Now that’s what I call a surgeon general

It appears that Obama and his administration, while educating themselves admirably on health care issues as they’ve been doing for the past several months, have also clued in to the fact that there are doctors who aren’t on TV. Even before the inauguration, there were reports that  Obama had asked Sanjay Gupta, a fatphobic blowhard [...]

Hidden Plus Sizes on Etsy

You may already know that Etsy is a middle-class fat girl’s dream when it comes to stores like Jane BonBon, MissBrache, and SelenaEon (reviewed by stitchtowhere on Fatshionista), all of whom specialize in or at least explicitly advertise plus sizes. If you’ve got the money to buy new clothes but don’t think you have the [...]

Allegorical Figures

The local commuter paper ran an interview today with John Currin, a painter who deals in explicitly physical and sometimes pornographic images of women. (The first picture on the linked slideshow, actually, is NSFW.) I find his work interesting, if sometimes (deliberately) disturbing; I wouldn’t exactly count him among my favorite painters but I have [...]

Midweek link roundup

When I was in school I always used to get in trouble for talking or passing notes with my friends instead of doing my work. Little did I know it would prefigure my blogging habits. Sure, we haven’t turned in a lot of essays, but here’s a peek at what we’ve been passing notes about [...]

Douchehound of the Day

I just sent the following comment to spam:
I wish you huge obese would stop complaining and talking.
(Linkage mine.)
Because it’s not good enough that you can, you know, just not read our fucking blog. We need to actually become silent.
As usual, we don’t douchehound people because they piss us off; what pisses us off is otherwise [...]

Wait, you mean there are supposed to be WOMEN inside these clothes?

You might have noticed that there hasn’t been a lot of content lately, because things happen — most notably, Kate and I have to go be professional writers sometimes, not to mention the fact that we’re both pretty strenuously ADD, and SM and A Sarah have the equally if not more time-consuming demands of academia. [...]

The nocebo effect

We talk a lot here about how mental health is just as important as physical health. This is often in the service of pointing out that even if losing weight were in and of itself a healthy goal — and there’s plenty of evidence that things aren’t that simple, and that in fact the pursuit [...]

Friday Fluff is Overrated

The folks at Feministing just posted a link to the blog Overrated List, a spectacular illustration of the principle that the most brilliant ideas are often the simplest. Overrated List draws its inspiration from well-known tool Christopher Hitchens, but I forgive it, because it goes on to be both funny and intriguing:

According to a 2006 New [...]

Friday Fluff: Bad to Verse

It’s National Poetry Month, which I almost always forget about until it’s almost over. SM’s the poetry expert here, with an MFA in poeting, but I’ve got a Master’s in English and a deep-seated and ferocious love of good poetry. Many is the intense conversation we’ve had about how to interpret “The Waste Land,” or [...]

Stumbling towards ecstasy

Because of our delightfully stringent comments policy, most of the rants about fatties eating everything in a twelve-block radius never make it onto the site. Those “arguments” just aren’t worth thinking about. But we do see some genuine confusion from otherwise reasonable people who can’t see how non-restricted eating could possibly be compatible with health, [...]