It’s time for Throwback Thursday, where we feature posts dredged up from Ragen’s old LiveJournal. Ragen would rather the internet forgot everything she wrote before she was a fat activist, so she deleted it all within days of us discovering it. Luckily the internet never forgets. What doesn’t she want you to know? Read on!
In today’s update we learn that Ragen believes she has psychic powers. Not only can she read people’s minds against their will, but she can shield her own mind from other psychics and make them physically uncomfortable if she wants.
This is the same person who proudly announced she had “outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted” one of her critics when they decided to stop posting about her because they believed she was mentally ill.
Ragen Chastain from Dances with Fat is a mentally ill person
“After all this time, I just came to the only sane conclusion, Ragen Chastain might be a mentally ill person…
[…]
This is why I come to the only logical action that anyone could take, to not give any more attention to this mentally ill person, to not feed her disease and desire to be the center of attention.
This is the last time this blog features Ragen Chastain.”
fatpeoplelove.tumblr.com
Dances with Facts 
this shit just makes me pity her. ugh. good post though.
Best post ever. This is like a horror movie. “I’m Ragen and I’m in your mind.”
Omg YES!
Seriously though, I’m really starting to pity her!
The phrase, “crazy as a shithouse rat” comes to mind.
I am trying to discover why this woman seems to be inspiring such anger.
There seem to be several blogs and web pages that target her as lying, or as being ill. I am just learning about her today, and am curious about the level of animosity she seems to draw.
Thank you in advance for shedding light on this.
Ragen Chastain is a college dropout who calls herself a “UT alum” and “trained researcher”. Her old Livejournal reveals an extremely narcissistic individual who was unable to stick with any weight loss plan for more than a few days, but constantly struggled with her weight affecting her ability to dance. Ragen desperately wanted to become a top flight professional dancer, but instead of losing weight and putting in the work, she eventually gave up and started a dance company for fat people so she could call herself a professional. After a long string of failed businesses, she “retired” in her mid-30s when she realized she could monetize Health At Every Size in the form of a blog and speaking engagements.
Ragen has “national dance champion” titles against one or two other couples at the non-competitive newbie level of a small regional dance circuit that used to be called “Fun Country”. She is the slowest finisher in the history of the Seattle Marathon, taking over 12 hours and holding up the race volunteers for four hours after the last finisher, a 77 year old lady. She walked a 5K in 70 minutes after berating the volunteers for not having 4XL t-shirts. She is “training” for an IRONMAN in October that she has no intention of actually entering because it’s physically impossible at at her weight over 300 lbs (e.g. her required power output in the bike section is higher than world champion female racers). Despite all this she calls herself an elite national dance champion marathoner and future IRONMAN. It’s extremely insulting to real athletes who actually put in the time and effort to compete at a level worthy of the titles she claims.
She also makes truly bizarre claims like having psychic powers or that her mother “sold” her for an air conditioner in Mali (because 300 pound women are the “standard of beauty” in country ravaged by poverty and malnutrition). She claims she was 135 lbs and 7% body fat in high school during her “eating disorder” days (i.e. an accidental Ms. Universe) where she was eating 1100 calories/day and exercising for 8-10 hours/day. She claims she gained weight during inpatient VLCD treatment eating under 800 calories/day. It’s totally ludicrous.
Our issue with Ragen is that she uses all her false credentials to advise her followers to ignore the advice of their doctors, and give up on losing weight like her. She pretends to be an elite athlete who is unencumbered by her weight when all evidence points to the contrary. She claims there is no evidence that any more than a tiny fraction of people can lose weight, no evidence obesity causes any health problems, no evidence losing weight improves health, etc. Her analysis of medical research is laughably bad, but she’s still able to get a limited number of speaking engagements as well as quotes in major news publications because journalists do not fact check her properly and her credentials appear to be solid in passing. This blog is set up so anyone putting her name into a Google search at least has the opportunity to find out who the real Ragen Chastain is.
Sorry for taking so long to answering. It’s not animosity, although she can certainly be frustrating.
Ragen has embellished and lied about her credentials from the start. She knows just how to word things so that they imply one thing yet in reality, the facts tell us different. Her being a ‘trained researcher’ and ‘turnaround CEO’ really exemplifies that because if you dig deeper in her claims, you will realize that she is a college dropout. And she worked as a temp until she quit to start her own business. With a few side businesses along the way. Then a few years later, she quit to become a fat activist full time.
And while she identifies as a ‘queer,’ just 10 years ago she was divorced from a woman. In a poly relationship for a very short time. Then living with a guy. Few years later, he dumped her. While they were together, he ‘swore’ he was never going to get married again because the ex was basically satan. Two years after dumping her? Married with a kid.
Back to Ragen – one short stint with another couple. Then she moved in with another guy. Then they broke up and she moved to California with Julianne.
Is your head spinning? Because mine is. Everything about Ragen just screams opportunist. And she is preying on people that are weaker than her.
And that is why she is an asshole.
I don’t think anyone is weaker than Ragen.
[…] them, even though she was fine with leaving up hundreds of other posts, like her claims about psychic powers. Unfortunately these posts were deleted several years ago when she migrated to the WordPress […]
One note: the fat people love tumblr is gone. Ragen’s claim is that the fatpeoplehate tumblr briefly changed their name. Hard to know either way, but one of the reasons I’m even on this site is because it’s NOT fatpeoplehate.
The original reason is because she gives off sketchy-as-hell vibes so I went looking.
I just found out about her because an overweight friend of mine has been reading her blog recently. “95% of people can’t lose weight.” WTF is that? And where does she get off making claims that obesity isn’t linked to all sorts of chronic diseases? She keeps referring to all of this amazing research she has done, but it is just garbage.
This Ragen chick is nutter… like definitely mentally ill. I’d feel pretty bad for her if she wasn’t publishing all of that harmful misinformation. Eh, I still feel bad for her, but she also makes me angry. And despite what she would think/say, I’m not angry because she’s fat, but because she is a liar and a dumb one, at that.
To compare herself to an athlete… Seriously, what a narcissistic bitch.
[…] of her training plan on her training blog (the irony of Ragen making fun of “psychics” should not be ignored). Ragen says her training plan is “proprietary” (her trainer’s plans […]
If Ragen ever tries to get a real job, her resume will probably get her sent to a mental hospital
“psychic dancer ex-CEO researcher elite athlete blogger”
[…] Mali and can never visit or she will “not legally be allowed to leave“. At one time she claimed to be a psychic who could remotely assault people with her mind. She spent six years finishing high school because […]
Still, the world she created, and the way she writes about it, is very– well, I imagine that if “mind crawling” existed, then we would get blog posts like this about it. It’s very convincingly written, albeit the subject matter prevents one from wondering.
[…] Mali and can never visit or she will “not legally be allowed to leave“. At one time she claimed to be a psychic who could remotely assault people with her mind. She spent six years finishing high school because […]
I find it disgusting that a person like this would prefer endangering millions of people with her stupid fat logic and health “tips” than slim up her fat ass.