They say that ex-Catholics and ex-Smokers can be recognized by others from miles away. I wonder if this goes for dieting, too.
One of the more sociologically interesting things about the whole subject of obesity is how people react to not wanting to be fat.
I don’t mean by dieting. (Actually, dieting may be one of the least interesting subjects to me on earth right now. I’m simply not in the zone for it to fascinate me at the moment. I have, temporarily, reduced my eating life to two simple truisms: Eating healthily is good; Eating poorly is bad. This doesn’t actually determine my diet. It simply provides moral commentary on it from the background of my attendant guilt complexes.)
I mean by how they behave. There is more to diet-related behavior than what you put in your mouth, of course. Including a good deal of what spews out from it.
There was something curious about it, which was this: the writer, once you waded through the swamp of scathing insult, and if you happened to know something about her aside from this piece, is actually promoting a low-carb eating approach. This is rare enough to see in mainstream media that it’s usually almost a celebration.
Alas, the article didn’t actually say anything useful enough to do readers any good, but, I don’t think that was the point of the article anyway.
***
I feel that what the article reveals is something that has nothing to do with food, but with prejudice, and the way that socially people adapt to living within a culture permeated by that prejudice.
Obesity-ism has gotten so pervasive and so brutal that fat people have begun developing a world-sized case of Stockholm Syndrome. They now identify more with the people terrorizing them than with their own feelings or those of others in the same role, past or present.
In part to psychologically distance themselves from the horrible role of victim, they become the aggressor, victimizing others with the same demeaning and snide, patronizing and invalidating forms of insult that bullies have used since time began, no matter what the “-ism” being practiced.
Knight wrote:
Fat gene, my foot. Funny how it seems to manifest itself only in the prosperous, cake-guzzling carb-and-sugar-laden West. Where are the obese Sudanese toddlers? The porky Ethiopians?
The Gary Taubes book “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” debunked the idea that obese people are only found in ‘rich’ countries. Foods that create obesity are available even to–and often moreso for–the poor. I did appreciate that she recognized carbs as a culprit, obviously, but this didn’t seem to take the argument anywhere different than the typically misinformed dietary commentary, which is a bit odd.
She continues:
The excuses that people make for their own fatness drive me mad (I know whereof I speak and am not wholly unsympathetic: I was very fat myself at one point), and you can just see the mileage they’re going to get out of being told that it’s all down to genes. It’s not. It’s down to taking control of your life and down to choice: you can choose to be fat or choose to be normal. You can choose to make sacrifices or choose to be lazy — and if you choose to be lazy and remain fat, then fair enough, but accept that it’s your own doing and take responsibility for it.
All the mileage they’re going to get out of it. I see.
I agree with her on the part about responsibility. In fact, I don’t know anybody — including just about every morbidly obese person I know thanks to my involvement in the lowcarb world — who would disagree with the above perspective about responsibility.
But then when I step back and think about it, I realize: exactly who, in today’s world, is NOT considered responsible for their obesity?
Despite that thyroid can add weight, despite that other hormones can add to weight, despite that physical ailments and medications can contribute to either gaining weight or not being able to lose it, do you ever — have you EVER — seen one of the near-infinite number of fattists, in the midst of their sneers and remarks and jokes about fat people, build-in the caveat that perhaps they should be compassionate as it might not be the fat person’s fault? No? Because I never have. Ever. Even in the rare cases where a person IS fat and it is genuinely something they did not “do” (even via ignorance or accident), I have never seen anybody of the nature to snark about “fat people” or “why people are fat”, make the slightest allowance for that.
So let’s turn that perspective a bit: have you ever known a seriously fat person, no matter what their eating habits, who felt zero sense of guilt or shame or blame for their weight? Who honestly believed that no matter what, they were somehow “totally not responsible” for their weight? I know plenty who will say that little they do NOW affects their weight or metabolism, but I never met a fat person who considered themselves completely unresponsible for their weight in the first place.
Sure, I’ve met fat people who will attribute less cause to their eating than they should, and I’ve met fat people who have seriously said (and I happen to believe them) that they eat what person X they live with eats, who is 1/3 their size. But I’ve never met someone who simply projected the entire situation onto some force outside them, like it had nothing to do with them at all. I think I would probably consider that a form of pathology.
Put it this way: I’ve never met someone who so whined about it being totally not their fault, that they would NEED someone in an article telling them that genetics don’t matter, they just need to quit eating pie.
Someone needed to be told that?
On the contrary, what I have mostly seen is a big world filled with people who feel if anything such a ridiculous level of guilt, shame, and humiliation about being fat, that en masse in the USA alone they are willing to spend upwards of 30 BILLION dollars annually to try and deal with it. They are willing to buy and try infinite magazine advice and TV infomercials and books and more, to help them deal with it; they are dedicated to buying frozen meals and attending meetings and counting calories and weighing protein etc. all of this to “deal with it.” To deal, in great part, with their sense of overwrought responsibility, with their sense of utter mortification for wearing the modern sin-mark of Cain on the outside: FAT.
They don’t feel empowered. They just feel to blame.
So who exactly is this writer trying to save from themselves with the so-witty sarcasms of, “Fat genes, you see. More pie? Frappuccino with sweet whipped cream to wash it down?”
Maybe in her reality, fat people just love being fat, deliberately go out and do something to stay that way every single day, and feel zero sense of responsibility, let alone any nearly crushing, mind-bending shame that results in not wanting to leave the house, feeling like a personal failure, or whatever (I hear many variations on this theme from others over time). All those self-responsible, socially humiliated, media-mortified fatties are living in MY world apparently.
She added:
It’s no good wailing about rising levels of obesity if you show no interest whatsoever in trying to understand why people overeat in the first place. People overeat for psychological reasons, not physical ones.
Hmmm. Well, I do know many people who say they eat for psychological reasons. I personally think we attribute far too much to psychology, and I’d like to see obesity research and approach as a whole get back to biology where it ought to be rooted, and out of the armchair of psychotherapy. But I do agree that getting your head right is the first step (for certain), and that a lot of “eating disorders” have firm correlation with psychology. I simply suspect that nearly every serious eating disorder, however, is at least equally if not moreso rooted in physiology. As long as we simply “blame” people for either over-eating or eating poorly, rather than look at what physiology may be driving that, we’re unlikely to learn much.
Blaming psychology for fat is an existing precedent, and one of the reasons why obesity is equated with some failing of character or morality. Because it is not seen as a disease — as “a disorder of excess fat accumulation” as Taubes put it — but rather, is seen as a psychological state, it can be grafted onto all the assumptions about what’s in your head: gluttony and sloth, greed and laziness, emotional weakness, etc.
So while I agree totally with the “personal responsibility” angle, still what I see is just another harmony to that same getting-very-old insulting refrain applied with a broad stroke to all fat people:
Above all, we need to get to grips with the fact that fatness is a personal choice, one that can’t be blamed on anybody – or anything – other than our own greedy behaviour.
For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be any ordinary humans involved here, only the far-extreme of greedy gluttons who won’t be responsible at all.
It appears since India lost weight, she is now entitled to be just as stereotyping and insulting of fat people now as I’m sure others were when she herself was overweight.
In some people, weight loss brings greater wisdom. In others, it just brings the opportunity to leap over to the other side of the fence, and in the determination to not be a victim anymore, to become one of the victimizers.
It is a bummer when I actually AGREE with 90% of what someone says, and yet despite this, still manage to feel like they provided little in an article which could be construed as helpful in any way, and plenty which is pretty plainly hurtful.
***
It’s a fine line. I’ve seen people who lost weight on low carb have a hard time finding that line: the good intent that wants to demand people take responsibility, step up to the plate (no pun intended), and go to bat for themselves, believe that they have the power to shape their lives and their bodies, and refuse to let anything get in their way, is a GOOD thing.
But there’s that fine line to walk, where just on the other side of it, one is ignoring every possible mitigating circumstance, ignoring every detail that makes a unique human situation, and that leaves a person “where they are now” no matter what/how it came to be. That a person IS fat, does not mean they are doing something to be that way right now; it does not mean they don’t consider themselves responsible. They may eat better than 90% of the population and work hard at it every day and still be fat.
The whole approach is basically the attitude, “If you want to be fat fine, but don’t blame anybody but yourself,” but who actually does blame anybody else? Nobody I know. You start wherever you are, and you move forward by believing you can and you’re worth it. It is the pompous editorialists who assign blame for obesity: most fat people don’t assign it anywhere outside themselves.
The very psychology that makes people feel empowered enough to make a change, that makes people feel strong and optimistic enough to believe they can do it, that this can work for them, is the same psychology that is simply mortified by snappy jibes about their gluttony, by assumptions about their assumed major eating disorders, and by snarky public insults that equate the size of their thighs to the degree of their moral inferiority.
We are taught all our lives to hate fat, and by extension, to resent and belittle fat people. It is not so different than women who clearly hold a sexist bias against women in general, despite being one, because that is the cultural mindset they have grown up in. It is more than possible to grow up inside a culture with pervasive prejudice and, despite being part of that group suffering the bias, to learn to hold that bias yourself.
Even in decent people, even in well intentioned people, the bias still stands out at times, highlighted by the tendency to put emphasis not on proactive shared-empowerment, but rather, on negative demean-the-assumed-weakness.
***
I call it the ex-dieter complex. Now that they lost some weight, and it doesn’t matter how, they feel completely at ease not only sharing the same insulting prejudices that the culture at large already suffers, but doubly righteous in doing so, since “they used to be fat.”
Fat is one of the few situations of prejudice that would breed this, of course. People cannot behave that way because “they used to be black.” Only in the case of obesity can the victim become a stereotyping, insulting bully and actually walk away from it feeling as if they’ve done those they just insulted some kind of favor.
Why IS it that some people are fat and others are not?
Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, said:
…if you think about it in general terms, you can explain differences in weight in the population based on three possibilities.
…one possibility would be that the obese lack will power; this is a point of view favored by lean people, I generally find.
The second possibility that people consider is that we live in a toxic environment and that it’s the environment’s fault.
And then the third possibility is that there are biological drives that lead us to eat what we eat, and ultimately weigh what we weigh, in the same way as some of us are tall and some of us are short, others of us are destined to be heavy and others lean.
…I think most moderate scientists believe that of course that all three can be relevant, but that biology has really an underappreciated role in accounting for difference in weight, and we know a lot about the system now and so I think there’s a powerful set of data that supports that point of view.
{Ira Flatow: So when people are fat and they’re overweight, there is a major genetic factor here. It’s not as simple as saying “I have no will power” or “I tried the diet, doesn’t work.” There could be real hard wiring that’s the problem.)
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …some of the most powerful evidence that this is a biological problem and not a “behavioral one” (in quotation marks) is genetics. And so there are a number of ways to assess the genetic contributions to a trait. It turns out if you look for obesity it is probably the second most heritable trait, second only to height, with which it is quite close. Based on estimates that can be done by analyzing twins, 80 percent of the variability in weight can be accounted for by genetic factors.
Good grief! 80%? That’s…. huge. So much for the just ‘eat less exercise more!’ solves-all-fat line.
Friedman points out that the belief in leanness is a modern thing, and implies that the expectation that everyone should be thin is itself nonsense:
…Historically, being obese was the desirable body habit as so. If you go to museums… all the rich people in Egypt would pay extra money to have extra chins put onto their sculpture. Rubenesque figures were the vogue in the 1700s. Renoir’s characters were all heavy. In aboriginal societies the chieftains were all quite obese. For reasons that — you all have as good an idea about as I do I guess –- things changed here about what our views of what was attractive in the 60s and it set up an idealized view of what people should weigh and who they should be that just isn’t matched by our genetic endowment.
…The problem is not that small amounts of weight that improve health can’t be achievable; I think it can be. The problem is that’s not what most obese people want or the public wants. The public wants to be normal weight. And so I would much prefer to see that the dialogue and the issue center on improved health and achievable goals rather than setting up some societal construct that says everybody has to be perfectly wonderfully thin, a wish that really runs counter to almost everything science has to tell us about this problem.
I think people should make their best efforts but recognize, but not be prejudicial about the fact, that for many people most of the things you do aren’t going to work. And so my argument is not “we shouldn’t think about the problem, we shouldn’t address it.” The issue has to do with “what are we going to do about it.” And so I would argue what we shouldn’t do is fall back on simple nostrums like “eat less, exercise more.”
And here he talks a little more about the weird social stigma that obesity has, and how illogical it is from a medical science perspective:
I think that to the extent that increased weight has health consequences, people should do their best. It certainly is a good thing to be fit. And it is a good thing to eat a heart healthy diet. And it’s probably a good thing to make one’s best efforts to keep one’s weight under control. So that means not doing much different than what Hippocrates would have recommended. But I think at the same time we have to recognize that those measures are rather limited in their efficacy and that to make the leap therefore that people who are not successful at keeping their weight off are at fault is just wrong headed. And there are all kinds of attributes about each of us that might draw the next person to draw a conclusion about them. But to draw conclusions about obese people, I think, is unenlightened to say the least about what their personal characteristics are.
(Ira Flatow: So to stigmatize them is sort of making fun of the situation that they don’t have much control over.)
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: I think that’s right and the ironic thing is that I think the more of an outlier one is for weight, the more obese, the more difficult it would be to actually normalize weight. And so if anyone should be stigmatized it would be someone like me who could easily lose 10 lbs. and doesn’t. I think for the people who are really significantly overweight, it’s just who they are — to a very, very large extent.
… It’d be much better to forget about the stigma and assume people weigh what they weigh, and then encourage people to do what they can to improve their health.
Back to Genetics, he said:
…So when you see a very obese person walking down the street there’s a very, very significant possibility that that individual just has a genetic alteration that makes them so.
(Ira Flatow: So all those years when you saw a very obese person and they said, “I have a glandular problem,” they were telling the truth in a certain sense genetically speaking.)
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well I think so. They just didn’t know which gland.
Then he got into some interesting stuff about how the functioning of a morbidly obese body is in many cases simply working differently than others. He used gastric bypass patients for this example.
(Question from the audience 1: When someone has a surgical intervention such that a massively obese person of, let’s say, 400 lbs. or 500 lbs. removes part of his colon and attains a weight more normal to his size, for his height. Does that rewire the person or does that then remold itself into the norm and the body strives to achieve the larger weight yet again?)
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: …there’s another feature of this surgery that people, I think, ignore, and it’s this: when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure.
Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.
Geez. Me neither.
I can tell people, “I have tracked 3-4 weeks, repeatedly, of my food intake, and my BMR is allegedly like 4000 calories a day minimum, and I’m eating usually <1200 calories a day IF that, AND lowcarb… and not losing weight.” And plenty of them think I’m lying. I’ve actually had people suggest that if only I’d keep a food diary like they do in weight watchers (note: I *do*, or how could I be ‘tracking’ it??) that surely I would see all kinds of calories I didn’t know about. As if 3,000 calories is easy to hide, for someone who has to work hard just to successfully eat 1000-1200 calories a day! My biggest problem is getting my butt into the kitchen to eat anything at all. So it’s not like I’m grazing through fields all day and might ‘forget’ that ‘Oh yeah, I ate 3 pizzas or something while grazing through the lettuce greens!’, sheesh!
A reference was given me once of a Dr. Phil (I think) episode, where he tells this woman claiming the same thing that she defies the laws of nature, and then “discovers” from her husband that she is drinking thousands of calories a day in soda that she “didn’t think counted.” What a setup. She’s an idiot, yes, but I felt the producers worked hard to find some way to invalidate that and maintain the calorie-myth … tabloid journalism, essentially.
It’s basically insulting. I mean, I’ve had people argue what they are sure about on-paper. They heard it, or read it. Or, they are a fairly normal metabolism bodybuilder who gained weight from sheer overeating after leaving high school sports or something, and hence when they quit overeating and started working out again, it fell off. It is just not the same.
They think it’s a mathematical impossibility. I wish someone would find a way to communicate to the metabolic system how bad it is at math. I’m getting weary of people who would not doubt my intelligence or integrity on any other issue, acting like they’re sure I must be lying or deluding myself about what I eat, because they just can’t understand the calorie-math and why pounds aren’t dropping off me at the speed of light.
The more quantity of food and more often I eat, as long as it isn’t excessively of course, the more I lose weight. It’s hard to do, after my whole adult life of eating once daily in the evening.
If they’re consuming 700 calories every day they’re going to be expending more than that. And so what you would find, you would expect to see is as long as they’re that imbalanced they’re going to keep losing and losing and losing and losing. That’s not what happens in these people; they plateau and they stop losing weight at what is definable as a significantly obese level. Now, if I had that procedure you probably wouldn’t see me in profile anymore because I would just get so thin. That’s not what happens to these people and it appears that in the face of reduced intake the body shuts down caloric expenditure and they can’t lose any more weight.
But it’s all about the ‘basal metabolic rate’ right? How much exercise you get? He pops the balloon of what I call The Calorie Lie: the belief that to maintain obesity once must eat huge quantities of calories.
This is what sets me off most about conversation with people who seem to assume that every day I proactively DO SOMETHING to STAY fat. Sheesh!
Now this next part is pretty depressing, if eye-opening. This actually goes back to what Jonny Bowden was saying about how they used to measure the detail ‘calories burned’ by exercise, and it varied radically by person and was way outside what was ‘assumed’. According to Friedman, people who are obese and lose some weight (whether this is because they are obese or, more likely I just assume, this is part of WHY they are obese) actually burn FEWER calories in order to maintain the SAME weight as someone else who did not lose weight to get to the same place:
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: So it turns out – and this was some lovely work done by Jules Hirsch here at Rockefeller [this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, measured the metabolism of people who lost weight through a precisely controlled diet] –] it turns out they burn many fewer calories than you would predict based on their newer weight.
So let me put a finer point on this. Imagine you’re 250 pounds. and you lose 100 lbs. to 150 lbs. Now you ask how many calories does that person burn compared to someone who started out at 150 pounds.They burn like 300 or 400 calories fewer per day when they’re at that reduced weight. Now think about it. That person is hungry and now can only eat fewer calories than the equal weight person to maintain that weight, despite the fact that they weigh the same amount.
So just like Jonny said about how the calories burned in exercise was not consistent between different people, here Friedman makes clear, that even on a daily overall metabolic ratio (not just a limited exercise event), the amount of calories burned is not consistent between different people of the same weight. So Jane and Nancy, if eating the same things, and exercising the same amounts, may result eventually in a fat Jane and a slim Nancy, with no apparent behavioral difference.
And it’s possible that this “biases against Jane keeping that weight off.” Because eating identical food with identical exercise at the same body weight at point 1, a year later, Jane would be at least 36.5 lbs heavier. Multiply that by a few years and you have a very fat Jane, who never once needed to ingest pounds of bon-bons regularly in order to end up morbidly obese.
More:
(Ira Flatow: What about the other parts that control metabolism? Is it true that some people burn food faster and so it’s not the brain part and it’s just their thyroid, or whatever it is?
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: A very classic study was done about 15 years ago by a guy named Claude Bouchard. And Claude gathered up a set of identical twins and overfed them 1,000 calories a day for 84 days. And he asked what happened. So these people were in a room, they were given calories, they were forced to eat 1,000 extra calories a day; they should have put on a lot of weight. Some people put on a lot of weight, other people put on hardly any weight at all.
And when they looked, the twins were highly similar to one another, suggesting that there was some genetic predisposition to either put on weight or not put on weight when you were given extra calories. The people who didn’t put on weight activated metabolism because of metabolic circuitry and didn’t put on the weight. And this observation that some people can eat whatever they want and never put on weight and other people put on weight just by looking at it has been more or less proven based on that study, which actually was observed as far back as the 1700s.
Friedman said, regarding the twin studies, that the opposite variant of twins had also been studied, and it STILL comes out to being, at root, a genetic predisposition to gain weight or not, overwhelmingly, not environmental:
…they were then redone with identical twins reared apart compared to fraternal twins reared together. So you’re actually biasing against the identical twins so now the hereditability falls from 80 percent to 70 percent. Still 70 percent — and the other 30 percent could not be accounted for by the environment for those kids.
And finally, he referred to studies on adopted children, to see if it’s entirely about the environment provided by parents, e.g., take a fat mother, with fat children assumedly from “the environment she raises them in,” if you put a kid with different genetics in there, will they also be fat?
Another way to look at this, actually, is to take kids who are adopted and ask on average, do they resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents, making the assumption that some go to one environment, others to the other. They, to a very large extent, resembled their biological parents independent of the environment that their adoptive parents provided.
Well, that’s pretty much a measure from all three angles you can measure it, and in every measure, it comes out to be overwhelmingly a matter of genetic predisposition, more than just food intake or exercise.
***
I don’t really want to believe this. It sorta makes me want to cry.
And of course, it goes greatly against what we are all indoctrinated with from our dietary plans of choice.
It is not 100% genetics. It is not a 100% failure of people to keep weight off. It’s just… 70-80% genetics, and 95-98% failure.
Can I be one of the 2%? Can I modify my eating habits, exercise and lifestyle that the 20-30% can balance out the rest? Can I be the freak of nature that actually succeeds?
Damn. I hope so.
Am I delusional? Probably. The alternative might be suicidal, so it’s all I’ve got.
A few more quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, and related thoughts.
Friedman took on some of the hysteria regarding the “obesity epidemic.” There’s some stuff I didn’t realize or hadn’t considered.
I actually contacted the epidemiologist named Katherine Flegal, who publishes all the reports that are highlighted in the press every time we hear, in five year intervals, the weight problem has increased dramatically. And I asked her exactly that question. “Well, what about obesity in other countries? Could it be, for example, that the curve in England or Europe has just shifted a little bit to the left?”
Now I asked her the question and she said it might be but no one knows. The data have not been gathered in these other countries in a way that would allow you to compare. So the supposition that this problem is so much worse in the U.S. is not based on actual data.
Regarding the “massive rise in numbers” and “doubling of number of obese” people etc., the foundation of our “obesity epidemic” and related hysteria, he said:
That’s an argument I get all the time because people say, “Well, there’s a huge change in a short period of time in the amount of obesity and that therefore it can’t be genetic.” First of all, actually, that’s wrong. Genes in a population can change very rapidly as environment changes. In fact that’s the whole purpose of having variation in a population. As the environment changes in acute circumstances certain variants are selected and then predominate.
But setting that aside actually, I think people have a misconception about the role of environment in this because of misuse of statistics.
Let me explain what I mean. Obesity is distributed in the population. Some people are thin; some people are heavy; most people are in the middle; and you have a curve, a bell-shaped curve.
Now there’s a known phenomenon in epidemiology that when you have a normally distributed trait, meaning a bell-shaped curve, and a fixed threshold that defines a disease, if that average value shifts even a small amount, you get a disproportionate number of people who exceed the threshold.
So let me give you an analogy for IQ here and then I can tell you the actual data for weight. Imagine that 40 years ago the average IQ was 100 and there was a bell-shaped curve. Imagine now that our educational system improves and the bell-shaped curve shifts a little and the average IQ is now 105. With that you could imagine that the number of people who have an IQ greater than 140, so-called geniuses, might have doubled.
Now is it more useful to think about how our education is doing by saying, “average IQ increased 5 points” or “number of geniuses is doubled?” I think probably both are of interest but the former seems to me more informative.
Ok. So how does that analogize to weight? Over the time period that you’ve heard that the obesity rates have quote “doubled” or gone up by 70 percent, the average weight gain is: 7 to 10 pounds.
What?! All this hysteria over “obesity has DOUBLED!” and actually, it only means that the ‘average’ weight has increased by 7-10 lbs?! But remember that “bell shaped curve”. When you move that entire bell-shape on the graph, the number of people it encompasses is huge, so yeah, mathematically, the number of people affected is sort of exponential.
Do you suppose there’s a reason why we never hear, “Over the last X years, the average weight has increased 7-10lbs”? Instead of, “The number of obese people has DOUBLED!” Realistically, even a ONE pound shift in that gigantic population bell-curve would have moved a helluva lot of people over that line.
Now I’m not here to argue that that’s not important; it is important from a public health point of view. But if we then say that’s what environment contributes to differences in weight over that time frame, think about the fact that 7 to 10 pounds is almost nothing compared to the hundreds of pounds of difference in weight that you might see in any two people walking around the street today, both of whom essentially have unlimited access to calories.
Some of his comments from a couple years ago sounded similar to what I’m hearing about the current book ‘Rethinking Thin’.
…the idea that you can change your weight voluntarily is one that the diet industry has a huge financial interest in. And so anybody can tune into infomercials telling you what you need to do to lose weight is fork over some money to their diet plan, eat it or not eat it and you’ll lose weight. And I don’t think that message and that marketing muscle can be easily counteracted by what scientists have to say about it.
Part of the problem is that that notion fits in with people’s intuition. And this gets very complicated. It’s a control issue; people want to feel like they’re in control of what they eat and what they weigh. But at a certain point you need to ask yourself, “How much am I really in control of it?” Now the problem for feeding is that the time frame with which this drive expresses itself is out weeks to months to actually years. And so by the time the drive exercises its power people don’t recognize it as a drive, and they simply imagine that it’s a loss of will power, not thinking of it as rather an expression of a basic biological drive.
…the available evidence would suggest that the vast majority of people who find themselves at a particular weight — be it thin, medium, or heavy — that’s pretty much their weight.
It’s that somehow people think this is something they ought to be able to control. And they accept all these other things you can’t control that are just who you are. But people are very loathe to believe that what they weigh is who they are.
On one of the early ideas about the Fatzi Regime’s rush to label children based on their weight, he had a few comments as well:
(Ira Flatow: There was a news item that said New York’s Dept. of Education is considering putting kids weight on their report cards. Talk about stigmatizing kids.)
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well, you know I would ask everybody, listen to what I have to say and then think about the things you’ll read in the press about obese people and then substitute any other human characteristic in there in place of obesity. You’d never get away with it; you’d get arrested or something. I mean, the things that get said!
I’ll give you a few examples. I was listening to Imus in the political campaign and they were talking about Bill Richardson as a possible vice-presidential candidate and a Newsweek reporter says Bill Richardson is being dismissed as a vice-presidential candidate because he’s too obese. What else could you have said and gotten away with? William Sensenbrenner, a congressman, is quoted in the New York Times as saying to the obese, “Look in the mirror because you’re the one to blame.” I could go on and on. You have an opera singer fired because they’re too obese. And she correctly pointed out that this is the last bastion of stigmatization in the country.
And so when you read these things, think about it. Should they be putting a kid’s weight on the report card? I don’t know. Probably not.
And what about age? Plenty of us know people who ate anything and everything up to a certain point in their life, where they suddenly began gaining weight, which exponentially multiplied. Most people in lowcarb would consider it a gradual development of insulin resistance, based on the standard American diet (and I am referring to the USDA diet, not necessarily to chronic junk food). But might some of it relate to age? Or might those factors overlap? And if some of the “increase in obesity” is correlated with age, how might that affect the statistics? And if it affected the statistics, would that feed into the “obesity epidemic” hysteria?
Now, it’s a fact that people and animals get heavier as they age. We don’t understand why that is. It appears that leptin levels go up and some people lose leptin sensitivity as they age. We have no idea why. I’ll just digress to one other point that gets to your issue about the 7 to 10 lb. average weight gain. When you look at these data, they’re not corrected for age, And so, if the population is aging, that could contribute also to the perception that weight is changing.
He is not only blessedly aware of the flaws of the “BMI” as an evaluation, but of the issue related to weight and fitness. If you can take a person who is obese yet who plays three sports and is otherwise completely healthy–and I’ve known several people (and several teenagers) like this–then clearly obesity and health are not mutually opposing things.
The most important thing is what your general health is. If you’re overweight and not diabetic and not hypertensive and not hypercholesterolemic, then there’s a lot less to think about than if you’re diabetic and hypertensive and hypercholesterolemic. My own opinion, and this is just an opinion, is if you’re overweight and otherwise healthy, I would say try to be fit, try to eat a heart healthy diet and minimize your risk factors and try to enjoy yourself.
If you’re diabetic and have these other problems, then make your best effort to lose weight to the extent that it improves your health, do your best as you would for anything else.
Ira Flatow: So you said, you can be fit and overweight at the same time.
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Right.
I’d never actually thought about the ‘obesity epidemic’ being a sort of overhyped-hysteria. I mean, I think it’s good that this increase is recognized, but let’s get real, none of the authorities are recognizing the primary factors (sugar/carb overdose from an early age, and some researchers think as much as 50% of the population is probably sensitive to wheat/gluten and other primary foods that the official food pyramid insists be the dominant eating) that are massively contributing to weight gain and insulin resistance and eventual diabetes.
So since they are not even looking at the most fundamental cause for change, yet the hype is endless about this problem, what are we looking at here?
***
Years ago I did a study on media, for my own interest, and discovered that the news in general, on TV and in magazines, is not as much informative as predictive. Literally, when you look at it in retrospect, you actually see such a pattern that you start feeling like everything you were “officially told about” was part of some larger plan to “set up” a situation or presentation for something else that was planned ahead of time. Eventually, when I was watching the nightly news and writing down what was being said, I started asking myself, not, ‘Is it true?’ but rather, ‘Why do ‘they’ (whomever ‘they’ is) want me to believe this?’ which turned out to be a far more useful question.
So after seeing Dr. Friedman’s comments, and this from a 2005 lecture no less!, about how the potential age increase in the population (which we know we have thanks to the baby boomer population) can increase the stats, and how the 7-10 lbs average increase on a bell curve would of course make a big change in the numbers, I started thinking, “Since they don’t really want to look at the most legit science for solving it, and since the official recommendations are still corrupted by corporatism, then why is that they want us all to share the hysteria about this change in numbers?”
I think there are probably
– (a) profitable drugs which will get approved sooner than they should because of this hysteria, and that’s being relied on;
– (b) legislations which will get passed that would never ever fly otherwise, but will get pushed through thanks to this hysteria, and that’s being relied on;
– and surely some things I haven’t thought of yet.
It’s not really paranoia or conspiracy thinking, it’s just “precedent” from having observed news and related trends in the past and seen how it plays out in other subjects. I can’t help but wonder if the ‘hysteria’ is being ‘encouraged’ behind the scenes because of the “power” it provides.
Remember the recent British report, which had US doctors involved as well, that first suggested radical “intervention” into the lives of children and families including taking kids from parents and even forcing gastric bypass surgery, they actually said OUTRIGHT that they didn’t have the evidence to back their recommendations being what was right, but that the urgency of the situation demanded action. In other words: thanks to the hysteria, we no longer even have to prove something is a good idea before we radically invade the rights of the populace.
Maybe a little less hysteria and a few more people like Dr. Friedman would be useful. Not only for education and research, but for the actual political rights of individuals, children and families.
Most folks who have been on a lowcarb eating plan for awhile already understand that individual metabolism is, well, individual and not really predictable. But I think a lot of people wouldn’t argue that a predisposition to being lean or overweight might have a genetic basis.
Think a minute about what we mean by genetic. Does that mean that some races of people might be “more” genetically prone to obesity based on the current eating habits of our world, than others?
Yes, that’s what it means.
Now think about the rampant and unabashed prejudice levied against obese people culture-wide.
Let us say, just as a hypothesis, that native Americans, known to be genetically susceptible to alcoholism more than most other races, were also genetically susceptible to obesity.
So if we choose to discriminate against obesity, as a culture in a myriad of ways, what we are really doing is “cloaking” racial prejudice in our obesity prejudice, because a disproportionate number of folks from certain races will suffer compared to others.
Sure, people might (maybe) be as prejudiced against white folks who are obese, but the reality is that if someone is arbitrarily deciding whether a person is too fat to adopt or if a child is too fat to be allowed to live with their family or too fat to deserve a job, there is a whole lot of “soft” room for discrimination in there, since obesity is a nice blanket over the top of it.
When Western governments are talking about “intervention” that dramatically invades the privacy and rights of individuals and families, this becomes a radical and racial issue.
Here are some selected quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University.
Ira Flatow: You said that we don’t have enough data to understand why there’s been a 7 to 10 pound. weight increase. Do you have a hypothesis of your own about why this might be?
Jeffrey Friedman: What I think is happening is this. It turns out that that weight increase isn’t uniform across the population, and there’s actually really good epidemiologic evidence to suggest that. I think that a lot of the weight gain is concentrated in specific ethnic groups.
…I think that what we’re seeing now is ethnic groups that are predisposed to obesity are now getting access to unlimited calories. And I think that has a lot to do with that weight increase. And there’s some evidence to support that but it’s not definitive. Actually a lot of the epidemiologic data that you would really want to understand things like this is lacking.
…it turns out actually that these really obese kids are concentrated in particular ethnic groups and the gene pools are different in different ethnic groups.
So eventually we’ll be able to say something like, if you’re Native American, your chances of being biased against even by government agencies, is ___% higher than if you were say, Romanian.
If there is a higher chance that someone native were obese than there is that someone Romanian would be obese, then if we pretend a child or parent’s obesity is mostly about environment (hence they should receive family “intervention” by the government), we are saying that natives inherently less-deserve to raise their own kids, because more of them are fat than some other racial groups. (Remember this is hypothetical.)
So, if you’re white enough (or whatever) to luck into thinner genes, you’re probably ok, but we’ll have to round up more of the kids from those darn (check one susceptible-to-obesity race)’s kids, ’cause they are just too damn fat so much more often.
Do the cultural leaders of the races most genetically predisposed to obesity realize this? Realize that not taking any issue with “obesity issues,” means building-in institutionalized bias against their people?
Do you ever notice that everybody has an opinion about how people get fat, and how people should lose fat? Always.
Over the last 17-18 years since I got fat, I’ve had the opportunity to experience quite an “up-close and personal sociological evaluation of how people react to other people who are fat.” This would probably be a more pleasant study if I were not the fat person in question, of course, but it’s no less interesting, despite that.
Most of us have experienced at least some of this. You may be sitting in a restaurant with several acquaintances. One of them, usually someone pointedly overweight themselves, but who is clearly delighted to observe that you are more overweight than they are, will suddenly become the Grand Vizier of Dietary Advice. (The probability of this happening is in direct proportion to their guilt about what they themselves are eating.)
They may assure you, some sincerely and some patronizingly, that you definitely should eat the junk they are eating because the entire secret of weight loss is just “portion control” and “moderation.” The implied translation, of course, is: If you didn’t eat like an uncontrollable pig all the time, you wouldn’t be fat. They don’t really mean that consciously, most would never say such a thing, but the theory underlies their advice: obviously, you’re fat, so if you “ate moderately” they assume you would not be… you see where that goes.
They will assure you that if a person just gets adequate exercise, these things take care of themselves. Of course, the fact that your metabolism might require a triathalon to compensate for the dinner they want you to eat so they’ll feel better about doing so themselves, escapes them. They assume that the fellow on the left who is thin and wiry despite eating enough for three people, has the identical metabolism as yourself, who is clearly fat despite eating less than everyone there.
Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University (and the researcher who discovered the hormone leptin, which plays a crucial role it appears in how our body regulates our weight), said about obesity:
I think in contrast to almost every other medical condition where the lay public would just leave it to the scientist to inform them about what causes it, what the nature of the problem is, and what we should do about it, obesity is a condition where absolutely everyone has an opinion. Everybody has a deeply held set of personal beliefs about what causes the problem.
Well, I think fat is like the baffling tax code (and resultant nightmares about scary amounts of money you owe).
Plenty of people are lucky just to balance their checkbooks properly. The convoluted complexity of human metabolism is more than even the experts have a grip on at the moment, let alone the laymen. And it certainly doesn’t fit into the sound-bite over-simplied spoon-fed media our culture has become as addicted to as we have to carbohydrates.
Humans love to feel like they know what they’re doing, and what the answers are to things. We like it when everything has a place and just WORKS. No ambiguity, no confusion, no complexity. Nothing subjective. Only WE are allowed to be subjective: the rest of the world is not. When we are subjective, it is our right, our feelings, and who we are. When anything or anyone else is subjective, if we disagree, it is probably that they are irrational. Of course. If they were sensible, they’d agree with us! :-)
We are bred from childhood to fear fat. Fat is bad. Fat is the Other. Fat brings mocking, derision, abuse, social shunning, and pity. This is culturally bred into all of us and isn’t even conscious in most cases. So when the question of fat comes up, the last thing anybody wants, is to feel it’s an impossibly confusing morass of unfinished science and unanswered questions; we have no real handle on it. Survival instinct alone makes us want, makes us need, to feel like we have the formula and answer to fat, so we have power over it. The fact that we don’t know is irrelevent. If we feel we know, I think our subconscious fear-based psychology feels better about the whole thing.
The persistent denial of an entire culture in regards to obesity, coupled with a nearly hysterical panic about it, only emphasizes this. Research studies have had some interesting findings on this sociological subject. Some people say they’d rather be seriously injured than fat. Some college kids say they’d date a wife-beater or drug-user before they’d date someone noticeably overweight.
As a culture, our attempt to ’stamp out fat’ has been even less successful than our alleged war on drugs. We supply endless quantities of alcohol, and caffeine. The ghastly long-term abuse of cocaine-level drugs such as the entire class of drugs similar to Ritalin (and worse), for children as young as 2 years old, is mind blowing. (Every ’school shooter’ in the news, was a kid officially drugged by parent/government/school for years, did you know that?)
Yet despite how easy it is to give someone enough legal drugs to have them wipe out families of four on the highway, efforts continue to outlaw vitamins and herbs without prescription for being “dangerous”, and if a high school girl shares Midol for monthly cramps with a friend and is seen she can be suspended. We’re completely schizophrenic about the drug issue in our culture. It is a WAR on drugs. A war in which the profiteers appear to be profiting (the war on drugs helps fund the covert military operations congress will not approve or the public cannot know about), and the problem continues to get worse instead of better. With that kind of ‘help’, we could be at least ten times worse off within years.
And so it is with obesity. Magazines neatly couple drool-able foods with the latest diet fad and both on the front page. “Healthy recipes” in them tend to be blood sugar grenades allegedly made ‘healthy’ by using low-fat margarine and whole-grain flour… rather than a recipe that was more healthy by being, well, less UNhealthy. We constantly model near-impossibly skinny women as ‘the ideal’. We have endless ways of enforcing both subtly and overtly the ’sin’ of someone being fat and daring to show up in public, and then we wonder why people especially young women develop anorexia, binging, bulemia, and other eating disorders. If our ‘war on obese people obesity’ is as successful as our war on drugs has been, we can expect to have a far worse problem 5 and especially 10 years from now. The only real difference is that the diet industry is not funding black ops. We assume.
As Dr. Friedman said, everybody has an opinion. I agree. I have never met a person who openly said something like, “I have no idea how someone would get or stay thin.” Everybody, but everybody, believes they know the way, and this includes nearly every obese person I ever met, every person who never had to diet in their life, and so on.
Many years ago, a research paper published in the parapsychology (psychic research) field reviewed the perceptions and opinions of scientists outside the field about the subject. (For those who don’t know, many of the leading parapsychologists are/were legit reputable physicists and engineers and other hard scientists, before they dared touch the subject, which is the kiss of death to any science career: we are not allowed to ask those questions.) Pretty much all the scientists had an opinion about it (hint: it was definitely not a good one). Pretty much all the scientists believed that their opinion held scientific merit because they were a scientist, and they believed that they had enough information to have a right to opinion.
But when interviewed, it turned out that pretty much all of them were completely ignorant of the real science in the field, and their entire edifice of opinion was based on media: movies, magazines, comic books and fiction, and hokey commercial advertising. None of them knew anything about the real science, nor had they ever looked, nor did they want to know–but that did not keep them from pushing their ‘expert opinion’ on others with almost no provocation at all.
It is like being raised to dislike people who are a certain race or religion: You cannot reason with a belief that is not based on reason. We are bred to some prejudices, and they are constantly enforced culture-wide. Fat is one of them.
I’d like to relate to you a situation that examples just one of many ways that discrimination based on body weight has reached ludicrous ‘official’ proportions. I might add that the UK, USA and Australia share so much legislation and culture that I consider anything taken seriously in one as a potential in the other, and all have a myriad of issues with this subject.
Kylie Lannigan of Victoria, Australia, has PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. It can occur in girls as young as 11, and is the most common reason for women who are unable to conceive children. The list of side effects are a real bummer for the people who have it; not counting infertility, hirsutism (hair growth in annoying places), acne and other issues, one of the most common reasons we see people with this in the lowcarb world is because it tends to induce weight gain or actual obesity, usually in the torso area (the “apple” shaped figure). It can put them at “greater risk of” high blood pressure or high cholesterol or Type II Diabetes, but then, so can a zillion other factors, and the weight alone could do that, with or without PCOS.
In case you think this is rare, it is astoundingly common: About 1 in 10 women of childbearing age, is the current estimate of PCOS prevalance.
The Lannigans had fertility treatments, but alas the only result of that is, seven years ago Kylie tragically miscarried a baby girl at 22 weeks. Further attempts at IVF (in-vitro fertilization) were not successful.
Not surprisingly, couples with a PCOS woman are likely to consider adopting children, and three years ago, the Lannigans, desperate for a child, finally sought that route to parenthood.
It seemed hopeful. They owned a home, had been married for ten years, and were both employed full time: Kylie is a chef, while her husband supervises a vineyard. They wanted to begin the adoption process while she was still young enough to be considered a good candidate.
Kylie weighs 278 lbs and is about 5 foot 7 inches tall, but although technically obese, Kylie walks to work and night school every day, she had testing for heart disease and diabetes and was cleared as free of both, and so aside from the inconvenience it may give her, her body weight is not a worthy issue to adoption, nor did the people they interviewed with seem concerned about it.
The initial documentation and interviews mentioned that serious health reasons could potentially disqualify an applying adoptive parent, but although PCOS is a bummer (to understate it) for the people who have it, it’s not like it means you’re going to Keel Over Any Minute Now(tm). PCOS is not considered a disqualifying health issue.
If they did bias against that, they’d not only be disqualifying 1 in 10 women, but singling out the vast majority of the women most likely to want to adopt a child!
Three years later…
THREE YEARS the Lannigans have spent in the tedious, stressful, delaying bureaucracy of the application process. Kylie is 29 now, and nearing the age when she is no longer considered ideal for adopting an infant child. She and her husband went to seminars, had medical, police and finance checks and a home assessment, everything requested, everything that would give them a chance to make it happen, for years.
Finally, after all that, the Department of Human Services adoption counselors came out for yet another interview, and told them what wonderful parents they would be.
Except, they added, Kylie is too fat to be considered qualified to parent.
They told her she would need to lose 114 lbs to qualify for a BMI rating that would make them acceptable to adopt.
She has lost 26 lbs so far. But as she mentioned in an interview, she doesn’t even have time to lose another 88 lbs to qualify for their demands. She’ll be considered too old to be ideal to adopt an infant (over 30) by then, and that’s even if everything went perfectly, despite her body’s strong tendency to obesity, and even if, like some improbable Disney-movie ending, all the weight just fell off.
The agency, rather than ‘rejecting’ their application, ’suspended’ it with an “unless” caveat: so severe a weight loss, with such a time limit based on standard policies, that they may as well have rejected it. In fact, all ’suspending’ with that kind of requirement really does is reject it but without their having to defend in court what right they had to do that.
Kylie’s weight was no secret three years ago when they began this process, but nobody thought to mention to her that “fat” on its own would disqualify her. Do you think a government agency would openly advertise, “Don’t apply to adopt a child unless you are thin?” Maybe they should. It would have saved years of time and a lot of money and emotional investment on the Lannigans’s part.
Thought to consider: With the US and UK medical experts recommending “intervention” including seizure of children from parents if the children are obese, this brings up an interesting alternative: If people are too fat to be good parents at her weight, and this is official enough for a government-based agency to rule on, at what weight will social services eventually decide to seize children from perfectly good parents for the parents’ crime of being ‘too fat’?
The first and most obvious issue is the sheer prejudice. If they had applied this prejudice based on any other factor, they’d be sued like crazy. They can’t say, “Well you’re Race X,” or “Well you’re gay,” but they can say, “Well you’re fat.”
The obesity is nothing more than an ‘increased risk factor’ — but there are many, many ‘genetic markers’ which qualify as risk factors and have nothing to do with body size; discrimination of any one of which would be arbitrary and biased.
The second issue is the breach of faith. This woman has a time limit because of her age and adoption policy. She has worked for three years doing everything they asked of her so she could qualify to adopt a child that needed a home. And not until the moment they were supposed to clear her for it, finally, do they mention, “Oh yeah, and you have to lose over 100 lbs.”
As if this couldn’t have come up three years ago, so she would have had this time to work toward that! (Not that it’s any guarantee it’d work.) This point alone has several problems:
The first problem is the arbitrary application of their prejudice against her weight until the last minute.
The second problem is that the demand is so big that she’ll likely age-out of the application process before she CAN do it, short of some horrible, health-destroying attempt to fill that spot in her soul that desperately wants a child. (I can just see some desperate infertile woman becoming a cocaine addict to lose enough weight fast enough to qualify for the child. Yeah, that’ll help…)
The third problem is the frankly ludicrous and injust assumption that she, and by proxy anybody, can simply lose that weight. “Eat less and exercise more!,” the religious mantra of Fatzism goes. The fact that some people do NOT lose weight despite that, especially with a condition that probably caused the gain in the first place, or that it may take incredibly long periods of time to do so, and that different bodies are simply, well, different, is completely ignored.
How come the diet industry’s making well over 50 BILLION dollars a year, if all people have to do is eat healthy and/or eat less and exercise more?
And as one commenter noted, what if she regained the weight?
What, would they repossess the child??
I realized something last night. I’ve been reading a lot during the late-night hours over the last week or two, and it actually took a little while before my subconscious put a major “contradiction” together in the back of my brain and sent up a flare.
obesity /obes·i·ty Pronunciation: ō-bē′si-tē
Psychology Today online: Obesity is a condition of having excess body weight. When an adult is more than 100 pounds overweight, they are considered morbidly obese.
The Free Dictionary: [Obesity is an] increase in body weight beyond the limitation of skeletal and physical requirements, as the result of excessive accumulation of body fat. Morbid obesity: the condition of weighing two or more times the ideal weight; so called because it is associated with many serious and life-threatening disorders.
MedicineNet.com: Obesity: Well above ones normal weight. A person has traditionally been considered to be obese if they are more than 20 percent over their ideal weight. Obesity has been more precisely defined by the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) as a BMI of 30 and above. (A BMI of 30 is about 30 pounds overweight.)
OK, now we know what it “means.” Of course this says nothing about cause.
But wait, here to the rescue, in the American Journal of Psychiatry, with recommendations for the coming DSM-V manual (that’s the official manual of medical-psychiatry):
Their recommendation includes the following fascinating assertion:
Obesity is characterized by compulsive consumption of food and the inability to restrain from eating despite the desire to do so.
So, you’re telling me that of the MYRIAD of biochemical and metabolic reasons people gain weight or do not lose it, they have narrowed it down to the fact that fat people are just “gluttons who can’t control themselves”?!
Hey, I bet getting people of size accepted is going to be easier when the official psychiatric (that’s medical) field has obesity classified as a BRAIN DISORDER.
Now, I can easily see classifying binge-eating, or “compulsive eating”, just like anorexia and bulemia (the latter of which is just binge-eating + self-induced purging), as a psyche condition.
I just don’t see how they can “smoothly slide” this ASSUMPTION of the CAUSE of “obesity” into the official records like it’s a fact. Like there is no other cause or anything else to consider.
Once this is THAT official, we no longer have a medical system that ‘assumes’ that, we have a medical system that thinks it ‘knows’ that.
I assume you realize that once obesity is a brain disorder, any doctor on behalf of government-medicine or insurance-medicine can “require” you take psychiatric drugs to deal with your mental problem before anything else.
Have you ever heard about the theory (and book) about “Six Degrees of Separation”? Wikipedia’s entry on this says in part:
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one “step” away from each person he or she knows and two “steps” away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth. [...] While the exact number of links between people differs depending on the population measured, it is generally found to be relatively small. Hence, six degrees of separation is somewhat synonymous with the idea of the “small world” phenomenon.
I’ve been feeling a bit like that lately.
6 Degrees: Everything Eventually Relates to My Fat
I started reading stuff and it just kept leading to new topics that related to my own interests, life, health, etc. in ways I hadn’t thought of before. It started with Fat Acceptance, so that is this post. I’ll cover other topics later.
I’m just sharing, by blogging, stuff that is running through my head. I don’t really have a major politic though I may have an opinion.
Warning: not for the faint of heart. I’m pretty opinionated on social-politics! Especially when it relates to obesity.
“Fat Acceptance”
There is a lot of stuff in the ‘Fat Acceptance’ movement that I honestly never thought about before. I am writing this post in part to try and articulate inside myself what I’ve been thinking, and in part to expose other people to the subject–or my perspective of it, anyway.
The FA movement has its own problems. Like feminism, it was ’stolen’ by better funded, more vocal, drastically less effective and more-harm-than-help sorts, but there are still people and groups with a closer-to-original concept.
Pretend for a moment that you are a woman (if you are not). Let us say that you found a website by a man who said he totally respected women and considered them equals and worked for women’s equality right along with others who claim that.
But all his blog posts were things like, “Don’t be a Sissy: ditch the stupid flowered dresses,” or “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to do any job that requires body-strength or weapons,” or “Why Men Don’t Like Fat Chicks,” or whatever.
You would think, “This jerk doesn’t respect women, and he doesn’t consider them equals, or at least (in the case of the job) able to be competent. Rather, he is simply willing to say, ‘To the degree that women act like I think they should, and to the degree that I find them physically acceptable to my completely subjective opinion, then they are ok. Outside that box, women suck.’”
And you’d be right. That guy would NOT be any benefit at all to women; he’d be the worst imaginable “friend” that any kind of women’s acceptance group could imagine.
Or:
Pretend for a moment that you are a woman (if you are not). Let us say you found a website by a woman who said she was all for women’s rights and so on, and worked actively toward this promotion just like many other women do.
And then you found blog posts with titles like “Why Choosing to be a Nun is A Waste of Your Body”, or “Why Rape is Usually the Woman’s Fault,” or “Why Having Kids Instead of a Good Job is a Dead End”, or whatever.
You would think, “This jerk doesn’t respect women, and she is not interested in women’s rights. Rather, she is simply willing to say, ‘To the degree that women are choosing to act less like women, then I will conditionally support a woman’s right to exist.’”
And you’d be right. That gal would NOT be any benefit at all to women; she’d be the worst imaginable “friend” that any kind of women’s rights group could imagine.
All People Are Equal (but thin people are more equal than others)
Well, the ‘Fat Acceptance’ movement faces that, with others “claiming” to be part of it and being almost the opposite.
Ironically, the biggest problems come from seemingly positive things: all things “diet” and “fitness.”
Diets by their very nature are anti-fat. If ya thought it was ok if someone was fat, why would ya recommend they diet?
Fitness isn’t anti-fat, but if it implies that not being able to run five miles is a “problem”, then it probably is. The problem is not the action, of course. The problem is the attitude that it rides in on.
These ideas, websites, blogs etc. are not problems merely because they exist; they’re as welcome to exist as labradors and french fries and people who think navel piercing is cool. But usually their existence, and their philosophy, nearly always comes stapled to the rejection-slip of “should”.
You SHOULD diet, you SHOULD be thin, you SHOULD exercise more, “should”… which is just another way for saying, You aren’t good enough, and your choices aren’t really yours to make; if you don’t make the choices we think are right, you’re unacceptable.
I lost weight. Yay me! Now I’m 100 lbs less evil more acceptable closer to counting lighter!
Now if someone like me who has lost weight mentions it, the same way we would mention rain, or having learned to Tango, that’s no big deal. But if every time I see a fat person I want to go ’save them’ by telling them how lowcarb is the answer, or whatever, then I’d be practicing the same discrimination. If every fat person I talked to about where to find cute fat-size clothes, instantly brought up diet options, that’d be the same bias.
Because it is the assumption that fat is bad, and the assumption that everybody and anybody CAN lose tons of weight, the assumption that anybody SHOULD, the assumption that unlike every other issue in life people don’t have the right to choose what they do or how they are, that is at issue.
Now apply the examples above to fat and you understand why the FA people are sensitive about diet/fitness efforts seeming just as biased as outright I-hate-fat-people efforts.
Pretend for a moment that you are fat (if you are not). Let us say that you find websites, books and blogs, by people who claim to truly accept people as they are and to want to empower all people to make their life whatever they want.
But they are surrounded by articles like, “Fat Should Be Fit: Training for Marathons,” also known as, “Well being fat is somewhat ok IF you are “fit” by my standards but otherwise is totally unacceptable.”
Or, “The 10 Best Diets,” also known as, “Being fat is SO not ok we expect you to be changing that immediately!”
Or, “Fat: Large Size (14-20) Fashion” also known as, “Well there is a LIMIT to what is acceptable; 30 lbs maybe, but not 200 extra lbs!”
In a nutshell it comes down to, “Fat is only conditionally ok, depending on whether you fit my personal criteria of acceptable.”
Which is really just saying it ain’t ok, period.
“I liked ya till I saw yer cellulite!”
As long as it’s not ok for someone to weigh 300 pounds and still be treated like a human being, even if they are NOT dieting nor interested in it, even if they are wearing bright yellow sexy clothes that make some people aghast, even if they are NOT “fit” by whomever’s standards, then it is never going to be truly ok for people to be who they are at other weights.
If it’s not ok to be 300 lbs overweight, then it’s really not ok to be 30 lbs overweight either; as long as the criteria is arbitrary and subjective, it is going to be exclusionary to someone. Every socially accepted bias based on weight sets a precedent for why someone has the right to judge someone else. Or in short: it institutionalizes outright prejudice.
True equality and acceptance is not measured by whether you are considered attractive by someone’s arbitrary personal standard. No man (or woman) should have to want to have sex with someone in order for them to be considered an equal human.
I’m guilty.
I hate this, but it’s true: I have biases myself. I don’t judge people who are huge, but you know what? When I see someone who is 40 lbs overweight, walking past looking just fine except this huge belly-fat hanging over their way-too-tight hip-hugger pants, I think to myself, “WTF are they doing wearing that? What, they can’t afford clothes that fit? They actually think that looks good? Geez, that’s like white-trash fashion.”
That’s a prejudice, and it’s wrong. It’s none of my damn business what other people wear. And hell, some people probably DO think it looks good. These people didn’t ask for and don’t need my permission to be what they are and wear what they want. What gall! Am I saying they should wear baggies and dark colors because they’re overweight? Maybe I am subtly implying that — my own prejudice against myself, and my fat, and by proxy all fat.
And I think it’s bad to lock women in veils? What is the assumption that fat women should dress conservatively, other than veil-psychology applied in a western way to a select group of people?
I want to be a better person, and I don’t want to be like that, and now that I’ve been made conscious of it, I’m going to work on improving myself.
In our world today, you can parade through Jewish neighborhoods with Swastika signs because it’s your right to opinion, or parade about with communist and fascist and terrorist sympathy signs, and nobody is expected to complain lest it infringe on your ‘rights’.
You can build golf clubs and exclude women because it’s your right to preference, and nobody is expected to complain lest it infringe on your ‘rights’ (to ensure all major business deals and positions of power are men-only, and white-men-only generally as well).
Be All That You Can Be Others Think You Should Be
But you cannot be fat: that’s not really ok. Well sure, you can BE fat, you can be happy about it, but you’re likely to suffer more abuse than a Rastafarian mom in a Skinhead school PTA meeting.
You can jog to the sound of moooo’s from guys driving by who want to remind you how you’re a cow (my favorite experience when I first gained a lot of weight and went walking one evening). You can be more excluded from church, PTA and other social gatherings than as if you were the 4-eyed-fatso in 4th grade at age 9. You can have trash or food thrown at you in angry outbursts from people driving by who can’t abide having suffered the trauma of looking at you: it’s ok for them to treat fat people almost like skinheads treat gays or blacks, because hey, you’re FAT!–and everyone knows that is just NOT OK.
You can be denied jobs, promotions, transfers, raises, and all kinds of other things, for what “a bad example” you set.
But here’s the real crux of it: the only thing worse than being fat, is if you dare actually CHOOSE to ACCEPT being fat. Don’tcha know it’s only almost-ok to be fat if you are desperately trying not to be?!
So I guess, if you admit you totally suck as you are, then you’ll be almost-accepted in good faith that eventually you’ll be more like others and that’ll make you ok.
There is merely a margin of potential-acceptance-maybe-IF. Rather like snotty seniors in an exclusive fraternity who patronize the desperate freshmen that want in; good boy, pat on the head, keep trying, maybe eventually you’ll be acceptable.
Your reasons for not dieting are irrelevant. The world figures if you didn’t eat 412 bonbons a day you wouldn’t be so damn fat, and if you’d just QUIT THAT the problem would easily and instantly resolve!
As if the diet industry would be making tens of billions annually if that was really all there was to it. My god. What lack of critical thinking must be present in our population to actually believe this?
Pounds for Points!
It comes from within the ranks of the fat, too.
Dieters cheer each other on despite that historically and on the overall, diets and weight loss surgery have probably done more destruction to human life than the Inquisition ever did. I swear, we cheer each other like those people in the ritual circle on Logan’s Run, hoping to Go-To-God at age 30 in a blazing flash of laser light.
The International Journal of Obesity says that 95 to 98 percent of dieters who lose 75 pounds or more, gain back every single pound within three years. Two-thirds of them do it within that first year. Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent is ALL OF THEM. Success is practically a freak occurrence!
Seriously, watch this little video, she is beautiful and positive and right:
Now, as someone working on losing weight, and as someone with examples of people who have succeeded in losing a lot of it, and gaining muscle, and keeping the weight off, and having their life vastly improved — I HATE THOSE STATISTICS.
I want them to be untrue. Or, like everybody, “I want MY eating plan to be the exception!”
Sure, there’s lots of food religions, but only lowcarbers go to skinny heaven. Haha.
(I know, yeah, yeah. “It isn’t a diet, it’s an eating plan.” Yeah. Until you go off it, then it was a diet retroactively wasn’t it? Rather like you can quit smoking for 2 years, but if you restart you never quit, you just ‘paused’.)
Some of it almost made my brain hurt. I’m facing the dichotomy of WANTING to be truly non-prejudiced, wanting DESPERATELY for fat-acceptance to happen, yet having biases myself.
I spent days thinking about all the stuff I read on these blogs.
I am pointedly dieting, so I guess if I really thought being fat was ok I probably wouldn’t be. For now, I’m willing to sacrifice those logic brownie points for the slim chance of being in the 2-5% who succeed, and living longer for my little girl.
But plenty of people ‘have been there, done that’ with diets, way more than me. Why should they have to diet and get fatter, as most do? Why should they have to do anything others think they “should”?
My cousin should quit living on pizza and beer too, but nobody’s in HIS face about it, since he’s skinny. The issue shouldn’t be poundage, it should be the right of a human being to make their own decisions and to be whatever they truly are without hiding, apologizing, caveating, etc.
Weight-Loss Evangelism
Is highly public dieting (like this blog) anti-fat-acceptance? Well, some feel it is, even if unintentional or indirectly.
NOT because one chooses to diet — that’s a personal choice I have the right to make. But, if there is ANY assumption that any other people, no matter what size or weight, “should” diet, then maybe (maybe) the fat dieter is just as big a problem for the social-cause of fat people being treated like human beings, as fat-hating sorts are.
In both cases, it is implying (or outright saying) that “It is not ok to be fat, and anybody who is, should be doing everything in their power to FIX that.”
Or: “Sure, it’s perfectly fine to be fat, but oh my god I’m trying so hard not to be you know?!” Er…. yeah. Perfectly fine by me, riiiight.
OK, let’s not even pretend that I can truly say I consider fat just fine at the same moment I’m desperately trying to dig myself out of it.
But… fat is a fat person’s problem. It is not the business or problem of the people looking on. Nobody was ever injured by observing someone who was fat, any more than they are injured by observing someone who is short, or blonde, or black, or catholic. People just are what they are.
A common FA issue is people claiming to believe in fat rights, but then attaching “conditional” acceptance: I will accept this human being, Jane, as an equal with a right to her own decisions, only if she falls within parameters I am willing to accept.
Sorta fat: ok. Huge: not ok.
Fat but can go jogging: ok. Fat and not fit: not ok.
Fat but beautiful anyway: ok. Fat and I don’t like him/her: not ok.
Fat but trying not to be: ok. Fat and cool with it: not ok!
How could any of this be construed as truly accepting a human being for what they are? Conditional acceptance is not acceptance at all.
It’s not ok to be black only if you’re working sincerely on becoming whiter, for example. If that’s the criteria, then clearly, it’s just not ok at all.
(Although the bizarre lightening of skin in the case of black celebrities (and let’s not even start on Michael Jackson!) almost seems to dispute this.)
Barbie Comes In Colors
The awesomely talented artists winning awards today, like Halle Berry and Tyra Banks and Denzel Washington, though they are (at the least, if not moreso) as talented as others in their position, one has to admit that their facial features are a lot closer to most the white folks I know than the black folks. (Actually, Africa has every imaginable feature set. But for the blacks inside the USA, it does seem the aqualine features are less common.)
So in reality our society already has an example of “conditional” acceptance: it’s ok to be black if you sorta look like a sensual white with a deeply tropical tan. Oprah wouldn’t be on the cover of many magazines at my Wal-Mart aisle if she didn’t own the magazine (and some percentage of North America) AND have the highest public recognition factor in the country. She wouldn’t be on the covers–because she’s black? No. Because she doesn’t look like a skinny white chick who had a color filter applied. Her features are not really inside the comfort borders of the Hollywood mold, except by the proxy of her money and success.
Politically almost nobody is “prejudiced” anymore. Sounds good on paper doesn’t it? But the reality is that there is a “conditional acceptance” on a good deal of racial acceptance too, and you’ve only got to look around to see it. You see it in some women’s issues as well, some differently-abled issues, some gay/lesbian issues, pretty much any group of people that faces bias, gets the alleged-friends Of The Movement that will say, “I’m on your side! I totally accept your people — if you do this, and that, and with this condition, and that caveat, and…”
“I’m On YOUR Side”
Out of an entire culture that literally despises, mocks, is disgusted by, is rejective of, fat people (the more fat, the moreso), there is a fairly small contingent of people who will say, “I’m not prejudiced.”
But when those same people can’t seem to get over trying to foist diets off on fat people, when they argue ‘for’ fat-acceptance ‘only’ under arbitrary conditions, then they’re just pulling that same just-get-whiter logic.
Here’s a typical issue: “it’s ok if you’re fat but only if you keep it very quiet”: not more than 50 lbs overweight; wear dark colors; and god almighty, please don’t wear a bathing suit, as your getting sun or exercise would do actual injury to people near you forced to look on, just like white women having to share a restroom with black women 60 years ago was considered an unacceptable trauma to white folk.
(My god, is it that recent?! If life on earth is the scope, we’ve been about 3.2% civilized for about .00000007 seconds at this point. Nowhere to go but up I guess.)
OK, so we go and congratulate people for losing weight. I’ve lost 100 lbs, though that varies about 10 lbs either way lately, a whole lot more if you count my previous lowcarb phases. I’m working on it, and people are very supportive, and that rocks. But the Fat Acceptance people would say: Is the congratulations because you are less fat than you were yesterday? If it is merely “I have a goal, and a challenge, and this is my accomplishment,” then that is awesome. That is what it should be. If it is instead, “That’s great that you are 100 lbs less-fat than you used to be!” then technically, that’s a bias. Because there shouldn’t really be the assumption that a person “must or should” be thin, that fat on its own is ‘bad’.
Fat just IS what it IS. For most people it’s unhealthy, but for most people, survey says it may be healthier than their chronic failing diet attempts.
Do I feel the right to intrude on my neighbor’s drinking with this logic? No. Then why do I automatically feel a sense of near PANIC at the idea of a fat person simply deciding they were fat, that’s the way they are, and too freakin bad if others don’t like it? Cultural programming??
And this is part of the bias I fought, reading this stuff.
My mind keeps going, “No, no! They must be thinner because it’s miserable and unhealthy to be fat!”
Gaaaaaah.
The self-appointed Gods of Thin
Now in today’s world, we have the ultimate do-gooder invasion of rights and invalidation of others: the “for your own good” theory. Also known as, “But I’m just so concerned for your health!”
“My” should be the key word there. My parents and child and others who love me can use that line. Not strangers.
Research and reality are making clear that most people who diet end up simply doing more harm to their weight and health by the act of dieting itself. So that’s quite a damning situation, if you “must” diet. Kinda like being thrown in the lake with rocks around your ankles and if you drown you were innocent, but if you float they burn you at the stake as a witch instead! For the vast majority of the population, it’s a lose-lose medical situation.
My friend chooses to smoke cigarettes. We’ve now banned smoking from a good portion of the USA, but we haven’t yet gone so far as to actually invade their privacy, kidnap their children, force drugs or surgery on them, or other attack-methods for bringing them into the “popular considered-norm” with the excuse, “It’s just because we are all SO CONCERNED FOR YOU!”
BAH!
Since the dawn of time human nature has seen control-issues and governing forces trying to forcefully pound other humans into whatever shape they feel is most like themselves. “It’s for the children,” or, “It’s for their own good/health,” is in fact one of the brilliant reasonings used in every tyranny throughout history — Nazi propaganda often had exactly this kind of ‘excuse’ for why anything was ok. More utter disasters and hideous cruelty and destruction of basic human rights have been perpetuated in the name of “for their own good” than pretty much any other excuse.
I have a friend who chooses to not take his medications. That’s dangerous to him. Another friend chooses to live in bad neighborhoods that already nearly got him killed. Another friend chooses to engage in sports that could leave him paralyzed or dead. I have friends and family who are skinny (not just lean, I mean SKINNY–they cannot gain weight even when they try), who live dominantly on whiskey. Or live on McDonalds and Dr. Pepper, as do their children, who like them are skinny, so their likely health issues are completely invisible until they’ll come down with something shortly after adulthood–IF it waits that long. These people are either seriously “risking” themselves or quite literally killing themselves gradually, every single day.
But for the most part, nobody gives a flying pig about how unhealthy they are, except in academic meetings about medical statistics. It’s ok if they are unhealthy, it’s ok if they are even self-destructive – as long as they aren’t fat.
‘Cause you know, if you are fat, any issues — real or assumed — about your health and your “fitness” become the whole world’s business to pass judgement on.
Does this Bikini come in 6x?
Maybe Jane and John don’t choose to diet — not even with lowcarb. Maybe Jane thinks she looks great in that size 4x halter top and shorts. Who sets the god-like standards for these things?
Where on the “spectrum” between my cousin, who is literally dying of lack of bodyfat, hospitalized more than once, eating everything she can and unable to gain — vs me, needing to lose another 200 lbs, clearly suffering movement problems stemming from the weight, often eating almost nothing and when I do, it’s low calorie and lowcarb, yet I only occasionally lose weight and not very fast after the first few months — where on that spectrum is the decision made about what’s ok, who is ok?
And who’s making it? And whose RIGHT is it to make that decision? And what science are they choosing to make it based on, since plenty of science demonstrates the complexity and difficulty and unique-per-body nature of this subject?
The New Orphans of Saint Skinny
If my child kicks butt in karate but is chubby, according to the trend in western culture and currently under debate in Great Britain, she should be kidnapped from her parents, institutionalized, force-fed a low-fat high-carb diet (the worst imaginable thing for her genetics and likely to result in her starving, panicked, developing an eating disorder, feeling horrible, and getting fatter), and if that doesn’t work, suffer surgical destruction of her body to FORCE it.
The fact that even adults DIE of this (Die! People who were alive are now DEAD ON THE OPERATING TABLE!) during surgery, is bad enough. If we decide someone’s fat and kill ‘em in a surgery to ‘fix them’, we just did them waaaay, waaaaay, waaaaay more harm than their fat did them.
The fact that most people seem to gain the weight back plus more is bad enough. The stats really don’t look good for this working well for adults, never mind children. The biggest issue is profound nutrient deficiencies (no matter the supplements) and it just so happens children’s bodies have vastly more demands on that score than adult bodies do as they are growing, so imagine for kids it’s likely to be worse.
The brits proposing this travesty say openly that golly, they just don’t have time for any actual medical evidence to show up for why this would be a good idea. That one line ought to have made every onlooker stop the conversation and walk away on the spot, and go back to “intro to ethics” where you don’t take crap you really don’t know anything about and force it on people.
That is doing nothing but test-research on an entire population. You want your kid to be the lab rat?
The fact that a huge number of folks with weight-loss surgery suffer horrible side effects after anywhere from a month to a couple years, and that the lifespan/health past 5 years is SO horrible a statistic that all official agencies officially refuse to admit tracking it AT ALL doesn’t matter, I guess! (”Sorry, we aren’t keeping track of that, heh!”)
If the issue is FAT, all bets are off, all rights are void.
Drive-through Gastric Bypass
All the research that relates to nutrient deficiencies and protein or autoimmune sensitivities and more, that tie deeply into why people (especially children) can become obese, is considered irrelevant. I never and I mean NEVER heard of people doing all these tests prior to deciding to basically starve someone on a low-fat high-carb diet — or recommend surgery. Fatsos should be taken from their incompetent parents, forced into the Official Popular Diet, and if that doesn’t work, gut ‘em.
Ya know, even in the days of slavery you couldn’t just do that to a person on a whim to make ‘em look different, even when you “owned” them. But apparently in our enlightened age, children have fewer rights than even the slaves of old.
So if my cousin has skinny kids, no matter that they may eat 10x as badly as my child, all that matters to her rights, and their rights, is that THEY ARE NOT FAT.
I Cast You Out, Demon Fat!
Fat is the modern projection of evil. Assignment of it comes with all kinds of social side effects, as if being fat also makes you slightly retarded, depraved and immoral, uncontrolled and untrustworthy as well.
The Fat Acceptance Movement — the real threads of it, not the hijacking efforts of “It’s ok to be fat IF you’re fit AND you’re not TOO fat AND you eat whole grains AND you’re trying to lose weight AND…” version — basically seems to see the issue of fat as not a great deal different than race or gender.
At one time, I would have disagreed with that.
It’s the cross of Inquisition: We demand to know! YOU ATE DONUTS FOR ALL THIS FAT, DIDN’T YOU?! DON’T DENY IT! WE KNOW IT MUST BE TRUE! CONFESS, YOU SINNER!
When I was thin. When I believed the Great Calorie Lie. When I honestly thought, when I saw someone really fat, that it must be some staggering amount of sloth and laziness and face-stuffing that arranged it — even though, to the contrary, I had the evidence of a family of women dieting daily in one fashion or another for 20-40 years and never, ever, being thin during all that, as a counterpoint. I would have said, “People can’t choose their parents but they can choose their diet and exercise.”
But really, it’s the same equation. Your genetics set your baseline, your environment till now hugely contributes, and you can work in the present, but you probably can’t use a magic wand to reverse all metabolic damage/changes done over time.
Everybody knows someone who can eat astounding amounts of junk and never get fat. Doesn’t that just suggest that the opposite probably also exists? And prove that bodies are different?
Problem Puzzle Pieces
Much research seems to suggest endocrine issues as primary; some genetic, some from other causes. Drs. Michael and Mary Eades talk about various health issues on their blogs. As one example, Dr. Mike recently talked about the biochemical Leptin. About how it is (related: Everybody’s Different) radically different in people, and how its quantity and/or absorption can have a huge effect on the fat storage of an individual, no pun intended. That’s only one example; he’s covered a whole lot of biochem topics before.
Insufficient chemical X. Overabundance of chemical Y. Under efficiency of thyroid or other gland Z. Over-efficiency of starvation-response metabolic reduction. Notice that nowhere in that paragraph did “Sits around eating donuts all day” show up.
Research seems to be bearing out that the vast majority of weight loss attempts either fail or regress, and that the best thing anybody can do for getting thin is ‘choose naturally thin parents.’ Get real.
Sure, people who starve themselves often end up binging (I have many friends who fight this). People who don’t eat enough often end up storing as fat what they do finally eat no matter what it is (my primary problem). People who are overweight usually have an innate hormonal drive to eat the calories to support their present body weight, which is more for some than others and more than a skinny person would eat, sure. But that does not mean their initial weight gain, or their maintenance of their weight overall, is solely due to eating 4000 calories a day.
And so what if it was?? It’s their life.
Get real! Do you have ANY IDEA how many calories it “allegedly” takes to maintain my weight (that I’m not eating)? For me to intake this (let alone without noticing?!), I’d literally have to EAT A COW, MAN.
If people can drink bourbon, smoke cigarettes, practice unsafe sex, eat dangerous foods, participate in dangerous sports, refuse to take medications, refuse to exercise, and that is PERFECTLY OK WITH THE WORLD for the most part, then why is a fat person choosing NOT to further-screw their metabolism with dieting that they may already know doesn’t work for them, unacceptable?
Just for the record, I’m not building myself an alibi with this. I choose to diet. I choose to lose weight and I believe I can. (Of course, so do the 95-98% of the people it doesn’t work for.)
My point is, it’s a choice. There are people who do not choose to do this. And they have just as much right to make their choice as I do mine.
Fat Acceptance in reality is no different than other issues, in that you can’t accept it only halfway or conditionally, or you completely invalidate the point of accepting it at all.
It’s not ok to be black only if you have aqualine features;
it’s not ok to be handicapped only if it’s not more than two limbs and happened in a war;
it’s not ok to be asian only if you have an advanced degree;
it’s not ok to be gay only if you act straight so nobody knows (don’t ask, don’t tell!);
it’s not ok to be female only if you reject femininity and family… ;
you get the idea.
If any of those things are discussing “another human being,” and it looks like they all are, then the only thing that is ok is the WHOLE spectrum and ALL human beings.
You don’t have to choose a behavior or situation for yourself, you don’t have to agree philosophically or religiously or politically, but that doesn’t mean that in an environment of democracy, in a philosophy based on freedom and the fundamental equality of mankind, that any group should be rejected or invaded.
Fat Acceptance is, philosophically, a lot less about fat than it is about the personal freedom of a human being to be whatever they are.
The minute you put ANY ‘condition’ on that, you’ve just nullified the whole point of it. That means acceptance without:
officially encouraged,
… media-blitzed,
… … culturally-enforced,
… … … politically-manipulated,
… … … … institutionalized hate
of a given class of people.
In this case, of people who are fat.
Which, as a last note, is not an insult. I’m hugely fat. So?
Fat,fat,FAT.
It is a descriptive, not an epithet.
(With thanks to Joy, who made that fabulous point worth repeating.)
P.S. Humor for the day: I had this cartoon in my head — how I wish I could draw! I’ve often thought to be realistic, retail stores should put two vertical lines outside the door, as if it were a ride at a theme park: BUYERS MUST FIT BETWEEN THESE LINES. Haha!
P.S. And on a MORE POSITIVE NOTE, the fabulous MIKA’s third single, delighting in big women, has taken youtube by storm:
If you like Mika, this video is a live song (pop), followed by a live interview with him. He sings a lot of falsetto. The music companies didn’t wanna have much to do with him but he put his videos on the internet and it exploded. Kinda nice to see someone get popular because of popularity and not because some giant evil empire funded their becoming so! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHJlgvoAanw
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