Marilyn Wann weighs 270 pounds, and she’s not planning to go on a diet anytime soon.

Wann is an outspoken fat activist and author of the book Fat!So? She gave a series of speeches last week for “Love your Body Week,” presented by the Women’s Resource Center.

She describes her opposition to the discrimination against fat people as building on the legacy of the civil rights movement.

Wann said society has an unhealthy and inaccurate stereotype of fat people. She said this stereotype stems from three misconceptions: that people decide their own weight, that a person’s weight indicates how healthy he or she is and that skinny people are better looking than fat people.

People have a genetically predisposed weight that can only be slightly altered by exercise and diet, Wann said. A person could be fat and still be perfectly healthy, she said.

“I really believe in the pleasure principle rather than the punishment principle in terms of food and exercise,” Wann said. “The punishment mentality is discouraging.”

Wann has a self-diagnosed “allergy” to words such as obese and overweight because she says they make the improbable assumption that there is a normal weight.

Medical professionals and scientists who claim that obesity is responsible for health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes are misguided, Wann said.

“Data is analyzed to justify our prejudices?our scientists perpetuate what is going on,” she said. “When you look at medical data, correlation doesn’t prove causation.”

Wann also said that the weight-loss industry is behind a lot of the misconceptions about obesity being a cause for poor health.

“The (American) Heart Association is definitely in the pay of the weight-loss industry,” she said. “There is a lot of money to be made selling weight loss.”

Timothy Smith, a psychology professor studying obesity, says there is little or no evidence to back up Wann’s claims.

“The AHA is motivated mostly to promote research and education,” he said. “I don’t know that there is any evidence linking them to the weight loss industry.”

Wann said she does believe in exercising and eating healthily, but believes the focus should be on health, not weight.

“Take out weight as a goal and just eat healthy and exercise?I believe in the notion of health at every size.”

She advocates people disregarding weight and just focusing on doing exercises they enjoy and eating the healthy types of food they like.

“Your body knows more than anyone else when, what and how much you should eat,” she said.

Kristy Bartley, a counseling coordinator in the Women’s Resource Center, said that historically, most cultures have viewed larger women as beautiful and that the current American view of beauty is unhealthy.

“Why is it that the current female image of beauty as seen by heterosexual males looks like a 15-year-old boy?” Bartley said.

Wann began her crusade to end discrimination against fat people in 1993 after what she calls her “really bad day.”

Two things happened that day that forever changed Wann’s outlook on her weight. First, the guy she was dating told her he was embarrassed to introduce her to his friends because she was fat. Second, she received a letter in the mail informing her that she couldn’t receive health-care insurance because she was classified as morbidly obese.

“I woke up, my silence didn’t protect me?I decided to come out as a fat person,” she said.