Debbie says: I’m sorry to say I never heard of Kuttin Kandi (also known as Candice Custodio-Tan) before I read this article, clearly because I’ve been hiding under a rock. The woman is a force to be reckoned with: The first woman to reach the DMC USA Finals and a founding member of the all-female [...]

Debbie says: Post-traumatic stress disorder as a publicly recognizable syndrome was first formally named when I was almost 30. I can remember the first time a friend told me she had it, and how it sounded kind of clunky and unreliable in my ears; I can trace the progression from there to now, when I [...]

Debbie says: It’s climate change! It’s junk science! It’s fatphobia! It’s all three at once! “New Theory: CO2 makes you fat: It all started with a Danish scientist, Lars-Georg Hersoug, who made an astonishing discovery: “both fat and thin people taking part in the studies over a 22-year period had put on weight – and [...]

Lynne Murray says I always ask “who benefits” from any given “social problem.” The $60 billion diet industry or, as Dr. Deb Burgard has called it, “The Weight Cycling Industry” is in the business of cashing in on a problem of its own creation. Any truly efficient method of changing body size would put them [...]

Debbie says: I’d like to believe that a “retirement community” would be one of the few places in the Western world where we could age however we age, and not worry too much about how we look, or how changes in what we need affect how we are treated. But the Harbor’s Edge retirement community [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We were very impressed by this article by Valerie Tarico at truthout.org . Tarico couches excellent contemporary birth-control information in the context of Rick Santorum’s recent attack on birth control (“It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Happy New Year! We’ve been big fans of s.e. smith at This Ain’t Livin’ for a long time, so it’s great to have such a timely post to write about. In the maelstrom of New Year’s resolutions, she wants us all to remember: Fat hatred kills. It kills every day in [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We’ve been doing Thanksgiving posts since we started this blog in 2005, and almost all of them have begun with some version of a lament for how hard it was in the previous year to find things to be thankful for. This year is very different. Just this week, a very [...]

Lynne Murray says: Cat Protection Disclaimers I’ll start by confessing that I’ll do anything I can for my cats, though because of my disability, I’m forced to buy food for them at a store that will not only deliver but bring everything upstairs (courier services no longer do this). But there’s another reason that I [...]

Debbie says: Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1981, was a formative book for me. I’ve always thought of it as two books at once: first, it’s a book about the history of IQ studies and the false belief that Africans have smaller skulls (and thus, by inaccurate extension) less brain capacity [...]