At the NAAFA Conference, a good deal of Sunday was dedicated to Monday’s legislative visits. For those who signed up, we were divided into small teams and prepped to speak with our representative members of Congress. We were coached to discuss our concerns regarding the way that health is approached by the government (a weight-centered rather than behavioral-centered approach), about the discriminatory horrors of the CDCs LEAN Works program, about removing references to weight loss as goals from government sponsored health programs in the latest Health Care Reform bill and many more issues besides.

Team Pelosi

My group consisted of Fat Activist hero and author, Marilyn Wann (FAT!SO?), her friend O’Ryan, my partner, Eszter, and me. Because we were from San Francisco, our representative was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now, of course, you rarely, if ever, get to speak to the actual congressperson. You end up talking to an aid, who takes notes about your thoughts and concerns and passes those along to the representative in what I imagine is a rather abridged form. We were also prepped to only get to speak for 5-10 minutes.

However, in addition to the fact that we ultimately got nearly an hour to speak, we spoke with two people, both Pelosi’s aid, but also a Policy Fellow from Robert Wood Johnson, Deborah Trautman, who wanted to be there and understand what we had to say. As she is somebody who’s part of one of our country’s leading “obesity” research and policy centers, it was great to get to reach her directly with our message. Indeed, she was surprisingly interested in and receptive to what we had to say.  Granted, it’s her job to be polite and listen, but she was actively engaged by our comments and understanding about our concerns in a way I definitely wasn’t expecting.

Wield That Sword, Marilyn!

Truly, Marilyn Wann was the hero of our meeting. Her knowledge of Fat Activism, Health at Every Size (HAES) statistics and government policy are outstanding, as is her ability to rattle these facts and figures off in meaningful, comprehensible and enlightening ways. It was impressive watching her work her magic, and without her there, I’m fairly confident our meeting would have fallen short of the spectacular success it seemed to be (and when I say success, I mean we laid the groundwork for future communication, not that we changed the government’s policy towards fat). Some of the points Marilyn discussed were the efficacy of the HAES approach to health, including a case study at Mercy Hospital in Iowa, the experiments of Dr. Linda Bacon (whose book we gave Pelosi), and the ways it affects people in general. She even asked for government money to be spent evaluating a HAES v. a weight-centered approach to health. We also talked about the issue of discrimination in the insurance field, and Marilyn disclosed her own problems getting insurance - problems that are unjustly shared by the vast majority of America’s fat folks.

Isolating Fat Discriminates Against Everyone

When I spoke, I focused largely on issues of discrimination. For instance, I (riskily, I understand) bashed the CDC’s despicable LEAN Works program, indicating the way that it promotes fat discrimination in the workplace by “calculating the cost” of obesity for employers and encouraging them to do something about it. Well, you can’t make all your employees thin, so what to do you do? Fire them! That’s terribly discriminatory, and what’s more, it targets ethnic and racial minorities that often have a higher rate of obesity.

I also discussed a specific change to the Senate Draft of the Health Care Reform Bill that we were asked by our legislative trainer the day before to request. The bill was worded in such a way that the success of any government sponsored/funded community health program had to be evaluated based on weight loss. What!? By isolating fat people the government would ultimately discriminate against me and every other thin person. By making weight loss a criteria of success, the government has decided that I cannot become successfully healthy through their programs - because I don’t want to lose weight. Granted, many people - fat and thin - have no interest in losing weight, but it helps to think about this in more extreme terms.

Let’s say there’s an anorexic girl who looks like a gust of wind could knock her over. She goes into a government sponsored community health program for counseling and to start learning how to eat again and put a little weight back on so that she doesn’t, quite literally, die. Let’s say she does this and leaves. Would the government consider her a successful case? No! She didn’t lose weight! Does that mean that government programs would be stupid enough to encourage her to lose weight? Probably not (but, hey, who am I to say?), but that doesn’t change the fact that by adding in weight loss as a criteria for success, the government would be isolating fat people and excluding thin people from government community health programs. That’s downright stupid, and I explained it in so many words (not these) to Pelosi’s staff, who I think definitely understood the problem.

The Next Steps Towards Understanding Government Policies

Eszter and O’Ryan did a great job, as well, adding important points or summing up larger ones, and between the four of us, we had an interesting conversation with our meeting counterparts. Admittedly, the receptivity on the other end was not 100% there only because I think some of our larger emphases were being perceived in a more narrow way, but quite frankly, if someone can start to connect the ideas we were sharing with what s/he knows in order to better absorb our understanding of the larger situation, then so be it.

As it was, this meeting was only the beginning of speaking with our representatives on the Hill, and considering we took 17 legislative teams, all of which, to my knowledge, brought back great reports, we’re headed in the right direction to make ourselves visible and heard. And now begins the tough part: regular communication with these people through email correspondence and more so that we stay in front of them and they continue to learn about our priorities and requests.

Please consider writing an email to your own congressional representative encouraging him/her to ensure good government health policies for everyone. Though I’m sure you can do a great job asking for the right things, let me know if you’d like me to pass along the specific points we learned to request so that you can be consistent with our overall message and not miss a few important details.

Part I: Dr. Linda Bacon’s Reflections on Size Acceptance and Thin Privilege
Part II: Sharing Size Diversity and Acceptance with Children
Part III: Fly Free - Teaming up with the Association for Airline Passenger Rights
Part IV: Baring and Sharing with the Fat Poets’ Society

As an historian, Jay understands the degree to which our aesthetic judgments are shaped by our cultural surroundings, and he has studied and written about the importance of rights, respect and acceptance for all people. Jay is a member of the Association for Size Diversity and Health.