Blog News and Review Guidelines

First, the news: I'd like to welcome nightgigjo on board as co-moderator of this blog! That means that you can send reviews to either her @jo (at nightgig) dot com or to me @the dot bald dot soprano(at)gmail dot com.

Second: We're looking for more reviews!

If you're interested in writing a gym review for this blog, here are some guidelines you should be aware of:

The purpose of this blog is to help people find gyms that are welcoming to members who have widely different ability levels and body shapes. The corollary of this, of course, is that we also welcome reviews of gyms where you've had bad experiences as fat people/people who aren't exercising to lose weight. We welcome reviews from around the world; we will use keywords to sort them by country and city.

Be sure to include the following information in/with your review:

• the name of the gym
• the city/state/country that you're from
• if it's a women-only gym, you should make that clear
• be sure to tell us how we should credit you

Information that would be good to include:

• -price per month
• -information specifically on accessibility for people with disabilities

We look forward to hearing from you!

An Introduction

This blog was inspired by the comment thread on this post about gyms over at Shapely Prose. Since various people asked about a blog for reviews of gyms from a fat acceptance or fat-friendly perspective, I decided to provide a space for such useful (and often hard to find) information.

I'm interested in reviews of gyms from all over (I'll give them a location-based keyword) which discuss, in addition to things like quality of equipment and classes, information on how people are treated by the staff --especially how fat people are treated, how open they are to a HAES philosophy about exercise (movement for fun rather than for weight loss), and the extent to which people are bombarded by weight-loss information and/or pressure.

If anyone is interested in co editing/moderating this blog with me, let me know @the dot bald dot soprano(at)gmail dot com