It is a picture of a Slumber Party Barbie set from 1965. It comes complete with:

Pink Satin Pajama Top
Pink Satin Pajama Bottoms
Pink Robe with Sash
Pink Open Toe Heels with Blue Pompons
Pink Scale
How To Lose Weight Book
Pink Curlers (6)
Bobby Pins (6)
Blue Brush & Comb

The scales, which were permanently set at 110lbs, were removed from the 1966 version.

Source

One of them is Fatbet.net – Complete with catchy phrase “YOU BET YOUR ASS”. The basic premise is that you bet (or wager) against your friends about how much weight you can lose.

I registered for the free account, agreeing to the terms and conditions that I would seek some advice from a medical professional, that I would obey gambling legislation in my country/state, and that:

1. I understand that the creators of Fatbet.net are not medical or weight-loss professionals. I’m not sure they’re even professionals.
2. ….If someone gets upset because something I wrote was mean-spirited, I will apologize and try to make it up to them.
3. I understand that all others in any Fatbet group that I join will be able to see the amount of weight I want to lose (but not my actual weight), and they will be able to monitor my progress toward my weight-loss goal.

Then you are encouraged to set guidelines for the bet. Fatbet.net encourages you to follow one of two methods.

1) Everyone picks the amount they will lose. Fatbet.net say you should pick an amount that is “realistic and safe” but go on to state that “if someone sets a goal that is clearly too easy, they should be ridiculed on the message board until they adjust their goal” (um see terms and conditions 2 above).

2) The person initiating the bet sets a target for everyone.

Betting relies on an honour system where everyone logs their own weight loss, but they do encourage you to buy some digital scales and only include people in the bet that you trust.

Like any weight loss website, Fatbet.net have some ‘research’ that they say indicates that the program works… although they admit:

We’re not going to lie and say losing weight is easy. There is suffering involved. We knew that the competition, metrics, and accountability of setting up Fatbets helped us meet our goals, so we spent some quality time on Google one day trying to find out why. Calling this research is stretching it, but we did find some material that supports why the Fatbet concept works.

They research is actually some points about weight loss from another weight loss site. They end up with a quote from Self Magazine

Women who lost weight, then got on the scale daily for the next 18 months had the lowest recurrence of regain

Fatbet response: If SELF Magazine says it, that’s all the validation we need. Research: DONE.

You can also check out other groups who have taken part in this, including the Pie Hole Rangers, Whipped Marshmallows, and the Vegas Fat Asses.

If you ask me, betting on weight loss is taking a massive gamble with your health. I couldn’t easily find any information which discouraged teenagers from taking part in this site and there were no obvious warnings about the potential impacts of setting extreme weight loss goals.

Gambling on weight loss is dumb. It is a major gamble with your health and wellbeing.

I’m really hoping that these types of websites don’t catch on.

Today I got to do some press on Australian telly about the study and thought you may like to see it.

Would love your comments. It is about 1 minute 50 into the segment. Click here to go to the segment.

Frances Lochie from Corpulent

Well what a lovely response we have had from everyone about our Fatosphere study!

If you would like to check out a couple of the articles (featuring a terrific photo of Kath Read), here are some links.

Article on The Conversation

Monash University News

Also the lovely Frances Lochie and I did a radio interview this morning with Deborah Cameron on ABC Radio 702. Deborah was terrific! We even got to take some talk back calls. Unfortunately the last caller was advocating for weight loss and we didn’t get to respond. But I think her commentary shows that there are many people who spend decades hating themselves for who they are. Maybe if she had found the Fatopshere she wouldn’t have had to have gone through that?

So what was the study about? For a long time now I have been curious about the misconceptions about, and attacks on the Fat Acceptance movement. So about 18 months ago, my terrific PhD student Marissa Dickins embarked on trying to find out what the Fatosphere was really about. In particular we were curious about how Fat Acceptance bloggers used the Fatosphere to proactively respond to fat stigma.

In dominant obesity discourses, there is a clear assumption that if we can just get people to lose weight, then fat stigma will disappear. Rather than challenging the stigma, we expect fat people to conform to a medical and aesthetic norm of thinness. Some recent papers have even suggested that once fat people lose significant amounts of weight, that they themselves realize they are at fault for causing the stigma.

My take on this is that the undesirability of being fat, and the moral assumptions that come along with that, cause many obese adults to internalise weight based stigma. And because of this they spend significant amounts of time dieting and exercising their socks of trying to overcome that stigma. For many adults this pattern becomes more and more severe, the more the attempts fail.

So what happens when individuals start to say a big FU to this pathway and start to reframe the way they think about health and wellbeing? What happens when you take the focus off weight loss, and start to fight the stigma?

This is what we explored in our study.

We found that the journey to the Fatosphere is not an easy one for most people. People don’t suddenly wake up and think: ‘Hey, today I’m going to totally go against everything I’ve been told my whole life about how bad I am because I’m fat. And I’m going to say screw you to that dominant ideal. I’m going to start taking care of myself.’

Rather, the journey to self acceptance was a long one. In the paper we use a model to show the different stages that people go through in coming into the Fat Acceptance community.

Perhaps most importantly was what happened when people started interacting with the Fat Acceptance movement. For me one of the most interesting things was the extent to which the Fatosphere allowed people a ‘voice’ to counter stigma. That it empowered people to share experiences, and challenge dominant views about fatness. In many instances, it provided a safe space, a place to celebrate, share, embrace, and most importantly support – without a pressure to be on a journey to thinness. It also made me realise how absent those spaces are in the offline world.

And with this in mind, we found that the Fatosphere was also health promoting. Participants in the study described their mental and emotional health improving, and that they started taking part in activity because they enjoyed it rather than doing it just because it was part of a weight loss regime.

We can’t make any conclusions from this paper about whether Fat Acceptance is good for everyone. But I think the research  shows that this is a powerful model for people to respond to and feel supported with the constant stigma that they face in society.

A massive thank you to everyone who took part in the study. And to Bri King who is also an author on the paper and gave us such great help in contacting everyone and thinking things through.

We are now working on other papers from the study. There was a huge amount of data, so we look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months.

If you would like a copy of the paper, please don’t hesitate to ask

Dickins M, Thomas SL, King B, Lewis S, Holland K. The Role of the Fatosphere in Fat Adults’ Responses to Obesity Stigma: A Model of Empowerment Without a Focus on Weight Loss. Qual Health Res. 2011 Aug 2. [Epub ahead of print]

Obese adults face pervasive and repeated weight-based stigma. Few researchers have explored how obese individuals proactively respond to stigma outside of a dominant weight-loss framework. Using a grounded theory approach, we explored the experiences of 44 bloggers within the Fatosphere-an online fat-acceptance community. We investigated participants’ pathways into the Fatosphere, how they responded to and interacted with stigma, and how they described the impact of fat acceptance on their health and well-being. The concepts and support associated with the fat-acceptance movement helped participants shift from reactive strategies in responding to stigma (conforming to dominant discourses through weight loss) to proactive responses to resist stigma (reframing “fat” and self-acceptance). Participants perceived that blogging within the Fatosphere led them to feel more empowered. Participants also described the benefits of belonging to a supportive community, and improvements in their health and well-being. The Fatosphere provides an alternative pathway for obese individuals to counter and cope with weight-based stigma.