I’ve never really been on board the Fat Acceptance, capital letters, train. For one thing, its goals are unclear to me: sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat People (i.e., nondiscrimination in accommodations and jobs; the right to be treated with dignity by health care providers; the recognition that there has never been any good scientific evidence of fat as a cause of various conditions; fighting the whole “obesity crisis,” etc.), and sometimes they seem to be about Acceptance of Fat (i.e., body acceptance). I am completely and totally down with the Acceptance of Fat People part of it. The reason I can’t get on board the train is the Acceptance of Fat aspect of it, and how it’s being used by some of the people in the movement as a litmus test, particularly in regard to weight loss being seen as a “betrayal” of the movement.
This morning someone forwarded me a link to Hanne Blank’s new blog, Fickle Finger of Fat. I was all kinds of a-squee because, frankly, I love Hanne Blank and her books and her letter to her doctor. I think she is an amazing reminder that we must demand good care for ourselves, that ensuring we receive adequate care is, in part, our own responsibility.
But then I started reading. And Hanne Blank is trying to lose weight.
It felt kind of like a betrayal, a real kick in the teeth. It always does, when someone who has spoken out in support of fat bodies makes an effort that can be perceived as distancing the person from being fat. And Blank’s statement that she isn’t trying to be thin doesn’t really help, doesn’t do anything to lessen the blow. Because she’s still equating life improvement with weight loss.
In my post yesterday, I spoke about the entitlement that comes with appointing someone a role model, the feeling you can order them around or take any failure of theirs to live up to the standards you’ve set up for them as a betrayal. It’s ownership, pure and simple, and it’s wrong. Indeed, Hanne Blank addressed that this morning:
My life, my politics, my activism, and my communities are complicated and wide-ranging. I’m interested in talking and exploring a lot of those things, many of them publicly because that’s how I roll. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that because I talk about something, or because I have a political interest in it, that it’s the whole of what I think or that I am subscribed to any particular orthodoxy. And don’t make the mistake of assuming that because I talk about something, or because I have a political interest in it, that what I think about it is identical to what you think about it. It probably isn’t.
In sum, if you feel that I have lost my credibility as a Fat Acceptance activist by me saying I would like to lose some weight (in conjunction with the other things I am working on in regard to my body), take a step back. The picture of my activism, to say nothing of my life, is a hell of a lot bigger than the six-inch square of fat issues.
Kate Harding, who I love, also wrote a post, not directly about Blank’s blog, about how she’s gone from being agnostic on the question of whether people who want to lose weight can be part of the Fat Acceptance Movement, to believing that people trying to lose weight are in opposition to the goals of the Movement, as are liberals who vote for Bush:
I take the position that no one should pursue weight loss as a goal in and of itself. That is not the same as believing any individual who pursues weight loss is automatically, stupid, misguided, or incapable of supporting some elements of fat acceptance. It is my political stance on the matter, not a reflection of my personal feelings about any given person’s choices. There are too many different people and too many different reasons for that choice for me to say I have a problem with people who diet. But I have a problem with the practice of dieting, in the abstract. Big one.
Put it this way: I also take the position that no one should vote for a Republican president. That’s because, in the abstract, I believe there are solid, logical, demonstrable reasons not to vote for a Republican president. But I had dinner the other night with someone who voted for fucking Bush, and we had fun. I have no personal opinion whatsoever on the vast majority of Republican voters, whom I don’t know and never will. I could probably have dinner with plenty of them, and I wouldn’t feel any pressing need to fight with every one of them about their choices, because this is (at least nominally) a democracy, and that’s how it works. People do what they think is best, and as long as it’s legal and not violent, I’ll support their right to do that. But in the abstract, based on the best information I have, I still believe voting Republican is a bad choice, and I have no problem saying so publicly. That’s where I come down on the issue, not on the individuals who do it.
And that’s exactly how I feel about dieting.
Still with me? Here’s where it gets controversial. I do not believe you can truly be a fat acceptance activist and support dieting any more than you can be a liberal activist and support Bush. I believe the two are simply irreconcilable.
As Kate and the Rotund both acknowledge, there are some serious issues of personal autonomy that conflict with this stance.
I’ll say.
Because I have to ask this: Who the hell are you to tell me how I feel in my body and what I can do about it? Who are you to tell Hanne Blank how she feels in her body and what she can do with it, if she feels she needs to? In fact, what does Hanne Blank have to say for herself?
There are some specific aspects of my life, however, that are already improving as I get into the swing of doing more exercise and being more specific and directed about what I eat, and which, yes, are also improving with even the very minor weight loss that has happened so far as a result.
One is my joint and ligament health. I’ve sprained and broken both ankles in the past, more than once per ankle, and I have sustained some permanent damage to the soft tissues. My on-again, off-again case of plantar fasciitis is hell on wheels when it flares up. And recently, through the magic of a really ugly sudden combination impromptu Cossack squat-kick/nasty fall on the stairs when I took a step and landed on a cat, I tore some ligaments in my knee, an injury from which I am only just now healing. (The cat, by the way, was unhurt precisely because I went down like the Lusitania, which is to say with a great big boom.)
Bodies vary in their ability to withstand injuries. But to some extent physics is physics: I may be less prone to osteoporosis thanks to the weight-bearing exercise I do just by walking around, but if I get into an injury situation, it’s that much more weight supplying that much more torque. The heavier I have gotten the worse I tend to get hurt with joint injuries, and the longer it takes to heal. I understand from the orthopaedic literature I have read on the types of injuries I have had that this isn’t at all uncommon. I want to still be mobile and active when I’m 60… and when I’m 80. I also want to try to avoid surgery on the joints if I can. For some folks with stronger ankles, and without my history of traumatic injury to their joints, weight might be less of an issue, or even a nonissue. For me, having read the research pretty carefully and given it a lot of thought, it’s an issue.
A second is my metabolic health. Like a fair number of fat women, I have PCOS, and its attendant metabolic issues are playing more of an issue in my life as I get older. I do not at this point have Type II diabetes, and just between you, me, and the Internet, I’m hoping to manage to avoid that particular destination. But in recent years–even with a pretty healthy balanced diet– I’ve been creeping up on it. My body simply doesn’t handle carbohydrates as gracefully as it used to. I don’t need Mummenschanz to show up and do an interpretive dance to know what that means.
I’ve noticed that many of the people criticizing Blank for losing weight fall on the younger and/or thinner end of the spectrum (something that Natalie also noticed). I had no inkling 10 years and 90 pounds ago that I’d have trouble walking barefoot the 20 feet to the bathroom now, or that that niggling little ankle injury I had when I was 30 would have traveled all the way up my leg and be impinging on my mobility now that I’m pushing 40. I don’t want to be using a cane when I’m 50 and a scooter when I’m 60.
Sure, I’ve been working out pretty seriously with weights, and that’s helped a great deal (for instance, my knee ligaments are far less likely to get all twisted up and pull my kneecap out of track, because my muscles are stronger now). But physics is physics, and the less weight I’m hauling into middle age, the more mobile I will be.
Bring up losing weight, though, and someone will either start talking about HAES, or start in with the, “Diets don’t work! You’re doomed to fail. What plans do you have for regain?”
And that’s always annoying, for a couple of reasons: First, the idea that adopting HAES is only okay if you’re not doing it to lose weight (but losing weight accidentally is fine, because you weren’t trying to!) is a bit like saying that having an abortion is okay, but only for really good, movement-approved reasons, and only if you feel really sorry about it. Look, either you go whole hog with the “health” aspect or you don’t. Health at Every Size really means nothing if you can’t accept that there are circumstances in which being as healthy as you can entails losing some weight. From Natalie:
But the party line in size acceptance is that you can’t love yourself and wish there was a bit less of you, even if less of you meant that your quality of life is better (where better gets to be defined by the person living the life in question). The party line is that if you do lose weight, you need to be apologetic about it and explain that it was accidental, that it just happened. And losing weight via illness is okay, too, because that was out of your control, too. And it’s okay to talk about how you’re going to start working out because you just love to exercise and you really love your veggies and tofu, but you also have to be very clear that you’re not doing it to lose weight. Because that’s just a no-no.
And I’m tired of this doublespeak. For me, I am not happy or comfortable at the weight I am and I haven’t been for some time. I’m having some physical difficulties that are worrisome (I’m going to the doctor in a couple of weeks since I finally have health insurance) and I’m pretty sure that they’re being exacerbated by my weight. My mother dropped dead at 47 from a heart attack. I’d prefer that not happen to me and since cardiovascular disease runs on both sides of my family, I need to start taking better care of my body. And that means forcing myself to exercise (which I’m doing a terrible job at so far) and refraining from eating so much crappy food (limited success on that front). And you bet your damn bippy that if I manage to lose some weight–which is by no means guaranteed, but I would like to stop this gaining 10 pounds every year bullshit, otherwise I’m going to weigh 500 pounds when I’m 50 and I’d really rather not–I’m going to be happy about it. I’m not going to apologize and I’m not going to pretend it was an accident–but I’m also not going to count calories and obsessively weigh myself because that way lies madness. And maybe I don’t lose weight, and that’s fine, too. Either way, my health will be better.
Second, aside from the silencing aspect of the “Diets don’t work!” chorus, I’ve never really gotten a straight answer from anyone I’ve asked: what is it you mean by “diet?” Because cutting back sustainably on sugar and doing Optifast are not exactly the same thing. Yes, I’m aware of the “Oh, but cutting back on sugar is HAES” dodge, but how is it HAES (lifetime change) if you’re not trying to lose weight, but a “diet” (doomed to failure) if you are? For that point, back to Hanne Blank:
It’s an odd truism that in size/fat-acceptance circles, particularly the more politicized ones, weight loss is a very polarizing issue at the very least, and often effectively a taboo. Those who lose weight “accidentally” while pursuing HAES-based improvements of exercise and diet aren’t excoriorated for it (as long as they don’t act too pleased about it). But publicly decide to lose weight and suddenly it’s torches, pitchforks, and shut up and go back to your rice cakes, you traitor! You have no right to call yourself part of the size-acceptance movement, you running-dog lackey of Jenny Craig, George Bush, and Halliburton! You’re going against everything this movement stands for!
To which I say: oh, please.
I will eat ten hats if I am the only fattie, or even the only fattie in the fat-acceptance movement, who has ever entered into the process of trying to become healthier and more fit and thought “you know, losing some weight would not be so bad.” If it makes me a rotten person and a bankrupt role model that I’m being honest about that, so be it, because I know for a fact that I am not the only person in the fat-acceptance movement who has ever thought it.
Nor am I the only person in the size acceptance movement who has ever wanted or worked toward a weight loss goal even after becoming part of size-acceptance activism, and while remaining part of that activism. I’m not gonna out anyone, because it’d be rude. But I’m not.
People have difficult and complicated relationships with their bodies and their politics. The only reason I have to not be public and honest about my own is in order to not have people get their knickers in a wad about it, and frankly, that’s a pisspoor reason to tiptoe around the elephant in the living room that is weight loss in the context of the size acceptance community.
I haven’t done all the work I have to get my brain out of the “thinner is always better” trenches of mainstream culture only to unquestioningly toe the line of the “weight loss is categorically bad and constitutes categorically submitting to the body and weight values of mainstream culture.” I don’t roll like that. I’ve been there, clearly, I’ve worked in and with that philosophy over a period of years, and in the end I’ve found it incomplete and unsatisfying. This stuff is not black or white. Not scientifically, not medically, and sure the hell not personally, in our lives or in our lived experiences of our bodies or in our heads.
Ultimately, that’s where this all comes down: this is about me, and it’s about me working my way down a funky untrodden path, having no idea where I’m going to end up and no real notion how I’m going to get there. If you’re reading, that’s the one thing I ask that you try to keep straight. This is about me, and my body and my brain on a journey to try some things out and see where they lead and what I think about them on the way, not about dogma.
As Hanne points out in her open letter, she’s involved in a number of different activist arenas, and doesn’t toe the line in any of those, either. But those movements are all flexible enough that her deviation from someone else’s idea of what a ___ activist should be or believe on some detail doesn’t affect her ability to be an effective advocate for what’s at the core of the movement.
To analogize to feminism, the core is that women are people, with the same rights as men. There are any number of ways that one feminist differs from another in terms of what each finds important — as we saw with the Free Monty debacle, some feminists consider animal rights to be central, some don’t. Some feminists consider grooming choices to be crucial, others don’t. Some feminists think abortion is central, some think forced sterilization is. And then there’s the perennial radfem/”sex-positive” debate. While the internecine conflicts are tiresome, draining and counterproductive, the goal is the same: to improve the lives of women.
I’d like to improve the lives of fat people, and fight against fat hatred in science, medicine, law and the media. Do my efforts in that regard really only count if I can get a fifth-level blackbelt in Embracing My Own Fat and promise that I’ll never, ever do anything to change the size of the body I live in?
The central point that seems to be missed again and again is that no one is trying to tell you or Hanne Blank or anyone else what to do with their bodies. No one is denying anyone the right to pursue weight loss. Go for it. I hope that each person I know who invests themselves in the purposeful act of losing weight is one of the lucky statistical freaks who can lose the weight and keep it off.
As for this assuming Hanne Blank believe one thing or another - she set herself up as a fat activist. I don’t think any of us have assumed that is the only thing she stands for or the end-all, be-all in her world. But we have only her actions to go by. We look at this woman who has done this amazing work and inspired so many people to feel good about themselves. Whether she wants to be or not, she has set her public persona up as a role model for many, many people. No one owns her the person. But as a public figure, yes, many people regard her public persona in a certain inspiring light.
Honestly, I am coming to believe that she has engineered this on purpose. She has set up a public weight loss blog, disabled comments (comments WERE disabled when all of this began though I have seen a few pop up more recently), and in her earlier entries claimed that fat acceptance is a way for fat people to be lazy about their fat. She did this knowing that people were going to feel betrayed. And seems to kind of be enjoying her current role as Black Sheep of Fat Acceptance.
Your efforts do not only count if you get, as you said, the Fifth-Level Black Belt. But if you want to stand up as an Activist and tell people that they should love their own bodies, you really lack effectiveness if you don’t love your own. Dieting is a political act within the concept of Fat Acceptance. And, just to be real clear, dieting in this sense and in every other instance of my usage unless otherwise noted, means doing something with weight loss as your goal in mind.
This isn’t, to use your feminism analogy, the equivalent of grooming. This is akin to saying, well, as a feminist I support the concept that women are people with all the inherent rights that men have but, you know, I don’t want to work outside of my home and, more than that, I want to talk about how it’s a great choice to women who are working REALLY DAMN HARD to work outside of the home.
There is nothing wrong with the choice. It’s the promotion of that choice. The insistence that it needs to be a valid topic for discussion within circles of women who are trying their damnedest to get out of the home. YES, stay at home, enjoy your choices. But no one is challenging that choice the way they are challenging our right to work.
Well, that’s part of my question: what, exactly, does Fat Acceptance entail? Is it a political movement seeking to improve the lot of fat people, or is it a body-acceptance movement trying to get individual fat people to love their bodies?
In any event, how is deciding to lose weight because your joints just can’t take it anymore antithetical to loving your body?
Do my efforts in that regard really only count if I can get a fifth-level blackbelt in Embracing My Own Fat and promise that I’ll never, ever do anything to change the body I live in?
That question has been asked and answered a whole BUNCH of times in comments at my blog and TR’s this week, though I don’t blame you if you haven’t been able to keep up, what with your own blog drama.
To me, self-acceptance is a crucial component of fat acceptance. That doesn’t mean that everyone who’s interested in the movement will be 100% self-accepting. First, I doubt that anyone ever reaches 100%, and second, I think that most people find the movement when they’re not very far along the self-acceptance path at all, and the movement helps with that. I’d sure hate to turn those people off it altogether. But it does mean that within fat-positive spaces, talking about how much you want to lose weight — and demanding that everyone else validate that personal choice — is inappropriate.
(Note: I am using “the movement” there to refer basically to the whole concept of fat acceptance, because half the problem here is that there’s NOT much of an organized movement.)
A refusal to validate the choice to diet within the context of fat acceptance is not the same as refusing to support people’s bodily autonomy. And I don’t think the abortion analogy holds up. To me, the most effective analogy here is identifying yourself as a queer rights activist while undergoing “ex-gay” therapy. Or at least, choosing to remain closeted. There can be a lot of totally understandable, personal reasons for choosing to remain closeted, but to expect gay pride activists (and “fat pride” is another term many people prefer to “fat acceptance”)to validate remaining closeted as a personal choice that somehow does not conflict with gay pride? Is asking an awful lot.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’s the best one I’ve got. And it’s as clear as I can make my viewpoint on all this.
One of the reasons it’s imperfect — and the reason I went to the ex-gay analogy first, not just the closet — is that diets don’t work. It may sound like splitting hairs to say changing your eating and exercise habits is okay, but trying to lose weight isn’t, but from my perspective, it’s a really important hair to split. Because fat people are told constantly that we must lose weight for our health, and that’s manifestly untrue (except in a very small percentage of cases in which weight does directly affect someone’s health). However, fat people, just like thin people, can reap long-term health benefits from a balanced diet and regular exercise. I split the hair because I’m sure not opposed to anyone trying to achieve long-term health benefits. But a balanced diet and regular exercise will not produce long-term weight loss in most people. So as long as we keep the focus on weight loss instead of behavioral changes and health benefits, we’re barking up the wrong tree — which also happens to be a tree society privileges, based on falsehoods, distortions, and bigotry.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking your life would be easier if you lost weight; in this society, that’s completely understandable. But the reality is, thinking your life would be easier if you lost weight is very much like thinking your life would be easier if you won the lottery. Sure, that probably would make your life easier, but it is not something you can bring about by force of sheer will, just because you like the idea of it. (This gets muddied because most people can lose weight temporarily by force of sheer will. But it does not last in virtually every case, which means a long-term strategy for being healthier and happier cannot hinge on weight loss.)
Long-term health benefits are achievable for fat people. Long-term improvements in self-esteem are achievable for fat people. Long-term weight loss, in so many cases that the exceptions are insignifcant, is NOT achievable. And yet, the culture — and WAY too many doctors — keep insisting that the only way for fat people to be healthy and proud of themselves is to lose weight. This is dangerous bullshit.
And what it means is, dieting is privileged behavior. It is what fat people are expected to do to be acceptable in this society. Even if that’s not WHY a given person is doing it, the privilege issue becomes unavoidable when people come into fat-positive spaces and start saying, “But dieting doesn’t make me a bad person!” No, it doesn’t, any more than being white, straight, and upper middle class makes me a bad person. But in the context of social justice movements, insisting that my privilege be validated and respected by people who don’t share it is not gonna fly. (Once again, for the record, I am not and never was accusing Hanne Blank of doing that — nor do I think The Rotund was. This is a different issue.)
It is perfectly understandable not to be thrilled every minute of every day that you (collective you, not Zuzu-you) got stuck with fat genes in a fat-hating culture. But it’s not appropriate to derail conversations in spaces devoted to fat rights and fat pride by talking about how much you don’t fucking want to be fat — or as fat as you are — and how you think it’s so unfair that people won’t take your decision to diet as a personal, politically neutral act. This is what I see happening all over the place, and it’s what I was responding to.
And what all of this might mean is that The Rotund and I end up in the category of Radical Fat Acceptance Activists, while people who think dieting isn’t anathema to fat acceptance are regarded as moderates. That’s profoundly weird to me, because I think of myself as anything but radical, but maybe that’s how this will all shake out. I don’t know. What I do know is, the deliberate pursuit of weight loss is VERY unlikely to make anyone’s mental or physical health better in the long term; it actually stands a good chance of damaging people’s mental and physical health; and it is behavior that is culturally privileged as the acceptable alternative to acknowledging that size diversity is a simple fact of life, and fat people are just as human as anyone else. For all those reasons, I simply cannot see how dieting and fat acceptance can ever go hand-in-hand, philosophically.
I would never object to people doing what they like with their own bodies. If, theoretically, anti-dieting legislation ever made it to the table, I would fight against that as strongly as I do against anti-abortion legislation. And if people who are on diets want to help promote the cause of fat acceptance/rights/pride, that’s terrific. BUT, I simply cannot say the existence of some people like that means that dieting is generally compatible, philosophically and politically, with fat acceptance.
And I think that if the Fat Acceptance Movement is ever going to be a movement — instead of this eternally “emerging” concept that most people have still never heard of — people who want to be involved need to figure out where they stand on that question, because it derails more conversations, projects, and plans than you can imagine.
If some people come to a different conclusion than I have and want to approach it from a different angle, great. But I’m drawing this line in the sand in terms of the work I want to do, because my vision of a Fat Acceptance Movement includes promoting, without qualification, the fact that dieting is not necessary for good health and will not work for the vast majority of people. It’s awfully hard to get that message out when one is constantly trying not to alienate people who disagree. So I finally snapped and said, okay, fine, if I alienate people, so be it. They can approach it from their angle, and maybe they’ll be much more successful at advancing the cause of fat rights than I will. But that’s not how I want to do it, not the movement I want to be a part of, and I’m done with being wishy washy about it in an effort not to turn off people who fundamentally disagree with what I think is a very important element of fat acceptance.
Make sense?
And sorry about the length of that. I just posted the whole thing on my blog, so if you want to delete that monster comment and replace it with a link, go nuts.
That question has been asked and answered a whole BUNCH of times in comments at my blog and TR’s this week, though I don’t blame you if you haven’t been able to keep up, what with your own blog drama.
I did see that, but I also saw that the answer was, in at least one person’s words, “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” I thought the idea was that weight loss wasn’t supposed to be a matter of morality?
And in your response, Kate, I see you using the term “diet” without defining it. Like I said, that’s one of the frustrations I have with the stance you’ve taken: you can adopt the exact same behaviors, but if you’re not trying to lose weight, it’s HAES. If you are, it’s a “diet.” How is one damaging and not the other, if it’s the exact same behavior and results in weight loss?
And I do understand that dieting privilege runs deep in this culture, and that it’s a radical act to be a happy fat person. I get that. More than you yourself may understand, since you’re a much thinner person than I am and walk around with a certain amount of privilege because of that (as I did when I was your size). I understand that a fat-positive space is not the place to talk about weight loss for its own sake.
But what I have a real problem with is someone who is younger and/or thinner and does not live in my body setting out some arbitrary rule that while I may undertake measures to improve my health, those measures must not include an attempt to lose weight, even if doing so is beneficial for my orthopedic health, because if I do so, I’m not truly Committed to the Cause, or I’ve been brainwashed by the anti-fat, pro-dieting forces in society. I take real issue with the idea that Hanne Blank’s pursuit of what’s best for her body undoes all of her contributions to size acceptance just because someone without her health problems decides that she’s a Traitor to the Cause.
BTW, I also realize that I’m going to piss off and/or alienate a number of people with this. But it’s kind of par for the course this week.
And in your response, Kate, I see you using the term “diet” without defining it. Like I said, that’s one of the frustrations I have with the stance you’ve taken: you can adopt the exact same behaviors, but if you’re not trying to lose weight, it’s HAES. If you are, it’s a “diet.” How is one damaging and not the other, if it’s the exact same behavior and results in weight loss?
I defined it in my original post on the subject and an older post I linked to in that. And the definition is pretty much what The Rotund said: it’s the deliberate pursuit of weight loss as a distinct goal, separate from or in addition to health benefits.
And it’s a different behavior from HAES because A) one of the benefits of HAES is in boosting self-esteem and even reducing depression, so the mental aspect of the behavior is important, and B) it is assuming that permanent weight loss can result from HAES behavior, which it almost never can. I love this article for illustrating the difference I’m talking about.
What I’m saying is, HAES might cause incidental weight loss, but it will almost certainly not be permanent — yet the health benefits still can be. (Or at least have so far been proven to be much longer-lasting than any weight loss.) So including weight loss as a goal is pretty much asking for failure, while setting health improvement as a goal is realistic.
But what I have a real problem with is someone who is younger and/or thinner and does not live in my body setting out some arbitrary rule that while I may undertake measures to improve my health, those measures must not include an attempt to lose weight, even if doing so is beneficial for my orthopedic health
I can totally understand that feeling, but again, my point is, it’s NOT an arbitrary rule, because it’s a rule I’m basing on the fact that, no matter how old you are, no matter how fat you are, no matter how much your knees hurt, we don’t know how to bring about permanent weight loss. As I just said to someone in another thread, if you think losing weight and keeping it off temporarily will be worth it if it causes a temporary reduction in chronic pain, go for it — I totally get that. Might do it myself if I were in that kind of pain. But one of the things I’m arguing against here is the idea that permanent weight loss somehow becomes possible just because someone has really, really good, politically correct reasons for wanting to be less fat.
It doesn’t. Which means I’m not interested in debating someone’s personal reasons for wanting to lose weight; I’m interested in finding ways to help people be more comfortable in their fat bodies — no matter how fat, no matter how painful — because study after study shows that the deliberate pursuit of permanent weight loss is a sucker bet. Period. Not just for the thin and reasonably healthy, but for all of us.
So this isn’t me saying, “Oh, Zuzu, if you want your joints to stop hurting, you don’t love yourself enough to play in my sandbox!” It’s me saying, “Dude, chronic pain SUCKS, and the fatter you are, the harder it is to get by in this culture, which also SUCKS. But those sucky, sucky facts still do not make permanent weight loss possible for 95% of people. Which means I’m still not inclined to say that permanent weight loss is a worthy goal, in and of itself.”
What I disagree with is calling a plan of balanced eating and regular exercise a ‘diet’ to begin with. In my mind (and this might just be MY mind), ‘diet’ equates to ‘gimmick’. When I was growing up, I watched my mom go through the cabbage soup diet and the hollywood diet and whatever BS came down the pike. She even went to hypnosis. She wasn’t unhealthy, though - she was just heavy, like every other woman in her family, ever. They’re farm people. They’re sturdy. The women tend to live well into their 90s, healthy and alert and active, till they just abruptly drop dead. Those are GOOD genes, and all my mom ever did was hate them, and it makes me sad.
Personally, I’ve begun making a sincere attempt to eat locally, seasonably and sustainably. I don’t call this a ‘diet’, because it’s more a philosophy/morality thing for me, but the health benefits are pretty nice side effects. To me, ‘diet’ is synonymous with ‘fad’, and carries a ton of mental and emotional baggage I just refuse to carry anymore. Part of my new effort at local eating has been letting go of the ‘diet food’ products. It’s so reflexive to grab the fake fat free cream cheese spread instead of the full-fat locally made version, but I’m training myself out of it, slowly but surely, despite telling myself that you can use a lot less when what you use has lots of flavor. I feel a lot better, honestly, even though I haven’t lost a pound. Making this whole kerfluffle about ‘dieting’ is tricky for me.
Ailei, the stuff you’re talking about is A) stuff I try to practice, too, and B) not what I would call dieting. To me, diets are not defined by what you eat, what plan you follow, etc. They’re defined by the specific goal of losing weight.
As Meowser brilliantly put it in a thread at my blog, the difference between HAES and dieting is that in HAES, the behavior is the goal, not the size you end up at after engaging in that behavior for a while.
Well, that’s part of my question: what, exactly, does Fat Acceptance entail? Is it a political movement seeking to improve the lot of fat people, or is it a body-acceptance movement trying to get individual fat people to love their bodies?
Zuzu, i think it’s both, and that’s where the problems are coming in. The people who are into it as a political thing and the people who are into it as a body-acceptance thing are using the same terms, but intending different things by them.
Personally? I’m not political in the slightest. For me, it’s all about body/self-acceptance. As i’ve said on my own blog, if you don’t like who you are inside, it’s incredibly difficult (if not altogether impossible) to really be satisfied with who you are on the outside - regardless of what you look like. If you’ve got an antagonistic relationship with your body (be it from physical or emotional pain), all of the champions in the world can’t stop the bullies from seeking you out as a target.
So i guess i’m one of the Fat Hippies or something. I’m okay with that.
Ailei, the stuff you’re talking about is A) stuff I try to practice, too, and B) not what I would call dieting. To me, diets are not defined by what you eat, what plan you follow, etc. They’re defined by the specific goal of losing weight.
As Meowser brilliantly put it in a thread at my blog, the difference between HAES and dieting is that in HAES, the behavior is the goal, not the size you end up at after engaging in that behavior for a while.
Okay, you’re making me crazy again. If the only difference between something being HAES and being a “diet” is the motivation for undertaking it, how is it physically damaging when it’s a “diet” but not physically damaging when it’s HAES?
It seems to me that if you’re going to come out as anti-diet, you need to define that term. And you’re fudging, I’m sorry to say. If you want to argue that setting out to lose weight is mentally damaging, that’s one thing — but how is the very same behavior healthy in one instance and physically damaging in another, based solely on the motivation for doing it?
Zuzu says:
“In any event, how is deciding to lose weight because your joints just can’t take it anymore antithetical to loving your body?”
Right on right on right ON.
If the only difference between something being HAES and being a “diet” is the motivation for undertaking it, how is it physically damaging when it’s a “diet” but not physically damaging when it’s HAES?
That’s the only difference when we’re splitting the hair between doing the exact same behaviors with different motivations. But that’s not all we’re talking about here.
Dieting encompasses behaviors that can look like HAES, but it also encompasses a whole lot more, including behaviors that can be physically damaging.
HAES is not likely to cause physical damage, because the principle behind it is listening to your body and trying to care for it, not trying to change its shape.
So I am arguing that dieting, as a blanket term that includes any behavior undertaken for the specific purpose of weight loss, has the potential to be both physically and mentally damaging.
The kind of diet that involves, say, eating more fruits and vegetables and doing moderate exercise for the specific purpose of weight loss is not likely to be physically damaging. But it’s also not likely to cause much weight loss, even temporarily. It CAN, in some cases, which is why the hair must be split. But attempting to lose weight almost inevitably involves some kind of restricted eating, which HAES does not.
Basically, in the vast majority of cases, it’s apples and oranges. Very, very rarely, you’ll get an apple that looks just like an orange, and then you have to subject it to further analysis. But in most cases, there’s a very clear distinction.
***Okay, you’re making me crazy again. If the only difference between something being HAES and being a “diet” is the motivation for undertaking it, how is it physically damaging when it’s a “diet” but not physically damaging when it’s HAES?***
For me, following this discussion from a distance, there’s two things about this:
(a) It’s not physically damaging, it’s mentally crazymaking. And that may not be true for everyone, but I know it’s true for an awful lot of us.
(b) It’s not the actions of HAES/”eating a healthy diet” dieting that are physically damaging. It’s losing weight and regaining it that’s damaging. I guess there’s a chance that might happen with HAES, although I suspect the fluctuations are going to be small enough not to matter. And that would be true with “dieting” too, if that’s the only thing that someone’s doing. But if someone says “I’m going to lose X pounds,” there’s absolutely no way to say that HAES will do that for them. None at all. If someone really is determined to lose X pounds, the odds are they’re going to have to do something more than eating intuitively and exercising, particularly if they’re someone inclined to be fat to begin with. And THAT’S where it gets damaging.
I guess I probably differ from Kate in that I guess I figure that if you say “I’m going to live by HAES principles and only HAES principles with the goal of losing weight” that I don’t think it’s really dieting, per se. But I do think that actually reaching a goal weight of X that way is pretty unlikely, and I also think for many of us - myself included - it’s likely to be mentally damaging enough that it’ll go further than that or lead to self hate of various sorts. And for that reason, I don’t particularly want to read about it at fat acceptance blogs I go too. Because I find the repeated assertions that “But I just want to eat sensibly and exercise to get to my goal weight!” to be incredibly triggering because damn, if it worked that way for me, I wouldn’t be here to begin with.
what, exactly, does Fat Acceptance entail? Is it a political movement seeking to improve the lot of fat people, or is it a body-acceptance movement trying to get individual fat people to love their bodies?
It includes both.
In any event, how is deciding to lose weight because your joints just can’t take it anymore antithetical to loving your body?
A couple of possibilities:
1. If weight loss only ends up damaging your joints more, which some research suggests can happen, then losing weight in an attempt to improve your joint pain is counterproductive. (This especially is a risk if you get weight loss surgery. It can cause nutritional deficiencies that can increase joint pain. I know someone who committed suicide in part because that happened to her.)
2. Public “weight loss for health” messages end up strengthening the general sense in this culture that unless a fat person is trying hard enough to lose weight, they are refusing to take care of themselves and therefore don’t deserve health care.
Whether the person is “trying hard enough” is often judged by their size and not their behavior. Someone I know lost over 100 pounds, then went to the doctor and said “I lost this weight but my joints still hurt. Please treat me so I can exercise.” But because she was still technically “obese,” doctor refused to treat her. He said she hadn’t really tried hard enough to lose weight.
(In case my age, size, and health status make a difference in whether you think I am qualified to have an opinion, I weight over 300 lbs, I’m 45 years old, and I have several fat-correlated health conditions.)
All right, I’ll wade in here even though I know I’m going to regret it.
I lost 32 pounds with Weight Watchers and have kept 24 of those pounds off for five years (and the re-gain was because I had a ligament in my knee replaced last year and am only just now starting to walk normally again). Let’s get this part out of the way, too: I believe in the program so much that I work for them 4 hours a week for ridiculously low pay.
Someone who comes to Weight Watchers is going to learn a few things when they walk in the door: they will learn that they need to develop healthy habits (5 fruits and veggies a day, calcium, 6 glasses of water, fiber, etc.) and that if they try to cut back on the number of calories that we tell them to eat, they will not lose weight and may very well gain.
We teach people how to exchange bad eating habits for good ones, how overcome emotional eating, how to stand up for themselves when friends or family members get upset that they’re taking care of themselves, what a healthy amount of exercise is.
I personally know people who have lost 50 pounds and kept it off for more than 5 years. I also know a couple of people who have lost 100 pounds and kept it off for more than 5 years. So it becomes very frustrating to me very quickly to hear people toss off things like, “Oh, it’s impossible for anyone to lose weight and keep it off.” There may be some people that it’s impossible for, but not nearly as many as people would like you to think.
And yet, despite all of the above, people are going to see the words “Weight Watchers” and “know” that we are EEEVVVVILLLL diet-pushers who encourage people to lose weight in an unhealthy way as a goal in and of itself even though we all secretly know it’s completely impossible. I will, once again, be accused of bragging and putting myself above everyone else and don’t you know how anti-feminist it is to lose weight?
I now try to keep myself out of weight-related conversations on the internet, because I’m really tired of being called a liar because my own lived experiences don’t line up with someone’s political beliefs.
“If you want to argue that setting out to lose weight is mentally damaging, that’s one thing — but how is the very same behavior healthy in one instance and physically damaging in another, based solely on the motivation for doing it?”
I’d say that the mental damage can play out as physical damage, if you let certain disordered behaviors flair up.
Basically, if I do the lifestyle-change thing and my goal is “be healthier and maybe lose some weight if that’s in the cards but mostly just be healthier,” I’m not going to freak out on myself if I don’t lose weight. If I don’t get healthier, I’m going to calibrate what I’m doing until I get the blood profile, muscle strength, endurance, energy levels, etc., that I want.
But if I do the lifestyle-change thing and my goal is “lose fifty pounds,” well, I’ve got way less control over and sensitivity to what my body is going to do in terms of weight with what I give it than I do in terms of how it makes me feel. Only losing a few pounds can spur guilt-based eating/food-avoidance, weight-loss plateaux can inspire excessive amounts of exercising, natural, healthy upticks in weight can provoke feelings of hopelessness and destructive behaviors.
(a) It’s not physically damaging, it’s mentally crazymaking. And that may not be true for everyone, but I know it’s true for an awful lot of us.
Sigh. I’m not saying the process can’t be crazymaking. What I’m trying to unpack are the assertions that “dieting,” when all that distinguishes “dieting” from “HAES” is an intention to lose weight, is physically damaging, while “HAES” is not. And that just does not hold together logically.
2. Public “weight loss for health” messages end up strengthening the general sense in this culture that unless a fat person is trying hard enough to lose weight, they are refusing to take care of themselves and therefore don’t deserve health care.
Whether the person is “trying hard enough” is often judged by their size and not their behavior. Someone I know lost over 100 pounds, then went to the doctor and said “I lost this weight but my joints still hurt. Please treat me so I can exercise.” But because she was still technically “obese,” doctor refused to treat her. He said she hadn’t really tried hard enough to lose weight.
I absolutely agree that health care is something that fat people deserve regardless of expressed intention to lose weight. And that’s part of the “Acceptance of Fat People” bit that I sign on to.
But where I’m having a real, serious problem is with the idea that someone with a specific, weight-related health problem cannot talk about attempting to improve that specific, weight-related health problem by reducing the amount of weight she carries. I have a real, serious problem with the dismissal of her reasoning in favor of howls of outrage and how-dare-shes.
Why should anyone have to sacrifice their own personal health in the service of some ideal? Particularly when that person still supports the right of any other fat person to be able to demand treatment for what’s actually wrong with them, rather than being told to lose weight as a matter of course.
Mnemosyne, I’ve done Weight Watchers. More than once. You and I have different lived experience where that’s concerned, and most research on dieting is more in keeping with mine. Otherwise, I’m staying away from that subject here.
I have a real, serious problem with the dismissal of her reasoning in favor of howls of outrage and how-dare-shes.
Zuzu, come on. Who’s howling?
What I’m trying to unpack are the assertions that “dieting,” when all that distinguishes “dieting” from “HAES” is an intention to lose weight, is physically damaging, while “HAES” is not.
Well, I tried to do that in the rest of my comment . . . if someone is saying that “dieting” practiced in precisely the same way as HAES is physically damaging, I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing people saying that dieting probably won’t be, and can be mentally harmful even if it is.
Thanks for this post, Zuzu. You’ve articulated things a lot better than I could, clearly. It really does seem to be absolutely okay to try to lose weight and be a member of the fat acceptance community if you lie about it–as long as it seems that your motivations are pure, you’re allowed body autonomy. But as soon as you express displeasure about the size or shape of your body and express the desire to change that? Bad fattie! No biscuit!
What I’m trying to unpack are the assertions that “dieting,” when all that distinguishes “dieting” from “HAES” is an intention to lose weight, is physically damaging, while “HAES” is not.
Well, I tried to do that in the rest of my comment . . .
Since I addressed that, too, it’s starting to look like a bit of a straw man. You know I’m your big, big fan, Zuzu, but people aren’t avoiding your questions in favor of howling at the moon. We’re doing our best with a thorny, complicated subject.
Zuzu, come on. Who’s howling?
Anybody who’s wailing about feeling betrayed, betrayed! that Hanne Blank, after a lot of consideration and soul-searching, is losing weight because it’s what’s best for her. Anyone who’s referring to “dieters” (the definition of which is still a moving target) as “sinners.” Anyone who’s going to discount her work because she’s trying to do something for her health.
Hey, if you can be cagey about what a “diet” is, I can use a little creative license with “howling.”
Moreover, I really think you’re overreaching with the “ex-gay” analogy. It’s probably worse than the “Republicans” one you used. Maybe deciding to lose weight is like putting on lipstick and heels, in that you may feel societal pressure to do so, and there’s an argument that your conformation to society’s expectations puts pressure on other women to conform, but dammit, you also do it because you want to. Maybe it’s because I just wrote that other long post, but the reaction to Hanne Blank’s announcement strikes me as very similar to the reaction to Jill’s announcement that she gets Brazilian waxes.
Since I addressed that, too, it’s starting to look like a bit of a straw man. You know I’m your big, big fan, Zuzu, but people aren’t avoiding your questions in favor of howling at the moon. We’re doing our best with a thorny, complicated subject.
No, no. I’m asking you a question, a fairly simple one, and you’re addressing it, but you’re not really answering it. I’m hearing a couple of different things: “Diets” are physically harmful, but HAES isn’t. Even where what you’re doing for a diet is exactly the same as what you’re doing for HAES. I’m trying to suss out why, if the two are identical at a certain point, and the only difference is in motivation, one is harmful and the other isn’t.
I guess my contention is that “diets don’t work/diets are harmful” is an assertion that falls apart as a blanket statement when you start defining “diets” so broadly that something that’s very much like what you’re promoting as healthy is included in the definition.
Now, if you want to tell me that the mental stress of trying to lose weight is harmful, I can go with that. If you want to tell me that any effort to lose weight, moderate or no, is doomed to fail in the end, I can accept that contention as a general principle. If you want to tell me that low-calorie, restrictive diets that don’t give you adequate nutrition are physically damaging, I am all over that.
But don’t try to get me to accept that the exact same behavior is healthy when it’s done for one reason and harmful when it’s done for another reason. That’s no strawman. That’s a logical hole you could drive a truck through.
Aaaand I should probably walk away from this conversation at this point.
I’m also interested in hearing “weight loss” defined. I’ve heard fat activists who say that diets won’t make a fat person thin—i.e., change you actual body shape—and that seems reasonable. You’re round, you’re round. You can be 250 pounds or 300 but your type is your type. But I am skeptical of the idea that any weight loss is not possible. But I’ve had a few bouts of depression in my time where I overeat and I balloon up to 140. Getting back to portion control, mindfulness about fat, and regular exercise puts me back to 125 pretty quickly. I consider that weight loss, and it’s permanent as well. I’ve maintained roughly the same weight, with a short flare-up post-Edwards and a longer one post-graduation, over a decade.
It seems completely reasonable to me that someone can be in the FA movement while losing weight, simply by pointing out that losing weight is not the same thing as magically becoming Twiggy.
Zuzu, I swear I’m not trying to be cagey. I’m trying to be really clear. Apparently, I’m failing.
You write:
I wrote:
Well, it’s not the same, actually. First, no one’s criticizing people for losing weight but for deliberately trying to lose weight, which is a different thing. Sometimes, people do eat themselves beyond their natural set point, as you seem to have in your depressive episodes, and slide back to their body’s natural weight range with relative ease. Sometimes, people go on or off medication and lose weight. Sometimes people get sick. Sometimes people conquer compulsive overeating, a very painful eating disorder, and lose weight. I don’t know any fat acceptance types who have a problem with any of that. But ALL of those scenarios, taken together, still represent a very small portion of the population; the exceptions to the rule.
It’s the deliberate pursuit of weight loss to which I’m objecting. I don’t care if you’re trying to be Twiggy, or you’re trying to lose 15 lbs. I think either way, for the majority of people, any effort to lose weight will ultimately be counterproductive. And I don’t think trying to lose weight is compatible with fat acceptance, even though I think wishing you were somewhat less fat can be a very understandable thing, for a lot of reasons.
Zuzu, I say “diets don’t work” as a blanket statement because it’s a blanket truth. Again, exceptions don’t disprove the rule. And in light of that, I stand by the ex-gay analogy. You can try not to be gay, but if you’re gay, it’s not going to work for long. And trying not to be gay while also claiming you’re for gay pride is a pretty serious disconnect. The cosmetic/feminist analogy would hold if losing weight were as simple and optional as putting on make-up or getting a Brazilian, but it’s absolutely not.
If you don’t agree that diets don’t work as a general rule, then we’re not going to reach agreement via logic, because we’re arguing from two completely different positions.
The Republican analogy, btw, was only meant to distinguish between my political stance and my personal reaction to individuals — and then to make a very strong point about how antithetical I think dieting and fat acceptance are. I don’t think there are actually a whole lot of people who consider themselves liberal activists and vote Republican.
I just invited a woman who weighs over 500 lbs. and has decided to have weight loss surgery to guest-post on my blog. Her experience is so far from my own that I know my blanket statements don’t apply to it, and I want to include her perspective on my site. At the same time, I told her up front that her being an exception to the rule doesn’t make me any less inclined to keep stating that for most people, the dangers of WLS outweigh the benefits. She’s cool with that. In fact, she agrees with that. People’s individual experiences are unique, and that’s why I took such pains to distinguish my political stance from my response to individuals.
But all this focus on various exceptions to the rules takes the focus away from where my post started (which, again, was NOT as a response to Hanne Blank): there are a whole lot of people who think fat acceptance is a swell idea in theory but still can’t stand their own fat — and they want equal time for discussion of their weight loss efforts, and validation that trying to lose weight is a politically neutral act in fat acceptance contexts. After all this discussion, I still don’t find that remotely acceptable.
I can understand why people feel that way. I spent YEARS struggling with the cognitive dissonance of intellectually understanding FA and HAES concepts, but still thinking *I* could be in the 5% of dieters who keep it off — and really, really wanting to. This is not about a lack of empathy for people who want to be thinner, for any reason — from being in chronic pain to just wishing people would stop treating them like shit. It’s about my firm belief — based on a whole lot of fucking reading — that the deliberate pursuit of weight loss A) almost always hurts more than it helps and B) is fundamentally opposed to fat acceptance, insofar as it is, you know, not accepting your fat.
People are free to disagree with that, OBVIOUSLY. All I said was, that’s where I stand. And anyone who thinks I’m trying to “kick people out of the movement” (which you haven’t suggested, but plenty have) is assuming I have an authority I really don’t, which kinda goes to your point about pedestals.
Oops, sorry about fucked up tags. Second blockquote should have ended after “physically damaging.”
And my first sentence to Amanda should have been something more like, “It’s not completely reasonable, to my mind, actually.”
I need to step away, too.
You know what, I take the blame for this one. I acknowledged that a perfectly normal feeling, when confronted with a role model who is doing the exact opposite of what she used to endorse, mgiht be one of betrayal. I did NOT, however and thank you very much, suggest that Hanne Blank is a big ol’ evil betrayer of the cause. I did NOT go after her with pitchforks and a pack of villagers who want to see her ousted from the movement. And no one else has either.
But I’ve had a few bouts of depression in my time where I overeat and I balloon up to 140. Getting back to portion control, mindfulness about fat, and regular exercise puts me back to 125 pretty quickly.
Amanda, I don’t think anyone has said that short term weight loss/weight gain is impossible. I believe what is generally said is that most people set weights that it is very, very difficult for them to stay above or below - to get below if, you’re essentially forced to put your body in a starvation state (fat people put on restrictive diets until they’re normal weight are medically identical to people who are starving), and to stay above it you have to be eating past the point of natural cues and fullness. So . . . it sounds like 125 is your set point. You seem to assume that 140 is, and that only through “mindfulness” do you stay down at 125, which is a pretty common assumption in your culture. Most adults, though, I think I have a weight at which their body settles when they’re not forcing it away from that weight.
You know what, I take the blame for this one. I acknowledged that a perfectly normal feeling, when confronted with a role model who is doing the exact opposite of what she used to endorse, mgiht be one of betrayal.
You weren’t the only one. It might be normal, but you did express it in writing, so I can’t really believe it was fleeting.
I do realize that you had much more complex feelings about the matter than I gave you credit for in my post, and for that, I apologize. And, again, that’s one reason I kept this here rather than posting it on Feministe. Things have a way of getting out of hand there (Free Monty!).
But I can’t sign on to your contention that nobody wanted to see her kicked out of the movement. Certainly, there were no pitchforks, but lines were being drawn, and while she may have gotten a dispensation for her past work, it was clear that she did not now fall on the correct side of the line. Supporter, yes, but activist, no.
And, well, there was a lot of discounting of her stated reasons as being akin to wanting to wear a bikini. That’s why I brought up the age/weight thing: if you’re young enough, small enough or lucky enough to never develop, or to never have developed, any orthopedic issues, good on you. But if you haven’t, and you dismiss the reasoning of someone who has for wanting to lose weight, you come across as not really knowing what you’re talking about (and this is a general “you” here, not you personally).
Like I said, though, I never got on the train to begin with, so if I’m not welcome aboard, so be it.
Oh, and you also had the bad luck to stick out to me as I was writing my previous post about examining your shit and knocking people off pedestals that you’ve put them on. I had originally intended to bring the whole Hanne Blank thing into that post, but it got too long with the leg-shaving and cooch-waxing and puppy-enslavement.
I acknowledged that a perfectly normal feeling, when confronted with a role model who is doing the exact opposite of what she used to endorse, mgiht be one of betrayal.
Did she explicitly endorse judging others if they didn’t choose to maintain a body weight her self-appointed interlocutors approve of? Seems like an odd thing for a body acceptance advocate to do.
Actually, betrayal probably defines a body acceptance advocate taking that stance rather nicely.
When I was fat, I’m not sure there was a Fat Acceptance movement… But I was between 230 and 270 most of my adult life, from high school until I was about 30. When I turned 30, I made a decision to change my lifestyle for health reasons… I quit smoking, I started exercising, and I changed my eating habits. I started each of those at different times so I wouldn’t get frustrated doing everything at once. I did not diet, I just changed the foods I ate (less sugar, no more meat, etc.), no fad diets or anything, and I adjusted my portions. After that, I started to exercise, something I hadn’t done since I got done with phys ed in high school. Over about 15 months, I lost 100 lbs. That was 3 years ago. I’m still at that weight, with slight fluctuations. So to say that someone cannot lose weight and not regain is not true. It may be with some people. If you are happy and accepting of your body, then it shouldn’t matter whether you can change your body weight or not. I’ve never been involved with weight in a political way, so I’m sure there is a lot of nuance I’m not familiar with, but trying to convince people not to do something that they feel will improve their lives without harming anyone else doesn’t seem like a supportive thing to do. Giving information, like the percentages of people that lose weight who gain it back, the dangers of yo-yo dieting and such is great. Knowing your chances and what the dangers are is invaluable. But then using that information to convince people it’s not even worth trying… I guess I don’t see that as a good thing.
As far as I am concerned trying to separate Acceptance of Fat People from Acceptance of Fat is problematic. I don’t believe a person can really be accepting of fat people if, in deeds if not in words, the attitude is: ‘It’s ok for them to be fat, but **I** don’t want to be like them.’
Or to put it another way:
A) I want the world to accept me as I am today and treat me with dignity, respect and kindness regardless of my weight or shape. (external fat acceptance)
B) To achieve A, I first need to accept myself as I am today, and treat myself with dignity, respect and kindness regardless of my weight and shape (internal fat acceptance)
C) The act of dieting (or ‘lifestyle change’) is an act of transformation, designed to change my weight or shape and therefore it signals that I do not accept myself as I am today, regardless of my weight or shape.
D) To achieve A and B, I must eschew C.
E) Therefore the choice to lose weight or not to lose weight becomes a political act.
I don’t really see how HAES has anything to do with the above, except that it is about being the healthiest you can at the weight you are right now, without a goal of further weight loss. Weight loss may be a side effect of increased activity for some people, but then again, it might not be. Similarly, some might interpret eating healthily as low-carb or low-calorie and thereby lose weight. Others, myself included, define eating healthily throwing away old dieting behaviours and eating according to my body’s needs and, importantly, wants, without denial or restriction. So weight loss will not necessarily result from living a healthy lifestyle.
As far as I am concerned trying to separate Acceptance of Fat People from Acceptance of Fat is problematic. I don’t believe a person can really be accepting of fat people if, in deeds if not in words, the attitude is: ‘It’s ok for them to be fat, but **I** don’t want to be like them.’
You know, there’s a difference between someone like Elizabeth Hurley declaring that she’d kill herself if she were ever as fat as Marilyn Monroe, and someone who’s 40 years old, 300+ pounds, and experiencing orthopedic and other problems exacerbated by weight saying that, hey, my quality of life might improve if I lost some weight.
I have nothing substantial to contribute to this conversation, really, though I’m following it with interest. I just wanted to point out that the word “diet”, to me, means “how/what one eats” - and encompasses literally every way people eat. Eating at McDonald’s everyday is a diet, to me, as is doing Weight Watchers, or eating only what your nutritionist recommends, and so on. I know it can get a bit confusing when people use diet only in the weight-loss sense, and I still default to my diet=any way one eats definition. I think that kind of confusion is underlying a lot of this discussion, too.
But it also kind of points to how insidious the weight-loss definition of diet is. The primary definition of diet is the one I default to - and yet, the secondary definition of diet as weight-loss oriented is the one heavily pushed by our culture. It smacks of trying to hide something potentially very harmful in a good term. (This paragraph makes no sense, does it.)
Did she explicitly endorse judging others if they didn’t choose to maintain a body weight her self-appointed interlocutors approve of? Seems like an odd thing for a body acceptance advocate to do.
Explicitly? No. But after gaining a following as a body acceptance advocate, she’s now saying things like “But I also think that in our culture, ‘acceptance’ is often used as a more empowered-sounding euphemism for ‘resignation.’.”
Which sounds an awful lot like fat acceptance opponents who want to tell us we’re just too lazy to “take care of ourselves.” When, just like Hanne Blank, a whole lot of us have tried to lose weight, again and again, only to find that — shocker of all shockers — we’re in the 95% for whom that doesn’t work long-term.
I’ve lost 110 lbs. in my adult life, through both sketchy commercial diets and “healthy lifestyle changes.” I’ve gained it all back. And finally, it occurred to me that maybe the problem was dieting, not my own terrible moral failure.
That’s the lived experience I haven’t yet expounded on in this whole discussion (though I certainly have on my blog), which has revolved around so many people’s personal choices and experiences. It just happens that, as I mentioned in passing above, my personal experience is in keeping with all the research on long-term dieting success rates, whereas this idea that one can simply choose to be thinner if one has good enough reasons for wanting to be thinner really is not.
And I find it fascinating that the whole problem is that I’m setting up a litmus test, yet I’m also too young and thin to know what I’m talking about.
Zuzu, thank you for putting so much into this discussion. Thanks to everyone else who’s putting real effort into having meaningful dialogue. I figure that whether Hanne feels like or doesn’t feel like she’s (or will ever be again) a welcome member of the Fat Acceptance activist community or not, it sounds like it’s exactly this kind of discussion that she hoped to spark along with whatever else she hopes for her continuing efforts along this line of inquiry.
A couple of things:
I don’t think it’s true that Hanne set herself up as a role model. She does tend to do things that are admirable. That’s one reason I’m her partner - I admire the hell out of her. In following her passionate life, and in doing things with committment, she has done many admirable things, and she tends to do them publicly, so that lots of people notice, and some folks end up assuming that she always will be the hero that they see her being in this precise instant.
When she moves on, those same people can feel abandoned. That, I think, is the risk in identifying too closely with folks who are driven by the different drum. It’s wonderful when they take you where you feel like you need to go. It sucks when they decide not to stay.
Hanne follows a changing life and as she’s said, she has a lot of irons in a lot of fires. Expecting her to stay constant is really unfair to the person she truly is.
When she finds something that doesn’t ring true, she invariably calls it to question. If she feels like it’s a valuable public dialogue to have, she will take steps to make it public. That’s exactly what she’s done in this case, and this discussion, I think, is absolutely true to her agenda in this case.
I also think it’s safe to say that Hanne feels that the personal is the political. She and I have in common that in general when a cause really feels right, it is by definition something we have a personal stake in. This is one of the reasons, I think, that what she does is often so admirable to the rest of us poor, downtrodden souls. The fact that it does personally matter to her contributes to it feeling real, contributes to the power and the progress made.
But I think it also means that attempting to separate out how individuals behave from the ideology of any movement is something that sounds a lot like, well, bullshit. I think it’s more in keeping with at least Hanne’s style of examining and interacting with politics to make sure there’s no strong schism between the personal and the political.
If you’re going to say that individuals should be free to do what they wish with their bodies, then how is it not hypocrisy to say that role models (who are also individuals) cannot also do and espouse that freedom publicly?
Thank you again, Zuzu. You’ve done a lot of hard work here, and I really appreciate that investment.
Perhaps in degree, if not in fact.
Equally, its important to remember that weight loss will not guarantee the alleviation of those health problems or prevent new health problems occuring.
“I’d like to improve the lives of fat people, and fight against fat hatred in science, medicine, law and the media. Do my efforts in that regard really only count if I can get a fifth-level blackbelt in Embracing My Own Fat and promise that I’ll never, ever do anything to change the size of the body I live in?”
Beautifully said.
“But I also think that in our culture, ‘acceptance’ is often used as a more empowered-sounding euphemism for ‘resignation.’.”
Which sounds an awful lot like fat acceptance opponents who want to tell us we’re just too lazy to “take care of ourselves.”
Actually, the first bit sounds to me like a not inaccurate summation of what you’ve had to say about her choice here. The second bit sounds like something you’ve ported in from another conversation.
What she’s said that is she wants to make choices about her own body based on her own comfort and health and (this is the important bit by me) despite the fact that people who are not her have visceral issues about the subject of body size.
Her doctor doesn’t get to stampede her because he covers his prejudices with cherry-picked factoids about health risks. The industry built up around monetizing self-loathing through intense thigh-skin analysis doesn’t get to stampede her into judging her body through the implicit judgment of others.
And her admirers don’t get to dismiss her agency by conflating her informed choices about her own body with the choices of silly self-hating women damaging themselves through ignorance for aesthetic reasons.
Perhaps in degree, if not in fact.
That — that’s just astonishingly cold. And I’ll just add, what Julia said.
Alright, here goes.
I don’t identify as a fat activist or anything of that nature, but I am fat. I’ve tried weight watchers and similar sorts of things but I was hungry all the time, and I refuse to starve myself. I have a friend who generally weighs about what I do but is taller, so she’s not as fat.
Last year my friend spent several months REFUSING TO EAT and lost a lot of weight, which she’s mostly since gained back. She also obsessed over food. Constantly. She even stopped grocery shopping, and started sniping at me for wanting to buy food. Now, there were a lot of other things going on there that I’m not going to get into…
Suffice to say she has a lot of body image issues and so on. Well, one of her favorite ways to deal with this - besides REFUSING TO EAT and griping about food all the time - is to make ME feel like shit for being fatter than her. She’s found some very, very effective ways to do this, including dragging me to the mall with her because she was depressed and miserable and shopping would help, and going to a store that didn’t have a stitch of clothing in it that would fit me, and oohing and ahhing for two hours over how GREAT it was that she could wear these clothes now. For her, losing weight is a moral victory. If that makes me immoral, oh well, I guess.
So it is that whenever my friend, my best friend in the world, starts talking about how she needs to lose some weight or go on a diet, or how OMG she wants a cookie but she really shouldn’t eat one because she already ate lunch (yes, we are talking about a ‘cookie or lunch’ choice here) - whenever she starts on about this, despite that she’s my best friend and I love her and I would never /really/ punch her in the mouth…
…I want to punch her in the mouth.
Do I have a problem with her LOSING WEIGHT? No. But all this weight stuff is never, ever, ever only about a number on a scale - I think we all know that.
I think it’s always hard to deal with things that trigger frustration, anger, sadness. These are hard emotions to take on at face value and deal with in an ethical way. I’m very aware that some things Hanne has done are things that are triggering in those ways for some folks in the various communities we’re talking about here. It makes the whole thing hard to talk about in a reasonable way.
I am grateful that most folks in these discussions (here and on other blogs recently) are keeping it civil and staying sane. I know this is a measure of will and willingness to assume good faith. That’s all good.
What strikes me as odd, though, is that there are a lot of folks bent on discussing how Hanne’s efforts to see what she can change for the better for herself, her mental and physical health, are being used as reasons (by some, certainly not all) to say that she can no longer speak as an ally or member of the fat acceptance/size acceptance communities.
Almost all other political and activist movements that I know of or have been a part of will take allies where they can find them.
What is it that is so objectionable about (publicly or privately) talking about losing weight that it disqualifies you to speak as a member of or an ally to the fat acceptance or size acceptance movement (beyond the immediate, visceral reactions that are, honestly, clear to me from many perspectives including my own immediately personal reactions)? Some of the most powerful political and social figures of our time refuse to be chained by the Politically Correct (for whatever movements they find themselves associated with).
On the other hand, I promise you, there is no endless chit-chat about foods we wish we could eat but can’t because of our diet choices (though there is sometimes talk about genuinely missing foods we love but are demonstrably allergic to) or makings of moral equivalence between eating/not eating and “being good” in my house or at my table (where Hanne often eats). Not only are Hanne and I personally against such kind of talk (for obvious reasons) but it’s also a house rule.
If you stick with reading Hanne’s blog about this stuff, I hope you’ll find (as I have) that her writings continue to be thoughtful and provocative, interesting, and, I hope, not too triggering. But I’ll make no guarantees. Obviously, if that writing continues to be triggering in ways that can’t be helpfully mitigated, or the annoyance of having to do so is greater than any pleasure you get from reading it, it’s probably best not to follow the blog.
I realize I’m jumping in here from a place of partial ignorance, since I’m not as fully educated on fat-acceptance issues as many people here are, but I felt I had to address this:
You could say this sort of thing about any kind of health-related change or process. That’s why we make health-related decisions by considering possible risks, outcomes, and benefits. Sure, a particular health-care strategy may not guarantee a solution, but if there is a reasonable chance of alleviation, and the alternative is the continuation of a status-quo that one knows to be harmful or risky, I don’t see why that person shouldn’t do what he/she feels he/she needs to do in order to deal with the issue.
I recently had a tumor (benign) on my parotid gland removed. In talking with the otolaryngologist in assessing what was going on, he indicated that I had two options: to have the tumor surgically excised or to do nothing.
Surgical removal would take care of the tumor, but there was no guarantee I’d never get another tumor again. In fact, there is, based on available medical data, about a 10% chance I will develop another parotid gland tumor in the next ten years or so. On top of that, there is an increased chance of recurrence after each removal.
But to do nothing would have had the certain result of a tumor that would just continue to grow larger and a possible result of a tumor that would turn malignant, and malignant salivary gland tumors are among the deadliest of cancers.
So the choice was clear: get it taken out.
I think the difference between HAES and eating healthy specifically to lose weight is that there’s no guarantee you will lose any weight. If you have a goal of losing 30 pounds or whatever (whether your goal is to be a size 6 again or just stop your joints from hurting), and you eat healthy and exercise, what happens when you look at the scale after 6 months and realize you’ve only lost 3 pounds? Maybe the excercise and the food has made you stronger, given you more energy, cleared up your acne, whatever, but you still feel like a failure because you didn’t make your goal, and it looks like you never will? How depressing is that? That’s the difference between HAES and dieting, even when the dieting involves doing everything HAES would. HAES won’t make you upset if you don’t lose any weight or don’t loss your goal weight, dieting does. Permenant weight loss is just too elusive to make it a goal, and it’s just not mentally healthy to do so. Dieting works for some people, but if you’re not one of them you’re just setting yourself up for heartbreak. Just eat healthy and excercise and don’t worry about your size.
Marle, you’re making the mistake of assuming that anyone who sets out to lose some weight to improve their health has a specific pounds-lost goal in mind.
Zuzu, even if someone doesn’t set out the exact amount of pounds they want to lose they’re still setting up a goal they can’t control. If they say “I need to lose some weight” instead of “I need to lose 30 pounds” they’re still going to be upset if eating more veggies and exercising more doesn’t cause them to lose weight, or (what they would define as) a significant amount of weight. My best friend weighs over 300 pounds, and even when we were living together and eating the same food and exercising the same amount she still weighed, literally, more than twice as much as me. People’s bodies act differently, and your ideal weight, whether you specify it with a number or whether it’s just a general idea of being thinner, may not be a weight your body will go to with healthy eating. You can’t control how much you weigh, you can only control what you do. Worrying about what you can’t control will just make you neurotic. That’s why you should focus on eating healthy and exercising, and not what the scale says or what size pants you wear.
Jen de-lurking again for a bit, ironically, after lunch. As someone who has been anywhere from chunky to seriously heavy most of my life–with a two-year hiatus brought on by underemployment, where I became a gym rat with a BMI of 19-20–I was attracted to this thread.
I just don’t get–can’t understand in the least–how “fat acceptance” and “doing something to save your life/health” can be seen as NOT being part of a package of self-care. Yes, it fucking sucks that I have a hard time finding clothes–even when I was buff, my shape made finding pants hard–and yeah, it blows that being thin is co-attributed with all kinds of other positive traits in this society, and that being heavy has an equal amount of negative traits falsely associated with it.
Do I want to loose weight? Yes. Is it because of external pressure from society, from a desire to make clothes shopping easier? In part, I admit, YES. OTOH I also don’t want to wind up like lots of other women on my mother’s side of the family, who balooned up after 40 and have a host of health issues related to it.
Reading some of the comments above, I almost feel that there was a way–some kind of magic wand–that Zuzu and I could wave and alakazam fix the health problems without loosing an OUNCE, we would be branded as “self-hating” if we said out loud that we want to be thinner as well.
Folks, when I put on eyeliner in the AM, I do it partly as part of my “work look” but because *gasp* I like wearing makeup! Oh, the HUMANITY! You know what? I may be fat, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to make myself feel more attractive in other ways.
And, FWIW, you know what? I LIKED the way I looked at that 20 BMI. I was muscular, could deadlift almost twice my body weight in a Smith cage, and I fucking looked EXCELLENT. I wore my leather pants around the East Village in August BECAUSE I COULD.
A year from now, I hope to be that gal in leather pants in August again. I know that if I do that, I will also get over many of the menstrual irregularities and other health issues that I’ve had. Is that so wrong?
Melanie, I think your essential proposition that it is impossible to accept someone while not wanting to be like them can not be extended beyond the present discussion, i.e. outside the FA context.
I accept extensively tattooed people; in fact, I like it. But I don’t want to be like them. I accept professional athletes who dedicate their lives to relatively obscure sports for the love of it. I have a good friend who went to the Olympics in 2000. But I don’t want to be like her. I accept people who live on low incomes to keep doing activist and nonprofit work, but I don’t want to be like them. I accept people who get sterilized in their twenties because they are positive that they want to be childfree. But I don’t want to be like them. I accept people whose marriages come with a commitment that they will never have another sex partner as long as they live. But I don’t want to be like them.
If we could only accept those we wanted to be like, then our politics would necessarily be one of extreme xenophobia and homogeneity.
The ex-gay analogy depends, it seems to me, on the idea that a fat person that loses weight to the point of being thin, and (recognizing that this is infrequent) keeps it off permanently, is still a fat person. Kate, is that your position?
Jen, I’m glad you were happy with your body when you had a 20 BMI. That might be your natural healthy body weight, and since you got there before by eating healthy and exercising as much as you wanted, it certainly seems likely that you’ll be able to get back there. The problem is when people who have been overweight their entire adult lives think they can will themselves thin. Eating healthy and exercising [i]might[/i] get them thin (like it did for you), but it [i]probably[/i] won’t. I personally could never get to a 20 BMI while being healthy. The last time I was near there was when I was in high school and eating about one meal a day (dinner, the one meal my parents saw me eat), exercising made me feel faint and nauseous (but I did it anyways), I was so boney it hurt to sit in hard chairs and I had stopped menstruating. Yet, my BMI never went into the “underweight” range (because it is bullshit). Everyone has a different healthy weight, and the healthy attitude to take is just to focus on eating healthy and exercising, and accept that whatever weight you get to from that is your healthy weight. I’m not going to vilify you if your healthy weight is a 20 BMI. I just want everyone to know that everyone’s healthy weight is not that, and people can’t expect things that might not happen.
Thomas, if a fat person just happens to weight, become thin and stay there then I think the analogy would go to a gay person who realized s/he is bi and happened to met a member of the opposite sex and fall in love and get married. Where the ex-gay part comes in is that if a formally fat activist diets and then claims that all fat people can and should diet to become thin is just as harmful as a formally gay activist going through ex-gay “therapy” and then claiming that all gay people can and should become ex-gay (and they’re just as likely to stay thin/straight in the long run).
That might be your natural healthy body weight, and since you got there before by eating healthy and exercising as much as you wanted, it certainly seems likely that you’ll be able to get back there. The problem is when people who have been overweight their entire adult lives think they can will themselves thin. Eating healthy and exercising [i]might[/i] get them thin (like it did for you), but it [i]probably[/i] won’t.
Okay, now I’m confused. The only people who aren’t supposed to try to lose weight are people who have always been fat? People who were formerly thin (or thinner, at least) who gained weight are all clear for takeoff on the Diet Express?
What makes someone a fat person under those circumstances?
I’m sorry I was confusing. What I mean is that it should be about being at your own personal healthy weight, not trying to be thin in general. Jen already knows what her personal healthy weight is, and if she eats healthy and exercises then she will get back there. If a fat person doesn’t know what his/her healthy weight is, then he/she should eat healthy and exercise and then accept that whatever weight they are then is their healthy weight. If a fat person is already eating healthy and exercising, then they’re already at their healthy weight (or their best weight with their medical conditions) and if they still have health issue it’s something else, and dieting will just make things worse.
I’m not saying that fat people who’ve been thin before are all clear for Diet Express, I’m saying that if a person knows that their healthy weight is less than they are now they can expect that making healthy lifestyle changes will bring them back there. If a person doesn’t know where their healthy weight is (or know it’s about where they’re at) then making healthy lifestyle choices may or may not correlate with losing weight for them, so pinning their hopes on that is a bad idea, even if their diet is healthy. People should exercise and eat healthy (and by “people”, I mean skinny people as well because it’s no healthier to eat crap and not exercise if you’re skinny) for the sake of being healthy, not the sake of being thinner.
And let me mention–my period of “fitness” was an anomoly in my life. I had a) a very limited food budget–no eating out for me! and b) all the time in the world, literally–I got down to a “healthy” weight by literally working out at least 3 hours a day 4-6 days a week. That was my “therapy” during a stressfull job hunt/freelancing period, but it was by no means NORMAL.
My goal now is to get down to a more maintainable healthy weight. However, I fully realize that I may never be that buff or that strong again.
OTOH, the one GOOD thing I learned from pushing myself like that for two years was what my LOWEST weight was. I know when I was at my lowest weight and absolute thinnest. Incidentally, I was at my STRONGEST when I was 15lbs. heavier than at my LIGHTEST or THINNEST.
So, at least I have a benchmark I suppose for folks who cluck their tongues at me and say “you could be a size 12 one day” when I know full well that when I was at my absolute peak of fitness, I was still a 14, and a 14W at that if available.
Let me also add that sometimes you do need a kick in the ass by life to alert you to something bad going on with your body. I ballooned up 2 sizes in the past year for a number of reasons, including the death of one of my best friends in New York and very stressful conditions at work. I can “accept” the collateral damage that life has done to my body or I can at least TRY to reclaim my flesh to a degree.
I would love to fit into the suits that I got when I started my job 4 years ago, but in the short term, I at least NEED to roll back the clock to at least where I was this time last year. Period. I have seen my minimum weight/maximum “optimal live like a celebrity” fitness level, and it’s an important guidepost to keep in mind in order not to push myself too much. OTOH I know that there IS no maximum weight given my genetics. Left to old habits and lifestyles, I WILL swell up real fast from 40 on, and develop all the accompanying health issues. I don’t want that.
And I don’t think it’s a disempowering thing to say.
Ah, but there are some people who would say there is no such thing as a “healthy weight.”
The fact that this is such a convoluted thing, and requires so much in the way of rules, exceptions, it’s-okay-if-you-don’t-talk-about-its and all just indicates to me that the whole diet/don’t diet question is irrelevant for any individual.
What needs to be attacked, IMO, is the system that tells us we need to do it, not the individuals who do it. I know it’s been analogized to the ex-gay movement, but I think it’s much more similar to the question of makeup and feminine trappings in feminism: individual women may engage in this behavior because it makes it easier to get along in society, but rather than trying to get individual women to give up their makeup, why don’t we go after the system that requires them to wear it but does not require men to do so?
Similarly, the whole question of dieting (howEVER we’re defining it today) is a systemic issue: why is it that fat people who actively try to lose weight are treated better by society even if they fail, and why do thin people not have to do it to be acceptable? Shouldn’t the burden fall not on individual fat people to shut up about their eating habits and fall in line, but rather on the system that tells us that we must do that?
I admit to being rather tired of this whole issue right now, since I was cast as a diet-pushing WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ “I’m a humanist, not a feminist!” type over at Shakesville. I just don’t even want to engage anymore.
Ah, but there are some people who would say there is no such thing as a “healthy weight.”
Then, no offense intended to those people, but they’re horribly wrong. There’s no one-size-fits-all measurement for a healthy weight, but I’m 5′10″ and 265, and I know that I’d be a damn sight healthier if I were 230, because I remember what I felt like and what I could do three years ago when I was that weight. I wouldn’t hike the Utah desert in the summer on a bet right now, but I did then, and a big part of the reason I can’t now is because my knees and ankles won’t hold up, and because I have less stamina. Why? Because I’m carrying around more weight. It’s that simple.
Reading your post reminded me of the silliness surrounding the whole brouhaha over animal rights–extremists of any stripe are silly, whether well-meaning or not, and whether I agree with their politics most of the time or not.
I define “healthy weight” as the weight you’re at when you eat healthy and exercise.
I think the breakdown in communication is that you’re assuming that anyone can diet and exercise to the point of thinness, and stay there just as easily as anyone who’s been thin. That’s just not the case. Most fat people are not fat because they eat crap and are lazy. Most fat people eat the same things skinny people eat. Seriously. They just have really low metabolisms. Dieting (eating fewer calories than you *need*) actually makes your metabolism worse, so a lot of obese people were former overweight people who thought dieting would make them normal and it just messed their bodies up worse. Sometimes it’s genetics. My friend, who I mentioned before, who weighs over 300 pounds, is one of the skinniest people in her mom’s side of the family (brother and sister got dad’s genes) and the only time she was able to get into the “normal” BMI range was through bulimia. They’ve done studies on obese people and found that when they are put on diets to get to and maintain a “normal” weight their bodies act like they’re *starving*. That’s why most people can’t maintain a diet. That’s also why people shouldn’t go on diets for weight loss. You just don’t know if you’ll be able to lose weight in a healthy manner, and if you lose weight in an unhealthy manner you’ll put back on more than you lose. Focus on the healthy behaviors, focusing on weight will just make you neurotic and probably disappointed.
Oh, and if anyone’s wondering how obesity is genetic if the obesity “epidemic” is so recent? Take a look a Lillian Russell, who was basically considered one of the hottest celebrities a hundred years ago. Anyone got a guess on her BMI? If you look at cultures throughout history you’ll find that most of them had a feminine ideal (not that I’m supporting any feminine ideal, really) that we would consider huge today. Obesity is a problem recently because only recently we’ve found obesity a problem.
I think the breakdown in communication is that you’re assuming that anyone can diet and exercise to the point of thinness, and stay there just as easily as anyone who’s been thin.
Actually, I’m assuming no such thing. But that sure is getting attributed to me a lot.
To answer more fully: I’m really saying nothing about the merits of dieting one way or the other, but I have a problem with other people second-guessing anyone’s personal medical decisions.
When anyone says that nobody can make an informed decision to lose weight for medical reasons, and that anyone who does is not self-accepting, then that’s second-guessing the medical decisions that someone else is making (not to mention, substituting your own judgment for that person’s wrt state of mind). I don’t care if it’s stated as general principles or in response to a particular person’s decision, it’s a denial of agency: you can’t POSSIBLY be truly informed, and you can’t POSSIBLY accept yourself!
(You wanna say “This Movement stands for X, and you’re doing Not-X, so you can’t be part of it”? Fine. But unless you live in a body and inhabit a headspace, you don’t get to second-guess anyone’s real motivations for making a decision about that body.)
Whether diets work, whether anyone can *really* lose weight, IMO, is beside the point (just as it’s beside the point in questions of fair treatment or reasonable accommodation).
No, that is the point. I don’t think anyone is less of a feminist for wearing makeup or heels or shaving their legs or making any other choices that correspond to what the patriarchy likes. But, losing weight, in so many cases, is not a choice. I know plenty of people who eat healthy and exercise and still have an obese BMI. Even people who do lose weight by eating healthy and exercising a reasonable amount lose it incredibly slowly (in most cases, everyone is different) so it’s incredibly unsatisfying if your goal is weight loss, and dieting by eating less than your body needs is so unhealthy and will just damage you more. I don’t like judging people, but dieting really is more comparible to ex-gay therapy than wearing makeup or any other choices we could disagree with, because once I’ve put makeup on I have makeup on, but dieting gives me no guarantee I’ll be thinner or healthier and even a good chance I’ll be fatter and less healthy. Sure, a fat person might become skinny if they eat healthy and exercise, and a gay person might realize they’re really bi if they’re openminded (it happened to me), but trying to do either of those things if your body/genetics/whatever won’t let you is horrible to your mental state. The difference between HAES and dieting is that one focuses on what you can control (your actions) and one focuses on what you can’t (your body’s reactions to your actions). Dieting is an unhealthy mindset focusing on things you can’t control and that’s why fat acceptance people are against it.
So Marle, would you agree with me that a bisexual person who finds hirself in love with a MOTOS, and settles down into the kind of partnered opposite-sex relationship that gets the het privilege, but still openly identifies as bi and stands up for queer folks, has done absolutely nothing that we ought to criticize?
If so, then what is wrong with a fat person losing weight, if zie continues to stick up for fat people and identify with FA as a movement? Sure, their success might be used by others to argue that everyone can be “cured.” But the same is true in the bisexual case.
Would someone be credible as an anti-racism activist if they spoke publicly and at length about how they lighten their skin, bleach their hair, and wear blue contact lenses because it makes life easier in South Africa, where they live?
Oh, for Pete’s sake. A fat person who decides to go on a diet IS STILL A FAT PERSON. Will be a fat person until and unless s/he becomes not-fat. Will be treated as a fat person. If that person is agitating for acceptance by society but has made a decision to become a slightly-less-fat person for medical reasons, how is that person any less of a) a fat person; and b) a fat person working in the interests of fat people?
Similarly, a feminist who wears makeup and heels, waxes, and even gets a boob job, is still a feminist (as is a feminist who watches, or acts in, porn) as long as she believes in equality for men and women. A gay person who is closeted is still gay, and is not working against the interests of gay people as long as they don’t work for or become a homophobic legislator working to restrict the civil rights of gay folks.
Saying that the only way you can be any sort of activist is to be a picture-perfect, nirvana-achieving member of the elite who can then dispense wisdom and rainbows and puppies strikes me as, well, elitist. And like maybe you should be using terms like “double plus ungood.”
It leaves no room for the imperfect or the struggling. And aren’t our struggles what makes for growth?
But that also gets back to the problem I originally had, which was this: what, exactly, is the goal of the Fat Acceptance Movement: to get fat people accepted by society, or to get fat accepted by fat people?
Call me crazy, call me a Republican ex-gay anti-feminist trying-to-pass-for-white-South-African, but I think a social-justice movement has better things to do than root out Impure Thoughts. And I think it has a lot better things to do than to deny its members agency.
I’ve been trying to follow this thread (but dang, its 67 comments long! wow!) and maybe this has been covered already, but the thing about having been fat and then getting thin (or thinner) is that you never really ever forget the experience of having been fat. A lot of previously fat women never quite feel “right” in their new skin. For instance, suddenly, it seems to them, they get positive attention, especially from men. Or maybe they get more positive advancement opportunities at work. Or whatever. On one hand, that’s fun and flattering and enjoyable. On the other, they are resentful of the attention because they are the same person they were, just minus some pounds. Its a real blow to your feeling of self-worth, that all of this “acceptance” boils down to a number on a scale. Its a very complicated feeling. They question whether the any new relationships/opportunities are “real” or just a result of their new ability to blend better with mainstream society.
I think sometimes people fail at keeping off the weight because even though they are able to adjust their eating habits and lifestyle, they aren’t ready to emotionally handle the changes that come with moving about as a previously-fat-person in a now-thinner-body. Complicated stuff.
(In other words, when I have been fat–and I currently am, I know that my friends like ME for ME…. and shallow people generally avoid me, so I don’t have to bother trying to figure out who’s who. So yeah, I don’t get attention, but I have a comfort level of knowing where I stand with people.)
So even if you lose the weight, your psyche still has the scars of having been fat in a society that openly discriminates against fat people.
My point being that if Hanne loses weight (for medical reasons, or even for personal, non-medical, “frivolous” reasons), she doesn’t lose the life experience of having been fat and been discriminated against.
So Marle, would you agree with me that a bisexual person who finds hirself in love with a MOTOS, and settles down into the kind of partnered opposite-sex relationship that gets the het privilege, but still openly identifies as bi and stands up for queer folks, has done absolutely nothing that we ought to criticize?
That describes me.
I’m not vilifying people who lose weight. I’m not vilifying people who’s lives could be taken out of context and used in a hurtful way. I’m vilifying dieting, and I’m vilifying the idea that permanent weight loss is a choice like waxing or wearing makeup. If anything, it’s more akin to those cheap home waxing kits that never work. You can make the choice to have smooth legs, but if all you have is a cheap home waxing kit then you’ll likely just waste your time and continue to have hairy legs after all. I’m not trying to judge people or be the guardian of what people can and cannot do to their bodies, I’m saying cheap home waxing kits don’t work and you should save your money and your time and don’t get your hopes up just so you can have hairy legs in the end anyways. That analogy isn’t perfect either, but since people keep comparing dieting to makeup and waxing or whatever, it gets to what I feel is the difference. I know people who weigh over 300 pounds and eating healthy and exercising doesn’t cause them to lose weight. They could diet, but eating less than what your body needs is really damaging, and will lower you metabolism which is why so many people wind up gaining weight after dieting. I know the pressure to be thin, and I have friends who have severe medical conditions that are made worse by their weights, but we just don’t know the secret to permanent weight loss. We do know that temporary weight loss followed by regain is less healthy than staying overweight in the first place. So that’s why I’m saying dieting is bad. It’s not about trying to control people or decide for them what they can and can’t do with their bodies or judge people if they’re good enough for whatever, it’s just about reminding people to focus on what they can control and accept what they can’t.
Nor yet discriminated against by her own people, be they queer, or fat, or whoever/whatever they are.
Okay, now we go back around the merry-go-round again: If what makes a diet a diet is the intention of the person doing it to lose weight, it doesn’t really matter if the diet is ultimately successful or not, no? What matters is the mindset. And the mindset of someone who uses a home waxing kit is the same as someone who goes to a professional waxer straight from Rio: the hair must be removed, for reasons having to do with the patriarchy but also having to do with one’s own sense of aesthetics.
In either case, the decision to do whatever it is is problematic from the standpoint of whatever -ism is under discussion, but it’s not a rejection of core principles, which have to do with the pressure to submit to these practices based on gender, weight, or what have you.
It’s the same thing with the hair-straightening mentioned above: I don’t think that anyone would say that Shirley Chisholm, say, could not be an effective advocate for Civil Rights because she straightened her hair in order to get along more easily in society.
And I don’t know what’s up with the coding in that last comment. Every time I try to fix something, it adds more code.
Marle, I didn’t accuse you of villifying anyone. I accept you’re disclaimer that that’s not your intent. But your comment does not address the question I posed. You said that, in the ex-gay analogy, a successful weight-loser was like a bisexual married to an opposite sex partner, and I wanted to examine that thinking further. Is a bisexual person with an opposite sex partner, active for GLBT full equality, still a queer in good standing? Or is just partnering with a MOTOS betrayal? If it’s not a betrayal, then why is a former fat person who continues to advocate for fat acceptance and discuss their experiences as a fat person, betraying fat people?
(In other words, when I have been fat–and I currently am, I know that my friends like ME for ME…. and shallow people generally avoid me, so I don’t have to bother trying to figure out who’s who. So yeah, I don’t get attention, but I have a comfort level of knowing where I stand with people.)
Yeah, that’s been my experience too. There are definite advantages to being fat - assholes make a point of identifying themselves to you up front. It really does save time.
I think we’re getting confused on the analogy here. A fat person who loses weight and keeps it off is like a gay person who realizes they’re bi. Unusual, but not a problem. A fat activist who announces to the world that they’re going on a diet and they’re going to lose weight and not be fat ever again is like a gay activist who announces to the world that they’re going through therapy to become ex-gay and they’ll never ever sleep with a MOTSS or even look at them ever again. It’s unrealistic, because statistically most people who diet/go through ex-gay therapy after 5 years weigh just as much/are still sleeping with MOTSS (which I assume is the reason the other poster originally made this analogy), it’s damaging to your mental health and it’s harmful to continue to promote the idea that they can work, especially to the community you’re advocating for.
Who did that?
To me, it’s kind of coming across like the debate in the deaf community over cochlear implants. Some people think they’re wonderful, but a large minority think that they are a horrible plot to destroy the deaf community. (There’s a great documentary about the debate called Sound and Fury.) To some deaf people, if you decide to get cochlear implants for your deaf child (or yourself), you’re a traitor who has turned your back on the community.
So Marle, are you saying that people who can lose weight are fine to do so, intentionally, as long as they don’t announce that their weight loss is intentional?
I was going hypothetical to explain the analogy, but while the specifics don’t match Hanne Blank, she is doing damage to the fat acceptance community by being a fat activist and now perpetuating the myth that dieting can work.
Mnemosyne, cochlear implants would be analogous to dieting if 5 years after getting a cochlear implant the majority of recipients were just as deaf if not more deaf, and then they would be expected to waste their time and money and damage their health to get another one. and another one. and another one. as each one failed.
A big part of fat acceptance is eradicating the myth that diets work. No one knows the secret to permanent weight loss. Some people do it, most people don’t. We of course support healthy behaviors, which *may* lead to permanent weight loss, but there’s no guarantee, and chasing something you can’t control is not a healthy behavior.
I wonder if you’ve read Hanne Blank’s post explaining what she’s doing and why. Because she’s looking to reduce her body weight for specific reasons, not become thin for the hell of it.
And I really think that the concept of acceptance of fat people really needs to be decoupled from acceptance of one’s own fat. Because you can have a problematic relationship with the latter and still be an effective advocate for the former. Sort of like how you can be a porn actress and still be an effective feminist.
Speaking of disservices, though, I really think the idea that someone who is in pain cannot do what she needs to do to care for her body and still be an advocate for body acceptance is a morally bankrupt one. And I think that’s what keeps a lot of people away from the “Movement,” however that’s defined.
Not quite — we know that permanent weight loss requires permanent lifestyle changes. It requires eating appropriate amounts for our body size and regular exercise. Is everyone going to be rail-thin? Of course not. I may be within the BMI for my height but I’m nowhere near rail-thin because even at 5′3″, I have a large frame. I will never, ever have a BMI of 18 or even 20, because I have too much bone and muscle mass.
What bothers me about your delineation between “good” weight loss and “bad” weight loss is that the steps you take for both to be permanent are exactly the same. If someone wants to lose weight and does so by eating healthy food and exercising, why is that so different than someone who starts eating healthy food and exercising and “just happens” to lose weight? Why are the exact same steps bad and doomed to failure if you have one motive and good if you have another?
Weight loss is not easy. Neither is weight maintenance. I think that your thinking that there are Lucky People who can lose weight without trying and Unlucky People who can never lose no matter what they do is harmful in itself. It’s a very Calvinistic, “saved and unsaved” way of looking at things.
Zuzu, you said it perfectly:
Speaking of disservices, though, I really think the idea that someone who is in pain cannot do what she needs to do to care for her body and still be an advocate for body acceptance is a morally bankrupt one. And I think that’s what keeps a lot of people away from the “Movement,” however that’s defined.
What you just said. If I need to do something to my body to care for my body and someone else doesn’t like it, fuck em. Hell, if I want to do something to my body for totally cosmetic reasons that I want for myself, and someone else doesn’t like it, fuck em also.
Mnemonsyne, while obviously people who do experience permanent weight loss make permanent lifestyle changes, many others who make those same changes will not have permanent weight loss. I’m not talking about everyone not being able to be rail-thin. Personally, I eat a diet of mostly whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and I exercise serveral times a week, and I have accepted the fact that this will never get to a “normal” BMI. No, I’m not excessively muscular, I’m not big-boned. I’m just in the overweight section of the BMI scale and there’s just no healthy way of getting me down. If I tried to eat healthy and exercise just for the numbers on the scale I’d just make myself depressed (again). Which is why I do it to be healthy, not to lose weight. I have friends who weigh over 200 or 300 pounds. They’ve tried eating healthy and exercising the best they can, and their weight hardly budges. The only way they can lose weight is to limit their food to less than what they need, but that’s damaging to your health and wrecks your metabolism and in the long run often causes you to gain more than you lose. Most people can’t control what they weigh, and planning on permanent weight loss is like planning what you’ll do when you win the lottery. I’m not saying that there’s good weight loss and bad weight loss, I’m saying that whatever you do you probably won’t lose weight and keep it off (and I’m not talking about a person who gained 10 pounds over the holidays or something and wants to go back to what they were, I’m talking about a person moving from the “overweight” BMI range to “normal”, or a 300 pound person losing anything noticable) so don’t pin your hopes on them. Do healthy activities for their own sake, but don’t expect things you can’t control.
Zuzu, I’ve read Hanne Blank’s posts. I know and understand exactly why she’s doing it. But dieting doesn’t become more effective when your reasons are medical instead of about appearence. I understand why she wants to. My best friend is “morbidly obese” and she has a number of conditions that doctors say are caused or made worse by her weight (diabetes, infertility, back pains). Over the 12 years I’ve known her, I’ve watched her try and diet again and again. The only thing that “worked” was bulimia (in getting her BMI to a reasonable level), but obviously she can’t maintain that. After each diet she’s gained more and more, and her health problems became worse and worse. Her back problems were so bad that she walked on a cane and we were quite convinced she’d be in a wheelchair eventually. But diets didn’t work. Eventually she stopped dieting and started eating healthy and exercising for its own sake (so her motivation didn’t die every time she broke a scale) and now, while she hasn’t lost any weight, she’s off her cane and her diabetes is controlled and she’s healtier than ever.
Her story isn’t unusual. Hanne Blank knows that. She said herself on her weight-loss blog “weight loss and dieting are at best fraught and at worst self-abusive”. She’s been a fat activist for a long time, and has really sold the notion of body acceptance and has advised fat people how to tell their doctors they’re not losing weight. She knows what she’s doing contradicts everything she’s said. She knows what she’s doing is likely to fail. I think many fat acceptance people are shocked that she of all people is succumbing to the myths of dieting. And I think a lot of them are angry because she’s undoing a lot of the work she and others have done on fat acceptance. If she’s dieting, how can we expect anyone else to fight the pressure and not? And, just to reiterate, the problem with dieting is not that it might work and create less fat people. The problem with dieting is that it usually doesn’t and leaves people less heathly afterwards, both physically and mentally.
One of the reasons I firmly support body acceptance is that the arguments against it are invariably rigidly cherry-picked and disingenuous.
I haven’t seen an argument against Ms. Blank’s position here that wasn’t in the best tradition of doctorial prejudice, and some of the arguments would, with very little editing, fit in seamlessly in a pro-ana blog.
Yes, if you conflate every woman who’s stampeded into losing weight out of fear or vanity and who (because who the hell do those arguments work on?) go about their self-destructive task ignorantly with intelligent people making informed decisions about their lives, you can construct and argument where there’s no point in trying.
It seems like a really toxic thing to do to someone who’s trying, in an informed way, not to hurt.
Perhaps this is a subject where folks need to get outside everyone’s box.
I just started reading fat acceptance blogs recently being interested in personal fat acceptance. I don’t find that our definitions mesh very well, however.
Fat acceptance to me, means to notice, to affirm the “isness” of something, without judgment, without characterizing the nature or the meaning of “what is” but simply acknowledging that what is, IS. I’m fat. This IS. I have a lot of fat on my body. This IS.
Acceptance also to me means present moment reality - the “what is” is NOW. It’s current.
What acceptance is not - again, “to me” — is an investment in the status quo, an insistence that what currently is, MUST be, must continue to be. On the contrary, in my experience, accepting what is, may open the door to possibilities that my own projections and anticipations of the future keep closed. Acceptance is often the first step that I take into the unknown, by paradoxically standing still and acknowledging and living in the present reality. Or if it is not the prelude to change, then acceptance is it’s own reward, paid in peace.
From what she’s said on her blog, I see Hanne Blank as living fat acceptance. She’s acknowledging what is, not just her fat, but the health care concerns that she identifies as being possibly/probably related to her fat. Her pain and condition is part of the “what is” of her being-fat experience. She’s looking at, seeing her fat and her overall physical state, interpreting them and making changes in her *present reality* to address what she sees, leaving the future to “what will be, will be”. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted her writings, as I don’t see this, therefore, as “dieting” which is future oriented. (As is the notion, imo, that if fat currently is, fat necessarily will be.)
If being part of the fat acceptance movement means having a dedication to one’s status quo of fatness that precludes any present day changes that may or may not change one’s future state of fatness, this is a very narrow focus indeed, imo. It seems to me to be peculiarly hidebound and motivated by fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the potential to change, really change, i.e. “permanent lifestyle changes”, fear of possibilities, fear of believing in possibilities, fear of believing in the power of one’s own ability to allow change. Hardly a revolution.
(Mnemosyne, I’ve been appreciating your posts on here.)
It’s not about fear, whether fear of permanent life changes or fear of thinness or fear of anything. It’s about accepting what one cannot change.
I’m not afraid of permanent life changes to be healthier, I’ve made them. For a long time I didn’t exercise, my meals were typically mac ‘n cheese or raman noddles, and I ate way too much chocolate. This was obviously bad, and I made the choice to stop. I now exercise as much as my asthma lets me, I eat balanced meals, and I only have “treats” once or twice a week. I feel a lot better now. I also lost 20 pounds. I didn’t choose to lose 20 pounds, and I don’t say that because I think it was bad or I want to distance myself from it, I say that because if I had been choosing it would have been 50. My weight stopped going down about a year ago, and I really would have prefer it hadn’t. But it did, and I can’t make it go down anymore in a healthy manner, even if that means I’m stuck being overweight. My best friend also made lifestyle changes to be healthier, but if she lost 20 pounds you couldn’t tell. We’re not afraid of lifestyle changes or of becoming thin or anything else. We’ve just made lifestyle changes and didn’t become thin, or even that much closer to “normal”. I want to see the assumption that people can take control of their weight gone because it just doesn’t work like that for most people.
Hanne Blank is trying to lose weight. She says that clearly on her blog, she’s not just open to the possibility of losing weight or whatever. She has very good reasons for losing weight, I can fully understand why she wants to, but the question isn’t why, it’s how. Just eating healthy and exercising may or may not cause weight lose, and when it does it’s very slow (my 20 pound too 2 years, that’s less than a pound a month) and often stops long before you want it too, and on people as large as her it often doesn’t cause a noticeable amount lost. Besides, from what she’s written before, she was already doing that before she decided to lose weight. If she wasn’t losing from that before, she’s not going to lose a whole bunch now. I’m assuming she’s doing the traditional method of dieting, which involves eating less than your body needs (if I’m wrong and anyone read specifically what she’s doing, feel free to correct me). 95% of diets fail. Every study has given a figure close to that number. By “fail” I mean within 5 years all the weight is back and often more, and we know that yo-yoing is less healthy than staying at the same weight, even if it is high, the whole time. And no, diets don’t fail because people are lazy. When you eat less, your metabolism goes down, so if you try to eat a normal, healthy diet ever again, you will go back up. Also, study after study has shown that for most obese people who diet into “normalness”, their bodies act like they are starving, which involves, among other things, constant hunger. Most people can’t deal with constant hunger, and many of the ones who can watch their metabolism plummet below a level they can met, and the weight piles back on. The 5% of the people who succeed are the ones who’s bodies don’t react like they are starving, or the ones who literally dedicate their life to counting calories and such. So Hanne Blank isn’t just choosing something that has a low chance of success, and she isn’t choosing something that a reasonable amount of dedication will raise the chances. She’s choosing something that has a 95% chance of making her health worse. She’s also trying to claim that choice is a healthy, valid choice, from her position as a fat activist, which is undermining everything we (and she!!!) have been trying to tell people.
I hope my posts are helping people understand why people are mad at her. I’m not really seeing any evidence of that though, and if the only responses this post gets continue to misconstrue my position as being against losing weight then this will be my last post here on this subject. I’m not sure if anyone’s actually hearing that I’m actually saying that choosing permanent weight loss isn’t possible for most people, not that having permanent weight loss is bad, and I’m not going to keep trying if no one’s going to hear.
Merle, this is where I’m getting frustrated — you keep insisting that I acknowledge your personal experience that you and the people you know have had difficulty in losing a large amount of weight while refusing to acknowledge that I personally know people who have lost a large amount of weight and kept it off for more than 5 years. I know someone who just entered her 35th year of keeping off 50 pounds. My husband has kept off the same amount for almost 10 years.
And yet, to you, those people are impossible freaks that I must be making up, because it’s not within your personal experience and doesn’t fit your beliefs.
Is it possible for every single person in the world to lose weight? No, because everyone’s different. People have different bodies and different metabolisms. People have subclinical or unrecognized eating disorders — there are twice as many bingers as there are anorexics, but anorexics are the ones who get most of the attention. People have lives and circumstances that make it difficult or impossible to devote the necessary resources to weight loss or weight maintenance.
I never claimed that everyone could lose weight if they just tried real hard. I just said that it is not completely hopeless and impossible. Even people who can’t lose pounds on the scale can gain muscle and improve their health.
You, on the other hand, are claiming that no one can lose weight long-term. Ever. And if someone says that they did, they must be lying because you “know” it’s impossible.
“I’m not sure if anyone’s actually hearing that I’m actually saying that choosing permanent weight loss isn’t possible for most people”
I’m hearing you say that, and I much appreciate you being willing to discuss. This whole discussion has been very helpful to me to clarify my thinking about a complicated and emotional subject.
I would agree with your statement if you said “isn’t probable for most people”. There’s no question that based on past experience, regain of lost weight is a very serious and likely outcome, making the initial quest for weight loss look futile. But I think we’re just beginning to acknowledge this as fact and still inexperienced in devising strategies to circumvent it.
You said, “It’s about accepting what one cannot change.” I would agree with that if no one had ever permanently changed their weight, which is not true. That some do it proves it can be done. Who are they and how do they do it? I don’t think we know enough about that. And then we’d have to evaluate for ourselves if we are willing and able to do what it might take, or not. Perhaps only time will tell that one for each of us should we try.
If someone wants to brave the odds and give it a whirl, why is that seen as so threatening? Yes, weight loss and dieting are “privileged” by society, but a movement for change is all about well, changing society, not conforming to it’s attitudes in a back-handed reactionary way.
You said re Hanne Blank, “I’m assuming she’s doing the traditional method of dieting, which involves eating less than your body needs.” I find that last bit a curious statement. Being 100 lbs away from the high end of “normal” myself, I would say that I’ve been eating more than my body needs for years now. My body probably only needs between 1-2,000 calories to function normally, yet I’ve been giving it a lot more than that which is why it’s been storing that extra food as fat. Hanne Blank said she has eliminated most sugar and refined carbs, which is having a positive effect on her blood sugar fluctuations and sense of well being. I reread her blog post and yes, she is “intending” to lose weight but I still see her as focused primarily on her present reality and accepting what her efforts may or may not bring in terms of weight loss.
That’s how I feel about it too. Fat acceptance for me right now is accepting that I am too fat, and accepting that unless I make changes, I will continue to be and feel as I have been, which has not been good. So now I choose to make healthy changes, reap the reward in the present, plan on them being permanent and hope for the best in long term weight loss. I do this, not without some trepidation, but also knowing that while change is very difficult and challenging, it’s not impossible.
Mnemosyne, I’m not saying no one has, and I haven’t accused anyone of lying. Statistically, most people who try to lose weight permanently don’t. There are of course people who have, but everyone is different and doing the same things as them may not cause you to loss weight, or nearly as much, or permanently, so you shouldn’t expect it. Certainly I whole-heartedly support doing whatever you can to increase your health, whether it’s exercising to gain muscle or eating better food so you feel better or whatever, and of course you might lose weight from that (or you might gain because muscle is heavier than fat) but you can’t know in advance how your body will react to what you do, which is why I say focus on what you can control and don’t worry about what you can’t.
JL, thank you for your post. I don’t mean to sound as if I’m unhealthy eating for the sake of an ideology, I think everyone should eat as healthy as they can no matter what they weigh. And yes, the farther away your eating habits are from healthy and what your body needs, then the more likely it is that when you change you will lose weight, and the more likely it will be that it will be permanent. I just know people who got to 300 pounds eating just like the thinner people around them, and I’m not sure how you lose weight in a healthy way from that. Still, even if it’s more likely that you’ll lose weight I wouldn’t recommend pinning your hopes on it because you just don’t know. But, if you do things that are good for your body irregardless of weight, and if you’ll be happy if your body becomes healthier in ways that aren’t related to weight loss so you can be happy even if the scale doesn’t cooperate, then I can’t tell you you’re wrong. Good luck JL, I hope you do succeed in becoming healthier .
Statistically, most people who try to lose weight permanently don’t.
Here’s part of the problem with your construction: are you talking about people who successfully lose to their goal weight and then regain, or people who are unable to lose more than (say) 20 or 30 pounds and then the loss stops? Because, again, the biggest issue with people who successfully lose all the way to their goal and then re-gain is returning to old, bad habits. People who have a difficult time losing any weight, or who lose it very slowly, have completely different issues and giving them the same instructions as a re-gainer is not only useless, it’s counterproductive.
Not to mention that (IMO) a lot of health “experts” seem to have this weird idea that a woman’s weight should stay exactly the same from the age of 18 until death. That means that women who have a baby and gain the doctor-required amount of weight have “failed,” or that women who kept their weight down in high school by starving themselves and smoking have “failed” when they start eating healthful foods and exercising and gain some muscle. And that’s not even taking into account lifestyle issues, disability, etc.
(Oh, and this is dopey, but it is one of my pet peeves: a pound of muscle and a pound of fat weigh the same. A pound is a pound is a pound. But that pound of muscle is more dense than the pound of fat, so you can have two women who weigh exactly the same on the scale but one will look “thinner” because she’s compact.)
JL, my best advice to you is to get a thorough checkup by a sympathetic doctor to make sure there’s no underlying issue that could frustrate any attempt to lose weight (both PCOS and hypothyroidism are much more common than people realize) and get a referral to a registered dietitian who can help you put together a healthy food plan that’s appropriate for your current size. Contrary to popular myth, “Eat less” is usually not the answer, and cutting calories back too far is counterproductive.
And don’t think that “exercise” means you have to kill yourself at the gym two hours a day. A half-hour walk at lunchtime every day will do much more for your cardiovascular fitness than a gym routine you can’t keep up.
“Call me crazy, call me a Republican ex-gay anti-feminist trying-to-pass-for-white-South-African, but I think a social-justice movement has better things to do than root out Impure Thoughts. And I think it has a lot better things to do than to deny its members agency.”
Zuzu, I really love you for saying that there. I really do it made my day. Would you mind if I quoted that?
Be my guest!
Mnemosyne, No insurance or money for private pay doctors. I am my own doctor! So far my record is pretty good. I don’t believe I have PCOS or am hypothyroid, which is something I probably was some years back that I cleared up with supplements.
Losing weight is something I’ve always been able to do though it’s clearly a little harder now post-menopause. I’m not really a foodie; don’t like to cook, try new foods, go out to eat, etc. It’s more that food is the substance that I use and abuse addictively. (Both siblings are alcoholics). I’m an incest survivor and my body and I are uneasy strangers at best. I’ve been working on these issues for a long time and hope that maybe now at long last, I’m ready to make peace with my bod. We’ll see.
I’ve been walking regularly for over 20 years now, btw. Excellent for depression and my golden retriever loves it too, of course. We have some nice places to walk here, including a 7 mile mountain bike trail where he can chase deer and rabbits. For 30 seconds.
JL
Marle,
I just know people who got to 300 pounds eating just like the thinner people around them, and I’m not sure how you lose weight in a healthy way from that.
I wish I could be around 100 years from now because I think that medical research is going to know a whole lot more about issues like these. I certainly don’t think that every fat person is fat in the same way or for the same reasons as others.
There has been some interesting research that learned about certain things such as enzyme reactions and bacteria in the gut, that are different in the obese which I think will one day yield meds or other interventions that will change life as we know it. Who would ever have guessed, for instance, that weight loss surgery’s effectiveness probably owes as much to subsequent hormonal changes as to having a much smaller stomach?
Thanks for the good wishes.
I’m not really a foodie; don’t like to cook, try new foods, go out to eat, etc. It’s more that food is the substance that I use and abuse addictively. (Both siblings are alcoholics).
In that case, if you haven’t already used them, you might want to try something like Overeaters Anonymous, which was created to deal with those kinds of food issues and (even better) is free.
If it helps, it’s very very common on weight loss message boards to see messages from incest survivors who have a meltdown when they start losing weight and getting attention that they just can’t handle, so they gain the weight back again. That’s the advantage to working with a group — you feel like so much less of a freak when everyone else has issues, too.
Marle,
I’m the Malcolm who is Hanne’s partner, not the other Malcolm in the fat-o-sphere (who I understand is something of a no-dieting extremist, so it should be easy to tell us apart).
Hanne is losing weight even as we speak. The primary difference she has from some others in the fat acceptance activist community that are also effectively losing weight for various reasons is that Hanne is doing it intentionally and publicly. Like Hanne, I won’t out anyone who doesn’t feel like making the choice to take your bull by the horns intentionally, but I assure you I personally know at least two others who are involved in weight loss activities as well (just not publicly).
I hear what you’re saying and honestly so does Hanne. She is doing this project partly out of personal curiosity (to see just how much bullshit she can sniff out and how much helpful health-related protocols she can find for her body and her health issues) and partly because she feels that these are conversations that need having, within the fat acceptance community.
Why do folks who lose weight and refuse to toe the dogmatic party line about not doing it intentionally, not doing it publicly, and who don’t participate in an alarmingly similar to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” dynamic so extremely objectionable that they can no longer be tolerated in the community?
In her eyes, it seems, the reason is that the topic is so objectionable, so taboo that no one within the community is willing to talk about these in a fair way with eyes toward building more community, compromising, and working to get along and build strength between us.
Folks like Hanne (and me, in other contexts), are the kinds of folks who tend to take that sort of circumstance head on, take the bull by the horns.
Your language (about Hanne’s public choices) continues to be exclusionary, and while you are certainly putting a huge amount of effort into explaining your perspective to the others here (for which I applaud you), your mind seems basically made up and you seem disinclined to work toward mutual understanding and community building.
Instead, like many of the other very vocal opponents of Hanne’s project, you are treating these issues as non-negotiable boundary issues. That’s fine from a personal standpoint, but I don’t think it’s acceptable in a community that is about acceptance, and not really an acceptable point of view, I think, for a community spokesperson.
Mnemosyne,
Yes, I’m familiar with OA; that’s how I recognize some of my problems with food as being akin to addiction. It was following several years of participating in OA that I had the strength to start working on incest issues and it was then that I re-gained a lot of weight. The protective symbolism is obvious, of course, as is my recognition now that I self-medicate with food in times of stress, but at the time it was just devastating to be “working the program” and no longer having the program work for me. After a time, I became disillusioned and left OA.
Malcolm,
I have to say that I think it’s a little odd that you are here seemingly speaking for Hanne Blank. She’s addressing these issues on her blog as she sees fit and is not commenting on other blogs out of choice presumably. Triangulated conversations are awkward at best and pathological at worst, imo, reflecting a lack of appropriate boundaries.
Personally, I think this ideological purity requirement regarding weight loss within the fat acceptance movement is misguided, but otoh, my impression was that Hanne Blank has said, in effect, “I’m not the fat activist you all assumed I was so your sense of betrayal is misplaced”.
If the agreed-upon understanding among the members of “Fat Acceptance” with a capital A are that deliberate weight loss is a contradiction in terms with accepting one’s own body as fat, then yes, they have a legitimate peeve with Hanne Blank. But since she herself does not appear to be clamoring to be IN the movement, why are you, whoever you are, objecting to them being exclusionary?
JL,
I’m here on my own (for my own reasons - I’m part of the fat acceptance activist community as well) and also because I live with Hanne, so have this privileged(?) perspective of having daily conversations with her.
I think it would be dishonest of me to participate in a conversation about Hanne without making it perfectly clear where I’m coming from, so that’s why I do it. But I think you’ve got a point in twigging to the potential issues of interpretation of my role in any debate (especially about Hanne) that I participate in, so I’ll try to phrase my disclaimer in a less tangled way in the future.
I should note, though, that I don’t think it’s really constructive (or going to end well) to talk with someone you hardly know about their boundaries or lack thereof. If you’d like to take that particular conversation somewhere else, I’m pleased to do so privately. Please feel free to write me about it at malcolm.gin@gmail.com.
My perspective of the Fat Acceptance Movement’s feelings/agenda on the whole about the subject of Weight Loss is that it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which I find objectionable from having been in other civil rights activist movements in my life (and am still involved in). My impression of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies is that they’re essentially hypocritical, and I don’t like them, either from a personal point of view or from an organizational policy-making point of view.
Therefore, personally (as my own activist), and through knowing Hanne as well, and talking about these sorts of topics with her frequently, I feel I am on very solid ground talking about these topics here for my own good, whether or not Hanne’s part of the picture at all.