Fat acceptance in France

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This is a very interesting article, and there didn't seem to be any OMGOBESITYEPIDEMIC slant to the majority of it. Granted, the first woman Cox interviewed was French and thin (a former fattie) who does not believe you can be fat and happy and that it has bad repercussions on your health. She also doesn't think you can dress well if you're fat (of course not, designers haven't yet come to the conclusion that some fat women have money to spend on their clothes, so they aren't designing for larger bodies). She says when you are fat, your self-confidence and esteem go down (well duh, when you hear/see on a daily basis how disgusting and worthless you are because of your size, it's damned hard to be self-confident and have any self-esteem at all). I think she is maybe projecting how she felt when she was fat onto all fat women, and not all fat women think they are lumps and ugly (hooray for them, and for those of us who are working on loving ourselves at whatever size we happen to be).
But the rest of the article explains why the French find fat distasteful, what a small group of women have done to change the way fat people are treated, and then an interview with Velvet D'Amour. There is also an audio clip of what Velvet said to a woman at a swimming pool who called her a whale. That clip alone was worth going to read the article.