Fat and happy

Padre Gold isn’t a fancy bar. The American Legion-owned watering hole and banquet room is a low-key neighborhood joint in Linda Vista with a nice-size parking lot, cheap drinks and a sweet wooden checkerboard dance floor. There’s nothing frilly or pretentious about the place, which makes it the perfect setting for Kathy Hernandez and her new Big Beautiful Women club night, Club Catalina.

“Five dollars to dance or free if you’re just here to drink,” says Kathy, roosted at her typical spot at a desk just inside the doorway beneath a huge American Legion logo painted on the yellowish-gold walls.

It’s just after 9 p.m. and the crowd is slowly starting to trickle in. Kathy’s carefully painting on a second coat of “Big Money Frost” green nail polish to complete her look for the night. It’s a week away from St. Patty’s Day, but next week she’s taking Club Catalina on a field trip to the Santee drive-in, and the week after that she’s got an Easter/spring-fling theme planned. Kathy’s red wig and bright-green, oversized plastic hat make her blue eyes even more piercing than usual tonight. Her smile, too, seems prettier. Maybe it’s the perfectly applied lipstick or her soft white skin, which, by the way, makes her look about half of her 41 years.

Kathy’s got a beautiful face. She’s been told that her entire life, especially by people who are meeting her for the first time. It’s a nice but unintentionally underhanded compliment that many bigger women get from family and perfect strangers alike.

“Your face is so pretty,” they say. Translated, that means: “If only you could lose some weight.”

Kathy twiddles her necklace, a gold chain with a pendant shaped like a baby with her son’s ruby-red birth stone in the middle. She never takes that necklace off—not even when she showers.

“Hey, how are you doin’?” Kathy asks as a few Navy boys pay the cover and walk on through. “Que paso, A.J.?” she says to the next guy.

Kathy’s fluent in Spanish. Her ex-husband is Mexican and, when explaining the whole Big Beautiful Women (BBW) club thing to outsiders who aren’t big, she often likes to cite her husband’s reasoning, “If he saw you, he’d say, ‘Eeeeew, fea flaquita’” (translation: Eeeew, ugly little skinny girl). Some guys feel like they’re hugging a bag of bones when they hug a skinny chick, she says.

Kathy’s bright-red phone rings. “No, you know what, he didn’t come,” she says in a serious tone. “He said he was gonna come and he didn’t come. Don’t make excuses for him…. OK, well, just get here when you get here and do not drive too fast, OK?”

Kathy has a strict policy of no-nonsense and self-respect when it comes to men. Men, it turns out, think they can get away with certain things when it comes to dating a fat chick. She says they try to pull the ol’ midnight booty call, the “Let’s just hang out at my house instead of going out in public” move, or they’ll follow a girl out to the parking lot after ignoring her at a club the whole night, and only after they’re out of their friends’ sight will they ask her out. But that crap doesn’t fly with Kathy and her crew—no way.

In an official-hostess role now, Kathy gets out of her seat and makes her way around the club. After three years’ experience promoting another BBW night in San Diego, Kathy knows her role. It’s her job to make everyone, especially newcomers, feel welcome. She’s got to herd people onto the dance floor if they aren’t dancing already. She has to take dozens of digital pictures to go up on the club’s website, and she has to monitor the one or two Padre Gold regulars who inevitably find their way into the banquet hall part of the bar without paying the $5 cover—usually she finds them grinding up against “her girls,” as she calls them, a big smile plastered across their faces.

The guys who come to Club Catalina every Saturday are a mishmash of military men, young black guys, old white guys, corn-fed Midwesterners and everything in between. Some guys treat it like any other club—it’s a meat market serving up bigger-than-average racks of lamb. For others, it’s a chance to take their longtime ongoing personal ad, “SM seeking fun-loving BBW,” off the Internet and into real life. Other guys, though, say they just go for the friendly atmosphere. They say everyone’s just out to have fun without pretension at Club Catalina, and they dig that.

The girls who come to the club are one big group of friends. They all know each other and treat each other with the kind of shit-talking yet funny swagger most save for bosom buddies. It’s not like other clubs, where clumps of females stand around in their closed-off, cliquey way—most of the girls are outgoing and won’t hesitate to invite you to their table for a drink or drag your ass on the dance floor.

The BBW community is tight and surprisingly small, considering the size of San Diego. If you’re checking out Club Catalina for the first time, both the girls and guys want you not only to come back, but to come back with all your friends. And if you’re one of those young BBWs who didn’t know this type of club existed, or didn’t know you yourself could be categorized as a BBW, they really, really want you.

“I’m 38, and I have not always had this same attitude my whole life,” says Kimberly Johnston, a single mother who 15 years ago was wearing clothing five sizes too big for her because she thought she could hide her fat. Now she alters her clothing by hand to make everything hug her voluptuous curves. “If I had this attitude when I was younger—not that I didn’t go out at all—but I always felt like a fish out of water. Had I had this attitude back then, man, I would have been a completely different person. I would have been going out all the time. I guess I would have evolved a lot quicker.”

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But evolution for fat people is actually more like adaptation to a world that doesn’t understand or accept them. Social groups like the one found at Club Catalina exist in cities across the country because the thin-obsessed contemporary United States culture isn’t so kind to bigger folks. People like Kathy have found that it’s better, or at least easier, to separate from the mainstream and form a subculture where size acceptance is the raison d’être. As things stand, fat people are still metaphorically sitting in the back of the bus.

“Would it be acceptable for me to go over to a guy in a wheelchair and start berating him because he’s in a wheelchair?” asks Kathy. “That wouldn’t be socially acceptable. But three guys over there walking by and going, ‘Look at that fat cow.’ Is that socially acceptable? Right now it is. And I’ve watched mothers with children, they go, ‘Mommy, she’s fat.’ Do the moms say anything to that kid? Usually not. They go, ‘Hmm, yeah, she’s fat.’ But it doesn’t bother me. It can’t. If I let it, it’d eat me up inside. If I had to worry about these three guys coming in and looking at me with disgust and saying, “Eew, would you do her?’ I’ve actually heard that. What am I supposed to say? Should I call them assholes? I’ve done that before, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t do it every time.”

As if the social ostracizing wasn’t enough—grocery aisles are still too narrow, seatbelts too short, bathroom stalls too small, clothing too limited, airplane seats nearly impossible, medical equipment like MRI machines not accommodating—according to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), if you’re fat, it’s harder to get or keep a good job. Peggy Howell, spokesperson for NAAFA, says a majority of letters the group gets come from people who believe they’ve been victims of size discrimination.

“Before I was part of this whole size-acceptance movement,” Howell says, “my own boss told me to lose 20 pounds or lose my job.

“Discrimination against people of size is still rampant,” she continues. “It’s still a very serious matter, and, yes, it is a civil-rights matter. Size crosses all other boundaries. People of size are both genders, all nationalities, all races and all income levels, so singling people out because of our size is not only a civil-rights issue, it’s absurd.”

Even more absurd to Howell are things like Mississippi House Bill 282, a bill introduced last year that would’ve prohibited restaurants with more than five seats from serving people determined to be obese by the state’s Department of Health. The authors of the bill, which was killed shortly after it was introduced, later admitted that it had all been a silly publicity stunt meant to draw attention to Mississippi’s obesity problem. Not funny to those who would’ve been categorized as obese.

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The World Health Organization defines “overweight” as someone with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher. BMI is calculated by weight in kilograms, divided by height in meters, squared. You’re considered obese if your BMI is 30 or higher and morbidly obese if it’s 40 or higher. But in case you haven’t heard the griping coming from the size-acceptance camp—backed up by books like Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann, The Diet Myth by Paul Campos, Dispensing with the Truth by Alicia Mundy, Fat Politics by J. Eric Oliver—BMI isn’t really a good determinant of unhealthy weight, and maybe, just maybe, this whole so-called “obesity epidemic” is a bit out of control. Just not in the way most people think.

BMI critics like to use Tom Cruise as the unwitting spokesperson—the short yet muscled man has a BMI of 31, which makes him technically obese. Using BMI as the standard, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001 to 2004, about two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese and the estimated total cost of obesity in the United States in 2000 was about $117 billion. The point authors like Campos, who’s also a law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, want to make is that the numbers you typically hear associated with the obesity epidemic are inflated. What the numbers suggest is that overweight and obese individuals are likely unhealthy and therefore causing a strain on the medical system.

“It’s not that there’s no health risks involved with being overweight or obese,” Campos says. “It’s not that it’s 100-percent false—it’s just 97-percent false, and the risks are widely exaggerated and manipulated for all kinds of purposes. You know, the pharmaceutical industry is just behind so much of this propaganda so they can get the next generation of diet pills through the pipeline…. It’s estimated that the weight-loss industry pulls in 40 to 50 billion [dollars] a year—double the money people spend on book purchases a year, just to put things in perspective.”

According to the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), all of which rely on BMI to cull their statistics, overweight and obese individuals are at increased risk for numerous diseases and health conditions, including hypertension, type 2 diabetes and strokes.

Campos isn’t saying that’s not true. He’s simply arguing that it’s only people who are in the highest weight ranges who are at risk for health problems. “BMI is set at a ridiculously low level so we can pretend there’s this epidemic going on.”

But why?

Once something is called an “epidemic,” says Abigail Saguy, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, who’s written extensively on obesity and society, media pay attention, the Food and Drug Administration approves drugs quicker, researchers get funding and private health organizations get their good-intentioned messages about proper nutrition and exercise heard. If something’s an epidemic, it gets priority.

Saguy traced the origin of the term “obesity epidemic” to the mid-’90s, after a publication by CDC researchers noticed the increasing number of people who are overweight or obese according to the BMI. Soon after the report was released, Xavier Pi-Sunyer wrote an editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In it, he said, “If this were tuberculosis, we’d call it an epidemic.”

“So it was metaphorical at first,” Saguy explains, “but then the metaphor was dropped and people just use it. Some people know that epidemic can mean ‘more than to be expected,’ but that’s so subjective, because what sort of numbers are we supposed to expect? Most lay readers still hear ‘wild,’ ‘uncontained,’ ‘spread’ and ‘contagion’ when they hear the word ‘epidemic.’”

And more than just finding a nicer, politically correct term, Saguy suggests rethinking or reframing the entire campaign. In a way, she’s saying we should leave fat people alone—it’s the unhealthy people we should be targeting with get-healthy messages. There are plenty of people, she says, who are overweight and healthy.
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Take Rachel Richardson for example. A journalist and graduate student in Cincinnati, Ohio, Richardson writes The-F-Word.org—a blog about food, fat and feminism—and studies the history of eating disorders. She’s also a survivor of bulimia and anorexia—she lost 175 pounds and eventually got down to 125, which was considered an average BMI for her height. “But it required an anorexic lifestyle to maintain,” she says, “and now that I have the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had with food, I’m back to being considered as fat again.”

Richardson is a vegetarian and tries to eat organic and locally grown foods as often as possible, but her picture on her blog shows a full-figured woman most would consider chubby.

Basically, the losers in the war on obesity, according to Saguy, are people like Richardson who are visibly overweight but technically healthy. The huge number of people who fit in that category are continually stigmatized because of a public-health policy that says being fat is inherently bad.

“The commonsense wisdom is that fat is a choice,” Saguy says. “That a lot of people are able to justify their bigotry by blaming fat people for their predicament—you know, I’ve actually heard people say this: ‘I’m doing them a justice by making them feel bad.’ That by stigmatizing fat people you provide an incentive for them to lose weight in the same way you stigmatize smokers to get them to stop smoking. And I have no idea if it works with smoking, but what I know is that it’s rarely effective and it has all sorts of negative effects with weight, often leading people to binge or stay indoors and not go out. In general, I just don’t think social stigma’s a good policy.”

In a study published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that the difference between actual and desired body weight is a stronger predictor than BMI of mental and physical health. In other words, the results raise the possibility that some of the health effects of the obesity epidemic are related to the way people see their bodies, and the way people see their bodies is the way society sees their bodies—fat, disgusting and unhealthy.

“It’s a big mistake to assume that because someone is fat, they have a bad lifestyle,” Campos says. “You know, that they compulsively eat or never exercise, because there are lots of fat people who have perfectly healthy lifestyles. And there are plenty of thin people who have quite unhealthy lifestyles. It’s very dangerous to generalize about that stuff and it’s very socially corrosive to use body mass as a proxy for healthy lifestyles. And it’s also very false to tell fat people that they’ll be better off if they try to make themselves into thin people.

“The fact is,” Campos says, “most diets fail. What we should be doing is recognizing that healthy people come in all sizes and especially that pathologizing heavier bodies doesn’t help anybody. It hurts. The attitude of our public-health authorities is literally that the reason there are fat people is that they have not been informed of the social desirability of thinness, which is just about as crazy as thinking that there are poor people because they just aren’t getting the message that it’s desirable to have money in this country. And, to me, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the population has gotten heavier as the obsession with thinness has gotten more intense.”

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The politics of weight aside, Kathy and her girls are fat and having fun. Back at Padre Gold the morning after Club Catalina, Kathy and three friends show up for a “passion party,” a new take on the Tupperware parties of old, only with candles, sex toys and lotions instead of air-tight lids and durable plastic. The passion party, though, falls through, and the ladies make the best of it by chatting over a pitcher of ice water instead.

“Forget it,” one of the women, Cynthia, says. “I’m having a party soon…. This one, the lady brings plus-size lingerie. She has up to size 8X.”

“What size do you guys think Somber is?” asks Kathy. “I want to buy her a present.”

“Somber” is Susan Marquis. She’s what’s known as a super-size BBW, and she helps Kathy charge cover at the door.

Somber is upward of 500 pounds and, because of her size, has to order her clothing custom-made. She’s never had any luck in the lingerie department, so she makes all her bras and underwear herself. Somber got her nickname years ago. She used to work in the complaint department for a local business and was the only one who could ever calm anyone down. It’s easy to see how—Somber is hilarious and more confident than most women, thick or thin. She drove up to Club Catalina in a small Toyota truck covered in mostly political bumper stickers, including one small yellow one that reads, “Fat people are harder to kidnap.” A long black custom-made velvet dress she was wearing cost her $500. She walked in limping because her heart medication had given her gout.

Healthy or not, Somber thinks it’s important to support Club Catalina and other BBW events. She herself runs a Yahoo! meetup group, San Diego BBW and BHM (big handsome men), which is a group geared toward family-friendly socializing, and she also runs a nonprofit that provides clothing for plus-sized people with low incomes.

“I always try to support this establishment, obviously because I’m a big girl,” Somber says. “But, say if I go out by myself—which I do go by myself because I’m not shy—say I go to ’Canes or InCahoots, people will give me attention because I’m different. And it’s not necessarily negative—I mean, it can get negative sometimes because there are jerks, unfortunately, but you tend to just brush them off because, especially me, I literally have thick skin.” Somber laughs, then goes on to explain that, both outside and inside the BBW world, people as big as her can fall into the fetish category. There are men, like a little Mexican man who was at Club Catalina the night before and has been following Somber around for the past decade, who are fascinated or obsessed with large women. There also exists what are known as “feeders,” men who target mildly overweight women and feed them until they’re huge. And then there are “squashers,” men who pay women over 500 pounds to sit on their chests.

But outside the fetish realm there are men with simple preferences—belly men who like girls with jiggly tummies and, of course, boob guys and butt guys who like the plus-size versions better.

Eventually, the girls decide they don’t know Somber’s size and it’d be better to buy her something else. They move on to the topic of dieting and weight loss.

“It’s my choice not to lose 50 to 60 pounds,” Kimberly Johnston says. “I mean, it’s a vicious cycle, I could tell you all about being fat: You’re depressed, so you eat. Then you feel bad, and then you eat—you know what I mean? I understand how it happens, and it doesn’t make me a bad person because I can’t get out of it. But I did do something about it. I got to the point where I had severe health problems. I was diabetic and severely depressed. My cholesterol was so bad I should be dead. It was so out of control. My whole life was being depressed, sleeping then driving through a drive-through. I couldn’t pull out of it, and I didn’t, so I got weight-loss surgery to get better, and I’ve put some weight back on since then. It’s like any addiction, and I have to learn to live with it. And coming to Club Catalina helps me. I don’t have what it takes to weigh 140 pounds. I weigh 200 pounds and, realistically, I’ll probably weigh 200 pounds for the rest of my life.”

“You know what,” Cynthia adds, “I work in the medical field, and you would not believe the skinny people’s health problems: hypertension, anemia, cholesterol. Matter of fact, just two days ago, a skinny person had cholesterol over 1,000—the whole lipid panel. You know, unreal. And big people come in with lipid panels that look great. You know, I don’t have any health problems at all. In my eyes, health is 90-percent mental, 10-percent physical. It’s the circumstances of what goes on in your life and how you deal with it. I went from 348 and lost 70 pounds. Now I feel fine. If you’re comfortable in your skin being big, who gives a shit, you know what I mean? Promote how you feel. Promote who you are.”    

Club Catalina happens every Saturday night at Padre Gold, 7245 Linda Vista Road. Check out groups.yahoo.com/group/bBWClubCatalina or www.myspace.com/bbwclubcatalina.

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