The Fat Acceptance Movement
There’s a good old rant and discussion going on at HealingMagicHands place about this ridiculous “movement” (feel free to join us there) and it reminded me of this Time article I read last week.
To my mind, promoting obesity as “fun” is the same as promoting anorexia and other eating disorders as healthy lifestyle options.
I have been both obese and borderline anorexia thin in my lifetime and neither of them have felt healthy. I am very overweight at the moment and, now that I am off chemo, I am working on a new lifestyle eating & exercise plan. Not just a diet. Because you cannot successfully lose weight simply by cutting calories – that just fucks up your metabolism. You need to DO MORE too. It took ten years for me to get this fat (at a rate of about five pounds a year) so it would be unrealistic to think I could lose it quickly. Which is why the focus will be on becoming more active and doing more, as well as making a few simple diet changes.
But for the record … FAT IS NOT FUN. And I wouldn’t like to be “accepted” as an overweight lazy excuse-maker who doesn’t want to take any personal responsibility for how I look and feel. I mean, would you?
casa azahar 
Thanks for the post, Az. I think I’ve said my piece over at HMH!
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Fat acceptance doesn’t have to do with being irresponsible. It has to do with the fact, based on many studies, that even with
dietlifestyle changes and exercise, most people fail to lose more than about 10 % of their body weight and keep it off. It also has to do with the fact, based on many studies, that fat is not killing us, that people who are classified as “overweight” based on current fads, are the longest lived, with both “normal” and “obese” as next longest. It’s accepting that every pill and potion, and surgery offered to get rid of obesity is dangerous in and of itself, more dangerous, to my mind, than carrying the extra weight. You cannot decide that someone carrying even a hundred pounds of extra weight is irresponsible and lazy. They may be, but that’s like judging that some race or ethnic group is lazy, just because of their skin tone. Fat people are the only ones you can call names anymore, and despise.Good for you for trying to get healthy. But just do that, try to get healthy, and don’t peg it to a number on a scale. For more in-depth coverage of the studies involved, by someone with a science background that reads the actual studies, you can go to Junk Food Science.
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“most people fail to lose more than about 10 % of their body weight and keep it off.”
Most people? I have a very hard time accepting this as a “fact”, SS. And it also seems to me that it’s pretty easy to find “scientific studies” on the internet that back up just about any viewpoint. I agree with you that not all fat people are irresponsible and lazy, but I also cannot believe the studies that portray overweight people as helpless victims. And here I am not talking about people who are 10-20 pounds overweight, which I agree can have a beneficial effect on a person’s general health. Nor am I talking about people with physical handicaps, or those on certain medications, which clearly affect body weight. But c’mon. If someone can no longer see their feet or needs an arm extension tool so they can wipe their own butts … how can this be regarded as “healthy”? How did they ignore the fact of their increasing bulk until it got to such an extreme state? This is what I mean by being “irresponsible”.
As for lazy … well okay, I’m not lazy, but my lifestyle did become a lot more sedentary after I had a hysterectomy ten years ago, without me adjusting my food intake. I don’t feel like I overeat, and I almost never eat junk food, but clearly there is an imbalance going on somewhere or I wouldn’t be this fat. And it is also clear to me that I have been in denial to a certain extent, otherwise I would have made healthier choices much sooner.
If you went back to the US in the 1940s you would find very few obese people. Just like if you came to Spain today. It’s far too soon for the recent increase in morbid obesity to have any sort of real genetic cause because our genes don’t change within the span of a generation or two. Sure there have always been people who are prone to being overweight, for various reasons, but again, this doesn’t explain away the fact that in North America obesity has risen so drastically within a relatively short period of time. So to me this says that most cases of obesity have to be caused by lifestyle choices. Likewise I do not see any comparison between obesity and, for example, skin colour or sexual orientation. I’ve seen this argument made before and find it spurious.
And while I may come across a bit harsh towards overweight people it is actually the helpless victim attitude that annoys me. I do feel sorry for people whose metabolisms have been fucked up by years of yo-yo dieting, and for those who are psychologically damaged and have self esteem problems because of being overweight. Based on my own personal experience I know what a vicious cycle that can become. But as with all change … it don’t come easy and it doesn’t happen overnight. And I think that’s what most people forget, and which is most likely the real reason they don’t lose more than 10% of their body weight and keep it off.
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There’s a world of difference between being a little plump but essentially healthy and being obese and putting too much strain on one’s organs, skeleton and musculature.
Similarly, as Az says, being skinny does not necessarily equate to being healthy or fit – there are plenty of skinny people with clogged arteries from smoking and weak muscles etc etc who are both unhealthy and unfit.
Its all about balance, as are so many things in life.
And as for the ‘facts’ about obese people living longer – I’m afraid that is spurious. The cultures with the longest average lifespans are those – like Japan and India – where obesity is still not the norm.
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I’d say this is the kind of thing that makes some people overreact
Writer Kinda Apologizes For Fat Remarks
I’d happily choke the neck of anyone bitching because Penney’s moved downtown and she couldn’t FIND HER SIZE TWO! What a disaster! In good enough shape to do a novice competition, I was maybe a ten. Twits like this, or guys who trash “fat chicks,” deserve to be sat on by several.
But there’s no sense confusing that just irritation with insistence that it’s really not hurting you any to be way too fat.
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For the Complete Guide to Enabling, Excuses and Blaming Others about Your Weight, go to Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose.
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Ian, thanks for that. I was groping for a way to characterize some of the stuff I saw there.
I was toying with “Adore Any Amount Of Fat And Everything That Goes With It Or You’re A Bad Person” but it didn’t have that zing.
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Wow, that really is scary stuff, ian.
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I’ve been visiting Kate for some time, and I find some of her feminist stuff very compelling. But I could not have found a better way to describe her, and the other FA blogs, than that wonderful phrase Ian came up with.
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Gee, eat less and do more. Whoda thunk it?
Small Change, Big Weight-loss Payoff
This is why I want my focus to be on doing more. I think I eat okay most of the time though there are some changes I want to make. The main difference since I started putting on weight was that I was less active than before. Having said that, I have spent the past year doing very little exercise (three major abdominal operations and two bouts of chemo are real energy killers) and this is the first year since the hysterectomy (1999) that I haven’t put on any weight. Hmmm…
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This is definitely the way. I am also on the plump side, always have been. Two years ago I had lost almost 7 kg by essentially reducing snacks and eating lots of fruits. NOT the frozen fruit advised in the article, in Italy we have wonderful fruit, I would not bother with frozen horrors.
The problem is that as soon as one goes back to the old eating habits, like I did because of a stressful time, all the weight comes back.
It’s a slow process but who needs to lose weight fast? I will do it again as soon as I have the concentration to keep myself in check.
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Well, that is the main point, isn’t it, Letizia? Other than that small majority of naturally thin people (Nog & nursemyra come to mind) most of us have to be aware of what we eat so as not to put on weight. Which means making sensible lifestyle changes and sticking to them. Going on a DIET and then returning to the old habits is what creates the yo-yoing damage to one’s metabolism.
I’m not a naturally thin person. The times in my life I’ve been very thin – actually too thin – took a LOT of work. I ate next to nothing, went to the gym every day (sometimes twice a day) as well as going for morning runs in the park. It was an obsessive and not very happy way to live.
I lost about ten kilos after my first cancer-related operation in May 2008, mostly because I’d spend ten days not eating anything at all and then for a month afterwards could barely manage to eat even 3/4 of a sandwich before feeling full and needing to lie down.
The changes I’m making now won’t be drastic ones because they have to be changes I can live with always. And I have no desire to be thin again. Pleasantly plump would be just fine with me. 🙂
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Meanwhile, seems it’s best not to get too gungho the other way either …
Orthorexia nervosa – a fixation with healthy eating.
Healthy food obsession sparks rise in new eating disorder
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I suspect that this “new” disorder, which I’ve heard of before, is nothing more than a way of being OCD — a legitimate problem — which will now be misused as an amateur armchair diagnosis to belittle people like me who really don’t want the ice cream, thank you. Or worse, to whang on people who really do react to some foods and are necessarily rigid about avoiding them. You watch.
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Well, people already look at me like I’ve got four heads when I tell them I don’t like chocolate …
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This should be clear to anyone who travels outside the US – noticeably fewer obese people in almost every other country in the world.
Food Habits More Important Than Genes
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