“Fat is not Contagious” from Leslie Goldman’s “The Weighting Game” at Her Active Life

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“Fat is not Contagious” from Leslie Goldman’s “The Weighting Game”

Posted March 18, 2008 at 12:00 PM by Katie Drummond

Section: Her Health, Body Image, Eating Disorders, Her Motivation, Books, Special Features

Fat Contagious A NYC writer by the name of Kim Brittingham found herself fed up with the stares and glares and outright rude comments she often receives while riding the bus. (Kim weighs around 250 pounds and is accepting of her size, as well as the word “fat.” ) However, there’s only so much a person can take and she soon grew tired of experiences like this:

“I’ve been on buses that filled to an inhumane capacity, with commuters packed in like desperate refugees or sows to the slaughter. Still, the seat beside me remained empty. I once watched a woman tolerate being wedged between a foul-smelling man with roaming hands and a perspiring giant with a hairy armpit an inch from her face, yet she staunchly refused to collapse comfortably into the seat available at my side. To be fair, she might’ve been enjoying the feel-up, but judging by her expression of disgust and the dirty looks she kept shooting at me, I think not. Why wouldn’t she just sit? And what had I done to deserve the evil eye? Had I contaminated an otherwise perfectly good seat by situating my deadly girth beside it?” (Posted on freshyarn.com)

Kim did not sit idly by. She got creative. She designed a fake book cover on her home computer, complete with bar code, a picture of a large cartoon woman on a scale, a faux author (Kimberly Cox, PhD, the name of one of her childhood tormentors). The jacket got wrapped around a biography and Kim proceeded to “read” from it every day in public for the next four months.

Reactions ranged from double-takes to whispers to drop-jawed confusion and fear. One young woman actually called her friend on her cell and said, in a not-so-quiet voice, “Cheryl, it’s me. Listen. I’m on the 79 bus and I’m sitting across from this woman who’s reading a book called, Fat is Contagious: How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Can Make You Fat. No, I’m serious. Yes. I know it’s mind-boggling. Should I ask? O.K., well, can you check Amazon for me?”

Read the rest of this entry, and chime in on the debate, at Leslie Goldman’s blog, The Weighting Game.