I AM FAT . There are days when I feel lucky to live in the city and county of San Francisco, the first jurisdiction in the United States to provide guidelines on how to prevent discrimination based on height and weight. And there are days, like May 20, when I am listening to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on channel 26 and I hear Sup. Gerardo Sandoval present a resolution to get soda machines out of public facilities, using the 300,0000-deaths-from-obesity-a-year number as a reason. Having antidiscrimination guidelines doesn't do much good when leaders in the community perpetuate the fear of being fat.

Fat activists are familiar with the 300,0000-deaths-from-obesity-a-year number. It is often quoted and rarely cited. Why is that? In Big Fat Lies (Gurze Books, 2002) author Glenn Gaesser notes that Drs. J. Michael MiGinnis and William H. Foege published a paper in the November 1993 Journal of the American Medical Association on the causes of death in the United States, in which they said diet and exercise patterns were the cause of death for 300,000 people annually. The doctors made no mention of the weight of those people.

Gaesser goes on to note that a junk food-and-couch potato lifestyle is, in fact, unhealthy – but that there is no justification for equating that kind of health issue with a physical characteristic, like fatness.

My extremely thin friends, who eat junk food and never move, are not as healthy as I, who eschew junk food and walk and swim. MiGinnis and Foerge have made efforts to correct the understanding of their data, but it is still being misused in the halls of public policy.

But what about soda machines in public facilities? I completely support getting them out of public facilities. I rarely drink soda. It is even more rare that I drink the two most often consumed brands of soda. I have issues with huge multinational conglomerates. And let me be clear: I am really very fat.

I have a friend, an athlete, who drinks large bottles of Coke every day. It can't be good for her. But if you saw the two of us on the street, you would assume that I drink soda and she does not. And you would be wrong.

I often listen to channel 26. I think the district-elected Board of Supervisors is one of the most politically hopeful things happening in an otherwise politically dark time. And Sandoval is one of my favorites. But we need a teach-in at city hall. We need the board to understand the complexity of fat experience. We need public policy makers who don't accept the rhetoric of the medical and diet industries, both of which are vested in selling diet drugs, risky surgeries, and weight-loss programs.

We need to elevate the language and not use hollow statistics to make the case against bad food and drink. We need a public health community that can figure out how to encourage healthy choices without demonizing a body type. Because in San Francisco it is not acceptable to discriminate on the basis of height or weight.