So, we've got a web article that explains how long you'd have to exercise in order to "burn off" different foods from chain restaurants.

A donut? 59 minutes of walking

An egg McMuffin? 32 minutes of running.

A chocolate chip cookie? 62 minutes of biking.

How can this be presented as anything other than wild comedy? An hour of walking in order to justify eating a donut? or of biking in order to eat a cookie? What this article is claiming is that if you ever eat a tasty fast food treat you'll need to exercise for an unreasonable amount of time or else it will make you OMG fat! And let's not even deal with the overly simplistic calories-in-calories-out calculus.

I can so easily see most people who haven't been exposed to Health at Every Size or Fat Acceptance reading this article and coming to the conclusion that it's never worth it to eat a donut, or a cookie.

What a sad, screwed up thought.

A new study shows that fat, white Americans are more likely to report that they've been victims of discrimination than thinner people. The study seems to focus primarily on respndents' perceptions, not whether or not discrimination actually occurs. But nowhere does the article indicate that discrimination on the basis of body size is wrong, nor does it discuss the possibility that fat Americans of all races are indeed discriminated against. I found the completely distanced, neutral tone of the article jarring. Even if the study at hand was not focused on these issues, someone could have been quoted about them, to flesh (heh! flesh!) out the full story.

Still hard-hearted

Months later, I just googled "hard hearted yankee bitch" again and YESSSSSS it pulls up my blog and only my blog! Score!

Seeding Google

I just googled the phrase "hard hearted yankee bitch" because I feel like one of them today, and I got no hits. So I decided I needed to post that phrase, just because. Because today I am a hard hearted yankee bitch.

Fat transplant patients allowed to get sicker while waiting for organs, blamed for their own ill health

The very obese wait longer for organ transplants, up to ONE YEAR longer. The likely reason is that doctors view the obese as being at greater risk for complications and death, therefore donor organs are more likely to go to slimmer patients.

Well, you know why the obese patients might be doing worse? Because you're making them wait months and years longer than other patients for a transplant, giving them plenty of time to get sicker. And then you're blaming their weight for their failure to do well after a transplant!

Patients are being denied treatment, and then blamed for it. Words cannot express the cruelty of this situation.

After an Eternity of Pressure to be Thin, the Universe Caves

"The universe just got a little bit slimmer. Revised calculations indicate the universe contains less normal and dark matter than previously thought, resulting in a "weight loss" of 10 to 20 percent."

New Measurements: The Universe Weighs Less

When interviewed, the Universe credited sensible eating and exercise for its weight loss. "I feel so much happier now! I don't understand why all of the other Universes don't do what I've done. It's not a matter of dieting, it's a whole new lifestyle."

The Universe's mother promptly began pressuring the Universe's sister to lose weight, leading to laden silences and flung recriminations at Thanksgiving dinner.

Richard Jewell / Tania Head

The news story that came out yesterday, about Tania Head, a woman who has for six years presented herself as a survivor of the World Trade Center attacks, but who apparently had no connection to them, is weird and surprising.

I can't imagine what motivated her to develop her story and to continue to build on it, volunteering with victims' groups and giving tours of the WTC site. Did she mean for it to go this far? Did she start by telling a story that was mis-heard, and then took it farther and farther with each retelling?

Apparently she was fairly subdued, if not in the details of her story, in her telling of it. She would hold back parts of her tale until prompted, but then would claim that she'd been one of the few survivors from a floor above the crash site in the second tower, saved by a man who later died, given an inscribed wedding band by a fatally burned man (which she later returned to his unnamed widow), badly burned herself, and lost a fiance (or husband, depending on the telling of her story) in the collapse of the first tower. Her supposed rescuer and supposed fiance are real men, but neither has a demonstrable link to her. She won't name the dying man or widow who are part of her tale.

Others will hash over her story. But here's what has worried me since I saw the article about this in the New York Times: Head is a fat woman. And our society so vilifies fat people that it was just a matter of time before people started associating her behavior with her size, and in many ways blaming it on her size. Did she decide to attract the attention accorded a 9-11 survivor because nobody wanted to pay attention to an average fat woman in America? Did she need to create a fictional husband because she can't find love? Whatever her motivations, whatever happened, there is no doubt whatsoever that she will receive more criticism for carrying out her charade as a fat woman than she would have if she were a size six.

But why should her size matter at all? Thousands of people died on September 11th! Families ripped apart! Two cities scarred! And for whatever reason this woman took advantage of that moment of collective horror to embed herself into the culture of 9-11 survivors. (I doubt that she is the only one.) So why, why, WHY must fat become a part of this narrative? It trivializes the lives of the victims of 9-11 to focus editorials on this story on the size of Tania Head's body. I want to know what was going on in her mind! What did she feel in her heart! What difference could it possibly make to this story to focus on what the number on her bathroom scale reads?

Remember Richard Jewell, who was falsely accused of having planted Eric Rudolph's bomb in Olympic Park in Atlanta? Not only was he vilified by the press, but criticisms often focused on or at least alluded to his size. Somehow his body was offered up as visible evidence of flawed ethics, of a criminal mind. Those criticisms were unfounded. He was not only innocent, but a hero who led people away from the bombed park. But the insults that were hurled at him in the media plagued him for the rest of his life, until he died, young, earlier this year.

Gina Kolata does a wonderful job in her recent book, Rethinking Thin, of demonstrating that body size is not a behavioral choice or an outward manifestation of emotional flaws. Some people are fat, some are skinny, and the difference is almost always determined by genetics. But Americans don't see things that way.

America likes to judge people, and wants to think that people can be judged by looking at them. Fat people are easy targets, standing out from the crowd with a physical trait that the thin like to think indicates sloth, greed, laziness, stupidity.

It took less than a day before Tania Head was tarred by that brush. All that remains to be seen is how thoroughly will she be slandered not as a tragic and bizarre psychological case but as a fat woman.

I just did a google search on "Tania Head" and "fat", and the first page of hits tells me that I'm sadly, disappointingly, right.