Hanne Blank - The Unapologetic Fat Girls Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

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.
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Front cover photograph copyright 2012 by Substantia Jones of .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blank, Hanne.
The unapologetic fat girls guide to exercise and other incendiary acts / Hanne Blank.
p. cm.
Summary: This empowering exercise guide is big on attitude, giving plus-size women the motivation, support, and information they need to move their bodies and improve their healthProvided by publisher.
1. Overweight womenPsychology. 2. Overweight womenHealth and hygiene. 3. Exercise for women. 4. Physical fitness for women. I. Title.
RC522.O25B53 2012
613.71082dc23
2012023600

eISBN: 978-1-60774-287-6

v3.1

For Benjamin Lee,
who understands that sometimes,
push-ups are performance art.

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 womens 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.

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 bricka 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 wouldve 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 dont 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 describedif youll excuse my translating the phrase slightly inaccuratelyas 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. Its very The Many Moods of Me Moving My Big Ol Carcass around here sometimes.)

The point is, I exercisenot, as I think I have made pretty clear, because Im 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 its important. Rather, I know its 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 bodys ability to use its own insulin convinced me that exercise was more than just Something Youre 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. Its been very illuminating to observe what happens for friends and loved ones when they do and dont 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 someones 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 doesnt seem to matter what size someone is. The beneficial side effects movement has on the bodys 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 isnt what I find most important about exercise. Its not even the most compelling, in the long run. Exercise, after all, doesnt make you immortal or even bulletproof. There are plenty of health conditions that exercise cant and wont 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 bodys 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.