeks and has gone from 217 lbs. to 191 lbs.

Jere Before and After

He has done an incredible job of working out consistently. Here is a photo of his workout schedule.

Jere's Workout Schedule

When I read about his consistency, I was so impressed with how well he has done, especially when tempted with a birthday cake like this less than a week before:

Jacobs Party by atp_tyreseus from Flickr

If I found myself in front of a beautiful cake like this, I would have trouble eating it and even more trouble NOT eating it. I would have been paralyzed with indecision or acquiesce to a binge. Instead, they had a cake fight. You can read about it here.

The next time you are confronted with a beautiful dessert or savory treat, remember Jere and how his devotion to fitness really paid off. You are in control, not the food!

8/14/2009

PostSecret: Nothing To Hide Behind

By Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am — Filed under:

This postcard from PostSecret was in last Sunday’s collection.

PostSecret: Nothing To Hide Behind

It reads:

Sometimes I think the reason I can’t lose weight is because
I’m Scared.
If I become thin and discover guys still aren’t attracted to me, then I will have nothing to hide behind.

I think the reason that ALL of us have troubles losing weight is because we are scared. Each of us are scared of different things, but fear seems to be the largest obstacle in our way.

I’m scared that my family won’t like me as much when I’m thin. A lot of what we do together is eat. If I have to watch my food all the time, will be still be able to enjoy each other?

What is it about getting to your ideal weight that makes you scared? How can you get over that fear so that you can get to your goal?


PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

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