The joke's on everyone else: Fat and fun do mix
Social events for overweight folks are growing in popularity
Thursday, June 23, 2005
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
THE NEW YORK TIMES
JoAnn Bellemore was the only fat person in her family, the eldest daughter
of a career Navy man and a strict Japanese mother who believed that an
unwieldy body represented a lack of self-control. Like other military
children, Bellemore spent her childhood bouncing from city to city, though
for her that also meant being towed from one diet doctor to the next.
Like many adolescent girls she kept a diary. In hers she scribbled the
contents of her stomach, not her soul. It was not until the end of her teen
years that she found courage.
"Mom, you have to love me the way that I am," she said as she was about to
graduate from high school. She was 5-foot-8 and 235 pounds.
Today Bellemore is 49 years old, 250 pounds, and the founder of the Big
Beautiful Women Network (BBWNetwork.com), which organizes Vegas Bash, an
annual weeklong gathering of obese men and women in Las Vegas. Five hundred
people are expected at this year's bash, from Tuesday to July 3 at the
Stardust Resort and Casino.
It is just one of many social and athletic get-togethers that Bellemore's
network and other groups like it organize in Seattle and elsewhere to allow
the very overweight to mingle in a climate of tolerance. The events are
meant to encourage people to get out and meet one another, to transform
their shame into confidence and to accept themselves as they are.
As Sandy Schaffer, the director of the New York chapter of the National
Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, put it, "Why allow somebody to say,
'You can't do this until you lose weight'?"
"There might be a lot of fat people in this country," said Schaffer, who is
5-foot-5 and 280 pounds, "but there aren't a lot of empowered people."
Bellemore has been reluctant to speak with reporters because of the way
groups like hers have been represented in the news media. Earlier this
month, for instance, a St. Louis newspaper ran an item about a Midwest Chub
Club gathering under the headline "Lard Have Mercy." A few years ago a
television station filmed a fat acceptance association event while
participants were eating and set the scene to barn music.
"It's like one of the last prejudices," Bellemore said. "Comedians make
jokes about fat people that they couldn't make about other groups."
The Vegas Bash began in 1997 when Bellemore, who was living in Phoenix,
invited members of a Big Beautiful Women Internet chat group to meet face
to face. Twenty-six people showed up. The following year 100 people came.
By Year 3, Bellemore and her husband had moved to Las Vegas to work on the
event. Now eight years old, the bash has laid the groundwork for 48
marriages.
This year's gathering will include karaoke, a pool party, a fashion show, a
costume contest, dance lessons and an appearance by "Elvis."
Many other social events for the obese are also growing in popularity. BBW
Cruise, a company in West Palm Beach, Fla., booked more than 200 trips last
year, up from 40 in 2003. Big Boogie Nights, a San Francisco group that
produces nightclub-style dance parties, will begin giving them in New York
City this fall. And Big Moves, which has sponsored dance workshops and
dance troupes in the San Francisco area since 2000, is offering workshops
in New York City and has started a troupe in Boston.
Advertisements typically describe events as being for BBWs (Big Beautiful
Women) and BHMs (Big Handsome Men), but many of those involved simply call
themselves fat. This, they say, is a conscious attempt to encourage people
to regard the word as a run-of-the-mill adjective, not an insult.
Like most event organizers, Bellemore aims to create an environment in
which obese people feel at home. Every year after the Vegas Bash she
receives a flood of e-mail messages from participants who describe missed
proms or insulting spouses and how the Vegas Bash helped them mend their
wounds.
"Fat people have just been so shot down," said Daniel McKay of Seattle, who
along with his wife organizes bowling nights, barbecues and comedy shows
through BBWNorthwest.com. He also moderates a Yahoo chat group of the same
name that has more than 8,500 members.
People want to go out, "but they get laughed at or made fun of," said
McKay, 6-foot-6 and 280 pounds.
The same thing happens on vacation, said Barbara Salas, owner of BBW
Cruise, a size 26. "If you go by yourself, and you're in a bathing suit,
people are going to look at you and go 'ew' or make comments," she said.
Liz Nickels, a psychologist in Oakland, Calif., who is 5-foot-7 and 275
pounds, founded Big Adventures to teach obese women to scuba dive. Among
her graduates is Deb Malkin, the vice president of ecommerce for
alight.com, a plus-size online clothing company, who learned to dive on a
Big Adventures trip in Maui.
"When it's around issues where we feel segregated, like clothing or fitness
and, for some people, dating," Malkin said, "it's important to be with
people who understand you, who don't judge you." The Big Adventures diving
trip inspired Malkin, who is 5-foot-3 and 245 pounds and lives in Brooklyn,
to take up karate and swimming. She said she had tried using traditional
gym equipment but had negative experiences.
"My hips don't fit in some of those machines," she said. "You just feel
uncomfortable, and you eventually come up with enough reasons not to come
back."
Sympathetic thin people, or "slender allies" as Nickels calls them, are
allowed to participate in the dives, but not to talk about dieting or to
make disparaging remarks. Most groups for very overweight people have
similar rules.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65
percent of American adults 20 years of age and older are overweight,
meaning their body mass index is 25 or more, or obese, meaning 30 or
higher. In April a highly publicized study in The Journal of the American
Medical Association suggested that people who are somewhat overweight, but
not obese, have a lower risk of dying in a given year than those of normal
weight. Nevertheless, as a person's body mass index climbs above 25 or,
more dangerously, past 30, his or her risk of developing diabetes, high
blood pressure, heart disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and various
kinds of cancer -- breast, colon and endometrial -- rises.
Salas, like many others involved in plus-size gatherings, contends that
society emphasizes weight too much. People should be encouraged not to diet
but to build strength and stamina, she said.
Groups for the obese provide guidance on meeting challenges that lighter
people may never think about. For example, Salas advises the carrying of
airplane seat-belt extenders to avoid the embarrassment of having to
request one from a flight attendant. She books clients on ships with pools
that have steps rather than ladders because steps can accommodate larger
bodies.
Likewise, Nickels of Big Adventures makes sure her diving students are
equipped with large-size gear, and Bellemore assures Vegas Bash attendees
who use scooters that they will have ample room to maneuver around the
casino.
Rochelle Rice, who runs In Fitness and In Health, a studio for overweight
women in Manhattan, helps yoga and Pilates students strengthen their
abdomens (to reduce lower back discomfort) and their thighs (to better
support their knees). She also emphasizes balance exercises to counter a
common fear, falling.
The exercise comes as a bonus. Many people who sign up for the classes,
vacations, dances and parties say they are mostly drawn by the possibility
of companionship. "I'm a big guy in addition to being what they call a fat
admirer," said Darren Battle, the creator of Big Boogie Nights, who is
5-foot-9 and 285 pounds. "It was important to me to know that there were
women who were attracted to me."
"Beauty isn't this static little thing; it really is a continuum," said
Carol Squires of San Leandro, Calif., who is 5-foot-6 and 350 pounds and
dances with a hip-hop troupe called the Phat Fly Girls. "It is your
birthright to be on that continuum. And there's room for all of us."